Quote:Original post by JamesPenny
Holy crap, a fantasy city sim sounds awesome. Try to attract heroes to trade there to boost your economy, invasions by monster, guild politics, magic. I would buy this.
They've made this game (sort of, it's actually much simpler than what you describe), it's called Final Fantasy: My Life as King, it's Wiiware.
Back to the topic at hand though, I think the kind of game you want to design is what D&D players would call an 'Urban Adventure' - everything takes place in the city. No need for many (if any), outside environments, all the quests, NPCs, adventure sites, etc, are all located within the city.
That being said, I think when you consider just the massive size of a city, you don't want players to have to walk through countless residential neighborhoods full of locked doors (unless you want to spend years making each house, even then there likely wouldn't be anything relevant to the game in each one.)
From my experience, the best way I've seen to implement a big city is to subdivide it into sections, and take a 'snapshot' if you will of each section, say a 5x5 block square where important things will happen, they do this kind of thing in Neverwinter Nights and other more recent RPGs. That way you get a nice bit of the city's flavor, plenty of room for NPCs and quest locations, and not a lot of needless running around.