Hey gang, I’d like to take a moment to show some appreciation for something underappreciated, and to springboard from that into a broader discussion.
In RPGs, you tend to go to a lot of settlements. And those settlements tend to be, well, tiny. Oftentimes they might imply a much larger population that you simply don’t get to access, but more often the entire settlement is actually incredibly tiny. The world, of course, exists only for your play experience, so why spend additional time designing and implementing redundant stuff?
Well, Summoner – an RPG that was a launch title for the PS2 – said screw that. It doesn’t have a lot of settlements, but the major one, Lenele, is truly massive.
I can’t find a map online so have this instead!
Now, when I say Lenele is big, I really do mean it’s big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way from Org to the Crossroads, but that’s just peanuts to Lenele.
It is the only city I have ever come across in a videogame which is convincingly city-sized (Aside from ones actually set IN a city, like GTA or whatever). Now to be fair it’s not incidental, it’s one of the game’s major settings and one of only a handful of settlements, but it truly is VAST and it’s so, so glorious to run around and get lost down back alleys and have no idea where the heck you are because it’s just this massive warren of streets and alleys and finding some random store tucked away in the middle of it all.
So, what cities/villages/etc. in games have impressed you for one reason or another?
The thing that bothered me about cities in games – how incredibly wooden they seem. Nothing of consequence really happens. Elder Scrolls: Morrowwind and Oblivion had some really nice cities, but the npc’s in them really didn’t do anything. Sure, shops closed at night, but so what. I’d like to see a game where the npc’s in the city actually moved around and did things with purpose. Perhaps some sort of AI just for the city. I guess that’s where the old pencil/paper role playing won out with our old gaming group. Imagination trumped cgi – and still does by a majority.
I loved Camelot in DAoC. I had a lot of fun doing the crafting quests, where you’d get an assignment from your trainer to craft something for one of the NPCs in town, then have to find them to deliver it. There were some amazing back alleys and tunnels in there!
Actually I hadn’t thought of that Kit, but MMOs do tend to have particularly large cities and stuff! FFXI, WoW, though City of Heroes probably doesn’t count… xD