I always wish towns in jrpgs (and stuff) could be better… but how?
I think the coolest twist on the “towns are where you spend money and plot happens” dichotomy is in Witcher 3, where there is no real boundary between what is a town and what isn’t. Like, you can pass through a village, and find it populated mostly by people who don’t want anything to do with you except maybe sell some random bullshit you don’t actually need. It’s so realistic! It’s not like every town has exactly 1 inn, 1 item shop, 1 armor shop, 1 weapon shop, etc.
Then you get to that big city whose name I forget, and it’s not just a town, but like an entire fifth of the game (or something, I don’t know). You spend enough time there to actually get to know it, and it actually feels like a city that is not entirely designed around its usefulness to the player either, but in this case it is just way bigger than it needs to be.
It seems like this is at least partly due to the influence of open-world action games, but also probably other stuff too
It’s important that there’s a lot going on in the backgrounds/out of bounds, there needs to be a lot of places you don’t have access to but can get glimpses of, like in Midgar or anywhere in Persona. if i have access to everything and your kingdom is 6 houses and 20 people then you really start losing me.
Mention that party splitting up mechanic itt! Would be cool if you could expand upon it
I feel like yes, the Witcher does towns well. I don’t think that solution works for every game though. I kind of like the “instanced” feel of safety. Like there are two different things in the world. Nature hell and man-made heaven. That works for some games. I would like those games to however pull a fast one on me and suddenly give me a town that’s actually a dungeon as soon as I enter it. People running around scared, trapped, hunted or captured by monsters. Let me fight through it and clean it up. Maybe after it’s done the town looks different and after more time passes even more different. Or, instead, make it so that you can liberate districts of it and change the look (and function! Unlock the different stores or the inn or…) of those until the whole town is safe again.
Yeah, I’m talking more about a city here than a town I guess but those are things I’d like to see
Party-splitting reminds me of FFIX, because arriving in a new town was always an event. Everybody’d go their separate ways, and you had to make sure you checked 'em all out before stumbling on the next major plot progression or you’d miss out on Active Time Events to see all their little side-stories. I’m pretty sure revisiting towns out of the expected sequence didn’t get you anything noteworthy, though, so this felt like less of a feature of the towns themselves than it was a function of how the story worked.
I have a weird feeling as though Steambot Chronicles was really ahead of its time, but I cannot articulate on that further at 3:29 AM. Which reminds me that, since today is 9/29, I’m now half-way to being 73 years old. To celebrate this occasion, I’m going to bed.
star ocean 2 had really good towns that felt like actual people lived and worked there. i played most of it when i was a kid but i remember like, publishing company offices and milkshake shops? in a weird sci-fi elf world? there is a tsunami and earthquake in disc 1 and people talk about losing their house and livelihood and shit. it just seemed so real. (hurricane katrina happened like a month after i got to this part.) your party splits up also and you can hang out with people at churches and talk about society’s views on witchcraft or whatever. i might be misremembering all of this
Since FF:Crystal Chronicles will be re-released in the near future, let me bring up one of the things i liked about this game that weren’t brought up often/not at all.
The towns/cities you encountered all felt unique, sth that was achieved by using distinct bgms for each town, having different races leaving their mark in the design/architecture of it and also using daylight/townsfolk to differentiate them. Of course, it had 1 inn, 1 item shop etc…
However, during the game, you actually get to visit a town that ran out of mana tree drops and had to be given up to the miasma, sth that the game handled pretty well narratively if you think about the restrictions emposed by/of carrying the chalice, why you are doing what you are doing as a player (to keep your hometown safe, collecting the mana tree drops), and it is a pretty good/moody atmo that the game creates.
That design decisions are a decade+ old by now, and tbh, I think i still haven’t seen a game that managed to interweave gameplay restrictions, narrative and setpiece design as well as FFCC did in its best moments.
I like towns that you can “upgrade.” The one really awesome thing about Soul Blazer is its weird town/dungeon progression loop. Every town starts out tiny and empty. As you fight through its associated dungeon, you slowly complete objectives that cause the town to develop further. You destroy one monster spawnpoint and a building appears in the town. You destroy another and a new NPC arrives. It’s satisfying to build up the town bit by bit, and this also breaks up the pacing issue that traditional JRPG towns have – the lull when you first get to a town and have to spend 45 minutes just walking around talking to people.
Dark Souls 2 has a very basic version of this with the starting town of Majula. As you progress through the game, the various NPCs you meet take up residence in the town, and you can use their services whenever you return home.
are there any rpgs that have just one town because that would be pretty interesting to me (other than megadungeon crawlers i guess). master of the wind has a fun balance between globetrotting adventure and the hometown that you keep coming back to because, well, you live there
also on the other end, more towns that you just navigate by menus
are you sure that doesn’t have more to do with bioware? :v
i never got far in BG2 (genre burnout coming off the first game, timesink, etc) but in my imagination i’d want to see a small geographic area and a not-huge number of NPCs who change and have new things to say and make you do as you go through the story. animal crossing or harvest moon-ish, but more jrpg and less simmy
How many games expect you (or even let you) knock on a person’s door before entering their house?
I know it’s common in games for NPCs that don’t want you in their house to talk to you through the door (implying that, yes, the character usually knocks before entering). Some of the more memorable (to me) interactions in Earthbound happen this way (for instance, there’s a guy who tells you to buzz off because he thinks you’re a Happy Happy-ist missionary).
I dunno, I just think it’s weird that so many video games let you barge into peoples’ homes with neither you as the guest nor the NPC as the host putting forth any effort to role-play any form of hospitality. Even just a canned knocking sound effect/animation seems to be quite rare (and someone saying “Come in!” as a response is probably even rarer).
I’m imagining a game where you can knock on a person’s door and have the chance to state the purpose of your visit. “Have you seen this [villainous person] pass by?” “Do you know the way to [City X]?” “I need a cupful of sugar.” “It’s cold outside.” etc.
(Maybe games like that do exist and this post merely exists as proof that I don’t play enough vidcons. idk)
I am perhaps odd in that the bigger a game town the less likely I am to enjoy it. I’ve dipped my toes in certain games where within the first hour I enter this huge town full of NPCs and numerous buildings and I just turn it off rather than have to go through all of that. If the town is a huge portion of the game like say Majora’s Mask then sure, that’s fine, but when it is a random rpg where it could theoretically be whittled down to four or five important places (inn, weapons shop, armor, etc.) but has a ton of places added to make it feel more lived in and the heart of the game is still the adventure then… well kill me instead.
If you want specific examples, this is why I never got more than an hour into Oblivion or Xenoblade.
Yes! This is exactly the sensation that has motivated me to think about how this part of RPGs could be better. I love the idea of wandering through an inhospitable wilderness for days, living out of a tent and battling fierce wildlife, before finally stepping into a city that is full of creature comforts, opportunities to unwind and restock. But so often you end up just talking to every NPC, ransacking everyone’s house, and then maybe buying an item or two if you can afford it. It’s sad to me that there haven’t been nearly as many attempts to innovate that part of the RPG experience as there have been to make the battle system more engaging.
LA Noire does. But if the resident is a person of interest, you can expect that they will either let you in or you will automatically kick their door down.