what you do in towns and how you do it

King of Posters
#21

I think that honestly, the thing that makes or breaks a videogame town is the writing. Night in the Woods takes place entirely in one (not that big) town, but it’s engaging throughout because its writing is so enjoyable. All NPCs are unique, and even the most minor ones have fun personalities and little arcs that you can notice over the course of the game.

Contrast this with Dragon Quest XI, where the writing is mostly just serviceable, and almost every single person in every single city is one of like 6 stock character models. I mean, the parents of one of your party members are represented by generic character models! It’s kind of depressing. The look and layouts of the towns are pretty neat, but (with the exception of the haiku-speaking villagers of Hotto), there aren’t really any interesting people in them.

I love @alfred’s idea of making you find the cleanest bathroom. I would love a game where you have to make little practical decisions and snap judgements about the towns you visit. Where should you go to get connected with the local anarchist scene, how should you ingratiate yourself with the convenience store owner so he’ll let you post up and stake out his parking lot, how should you deal with someone making a scene at a restaurant?

4 Likes
#22

xenoblade x has one town: a half-complete model los angeles. it’s separated into four slices. one is a military bit, there’s a shopping district, and there’s a little model suburbia, and then there’s an incomplete bit, some iron scaffolding hanging over the water below. it’s so good.

one of the things the game sets up v well is that every stupid little sidequest where you mediate someone’s whatever problem is directly relevant to the aim of getting set up on this mysterious planet, so there’s an acand these unfold in this huge web, and when they all start to link together in unexpected ways halfway through the game it’s good as shit. even if the writing is trash over time you build this connection to the city by participating in its growing and changing community

the recent xeno 2 expansion harkens back to this with a focus on one city and an astro-boy omega factor style community map but is not quite as successful imo

4 Likes
#23

wait xenoblade series takes place on earth? what the fuck?

#24

Deadfire (seriously everyone play deadfire it’s the best all around traditional party based RPG in a very long time) has one big main town and lots of smaller ones and carries that off well.

#25

If I’m remembering right, all of the Xeno games are somehow connected to the real world. Xenosaga is just a few centuries into the future, and during the events humanity is exposed to a sort of supernatural object that has reality-altering properties, which sets up the events of Xenogears in the very distant future. Someone more familiar with the Xenoblade stories will have to confirm how those fit into the picture.

2 Likes
#26

i think xbx is about terraforming or colonising a new planet, and the human ship that lands has this model of LA inside it

3 Likes
#27

I think the issue is that game towns don’t work like real towns do. Whether you are wandering around a digital or actual wilderness (real wilderness hopefully lacks monsters and random battles) it comes down to seeing a hill and wanting to look around from the top of it, or picking a random direction and seeing where it leads. There are differences, but they are close enough.

In real towns you wouldn’t feel a compulsion to talk to every single person you come across, or be scared to not enter a random building and risk missing something. There are buildings in my town I haven’t gone in ever and I’ve been here well over a decade! To give a different analogue, imagine how exhausting going to a mall would be if you had to go into every single store and talk to the staff in each one. I’m sure there are some people who do that, but most wouldn’t.

I think the trick isn’t to make the in-town writing better, I think the better idea is to fill it with tons of terrible meaningless writing that would punish anyone insane enough to try and talk to everyone and go everywhere. Okay, that’d probably backfire terribly, but I think the key would be to break the crazy gaming OCD complex that makes people feel the need to do literally everything in a town, particularly in a single visit.

5 Likes
#28

Man, I remember having HUGE arguments about this sort of thing back in the Neverwinter Nights forums around '01 or '02. There was this one guy—this guy, actually—who made an argument that went something like this:

Old RPGs had to bank heavily on abstractions. Say you make your dungeon out of tiles over one or two screens: sure, there have to be branches in order for it to be interesting, but players don’t like dead ends. Players want to explore. So, designers put treasure chests and other rewards in these out-of-the-way rooms. However, that now provides an incentive for players to keep their eyes on the boundaries, to think of this space as a limited playpen which they need to completely map out. It draws attention to how small and abstract the dungeon actually is. This is a reasonable trade-off when you’re talking about the Narshe mines, but you shouldn’t reproduce this structure in, say, a 3D-rendered forest.

Similarly a town: if every NPC has unique text, or (worse) if some NPCs have secret rewards and others don’t, but there’s no way to tell immediately which a particular NPC is, you drive your player to exhaustively interact with every single NPC. This isn’t actually beneficial. If NPCs are set dressing, don’t let the player interact meaningfully with them. Make it obvious who’s important enough to talk to, and you can actually preserve the town’s appropriate sense of scale.

8 Likes
#29

Most western-type open world games have been distinguishing between important NPCs and civilian filler for a while now, some more subtly, some less. Anyway this isn’t a big problem any more. But I think the OP is interested in jrpg towns specifically, which are already characterized by their small scope and the unique character of each NPC.

#30

That’s true. I don’t think I had this feeling of having to talk to everyone in Witcher 3. However in DQ11 I do and I really enjoy talking to everyone in town. There aren’t that many people anyway, even in the big towns! It’s balanced very well. Most of them have something interesting to say. Interesting to me at least. It’s mostly subtle world building. I like that.

Also, this doesn’t break immersion for me or feels dumb. It fits within the world and genre of the game. I don’t think this has to change.

#31

I think the Trails games do this, in that each NPC is sort of like a living character whose personal story changes as you progress through the game. But then I’ve read comments that criticize this because it’s terrible for people with OCDs.

1 Like
#32

I can think of plenty of good video game cities but towns are making me think harder. Deadly Premonition? A town feels like it needs some industry that is fueling and coloring everything else.

I will keep thinking

2 Likes
#33

I’d like a town interaction where the party members meet, plan then split up to fulfill specific tasks based on their preferences and past experiences together. Then we meet up after at the pub and you get replays of specific “memories”, ie random events that happened to those characters if they are excited/scared what ever and or if you just ask. That way everything or at least most important things get explored and important info is given to you.

Id also like to be able to send a smaller team back to town to resupply a larger team currently in a dungeon. Lets hope its not the day the gang we didn’t know about is in town and they get kidnapped and just never resupply us and we have to go investigate.

Towns themselves should be laid out like a more fun/cool version of an actual town with structure placements that replicates people’s preferences for where someone might wish to live, where industry would be and where people like to make big decisions, burn witches, hang out, party, fish, race giant bumble-bees.
The place should tell the story of the people there.

The towns people should have random problems that disrupt their day that you can help with to earn extra what ever. But also you can cause problems to fix if you are playing as a jerk. Maybe sabotage the mill workers’ cart and then offer to give him a ride in the morning. Or catch someone else pulling a similar scam and get embroiled in town politics when it turns out to be the Mayor’s son.

Ultimately Id like towns to be little mechanical toys you can observe or take part in.

6 Likes
#34

The main reason the games are such a nightmare to translate. Every single NPC in every single town has new dialogue after every single minor story progressing event occurs. You can unlock the game’s final dungeon and travel all the way back to the starting town and everyone will have new strings to spit out.

The Persona 2 duology does the same thing but at least there the entire game takes place in the same city and all the NPCs are just scattered around the shops which you travel to from a menu so it’s at least feasible to do a lap around.

#35

Not quite! Xenoblade X, specifically, is a sci-fi setting taking place after the destruction of earth by alien forces, following one of several colony ships named after earth cities. That specific one is the US-built New Los Angeles, containing a partially built (they had to both leave and crash ahead of schedule) LA-style city as mentioned earlier, and crashed on an alien planet where it is used as a base to rebuild civilization in a kind of amusingly misunderstood pseudo-american lifestyle. You get to teach aliens about God and burgers, I kid you not.

That setting, though, is unrelated to the non-X Xenoblades (irrespective of whether those may or may not have an earth-related timeline hidden somewhere, they at least outwardly present themselves as completely unrelated fantasy settings, unlike X where you immediately learn about earth).

(also, unlike Xenosaga which half-covertly fits Xenogears’ timeline, although in great part because it takes place in one of the least defined spots of it, the Xenoblade games very much don’t, though you may find more than a few parallels even discounting Kos-Mos’ guest DLC spot in Xenoblade 2)

2 Likes
#36

They’re awesome for this and frankly spoiled me on all other generic townspeople.

#37

That would make an awful lot of sense for games where not all characters can be in battle at once. So, most jrpgs. Could give them something to do while they’re not in use and make you think ahead when you plan out who to take on the next leg of the journey because the sent out characters won’t be available to switch in to fight your battles

1 Like
#38

This is a huge copout answer to anything video-rpg related but this just instantly made me think of D&D

1 Like
#39

This is an absolutely fantastic conceit for a jrpg which makes me feel bad because I know this game cannot be good from the point of view of me, a person who is absolutely done with jrpgs as mechanical objects

1 Like
#40

happily it’s not just you, the game is cloying awful in both mechanics and storytelling outside of that core concept