What's the best to do a huge city in a game?Would you accept a GTA-like approach in TES games for the capitals?
>>739565634Give me a smaller-scale city where you can enter all buildings.
Just Morrowind size is good enough.
>>739565634It would be really easy to make TES cities feel bigger by just visually redesigning the existing space to imply that more of the city exists beyond the play area. There is nothing wrong with only making a limited "section" of a city playable space instead of claiming the playable space is literally the entire city. Plenty of games do this successfully.
>>739565634Its not a magic bullet but 2D games seem to handle scale better than 3D ones.
>>739565762>enter building>there's nothing worthwhile inside
>>739565634A big city thats chopped into parts is one of the better solutions. Look at the first image, I would divide it up like this>Docks>Neighborhood>Inner City>Are surrounding the castles>Courtyard for both castles>Castle interiorsAll filled to the brim with NPCs and quests that actually matter.
>>739565634I like dishonored's city. The playable area was small but it made everything in the setting feel huge. They are an example to follow.
>>739566354ThisAs an adventurer you have no business in most areas of the city anyways. You skipping over everything that isn't the market district and local leader is expected. Hell, cities may actually develop in a way where the adventurer district is a thing, in a fantasy setting. And adventurers would be actively discouraged from leaving it into other parts of the city 99% of the time
>>739565634>pokemon cities in the anime>pokemon cities in the games
>>739565876Play TR. Old Ebonheart is a good example.
>>739566606Bethesda did this with the Imperial City in Oblivion and everyone complained about it for some reason even though it is the only truly "big feeling" city in the entire franchise.
I have seen peakAnd the 3 follow up games got nowhere near it.
>>739565634Ive said this before but it would be kino if game made settlements where roughly half of the buildings are enterable and have some kind of content. that way you have an equal chance to stumble into a generic or useful building. I think that does a good job at both filling out a place, but not to the point where most if it is just nothing. Filling out a bit of useless hourses just makes sense, cause in fiction, your character probably doesnt get involved in EVERY goings on in every house in any sizable location.Something like 25 fleshed out buildings and 25 generic buildings, from a scattering of different social classes and occupations.
>>739565634assasins creed, theres so many pedestrians on the streets like an actual big city, not just some like in gtanewer ones don't have that many pedestrians like the old games
>>739565876Morrowind cities are DOGSHIT. It's just a bunch of copy-pasted brown oval buildings
>>739565634Something I haven't personally seen yet which would be cool would be if you had a big city like in most games. And like most games all the buildings are seemingly non enterable. Unless, you break in. Have some sort of mini game where you pick a lock on a window/door. Or maybe even kick the door down. Then it does an old school Resident Evil like transition scene. The game then procedurally generates a random interior. So technically you can enter every building in the city if you really want to. Who knows what you'll walk in on
unless the living immersive city is the actual point of the game, restrict access to more fleshed out sub areas with the implication that there's a lot more city that you aren't bothering with.depends on genre and implementation of course, something like morrowind that gives you levitation simply can't do this.
I don't really want to have to spend 5 hours walking through gran soren because it needs an accurate amount of houses to make sense.
realism does not belong in video games. only make what matters to me the player
>>739565634I've always been completely sated with the "illusion", e.g. the city looks absolutely massive but is just like a few rooms. kingdom hearts 1 and 2 did a great job of making locations feel colossal despite being like 4-5 rooms just because the art direction and level design made them feel so much bigger than they werepeople who want every single building to be enterable so the games usually compromise by only making cities with a couple dozen structures are kind of dumb
Athkatla in Baldurs Gate 2 feels impressively large and scaled.
>>739567920Second is better.The feeling of size is better than the absence, or perhaps worse, the actual presence of it.
>but muh unique and memorable NPCs>but muh navigation>but muh feasibilityNah, don't care, I want Elder Scrolls 6 to have Assassin's Creed sized cities with hundreds of enterable buildings and thousands of NPCs. I doubt the average player could name more than 5 NPCs per city in Skyrim from the top of their head so I don't think there would be much of a loss. Add some kind of lore appropriate taxi service and fast travel to help speed things up if need be and it would probably be cool.It would unironically be a good use of AI to just fill in generic houses, while you could still have handcrafted buildings for important NPCs. Daggerfall had generic interiors too and at the time normies loved it before Morrowind focused on handcrafting everything.
>>739565634Funny that you say that because left literally looks like a NV town.
if you want a huge city where everything is interactable, then the game needs to focus on procedural generation and systemic design. but for some reason gamers dont like that and want everything to be hand crafted.
>>739565634big cities in rpg games suck desu, there's nothing to do therewitcher 3 or dragon's dogma city was too big and emptykhorinis from gothic 2 will never be topped
>>739565634Most games as big as Skyrim will never dare to attempt such cities because its very difficult to do this. Skyrim as a land mass should also be greatly expanded if such cities were a thing in the game.
>>739565634GTA approach is even worseJust give me reasonably sized cities with something actually to do. I wouldn’t even hate Skyrim’s towns that much but some of them literally only have one or two quests.
>>739567920I agree with the Witcher cities being lacking of places to do other than >Go here>Find clues/kill squatters or do monster contract of the week >Repeat With most of them being unable to enter, but at least they look and feel like cities with the crowds of folk wandering around, better than Skyrim cities that for sure
>>739568397No it doesn't NEED to do this. Procedural generation sucks but what you said is mostly correct. The problem is that handcrafting such a game as most would put it would be way too time consuming for most developers. It would take a level of passion to make such a game that this industry would likely never see out of a developer due to how much time and money such a game would cost to make. Not to mention these days if you want even a half decent looking game their needs to be tons of developers working on such a game.>in shortIts not impossible for a game like what OP wants to be made but its highly unlikely the conditions for such a game to be made could ever be met.
>>739565634I know this is a meme, but none of Skyrim's cities are supposed to look like an 18th century German kingdom. Cyrodiil maybe, but Skyrim is a rural, underdeveloped backwater. Genuinely what do people think Viking-era Norse towns looked like?>>739567414I've never understood why people ask for this. Why make an open world game if it's not going to be completely open? The whole appeal is players feel like the game is simulating a real place populated by real people who live and work in real buildings. If you just want an environment that suggests a city but otherwise keeps the focus on quest-relevant stuff, tons of linear games already did this exceptionally well.
GTA works because you get to drive a car around (fun) and not ride a horse around (not fun)
>>739567356I love how all the zones transition seamlessly with each other.
>>739565634I get the complaint that the Witcher 3 doesn't let you enter 5000 buildings, but I think that's retarded and that it's the game that felt the most like an actual living city to me.
>>739567920Bottom is kino
>>739567748do this except for the "parts you aren't bothering with" the game can procedurally generate thoseso you'd have handbuilt:>docks>market>main castle>&c.then for all the residential spaces you'd have the engine generate those so you can go into every building and steal goods from people's houses and stuff
