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Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

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Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

#21

Post by owyn »

fennecbutt wrote: post #11
reactordev wrote: post #6

I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…

I have commented on Todd's failure to deliver on such promises in skyrim before. But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust. I'd love exactly the same; the game should still tell a story or have a point (unless it's a complete sandbox), so key plot points can be included but otherwise it's a simulation and the player can do things with their agency, but so…

Shadow of Mordor (and the sequel) had something called the "Nemesis" system where some of the Orc Captains you kill (and the ones who kill you) might survive off screen and get stronger and come back with scars and buffs and new nicknames. It didn't do the village/town stuff you are talking about. They talked about doing it in future games but never did.

Didn't find any good technical write-ups. Although apparently it's "patented".

Here's a decent video overview. I hate that everything is video now but this is the world we live in I suppose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fh5qc-ZnaM

Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

#22

Post by reactordev »

owyn wrote: post #21
fennecbutt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have commented on Todd's failure to deliver on such promises in skyrim before. But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust. I'd love exactly the same; the game should still tell a story or have a point (unless it's a complete sandbox), so key plot points can be included but otherwise it's a simulation and the player can do things with their agency, but so…

Shadow of Mordor (and the sequel) had something called the "Nemesis" system where some of the Orc Captains you kill (and the ones who kill you) might survive off screen and get stronger and come back with scars and buffs and new nicknames. It didn't do the village/town stuff you are talking about. They talked about doing it in future games but never did. Didn't find any good technical write-ups. Although apparently i…

Yeah, good game mechanics scarred by an IP royalty agreement.

Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

#23

Post by jmyeet »

A game that (IMHO) handled this really well was Assassin's Creek Odyssey.

Athens takes up a huge part of the map but is on the same scale. Of course it's still a fraction of the size that the ancient Athens would've been but it's still impressive.

The real issue here is time scales. Nobody wants to spend an IRL week riding between towns so those distances get compressed for the sake of storytelling. This problem haunts pretty much every game genre. Take the Civilization games where a unit is moving 1-5 spaces per turn and a turn is 1-20 years. the WW2 time scale is about 6 turns. If you ever played Civ1 on the Earth map, Europe is also about 12 squares so the European theater of WW2 cmes down to a couple of riflemen or modern infrantry and 1-2 Armor units smacking into each other if you get stuck on the time and distance scales.

Books, comics, TV shows, movies, etc don't have this problem because they don't have a constant scale (24 notwithstanding). And the goal is to tell a story. Even in an open world open ended game, you're telling a story.

I miss the old D&D turn-based games, even including the later more graphical entries like Eye of the Beholder. It was kinda funny to duck into a room and camp for 200 hours to heal and recover.

You just don't worry about these scale issues if you're immersed. That's what I learned.

Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

#24

Post by paragraft »

owyn wrote: post #21
fennecbutt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have commented on Todd's failure to deliver on such promises in skyrim before. But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust. I'd love exactly the same; the game should still tell a story or have a point (unless it's a complete sandbox), so key plot points can be included but otherwise it's a simulation and the player can do things with their agency, but so…

Shadow of Mordor (and the sequel) had something called the "Nemesis" system where some of the Orc Captains you kill (and the ones who kill you) might survive off screen and get stronger and come back with scars and buffs and new nicknames. It didn't do the village/town stuff you are talking about. They talked about doing it in future games but never did. Didn't find any good technical write-ups. Although apparently i…

Yes here's the patent. The independent claims are frustratingly broad if you're trying to think through practical NPC world sim systems.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160279522A1/en

Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

#25

Post by Agentlien »

philsnow wrote: post #18

One thing that is really useful about the distinction is that almost necessarily, there are different scales involved. Ultima VI was the first of its (mainline, not 'online' or 'underworld') series to not really have the "town/dungeon/overworld" distinction. It got fairly awkward to have towns and the overworld be on the same "layer", because the towns could really only have a dozen or so buildings because otherwise…

I don't think the idea of realistic scale for video game locations is very attractive.

You can have vast worlds with huge procedurally generated towns. Daggerfall did this and to me it just felt like boring filler. As did its enormous landscapes.

You can have large towns dense with interesting hand crafted places and characters. Baldur's Gate itself from BG3 is a great example. I loved it, but it consumed 50 of the 100 hours I spent on my first playthrough. Almost two months of my daily playtime.

If you want a game where the great outdoors and dungeons are afforded a huge chunk of your time, towns need to be idealized. I love how Breath of the Wild did this. You get the sense of the place from the layout and architecture. But you can still visit the whole place and talk to everyone, without it being the main thing you do in the game. My imagination will scale the place as feels appropriate, without the need for a thousand houses I have no reason to enter.

Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

#26

Post by noelwelsh »

reactordev wrote: post #6

I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…

One problem with the simulation route is that games in the D&D lineage are usually wildly unbalanced. A, say, level 5 monster could run through endless level 1 NPCs. Also, much of the machinery of our world (e.g. commerce) doesn't really work when then there are incredibly dangerous and malevolent critters scattered throughout.

Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

#27

Post by jrowen »

Early Star Wars Galaxies was like this. You could run seamlessly from the town center through the wilderness into a busy dungeon (the Tusken fort is a memorable example). Planets were not zoned and there was a ton of pure exploration. Players constructed functional towns with governments.

That game and UO were so ahead of their time (the fun version of the metaverse), and at this point it's gonna take a revolution in gaming to pick up where they left off.

Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

#28

Post by Scarblac »

reactordev wrote: post #6

I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…

Isnt this what Dwarf Fortress aspires to be? Simulated from the internal organs of dwarfs up, of course.

Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

#30

Post by hoten »

reactordev wrote: post #6

I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…

Check out Kenshi.

Wikipedia blurb:

> Kenshi is a real-time strategy action role-playing game developed and published by Lo-Fi Games for Windows. The game focuses on sandbox gameplay features that give the player freedom to do what they want in its world instead of focusing on a linear story.

https://youtu.be/_E4nKWxSG8o?si=t93p3FtBlh4Cxcvm

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