Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024) • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 7:53 AM UTC

Agentlien wrote: post #25

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 1…

The idea of the super realistic video game where you can do anything keeps recurring, but it wouldn't actually be any fun to play.

I had the idea first, when I was 8 years old and first played a video game. It just gets re discovered

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

#62

Post by reactordev » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 12:33 PM UTC

tstrimple wrote: post #58

reactordev wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dwarf fortress proves you can totally do things off script without player interaction. Poor Ragnar. As for the scale issue with criminality. You are describing exactly what happens when you put people on rails. They all end up in town. At the same time. If a game cluster has a population of 200,000 players monthly - it should have the space for it. No instancing. No sharding (other than maybe regional boundaries). Do…

Real cities have redundant opportunities. I live in a city of around 120k people. We have three Walmart's spread across the city and two Target stores. These are just the main big players obviously. There are dozens of smaller stores offering various goods. In game settings there tends to be one primary shop of a type per "area" forcing people to congregate around very specific places. Same with quest givers. There i…

This is how well designed MMOs do things. Guild Wars 2 for example. Big city, tons of shops, many of the same “type”, slightly different goods.

You are 100% correct that that is how it should be modeled.

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

#63

Post by reactordev » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 12:35 PM UTC

goda90 wrote: post #48

reactordev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a great game, much like its predecessor. However, it’s still linear in most ways. You miss out on those small side quests but that was true of the first game too. I’d love for a game to set the stage like: “Bad person/thing does bad stuff to good town” like intro, then it’s just you in a field by a small village where you live that is now in ashes due to bad event that happened while you weren’t there. Game On……

One problem is that the more you have happen without it being caused by/linked to player interaction, the more you need to have be possible to happen. Then you're either wrestling with a small chaotic world that doesn't make much sense, or you need to scale it up so much that there's no way the player will actually get to experience most of it. If you have 10 villages in your game world, then how many off-screen even…

>Then you're either wrestling with a small chaotic world that doesn't make much sense…

Much like in modern times eh? It’s all RNG. I take it you never played Daggerfall.

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

#64

Post by valiant55 » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

robrtsql wrote: post #51

reactordev wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dwarf fortress proves you can totally do things off script without player interaction. Poor Ragnar. As for the scale issue with criminality. You are describing exactly what happens when you put people on rails. They all end up in town. At the same time. If a game cluster has a population of 200,000 players monthly - it should have the space for it. No instancing. No sharding (other than maybe regional boundaries). Do…

> They all end up in town. At the same time. ... Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time. I hadn't thought about that. The perspective I am coming from (Runescape, Final Fantasy XIV) has players starting in one (or three) locations when they begin the game. Thanks for the Ashes of Creation name-drop. I don't know if I'll play it but I'm definitely interested in watching the trajectory of this…

Buyer beware, this game has been in alpha for 10 years despite sufficient funding. The cash shop is charging $25 for skins in a alpha game.

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

#65

Post by chongli » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 10:41 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #33

chongli wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the games by Jeff Vogel [1] of Spiderweb Software [2]. His games may not be pretty to look at but they feature worlds that are full of life and rich with detail. Monsters attack and damage towns, destroy buildings, leave citizens homeless and shopkeepers jobless, and may eventually wipe towns off the map. Meanwhile, the world is also full of outside areas to explore and dungeons to plunder. However, no town…

Many years ago I played Escape a from the Pit which was good but I played it on an iPad and eventually bounced off. Where do you recommend starting today?

My favourite in the series was Exile 3: Ruined World. It had all the elements I was talking about. I would give the 2nd remake of that one (Avernum 3: Ruined World) a try!

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

#66

Post by fennecbutt » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

reactordev wrote: post #20

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…

Oh I totally agree. More so I think the ability for AI to generate any kind of game you wish is in the not so distant future. Dwarf Fortress has some wonderful world events and npc choice trees. For example in my biggest fortress, Ragnar was bored. Ragnar got really bored. Ragnar stared at a rock for almost 3 months game time. Then Ragnar got inspired so he ran over to the bowyer workstation, fetched a few gems and w…

O-oh boy...well I guess he'd achieved his ultimate goal, perhaps there was nothing else after that.

That's what I love about these sorts of emergent systems. Although I was discussing it with a friend, there's a great ars war story on ultima: https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE?si=GXkjTKZNN6H_xoUe

Won't spoil it for you but we did have a great discussion from that around how emergent gameplay can be amazing, but player agency means that you'd still need the "hand of God" to be involved in fixing things and making adjustments so that major plot points and still enabled and the player doesn't kill the entire world (unless that's the point of the game I suppose).

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

#67

Post by fennecbutt » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

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 I agree that the patent system now exists for parasite businessmen and finance people rather than inventors.

But on a more positive note I loved SoM so much, played it on release - the nemesis system, movement and general open worldness of it was all so satisfying. I never got to the sequel but I'll have to check it out.

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

#68

Post by fennecbutt » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

Forgeties79 wrote: post #42

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…

> But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust. The problem is most deployments will likely be sloppy shovelware and every now and then we’ll get half decent games with it, maybe a great one every few years. Just like how we see now with garbage unedited LLM outputs flooding the internet and dominating searches as “articles” or “blogs.” It is just far too ea…

Oh for sure, but remember when Steam opened the green light thing more and a flood of absolute trash started pouring in...I feel like there'll always be shovelware, poor implementations and scams regardless of AI or any other technology. Seems it's just something that comes along with human nature, inside and outside of games.