Why don't RPG games have cities anymore?

Why don't RPG games have cities anymore?

muh console limitations

just you wait

You don't seriously want a RPG with a city that big, do you?

Important stuff is too bundled together or too far apart
Either way it doesn't feel like a city

because open world

fuck cities in rpgs. always too many characters and quests in a small location. Destroys the pacing.
Village > City

>anymore

Name one RPG with proper cities. Weebshit doesn't count because those aren't real RPGs

>role playing game games

Because no one wants to deal with FF12-tier load times just to cross one street to the other.

Daggerfall

Witcher 3

The best format is a medium sized world map with several populated villages and one centralized city with lots to do. Hand placed everything, nothing randomly generated.

>i define genres
ok

RPGs have never had Real cities. Even ones that took place entirely in a city.

I really do.
You can have a big city in an open world. Theoretically at least

Doesn't count.

Console limitations is one issue but in general the man hours needed to create so many different models and textures would be large and if theres not much to do other than talk to a few irrelevant NPCs and visit the inn/item store/blacksmith then it was just wasted money

Instead they need to work on the APPEARANCE of a large vast city so you still feel like you're in a big detailed place but really only go into a handful of buildings. Skyrim tried to do this but failed because they half-assed it.

Gothic 2. Khorinis.

Morrowind, even if it was only Vivec

For what reason?

Dragon Age Origins

Too popular.

>Vivec
>Balmora
>Pelagiad
>Seyda Neen

The last two are villages but yeah.

It's from a game he doesn't like.

Baldur's Gate I and II
Arcanum
Neverwinter Nights II
Dragon Age
Mass Effect series
Final Fantasy VII

these games all have one main city but best I could come up with

>Wanting a city as big as your image
It's not possible to populate such a huge city with worthwhile NPCs. You're either gonna set your entire game on the city and it's probably gonna feel too empty or you try to make up for it (and fail miserably) with procedurally generated NPCs.

You are out of your mind, son.

Look I absolutely love Origins but Denerim was a let down.

Well yeah but I was thinking more of Orzammar.

balmora is a town, not a city. vivec is the only proper city in MW. imperial city in oblivion was also alright

Dragon Age 2 took place almost entirely in one big-ass city, and it got so fucking boring.

Small towns with more to do per square foot are way better than big cities with nothing to do in them.

Vivec was not the only proper city. Balmora was huge. Ebonhart. Mournhold. Morrowind had a few larger "towns" that I'd consider proper cities.

Dragon's Dogma

Bullshit. Console RPGs have had cities for generations.

Not an RPG.

It was a flaw in execution, not in design of the city itself. I rather liked Kirkwall but they limited it to like five areas, got lazy and remade the same five areas but at night, and gave us like three wilderness areas. We just needed more, and a better layout. If Kirkwall had been entirely open with more quests (that actually mattered) and more activities besides running around, it'd be great. Give us a jobs system, or allow us to become a merchant, or something.

Why don't OP's stop being faggots anymore?

I'm not even going to touch this. I assume you mean because you can't create a donut steel self insert character, which makes you a fucking retard. Not my fault you can't roleplay in a game unless it's some big booty anime girl with pink skin and modded tits.

Most buildings are built in a similar fasion, so the need for more than 10 models for buildings would be overkill. Even then, you could just use a building block system to combine different "modules" and change the shape of buildings.

textures are the same.

Interiors would be the most taxing on man hours. I've made a few interiors for games like skyrim and Fallout New Vegas and if you want them to be detailed it can take a while. Making a basic interior (like a house) only takes like 30 minutes though, keeping clutter to a realistic minimum and navmeshing as quickly as possible.

A large interior, like a lab or a dungeon with multiple different rooms and sufficient clutter can take a few hours including navmesh, maybe even a day if it's a really big dungeon, but you don't need a lot of those since they are rare.

For a city it would be pretty easy to make the interiors. Just make 10-15 different interiors, don't clutter them, and you can make interiors that are "assigned" to different exterior doors, then just clutter them differently and assign different actors to them, and you can make a city with over 100 buildings in about a month, maybe less. That's just an estimation, since I've never done something that large.

Then you would need to do things like arrange the exterior cells around a road system, making sure you have alleys, main roads, etc. Basically you are making the city layout itself with the buildings. Then place down exterior doors and assign them to the doors in the correct interior cells and you're done.

The main reason large cities aren't on console games is for disk space.

FF8 - Deling City
Checkmate, atheists

I had a dream last night the hackers leaked a alpha version of the game on the internet and it was fucking awesome

Vizima in Witcher 1 is one of the best cities I've ever explored in a game.

because cities are boring, just look at GTAV.

you faggots are thinking whole realised metropolitan areas are fun places, you autistic cunts need to go outside more often.

Estharfags on suicide watch

The other user has a point actually. Most of the time you have very little input on Geralt's sayings and personality, and it feels more like playing GTA's story mode rather than a proper RPG

I'm still pissed that those hackers didn't leak a fucking thing but at the same time, I'm glad because it most likely would have made the wait worse for me.

What's wrong with GTA 5? Los Santos is a small part of the map. I feel like it's one of the better balanced city/open world maps out there.

I'm all for cities in RPGs, but even I wouldn't want a city that big in an RPG. I'd never explore it all, it would be pointless.

> Most of the time you have very little input on Geralt's sayings and personality

That shit is a meme introduced by WRPGs in the last 10-15 years, and has only been considered 'standard' for the last 5 years. It's mostly shit mechanic that only games like The Witcher actually pull off.

There are 30 years worth of "proper rpgs" that don't do that bs illusion of choice garbage.

> hand placed everything
Now here's your problem. Sufficiently realistic cities are way too complex and organic and large for a team to reasonably populate "by hand." It becomes a "pick two" problem. Simulate the scale and structure and it feels alien and devoid of life(no man's sky). Simulate structure and history and you'll be crossing a "city" in a two minute walk(Skyrim, can be compensated for by limiting action to one street or neighborhood like yakuza, deus ex, shenmue). Simulate scale and history and you'll have a lot of empty or redundant space (assassins creed).

Yes because making all of that doesn't take a ton of workhours and money.

They don't make cities in RPG because it's a waste of resources spent on an area with relatively little gameplay content.

This. The best places for RPG's to take place in are hamlets, villages, countrysides, or port-towns. Cities/Metropolises will always be the worst because the buildings will always be inaccessible giant squares that remind you of the lifeless purple rectangle that was Reboot's 'INCOMING GAME.' GTA V failed because you can barely enter any buildings- not even any fast food restaurants. GTA V's city was a DOWNGRADE from the interactions found in VC, IV, and TBoGT. In my opinion, Novigrad in TW2 failed hugely as well because 85% of the doors are locked and there simply isn't enough recorded dialogue to feel like a bustling city. The most memorable interactions of Novigrad happen on its outskirts, not in the city walls proper. Once again- Village/Hamlet is always better than a city. RPG's, indeed stories, are best when you are intimate.

Not that user, but Los Santos is much smaller than it should be, and instead of a diverse and well constructed city like we expected and deserved, we got a tiny blip of grey and brown downtown Hollywood streets, then 70% of the map was just wilderness with a few tiny villages here and there. But it's not even an RPG so those villages have nothing - no quests, no houses to enter, no npcs to talk to or explore. Oh yay, another little strip town I can drive through or pull over to punch someone.

It was a number of problems that all contributed to why the city portion failed. It had less activities to do than prior games, and the ones that did exist didn't do anything. Yoga? Why not stuff that lets you interact with the city and immerse yourself in what should have been a thriving town?

Nah, let's do yoga until you decide to fly through downtown for the billionth time in your supercar. But hey, you can pull over any time you want and shoot someone lol so sick man!

But they do.

Brotherhood was the best AC just because Rome was awesome and fairly sizable.

Fuck the 5 houses make a city bullshit of TES.

Suppose that's fair. I only really play GTA Online so I've never really taken much consideration into the lack of shit to do in the city since most of the stuff is player generated content.

>half of the city is castle and can't even visit it
>dungeon is not even most of the castle

Comfiest city right here.

More of a 3D skybox than a city.

city 17

Because Toussaint is better

that's not an RPG

is this armpit pussi

Open world.
And vidya audience being retarded.

I just want something that would be as good as khorinis Is this that much to ask?

Because everything is worse. Technology got better and it made everything FUCKING WORSE

I'm not 100% but I don't think the start fort shape works on such a large scale

Scale wise it makes sense. Don't forget that in the middle ages, which is what most fantasy worlds are based off of a city numbered like a few 10 thousand, which nowadays is a town. So if you have Vivec, which is a major city and has a hundred NPCs, than a town with 10 would still be quite sizable by comparison and could represent a decent hub.

Shitty consoles drove bethesda to cut down in the city sizes, and don´t get me started with the cell change when entering any of them in skyrim because of that.
PC games should remain PC only.

What if the entire game is set inside of the large city such as the image OP posted

Until about 60% through the game where you can explore the outside of the wall.

You could live your entire life in a city that size and not see large chunks of it, not meet large portions of the population and you would never be inside even a percentage of the houses there. Why bother investing in making something so unnecessarily massive for a video game when you could spend your resources making the game actually good?

FF7 did that to some extent, the whole beginning (around 4-5 hours) was set up in Midgar
And you go back later
Still one of my favorite RPG city

Can you ever go back to the surface or only in the slums?

You go once on the surface

Dragon's Dogma has a nice city

With absolutely nothing in it. Same with Shitter 3.

daggerfall

Why don't you build it yourself?

>Witcher 3
>nothing in it

You all sure seem to count things as content only when it suits you.

Why hasn't there been a real followup to Black & White. Even B&W2 didn't quite get the same feel.

I feel like we should be able to make a significantly more complex and interesting game based around the same premise by now. The AI alone should be a lot better. The scale, graphics and physics could all be improved too.

and we could not have anyone singing songs about what they want

>insomnia was a literal street

>the whole setting the promotion of the game based on for a decade is completely missing in the final game
Why is this allowed?

Daggerfall's city isn't proper in any sense of the word. Daggerfall is fucking enormous, but it's an extreme case of copy-paste.

I fucking hate how the loading screens shown loading screens from the city.

>Why bother investing in making something so unnecessarily massive for a video game when you could spend your resources making the game actually good?
Well, for starters because sense of scale and proportions matter you fucking idiot?

Sleeping Dogs has a pretty good balance between size and content

Sure they do. So the next time I play Freespace I'm going to get butthurt that I don't have to fly for 14 hours to reach the battlespace, fire a shot, wait 6 minutes for it to arrive, then have to spend 14 hours flying back so I can vent my heat in an atmosphere etc etc. Scale and proportion can be abstract, such as in TES games where a "major city" might have 20 buildings, 65 NPCs and yet still feel reasonably, despite covering orders of magnitude less space than an empty wasteland like No Man's Sky. I know which is more fun, and which is larger and more "accurate".

The fact is that to generate a city of a million people, that actually looks and feels like a million people live there, is a task far beyond anything you will ever see in a video game. Ever. Because to make a million homes, that actually feel like a million distinct homes, with real streets, real personalities would be impossible for any level of designers.

If you can't get a sense of scale and proportion from an abstraction then you are better off going outside to experience reality, than trying to use an abstract medium (video games) to achieve something they cannot provide.

>Skyrim had little to no writers
>Almost no RPG elements
>Towns were completely devoid of any interesting features except Whiterun's "Companions" lodge
>Bethesda says that they're so small because they're representations of the actual towns
>Mfw Bethesda has gotten this lazy and benighted with their main title

You don't count.

>Sure they do. So the next time I play Freespace I'm going to get butthurt that I don't have to fly for 14 hours to reach the battlespace,
Ever heard of Eve, Freelancer, X series or Elite you fucking mongoloid?
Also, you are comparing a MISSION BASED SPACE-SHOOTER TO AN OPEN WORLD RPG?!
Also also: great job of not being able to make a point without clearly absolutely silly hypebole that makes full all sense and proves how completely irrational you are about the point.

>The fact is that to generate a city of a million people,
Again, you god damn mongoloid, your entire point comes down to absurd exaggeration. What the fuck is actually wrong with you?

So in case you somehow still don't understand my problem: nobody is talking about actually rendering millions of houses you mongoloid. People talk about the difference between rendering 20 of them and 200 of them. And that is, while still abstracted, a major step that greatly alters the players sense of scale. That is the fucking point here.

So, Oblivion?

you haven't played it? you should.

It's not really lazy per se, it's a misuse of resources. Once upon a time you would have a character with thousands of lines of dialogue, but all of it typed out by one person, and be incredibly cheap to do. Now you have a character with 30 lines of dialogue that took far more time and energy to produce, not to mention money since apparently we need to hire Sean Bean to voice him. Theoretically a house in Skyrim is more in depth than one in Morrowind, with more furniture, objects and the like, which would be ok, if other things weren't cut in the process. They have more shit in buildings, but only half as many of them, and most of that shit is useless and doesn't really make it feel more real. In fact it's often an uncanny valley effect where it feels less real because your attention is now drawn to how all those table plants look the same, and why is every bed more perfectly made than in boot camp, and why does everyone go inside at the exact same time every day and etc.

It's not a roleplaying game though.

Check out Arcanum. It has an excellent city (Tarant) *and* one of the best villages (Shrouded Hills).

You say that, yet every town in Oblivion completely blows Skyrim's out of the water, they're all fit with their own unique quest lines, stores, guild lodges, and churches. And every character is fully voiced.

I'd say it's a mixture of laziness and lack of development time on their behalf. Less in the case of Skyrim isn't more.

Of course it is.

I think there is a place for some light random generation in the mix.

Okay, go buy a house, get married, and open your own store in Dragon's Dogma.

Tell me if that works, please.

>Vivec

vivec was quite huge but such a boring design

Because it's easier to just have gas stations with the occasional diner and few houses/garages next to them.