Town, outside, and dungeon represent decreasing levels of safety. In most games, players want a clear indication of how much danger they are in just walking around. Some games, like Dark Souls, do blur these lines. I think it would be easy to go overboard.
This strikes me as one of those things that sounds better on paper than in practice.
I believe the grand vision for Tarkov was for basically the whole world to be outside/dungeon. Kinda sad they didn't have the technical skill to pull off open world. That would have been an interesting gaming experience.
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 this area to xp, then go to this area, then this area.
For once I would like a Skyrim experience but where you're given free roam to unfold the story as you see fit. Crafting your unique story in the process.
I also don't think games should cater to safety or make towns "safe" from other players. I think the games should allow crime but also have punishment for it if caught by the NPC police or Players. Some of my best memories are from a public execution of a murderer on Ultima Online back in 1999. We had like 100 people gather (on a server that supported maybe 2000 tops).
> 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.
It sounds like you want to play EVE Online, but as a guy with a sword rather than a guy in a spaceship. There is a story, but it doesn't really matter and there's no direct way to interact with it. Systems are given safety ranking from 0.0 to 1.0, depending on how fast the NPCs show up and destroy your ship. Even in 1.0 space you're not really "safe" from someone deciding they just want to blow you to smithereens.
I don't think you're _wrong_ for wanting these things, but I think the largest game developers avoid them and provide more "on-rails" experiences for good reasons.
The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants and needs, and they would take actions to fulfill those wants and needs regardless of whether or not the player was even watching. It sounds like it would lead to a very interesting world, but in practice it led to criminal NPCs being dead before the player can meet them. (The truth to this story is debated: https://blog.paavo.me/radiant-ai/)
Likewise, the concept of an MMO where you aren't necessarily safe from other players in a town sounds interesting, especially in a game with a relatively small community. Applied at scale to something like World of Warcraft, I think that it would either be penalized so heavily that no one would do it, or not heavily enough so that new players have difficulty getting anywhere in the game because they are murdered by high-level trolls as soon as they log in.
I think what my ideal is basically DnD, but with an AI DM.
This is something that I'm hoping the current LLM and future AI work eventually get us to. If we can get persistent context and memory, or at least a simulacrum of that, we could get to truly dynamic reactive worlds
I think I turn more to story generators like Rimworld and DF than organic MMO or even basic multi-player these days. Especially in an MMO, there are just so many people whose entire goal is to make your play experience worse. People suck.
I'm surprised the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games aren't mentioned at all here. They're pretty well known for not always having these boundaries, sometimes very effectively (getting ambushed in town in Oblivion by a secret cultist) and sometimes comically (like some of the nonsense that happens with raiders and settlements in Fallout 4).
The 2024 D&D starter set literally has 3 adventure books for Wilderness (Outside), Caves of Chaos (Dungeon), and Keep on the Borderlands (Town). Of course that game has infinite possibilities for how to 'implement' those areas but kind of an interesting parallel.
I'm reminded of a diagram from the pitch doc for the original Diablo [0] that made its rounds across the web recently. The dungeon/town split was particularly sharp back then, but the broad design has stuck with modern ARPG design, either in the form of safe zones around town or explicit town zones.
A lot of this seems to be due to modern multiplayer design, with shared town instances and (usually) private dungeon/outside instances.
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 they'd take up the entire overworld.
Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom kind of have the same issue: there appear to only be a few dozen Gerudo for instance, and only a few hundred people total in the entire world.
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.
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.
I really like the balance that Morrowind offered: it all felt like one big world and going from town to outside to dungeon was smooth and unannounced. You really felt like you were discovering a place, and you really got lost in a pre-gmaps sense.
A modern version I like is Bg3. It has a much more linear playthrough than Morrowind and Toen/Outside/Dungeon is more clearly marked, but it's still smooth. Also, you have a sense of uncertain danger in all three setups. And dungeons can be fightless if you play them well!
Also, it's interesting how both Morrowind and Bg3 are both able to integrate the environment and the NPCs neatly into the battle system. Both feel like you're fighting in a live world. But they do it very differently. I think in bg3 it is much more fun to fight, but Morrowind allows for more silliness and out of the box thinking.
I think Gothic II did this really well. While there are some clear borders a lot of the transitions between the three categories are gradual and organic. You're mostly safe in the secondary settlements but go too far into someone's backyard and you might suddenly find yourself fighting for your life. It also managed to make the place feel expansive without any place feeling like repetitive filler content.
We need a Valheim-like where there are other factions of creatures that play the game similarly to you and independently make decisions on what they want to do.
Whenever you decide to buck general rules in video games you risk coming off as capricious. The only way to make it work IME is to clearly indicate from the beginning that you aren’t playing a game that adheres to typical rules OR you build a system that masks it so convincingly that people start questioning what the rules even are on their own. It’s kind of like going to see a magician: you know magic isn’t real, but when you see a really fucking awesome trick, you allow yourself to suspend your disbelief for at least a split second.
DDLC was cool, then it was cool to hate it, now it’s not a surprise anymore and has landed somewhere in the middle with I think most folks acknowledging it was a cool example of messing with the harem/dating sim formula. What I liked about it was how I spent a lot of the game figuring out what the rules were (I knew it was not a conventional harem game and I knew it had horror elements, but I really went out of my way to go in with as little information as possible). I kind of think that’s where the special sauce is if you want to break the “shackles” of things like outside/dungeon/town. BG3 had that magic for most of the first act I think for a lot of people, which I also think carried a lot of its success (and rightfully so). Once we saw behind the curtain it made a little more sense, but when you first dropped into that game it wasn’t clear what the boundaries or consequences were. The matrix wasn’t laid out before you. That’s the key.
The fourth place is the menu where all the inventory management, map viewing, crafting, skill point allocation occurs. In some games it feels like an integrated HUD (Pip Boy) and others a disconnected application in itself. Some the world pauses others you’re still vulnerable. Some the sound cuts and it feels cold and sterile or tacked on. If I’m spending hours in there rearranging furnkle berries into a corner not sure if I ought to throw them out yet, putting gems in sockets and comparing +3 modifiers on some purple enchanted drop — make it a nice experience! Some feel like business to business software. The trading system with NPC overlaps here. An area ripe for more creativity in my opinion. Have that mutant acid ostrich egg I’ve been carrying get cracked and burn a hole through my bag while ruining half my provisions.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 51.8 ms ] threadThis strikes me as one of those things that sounds better on paper than in practice.
For once I would like a Skyrim experience but where you're given free roam to unfold the story as you see fit. Crafting your unique story in the process.
I also don't think games should cater to safety or make towns "safe" from other players. I think the games should allow crime but also have punishment for it if caught by the NPC police or Players. Some of my best memories are from a public execution of a murderer on Ultima Online back in 1999. We had like 100 people gather (on a server that supported maybe 2000 tops).
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
The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants and needs, and they would take actions to fulfill those wants and needs regardless of whether or not the player was even watching. It sounds like it would lead to a very interesting world, but in practice it led to criminal NPCs being dead before the player can meet them. (The truth to this story is debated: https://blog.paavo.me/radiant-ai/)
Likewise, the concept of an MMO where you aren't necessarily safe from other players in a town sounds interesting, especially in a game with a relatively small community. Applied at scale to something like World of Warcraft, I think that it would either be penalized so heavily that no one would do it, or not heavily enough so that new players have difficulty getting anywhere in the game because they are murdered by high-level trolls as soon as they log in.
This is something that I'm hoping the current LLM and future AI work eventually get us to. If we can get persistent context and memory, or at least a simulacrum of that, we could get to truly dynamic reactive worlds
A lot of this seems to be due to modern multiplayer design, with shared town instances and (usually) private dungeon/outside instances.
[0] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/here-s-a-look-at-the-... (scroll down)
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 they'd take up the entire overworld.
Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom kind of have the same issue: there appear to only be a few dozen Gerudo for instance, and only a few hundred people total in the entire world.
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.
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.
A modern version I like is Bg3. It has a much more linear playthrough than Morrowind and Toen/Outside/Dungeon is more clearly marked, but it's still smooth. Also, you have a sense of uncertain danger in all three setups. And dungeons can be fightless if you play them well!
Also, it's interesting how both Morrowind and Bg3 are both able to integrate the environment and the NPCs neatly into the battle system. Both feel like you're fighting in a live world. But they do it very differently. I think in bg3 it is much more fun to fight, but Morrowind allows for more silliness and out of the box thinking.
DDLC was cool, then it was cool to hate it, now it’s not a surprise anymore and has landed somewhere in the middle with I think most folks acknowledging it was a cool example of messing with the harem/dating sim formula. What I liked about it was how I spent a lot of the game figuring out what the rules were (I knew it was not a conventional harem game and I knew it had horror elements, but I really went out of my way to go in with as little information as possible). I kind of think that’s where the special sauce is if you want to break the “shackles” of things like outside/dungeon/town. BG3 had that magic for most of the first act I think for a lot of people, which I also think carried a lot of its success (and rightfully so). Once we saw behind the curtain it made a little more sense, but when you first dropped into that game it wasn’t clear what the boundaries or consequences were. The matrix wasn’t laid out before you. That’s the key.