The city is the sh*ttiest part in any top-down party-based RPG (2024)

Cities are generally the most memorable locations of a game for me, especially because they are best at showing off settings. The wilderness and dungeons tend to be much less distinct. Beregost, Baldur's Gate, Athkatla, the dark elf city in BG2, the wards in Sigil, cities in Arcanum and Fallout, Kuldahar in IWD, the main cities in ATOM RPG, even the cities in PoE2 are all more memorable than the rest of the game to the point that you can even freely recall the location of houses and NPCs.

The demon city in WotR is somewhat annoying because it has weird constraints and an inane camera mechanic. NWN1 also has questionable cities but I wouldn't call it a party-based game.

If you are such a combat fa*g that you abhor quests and are not interested in the opportunity to get more immersed in the setting which they offer via dialogue, just don't do these side quests. It's not like optional quests are forced upon you.

Gargaune said:

But if you're not gonna make the town your focus, you're better off sticking to short stayovers in concentrated areas, like Mulstantir in NWN2 or the towns in TotM.

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This. Athkatla and Sigil work so well because they are the main focus of their respective games. Larian on the other hand is one of the worst offenders - their practice of jamming an enormous city into the last chapter of the game is infuriating.
Especially combined with Larian's high fantasy save the world plots. Bro, the world is about be destroyed, i don't have f*cking time to search for your ring in the sewers!

One city that's worked for me way back was Baldur's Gate in the original Baldur's Gate.

For 2/3s of the game, you're walking plains, forests, caves, gnoll fortresses and the occasional settlement or two. Basically, you're thick Into The Wild. Then the city opens up, and the contrast is huge. It's like a whole new world opening up. I think they tried to go with that with BG3 also. But as Larian's maps are so compressed and packed with content no matter if you're in a settlement or in a damp cave at the rat's ass of their worlds, it doesn't hit the same way. It may actually have the averse effect, like content fatigue: "Man, I've just been through all this stuff.... and they MOVE UP ANOTHER GEAR?"

Honorable mention also for Schatten über Riva / Shadows Over Riva, e.g. Riva in Realms Of Arkania 3. Not a top-down kinda city, mind.

Deadyawn said:

Anyways, let's end the post with a very special case. Behold!

Alushinyrra. Where just about every quest has 4 long loading screens at the very least. Of course, you can't just GO where you want to. Oh no, you have to do this retarded camera arrangement "puzzle". On every district. Every single time. Forward and backward. Not even the teleporters alleviate this much. What's that? You want to go elsewhere so you don't die of terminal boredom? f*ck you, you are stuck here. The whole city doesn't have a single sewer, yet is by far the sh*ttiest. BRAVO, Owlcat.

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Tbf, that's Owlcat. Due to their stance on quality control, I genuinelly think that they had locked down the idea with the camera rotation early. E.g. , before the critical path was finished. Which tasks you with errand jobs and to back and forth in between city sections. So you don't only cope with the repeat loading bars, but with the repeat camera rotation all the same. In other words: A novelty idea looking alright for the giggle on paper/early builds turned into actual nuisance in the finished area -- but they knocked it out regardless, as iterating and polishing costs time and money. That's how I totally see this going down.

That's also the point where I said "P*ss off!" after getting back to my save for two years on and off (80+ hours total). And the point where I said to myself I'm not gonna try to push through this anymore to get to the next good bit. Or to finally finish the damn f*cker and collect my elite badge of honor for actually having conquered both Kingmaker+WOTR, for that matter.

TheKing01 said:

Is this a cover thread for OCD? Just ignore the content that doesn't concern you.

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Hamster said:

Also, the lifehack i found is to defeat your OCD and accept that you don't need to see all the content in a city.

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I get what you are saying, I do... but I also want to do the fun stuff, and the first time I visit a sh*tty city I don't know where that is. So "lmao just don't do it" won't cut it for me.

How about they design a city like, say, Calimport from Swordflight ch2. Sometimes when you are walking down the street, if your character has good hearing, you may hear a commotion inside a house, for example. Hell, if you are a paladin, you passively detect something evil is afoot. Wow! What a clever way to direct the player to where the fun stuff is. You know where else I've seen this kind of stuff? f*cking nowhere, that's where.

Hamster said:

Also, the lifehack i found is to defeat your OCD and accept that you don't need to see all the content in a city.
And with that mindset to then try to limit immersion breaking activities like entering all the houses and talking to every person.
Only go inside people's homes if asked to during a quest, etc.

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I've always played that way. I also don't just accept like every quest, just because. I find it odd that even tabletop players would often do that, even if it doesn't suit the character they're having in mind. Sure, it's a video game. But still.

You've got to really wonder how anybody ever got through Daggerfall -- which is not that one city in the game of the same name. But the thousands of it. =D

Jaesun said:

I guess we need some new indie team to just do: City: The RPG.

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City guard RPG done in the style of a stereotypical cop drama. (Hand in your badge, Grimson, you're off the force! etc.)

Call it Draw & Quarter (law & order)

Hamster said:

Also, the lifehack i found is to defeat your OCD and accept that you don't need to see all the content in a city.
And with that mindset to then try to limit immersion breaking activities like entering all the houses and talking to every person.
Only go inside people's homes if asked to during a quest, etc.

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You drink potions and use scrolls.

Serus said:

They do not have to be scaled. You can present them in more abstract way. As many people mentioned a list of options is a good alternative. Doesn't have to be actual list, you can make a better presentation, it only need to work that way. Same can be done with outdoors areas. Abstracting elements that you find hard or impossible to present (semi-)realistically is the answer. Instead of making a small, silly city of a dozen houses (supposed to be a metropoly), make an abstraction. You kill two birds with one stone.

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Exactly. Without proper abstraction things feel tiny. You get this with KotoR where the rebels are hanging out around the corner from an Imperial base, or with Bloodlines where Strauss wants you to find where some cult is, when he can literally look out his window and see their headquarters (and the building is adorned with cult symbols as well). Hollywood in Bloodlines is even worse, and feels like a suburban strip mall.

You see the same issue with games that lack a travel map screen. Everything just feels tiny and clustered together. Proper abstraction allows for things to feel much larger, and you can also fill it up with a lot of interesting content.

TheKing01 said:

Objectively, any short RPG that demands over $5.99 converted to the average Codexers fifth-world currency, is offensive.

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As many people have mentioned over the -recent- years, this is how you get Ubisoft-styled open world games filled with tons of microtasks everywhere (or if you want something more local, Dragon Age: Inquisition) where the games are designed around padding their play time - here is a neat PDF presentation i made a few years ago showing how pretty much everything in Dragon Age Inquisition is designed around padding the game's time so that people wont complain the game is too short, as if game length is the most important quality of a game.

TheKing01 said:

If said RPG has boring content that's a necessity to complete the game, then it's a bad experience.

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This applies to any game and if anything, boring content in a longer game will be a longer bad experience.

The point isn't where a bad experience will feel better, the point is to avoid (or at least try to minimize) these bad experiences - something that is much easier to do in a shorter game because the shorter game wont have as much of an incentive (see above) to add filler content. And so there is no contradiction when someone wants to see everything in a game has to offer and liking shorter games: the shorter game will simply not have the bad/filler content.

TheKing01 said:

I'm saying using the basis of your argument as 'cities are bad in an RPG' reads and will be interpreted by a majority as an OCD problem you're projecting on the game itself.

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My argument isn't that cities are bad in an RPG though, my argument is that cities do not have anything special that make them inherently bad, it isn't 'cities that are bad in RPGs' but 'areas that are bad in RPGs'. In fact...

JarlFrank said:

Some of Morrowind's cities are cool (f*ck Vivec though, that one is hell)

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...Morrowind was exactly the example that came in my mind, with most of its cities and villages being fine (because they are generally small enough for things to be next to each other, having things like flowing banners with easily readable icons from a distance about each shop's function in several of them and often having layouts that are easy to remember) - with the exception of Vivec which is by far the worst city i've seen in any RPG (2D or 3D), exactly because it is a large empty area with copy/pasted square boxes that look 99% identical both from inside and outside and despite having done many playthroughs over the years it is still a hell to find where anything is.

But the core is...

JarlFrank said:

BG2's Athkatla is cool because there's little filler

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...cities that aren't bad have the same qualities as any other area that isn't bad. Avoid making them too big so that walking through them is annoying, avoid adding time wasting "filler" (with "filler" here i mean anything that wastes time without purpose, be it pointless encounters, pointless quests or even decent quest that however have you run all over the city in various opposite directions), put interesting stuff, etc.

Desman said:

Maybe it's nostalgia but i loved exploring Baldur's Gate

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See Also

Sheetz at 1895 S Franklin St, Wake Forest, NC

One-fourth of the Codex enjoyed exploring Baldur's Gate...in BG3.

Zed Duke of Banville said:

Desman said:

Maybe it's nostalgia but i loved exploring Baldur's Gate

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One-fourth of the Codex enjoyed exploring Baldur's Gate...in BG3.

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The rest were out shagging bears.

Desman said:

Maybe it's nostalgia but i loved exploring Baldur's Gate

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It was really earned to arrive at Baldur's Gate. That made it so much more interesting and engaging, the adventure starts in backwater country and little by little you traverse through the countryside, through small villages and hamlets, until after a long time and much revelation, you finally reach the city itself.

Baldur's Gate was a wonderful game, not perfect, but the city that gave it its name was a highlight of the game. Which was an impressive achievement by the devs.

Fire King was rather annoying but some would call it an ARPG. It was made using the same engine more or less as Demon stalkers (both had rats I believe).

I liked digging through garbage cans in Arcanum (needed random rats to kill from them imho). I loved stealing from shops at night then selling their sh*t back to them. FOOLS!

In the Questron Series I loved robbing towns and gambling.

Early ultimas, I loved killing everyone in towns/castles and robbing them. Hmmm....

Btw, there was the guard fights in Phlan. Seems like after you annihilate so many the mobs could just move in and destroy the city. In the PnP they could.

Tweed said:

Zed Duke of Banville said:

Desman said:

Maybe it's nostalgia but i loved exploring Baldur's Gate

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One-fourth of the Codex enjoyed exploring Baldur's Gate...in BG3.

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The rest were out shagging bears.

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Hey, this is something I get to say!

Jaesun said:

I guess we need some new indie team to just do: City: The RPG.

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Like Turdograd?

ds said:

Jaesun said:

I guess we need some new indie team to just do: City: The RPG.

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Like Turdograd?

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Sadly I have not gotten to that yet. Is that all then solely a game centered around a city?

Jaesun said:

I guess we need some new indie team to just do: City: The RPG.

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Say no more fam!

https://www.mobygames.com/game/12404/alternate-reality-the-city/

Tweed said:

Jaesun said:

I guess we need some new indie team to just do: City: The RPG.

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Say no more fam!

https://www.mobygames.com/game/12404/alternate-reality-the-city/

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That premise is actually interesting. No idea how that game is...

JarlFrank said:

What makes BG2's Athkatla work so well is that it's basically a "best of" of the city.
You get to visit the coolest districts with the most sh*t to do in, skipping all the average residential areas that have nothing but private apartments in them - but they are still implied to be there, as you can get into random encounters in the city streets when traveling between districts.
So you get the sense of scale of a huge city, without having as much white space as BG1 had, which presented the entire city to you but only about 10% of its buildings housed anything of interest.

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what makes athkatla not work so well is that it's basically a theme park full of giant bombastic buildings with 1/4 of the space you actually use for anything, so it takes forever to take places

Ah! AR The city WIKI; a dungeon crawl city. Sadly, areas beyond the city were never complete and the Dungeon just became a separate game rather than a module add-on. There was/is the Alternate Reality X project but I feel it is mostly dead.

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/alternate-reality-remake.74294/

The original outline for the game series included plans for 6 games:

• The City
• The Arena
• The Palace
• The Wilderness
• Revelations
• Destiny

I just saw an HD entry for ipad. Odd. It is perma death and on c64 the save disk often f*cked up. I got further on DOS. I tried to hexedit a few time but dos kept f*cking up. I got far enough to map the whole city and when I hooked up to the net online decades later i compared my c64 maps. 8-bit is missing a fair bit. Without the author finishing the vision I don't know if you could capture the feel. It can be a damn slog of a game.