Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
keithburgun.net
keithburgun.net
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).
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…
From there, don’t give a single hint until a player did something that could actually do something if they do it right.
An example would be early days of Minecraft before notch sold his soul, you wouldn’t have a guide or achievements or anything to help you. There were no wikis, only a small forum of people asking why are people punching trees?
Games need to feel more exploratory without giving everyone GPS direct to the next XP machine.
Much like in modern times eh? It’s all RNG. I take it you never played Daggerfall.
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 can the npcs.
Would be cool to come back to a village, and now the leader has changed because the previous one insulted someone at the tavern, who killed the leader in a fit of rage. The village then chose a replacement leader, the assailant was publicly executed for their crimes. But the villagers decided this was too brutal a punishment so they removed the leader, who resisted but got driven out of town. The ousted leader wants control of the village back so they've been planning to enter with a crew of mercenaries.
When you get to the village you get given a quest to go take care of the problem, based on the hearsay. Hell, when you get to whatever hideout they're holed up in maybe the npc has even decided to just give up and move somewhere else.
So many opportunities for awesome narratives. I've done experiments with this stuff in text, but not in engine with an actual game.
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 wood from the nearby piles, and started crafting a masterpiece crossbow. 6 months later, this thing comes out decked in jewels and gems, it’s got a +++ rating on the end. It’s wonderful. Then Ragnar loads a bolt. Pulls the trigger.
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).
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.
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.
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 easy flood us with trash while any decent work gets buried in it and can’t be found.
Meanwhile, the world is also full of outside areas to explore and dungeons to plunder. However, no town is safe. Spend too much time delving dungeons and you may return to a smoking ruin instead of a town. Or you may arrive in the middle of a monster attack on the town and get to participate in its defence!
Of course, the townsfolk aren't helpless either. They have town guards, soldiers, and even imperial wizards who arrive to help out. The wizards even create magical barriers to patch up the holes in the town wall!
As for how the games play, they're very reminiscent of old school Ultima games such as Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. As a fan of UO, you may really enjoy some Spiderweb Software games. No multiplayer though, these are strictly single-player turn-based affairs.
https://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/topic/26438-good-first-g...
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/what_are_your_favorite_spi...
In a different combat model, an equally unbalanced monster would avoid unnecessary fights agains groups of armed opponents. Not because it's afraid it would lose, but due to the risk of permanent injuries. Determined defenders could then try to take advantage of that behavior to drive the monster away.
The cats know they would win, but a predator at our size range might injure them and keep them from getting their next meal. Thus it's virtually certain they will not attack--and the news supports this. People get hurt when the animal feels it needs to defend itself.
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.
I played Eve a lot when it first came out up until about 2010 or so. The Alliance politics isn’t my cup of tea. The sandbox is great though. It’s just sad that gamers no longer see that and only want quests or missions or some direction on what to do next.
I’m hoping that with LLMs and AI, we’ll break free of this “waiting to be instructed” mentality of the youth and we can make games that are more diverse and open. Rock Star Games does some wonderful little scripted events and things in their games, they know how, but they still force you down this linear story arch. RDR2 was as close to the kind of game I’m talking about except for that fact. The fact that each “chapter” was a linear progression across the open world map.
Either way, if it does come to pass, I hope it doesn't become the norm. I am not interested in playing a game nobody was interested in making.
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.
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). Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time. Change it depending on their character creation choices, backstory, profession, etc. Let them naturally come to towns. Let there be enough land to support 200,000 inhabitants. These kinds of things I wish for. Space games are the only ones that manage to have enough room for everyone to live angrily ever after.
Ashes of Creation is trying its best in this area.
Land scarcity becomes a thing. Like in UO. You see what Eve has done, just let structures live so long as no one blows it up. In UO, they introduced decay timers so if you abandoned the game, you forfeit your lot. Games were smarter back then.
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 game.
You are 100% correct that that is how it should be modeled.
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
This strikes me as one of those things that sounds better on paper than in practice.
From article : "Maybe one cave system has a place where it connects to a dungeon, which connects also to a basement in some guy’s house in the middle of nowhere."
This just sounds better than having the black and white delineations between spaces. Yes!
To an extent, tears of the kingdom really does do this a few places, but not enough. It really is fun finding new holes into the underworld from a cave, and using the caves to get into the shed in that one village or to the tower etc
That said, I was also surprised ToTK had the same plot as BotW. Like, Ganon takes over the castle and then they defeat him and then they go into the basement and he's just there and he takes over the castle again?
[1]: i.e. one with 4-8 dungeons and new navigation/combat tools in each, not a sandbox like BotW
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.
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.
I had the idea first, when I was 8 years old and first played a video game. It just gets re discovered
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)
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.
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.
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.
Also the swamp camp is really close to some rather deadly creatures if you're not careful in the early game.
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.
Occasional attacks, but no real frequency or point to it - because they don't want to annoy players with it. At least in grounded it's based on how much you've attacked a type of insect in some regards.