Please say that you dont try to model a *whole* city.

[Ffordesoon]

The idea that you can separate interesting and boring stuff within a city is ludicrous.

I'm pretty sure anyone who writes travel guides for a living would disagree.

 

Funny thing is, I do agree with your basic point. I find both sides of the argument meritorious, but I personally tend to enjoy walking through a seamless city a bit more than one where I'm constantly being confronted with loading screens, even if the city feels smaller than a real city. It's always going to feel smaller, after all. Skyrim's cities didn't bother me, though I can see why they bothered a lot of people. I took them as abstractions; other people didn't. Both reactions are valid.

 

EDIT: Misread, sorry.

Edited May 4, 2013 by Ffordesoon

[mcmanusaur]

 

The idea that you can separate interesting and boring stuff within a city is ludicrous.

I'm pretty sure anyone who writes travel guides for a living would disagree.

 

Funny thing is, I do agree with your basic point. I find both sides of the argument meritorious, but I personally tend to enjoy walking through a seamless city a bit more than one where I'm constantly being confronted with loading screens, even if the city feels smaller than a real city. It's always going to feel smaller, after all. Skyrim's cities didn't bother me, though I can see why they bothered a lot of people. I took them as abstractions; other people didn't. Both reactions are valid.

 

EDIT: Misread, sorry.

 

Well, when we want to start using travel guides as inspiration for an RPG, I don't know what to say.

[jamoecw]

 

 

Cut off their arms? That's the worst metaphor I've ever heard. The fact that certain parts of the setting are unimportant is something I'd rather choose as the player to focus my efforts on other areas, rather than have the developers choose for me by restricting me to a linear path.

 

Once again, zone-structuring is not the question here as we know virtually 100% that PE will do that. It's question of whether those zones represent 70% of the city, or only 10% with the vast majority of the city existing as unrepresented space between the zones. The mountain metaphor is also a rather poor metaphor, as that is physically impassable by definition, whereas in a town it constitutes creating artificial cages out of buildings where a mostly contiguous network of roads should exist.

Methinks you're not quite up to speed on what a metaphor is.

 

Also, the point was that, even though you COULD physically climb and traverse the mountain, you don't need to do so, because there's nothing important there. Not that a city strictly resembled a mountain. Just like the cutting off your arms thing. The point was that the game has no need to provide you with the opportunity to cut off your own arms.

 

Arguing that it is some kind of crime or appalling that the developers of the game force you into a linear path simply by preventing you from traveling to every square inch of a city is akin to saying "They didn't put fishing boats in, so I can't paddle out to the middle of this lake and fish! But there's a lake right there! I should be able to do that! They're forcing me to decide that's unimportant!"

 

No, what they're doing is building a finite world, from scratch, and they can either build a tiny world, or build an appropriately-sized world and understand that you're not going to go literally every place in the entire world, since this isn't Cartography Quest VIII.

 

Then please enlighten me as to what a metaphor is.

 

We're not talking about fishing or mountain-climbing here, we're talking about one the two supposedly "big" cities. If you're a creative designer and you have to cut out 70% of a city because you don't have any ideas to make interesting content for it, maybe you should reevaluate your career. The idea that you can isolate the "interesting" parts of a city apart from the "boring" areas is complete lunacy, and the fact is that in the case of different areas of a city the one's left out can contribute as much content as what's included.

 

actually the main argument for cutting 70% of the city is budget constraints.

 

basically the arguments go something like this:

chef A tries to sell his idea of a pizza to a company, but due to lack of money he creates a tiny version of the pizza, which is not made to scale, due to him wanting it to work as a mini pizza (more crust for support than a scaled pizza, etc.)

chef B tries to sell his idea of a pizza by making choice slices of the pizza, picking what he considers to be the best slices, then making those without making the whole pizza (and thus may not be accurate)

the company evaluating the pizza ideas, get to see with a large amount of approximation of what pizza A will be, getting a great visual to sell the idea.

the company evaluates pizza idea B and get a much closer approximation of what the pizza will be due to having the size of the slice indicating the size of the pizza, density of the topping on the slice are probably more accurate, etc.  though he has to imagine what it would look like, as he doesn't have a good visual of it.

if the company likes visuals then they will most likely go with pizza idea A, if they prefer abstraction, then they will go for pizza idea B.

both have the same volume, both taste good, both require some mental compensation to account for them not being the pizza.

 

as for the few people that have argued about cities being largely boring:

chef A makes a pizza, he makes it with mixed toppings, some toppings will get eaten more than others.

for the same amount of work and expense chef B makes a meal with choice slices of pizza, and choice slices of steak, and some other fixings.  more people will enjoy the meal due to the chef taking the most popular parts of various meals, but that is not to say that he will accurately judge the mix of people that he gets, so he will end with the same waste.

 

there are merits for each and every option, and thus there are drawbacks of not going other options (as you don't get the benefits of the other options that your option doesn't provide).

[Lephys]

Then please enlighten me as to what a metaphor is.

I don't know about "enlightening" you, heh. But, I can share an explanation of a metaphor. "Humor is the lubricant for the engine of life."

 

That's a metaphor, suggesting that humor is to life as lubricant is to an engine. Even though it states that humor "is" lubricant, and that life has an engine, it's a figurative comparison.

 

The things I said were simple examples, not metaphors. I'm not trying to be an arse, I just thought you might like to know. For realsies.

 

We're not talking about fishing or mountain-climbing here, we're talking about one the two supposedly "big" cities. If you're a creative designer and you have to cut out 70% of a city because you don't have any ideas to make interesting content for it, maybe you should reevaluate your career. The idea that you can isolate the "interesting" parts of a city apart from the "boring" areas is complete lunacy, and the fact is that in the case of different areas of a city the one's left out can contribute as much content as what's included.

It's not about parts of the city being "boring" and literally not worth visiting. It's representative of the idea that they happen to be less-significant parts of the city, circumstantially.

 

Let me put it this way: If you have a city with 1,000 people living in it (that's not even that huge, really), your party isn't going to visit every single person, right? I mean, you're not vacationing in that city. You're doing stuff, within a story that's constantly developing. You've got stuff going on. So, you might hit a couple of taverns or inns, but you probably won't hit all the taverns/inns in the city. You might visit some seemingly insignificant commoners, but you're not going to visit every commoner in the city. There's just no time. That not only would make little-to-no sense, it would also be a RIDICULOUS amount of effort and resource-cost for the dev team. We'd have a city, and like 2 other little areas, and that would be the extent of the game.

 

So, you have 2 options:

 

A) Shrink the city, and just make ALL the lore support the idea that you're dealing with warring nations and such with 70-person cities, each with 1 of each type of craftsman/merchant and 1 inn.

 

or...

 

B) Represent the city as large, and somehow represent the fact that you're not going to be able to just vacation around through 100% of it at your leisure.

 

They've both got pros and cons, but I don't see the 2nd one as having more cons and fewer pros than the 1st. Just because it's been done in such a way that could've used improvement in prior games doesn't mean we should just abandon it now, instead of trying to improve it. And I'm not seeing how "Omg, there are sections of the city we don't go to?" is just completely unacceptable, unless you want to literally visit every single person in an entire 1,000-person (or larger) city, then do the same in other cities (since the game will have more than 1). Which I don't think is very feasible.