Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

https://keithburgun.net/outside-dungeon-town-integrating-the-three-places-in-videogames/

by vector_spaces • 7 months ago

118 67 7 months ago

axblount• 7 months ago

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.

WillPostForFood• 7 months ago

I think Dark Souls is not a fluke, it shows that when executed well (which very may be hard), it is additive. It makes things feel more organic.

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!

adzm• 7 months ago

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

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

AlotOfReading• 7 months ago

Safety can come from control over the world though. Consider Minecraft and Terraria (especially older MC), where monsters can spawn in most areas outside some minimum radius from the player. Neither is particularly "scary" because they give the player straightforward ways to control the situation. In fact, monster spawning leads to a lot of emergent gameplay in them.

jesse__• 7 months ago

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.

reactordev9• 7 months ago

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).

bobslay• 7 months ago

You might want to check out "Depth of Peril". kind of a cluncky diablo 1 like game. I liked it because of that dynamism. Graphics and gameplay are now dated, but if you talk fondly about ultima, you might enjoy it.

mysterydip• 7 months ago

Din's Curse and Din's Legacy (by the same developer as Depths of Peril) are other entries worth a look. They have a dynamic evolving world as you go about your business: https://www.soldak.com/Dins-Curse/Overview.html

jrmg• 7 months ago

I haven’t played it, but my understanding is that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 works this way. Meet a person who tells you something’s happening tonight, and you better get there tonight if you want to see/do it. Maybe someone who’s played the game can chime in.

reactordev9• 7 months ago

It’s a great game, much like its predecessor. However, it’s still linear in most ways. You miss out on those small side quests but that was true of the first game too.

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.

fennecbutt5• 7 months ago

I have commented on Todd's failure to deliver on such promises in skyrim before.

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.

reactordev9• 7 months ago

Oh I totally agree. More so I think the ability for AI to generate any kind of game you wish is in the not so distant future.

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.

owyn• 7 months ago

Shadow of Mordor (and the sequel) had something called the "Nemesis" system where some of the Orc Captains you kill (and the ones who kill you) might survive off screen and get stronger and come back with scars and buffs and new nicknames. It didn't do the village/town stuff you are talking about. They talked about doing it in future games but never did.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fh5qc-ZnaM

Forgeties792• 7 months ago

But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust.

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.

chongli2• 7 months ago

Check out the games by Jeff Vogel [1] of Spiderweb Software [2]. His games may not be pretty to look at but they feature worlds that are full of life and rich with detail. Monsters attack and damage towns, destroy buildings, leave citizens homeless and shopkeepers jobless, and may eventually wipe towns off the map.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs

[2] https://spiderwebsoftware.com

ajmurmann• 7 months ago

Many years ago I played Escape a from the Pit which was good but I played it on an iPad and eventually bounced off. Where do you recommend starting today?

noelwelsh• 7 months ago

One problem with the simulation route is that games in the D&D lineage are usually wildly unbalanced. A, say, level 5 monster could run through endless level 1 NPCs. Also, much of the machinery of our world (e.g. commerce) doesn't really work when then there are incredibly dangerous and malevolent critters scattered throughout.

jltsiren• 7 months ago

It's more about the combat model. Everyone is a fanatic who fights until death, despite any casualties their friends and allies have suffered. And weapons and other attacks are mostly harmless. They deal limited damage measured in hit points, which does not affect the combat effectiveness of the target, heals quickly, and does not leave any lasting effects.

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.

Scarblac• 7 months ago

Isnt this what Dwarf Fortress aspires to be? Simulated from the internal organs of dwarfs up, of course.

hoten• 7 months ago

Check out Kenshi.

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

block_dagger• 7 months ago

Ah, UO memories. PK killing as a Great Lord, Blackthorne shield in hand. Visiting town was all "bank" "bank" "bank" "lfg" "bank"

reactordev9• 7 months ago

Everyone I played with had a macro key program that when you pressed F11 would chat “bank guards!” So when you were in Briton, you just spam F11 for safety.

thesuitonym2• 7 months ago

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.

reactordev9• 7 months ago

Not quite. I want a story. I want that story to unfold as I play in an organic way.

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.

robrtsql2• 7 months ago

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.

reactordev9• 7 months ago

Dwarf fortress proves you can totally do things off script without player interaction. Poor Ragnar.

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.

esyir• 7 months ago

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

tstrimple3• 7 months ago

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.

crooked-v• 7 months ago

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).

fennecbutt5• 7 months ago

Settlements in FO4 were a letdown, the gameplay loop is so pointless. It's the same as your buildings being attacked in Valheim and Grounded.

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.

robotsquidward• 7 months ago

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.

brador• 7 months ago

Rest, risk, random = town, dungeon, overworld.

RandomBK• 7 months ago

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.

[0] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/here-s-a-look-at-the-... (scroll down)

philsnow• 7 months ago

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.

Agentlien• 7 months ago

I don't think the idea of realistic scale for video game locations is very attractive.

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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 7 months ago

The idea of the super realistic video game where you can do anything keeps recurring, but it wouldn't actually be any fun to play.

I had the idea first, when I was 8 years old and first played a video game. It just gets re discovered

jmyeet• 7 months ago

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.

jrowen• 7 months ago

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.

slowhadoken• 7 months ago

Most of my video game theory is based on manipulating these distinctions.

huevosabio• 7 months ago

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.

FuriouslyAdrift• 7 months ago

I remember "finishing" Morrowind and then accidentally becoming a vampire and finding out there was more to the game... then guild stuff.. then political stuff. Massive game.

ema• 7 months ago

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.

btschaegg• 7 months ago

Came here to comment on Gothic, too. I'd have picked the original Gothic even more as an example, though -- there, you are in a prisoner colony, even if you are in a settlement. Anger the wrong people and you won't survive the experience for most of the game.

Also the swamp camp is really close to some rather deadly creatures if you're not careful in the early game.

fifticon• 7 months ago

this has been solved in alternate reality for c64. some parts of town are dangerous, you may get mugged, others are safe.

Madmallard• 7 months ago

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.

Forgeties792• 7 months ago

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.

CompoundEyes• 7 months ago

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.

LorenPechtel2• 7 months ago

One thing he missed: places have names so players can talk about them.

Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)

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