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

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!

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.

Meanwhile, the world is also full of towns, 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

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

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

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.

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.