Re: Fare Thee Well, Piranha Bytes

On Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:49:53 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 10/07/2024 23:07, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

But "Gothic" had another ace up its sleeve. It's world didn't feel
artificially compressed. In so many CRPGs, the world is a lot smaller
than it should be; so-called major cities are comprised of a few
hundred people, towns are separated by only a few hundred steps of
wilderness travel, and the tallest mountain peak is less than a
thousand feet above sea level. These cheats are, of course, an
acceptable break from reality to keep the game fun by cutting out a
lot of unnecessary dross (and because it's resource-expensive to
actually generate a uniquely huge world) but it adds a layer of
artificiality to the experience.

>
I kinda accepted that there's a limit to how much effort should be put
into even designing a town but the part I found really jarring was the
lack of activity. Where are all the people just going about their daily
business. I think it was The Witcher that was one of the first games
that gave me a sense that a town was alive and not there just for me.

Strange, I didn't find "The Witcher's" city all that engaging, largely
because it was pretty empty. "The Witcher 3", was much better in this
regard, with much larger crowds. But even so, most of the people in
both games were fairly static, mostly just standing in place and not
really DOING anything. Although at least they did have the decency to
disappear at night and not stand around 24 hours a day.

"The Witcher 3" did have one of the first suitably LARGE cities where
it actually felt 'life sized' and filled with sufficient numbers of
buildings and businesses (even if most of them were inaccessible to
the player).

But I get it. Even though the idea for 'living NPCs' was around since
the 80s, both the difficulty and utility of this are rarely
beneficially to game-design. It takes a lot of resources --both in
terms of computing power and developer man-power-- to create a city
filled with NPCs who have active schedules (and -- as has been
frequently observed by players of "Elder Scrolls: Oblivion"-- can lead
to hard-to-troubleshoot edge-cases where the AI goes off and does
something unexpected).

But even more importantly, it doesn't really add much to the gameplay.
It's a neat tech-trick, something you can market as 'new' and
'exciting', but it often gets in the way of the actual gameplay. NPCs
with schedules often leads to players not being able to find the
quest-givers, stalling the plot. It's arguably realistic, but it isn't
much fun.

Still, the complete abandonment of the mechanic in the late 90s and
early 2000s was jarring, and that made its reappearance (limited as it
was) in "Gothic" all the more exciting.

Then the really jarring one, small villages that make no sense. So
there's about five houses yet you manage to support a fully equipped
black smith and a market that when the party arrive out numbers the
number of people using the market. You also get to why does the local
tavern contain far more people than actually live here.

"Ultima IX" had this museum where -if you entered it- there was this
ROAR of murmurs and movement, as if hundreds of people were around you
all shuffling about and admiring the exhibits. This despite the fact
that the museum encompassed all of a single, average sized room and
there was nobody in it except yourself. ;-)

With earlier games, I was a lot more forgiving. With so little disk
space, such tiny amounts of RAM available, you ignored the fact that
each city was fed by two farms that had plots of land smaller than the
average London flat. You just accepted that these were placeholders
representing much larger estates. It's less acceptable with modern
games, which have the resources to create a more realistic scale. I
mean, I'm not demanding total realism* but even today, most CRPGs
--where it is "Skyrim", "The Witcher", or "Kingdom Come"-- plop down
five or six farms total and call it a day. Wandering day after day
through endless farmland wouldn't be fun, but maybe a /bit/ more
attention to scale and realism?






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* it takes about a football pitch's -roughly an acre- worth of land to
feed a person for a year. A town of 10,000 would need 15 square miles
of farmland to feed it. More if you took into consideration the land
needed to feed the farmers, fallow lands, the inefficiencies of
medieval farming, etc. IIRC, there was a 10:1 ratio of farmers to
city-dwellers in medieval times, because you NEEDED that many
tillers-of-the-soil to keep even the smallest cities fed!