Why don't RPG games have big cities anymore?

stupid fucking devs have to compete with the graphics of other games, so all this time and money goes into goddamn graphics even though graphics could have stopped developing years ago and nobody would have even noticed

so much garbage on the business end affects the final build of the game and its a huge fucking problem.

>>375819356
Money doesn't go into the fucking graphics, they spend the most on marketing

it starts with a C and ends in onsoles.

>>375819215
>Why don't RPG games have big cities anymore?- 2 posts shown.
Not sure what you mean, considering that The Witcher 3 has one of the biggest cities featured in games since Daggerfal.

Because the cities are cut out of the game and then sold back to you later on in the game's lifespan.

>>375819215
because you play retarded westacuck garbage

>>375819215
Is spending thousands of man hours creating a large city going to net them more profit that Skyrim-sized ones that satisfy 90% of people?

No?

Then they don't do it. Video games are a product, developed by a business.

>>375819215
Because people actually don't like wandering around cities, the amount of dead time you have walking in big cities is substantial.

>>375819549
Novigrad is spectacular but it becomes boring after a while. We don't really need big cities in RPGs.

>>375819215
>anymore
When did they?

Can't think of even one beyond daggerfall

>>375819721
>Novigrad is spectacular but it becomes boring after a while.
Yeah... you basically nailed it and answered OP's question.

They are not cost-effective.

Consoles. Also shitty game engines; Todd's games can't have a town bigger than 4 shanties and 6 inhabitants since the engine begins buckling under the big and huge strain, whereas CDRed was able to make Novigrad. Slav technowizards of course took shortcuts, like all the NPCs had an extremely simplistic AI where all of Todd's AIs have to have his retarded gimmicky LUMINIOUS AI or whatever where they eat apples in their inventory and can spam out over 9000 paragraphs of infodump lore which every NPC since...i dunno, Daggerfall? has been able to mindlessly spam out if you bother to ask them a question.

>>375819215
Because all you faggots kept complaining about shit like

>why do they have all these doors and houses if I can't go in them?!

so they got rid of them.

>>375819721
The problem with TW3 in genera is that it is almost entirely comprised of horizontal architecture, and the angle of the camera absolutely refuses to let you take in whatever world design there may or may not be.

Also to be honest, TW3's cities just felt like stock MMO hubs. I wish there was more going on outside of cutscenes.

>>375819215
RPGs never had big cities. No RPG ever had anything that even qualifies as a small city. Probably not even a town. Villages and hamlets only.

>>375819862
Again, as TW proved, it has fuck all to do with consoles, and everything to do with cost efficiency of (mostly large-scale) games and harsh reality of game design working somewhat differently than people think it does in terms of pure positive reaction eliciting.

>>375819215
Name two rpgs that actually had big cities with more than a couple of visitable homes, I've never seen one in my life that came even close to a normal village, let alone a city.

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RPGs have NEVER had big cities.

>>375820032
No one wants to actually walk in anything even town sized though really.

>yfw you spend an hour getting from one side to the other.

>>375819215
Because people don't have the patience to sidequest anymore and spend tens of hours in a single city.
They want their railroaded main story to progress forward.

>>375820032
morrowind
baldurs gate

>>375820121
I know, I want to hear from OP what he meant with, "anymore".

>>375819961

Baldur's Gate was a HUGE city. Amn didn't feel as big but then again you didn't have those tiers where sometimes you could zone in to a lower/higher part of the city if you Global Traveled in from the wrong place.

But then again that was partly due to the resolution of monitors back then. Baldur's Gate and Amn weren't actually THAT big...it's just monitors were too small.

IN FF 11 EVERY thing was huge

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>>375820068
Cities in general were smaller in the middle ages. Because of plague and fire and shit. So don't expect metropolises with millions of people.

Still, there are some games that feature more than the usual 10-20 houses that's considered a city in modern vidya.

>>375820286
>>375820231
>baldurs gate
>huge
It was 4 areas if I remember correctly.

Just because it's implied to be big doesn't mean shit when you can only access a small part.

>>375820286
Athkatla was the city, Amn was the country.

>>375820371
It wasn't four areas, it was nine.

http://baldursgate.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Areas

>>375819215
Are you joking? Every single RPG has a big city now.

>>375820463
Ah right, maybe it was a good size then.

I must have mistaken it with PST or something.

>>375819215
Big cities are fucking awful though, why the fuck do you want one to be big

Unless the ENTIRE game is about one big city, they all turn into generic shit.

>>375820593
I mean, you're right it was still way smaller than a real town, and almost every building was unrealistically relevant to the player, but it was pretty big by the standards of the hardware of 1998. Sigil and Carth from PST were indeed quite small.

>>375820593
The map is here: >>375820353
Almost every house can be entered.

>>375820473
Are you joking?

>>375819721
>>375819806
because it a shitty designed city

The Division's map is still fun to run around and explore

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>>375819549
This, Vidya cities is generally really small, unless the idea is to have the game take place in a city.

>>375820714
>New York City version 13901284 is more fun to play in than Novigrad

For fuck's sake, this is why we can't have nice things

>>375819702
The only correct answer and anyone saying otherwise is a neckbear manchild faggot.

/thread

>>375820714
But it's just one long excuse for a loot grind, how can you compare it with RPG cities

>>375819215
Consoles

Baldur's Gate 2 did cities perfectly. A fucking huge city with lots to explore but limited you to the main centres of interest. There's no reason why they couldn't have done the same in Skyrim so that the cities would be more than a few houses in size.

>>375819215
>ywn have an urban focused RPG, with plethora of fleshed out side quest chains, with a few rival guilds with their own story lines you can join and betray, with dirty back alleys full of thugs and whores, with comfy taverns to rest and get drunk in

>>375819215
> Role Playing Game Games

novigrad is fucking beautiful. same with beuclair. IMO the attention to detail in the design of those two cities is fucking amazing.

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still the best city in vidya history

>>375820353
There is a gap between "thousands in a trade city and small capital of hundreds" and "millions of inhabitants", sure.
But that doesn't change that its rare for vidya cities to go beyond population of tens(10-99)

>>375820830

>i havent played The Division but shill W3 for free

Novigrad has shit design

>>375820904
doesnt change the fact that The Division has top tier design compared to W3

>>375821064
>with dirty back alleys full of thugs and whores, with comfy taverns to rest and get drunk in
THIS, and climbing mechanics

RPG games never had big cities. The simple reason is that it's a lot easier to model landscape than hundreds of homes and streets.

>>375820353
>The distinction between a town and a city similarly depends on the approach: a city may strictly be an administrative entity which has been granted that designation by law, but in informal usage, the term is also used to denote an urban locality of a particular size or importance: whereas a medieval city may have possessed as few as 10,000 inhabitants, today some consider an urban place of fewer than 100,000 as a town, even though there are many officially designated cities that are much smaller than that.
>10,000 inhabitants

Baldur's Gate has 300 tops.

>>375821230
What city? What game?

>>375821064
literally ff9. honestly all of the ps1 final fantasy games qualify as having big ass cities that you can do tons of shit in.
also 12.

>>375821064
cyberpunk 2077

it's gonna take place in night city. most of the map is just gonna be one city. think they said there might be a wasteland outside the city to explore but most of the game is gonna be in an open world cyberpunk city

>A script which manages the cazador presence at Bonnie Springs (VERShadows01QuestScript) reveals that the encounter was originally supposed to take place at Mountain Shadows campground, but was moved and reduced in scope due to performance issues encountered on the Xbox 360 and PS3. The script comments say in part:
>It's responsible for some encounters in the Mountain Shadows Campground - including a Cazador take-over.
>Moved this encounter to Bonnie Springs, and reduced the number of spawns, so that we can run shenanigans on adorable consoles.


Pretty sure the answer is consoles.

rpgs have never had big cities

>>375821602
khorinis, gothic 2

every npc has a schedule. puts games like oblivion and skyrim to shame.

>>375821230
>I did not play Yakuza games or most of jrpgs ever

I wish someone tried making one in a single massive city.

>>375821859
Like DA:II?

>>375821818
i've played yakuza games. the ones i played you are restricted to a few blocks of a city and an invisible wall prevents you from leaving

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why can't there be an rpg in a grand theft auto style game?

>>375821281
I haven't played W3 but I played division, the design's a fucking joke.

>>375821974
>invisible wall

it's called game world nigger

Yakuza game map is a lot bigger than Gothic's barren wasteland not to mention city design

Unless the entire game is set in one city or one city and some surrounding areas, the huge city will make it exhausting to find a specific area unless it's one particularly common hub and SOMETIMES side-areas. It's cool the first time you explore the city and see different districts and areas. It is an absolute chore every other time, especially when you need to remember every shopkeeper's name or differences throughout the city, and assuming they just mass-Copypasted things like this, it will get even more difficult the more specific things get. Huge cities work very well as an idea, but mechanically, they are almost universally awful.

>>375822209
yakuza also came out years after gothic 2 so of course it's gonna be bigger, retard.

npcs in yakuza don't even have a schedule to their day they are just mindless drones that mill around and you can barely interact with. you can go to arcades and restaurants but these are hardly central to the game, they are pointless distractions to pad out the experience. there is no unity of design, whereas the original gothic games had that thought put into the design of the world and making everything feel lived in and believable.

also the humour in yakuza is "*holds up spork*" tier, very unfunny. spent like 15 minutes watching a cutscene only to go into some weird beat em up combat where the character's hands were on fire, what the fuck? i'm not weeb enough to forgive yakuza's problems.

>>375820842
I was about to say otherwise, but then all your buzzwords convinced me I was wrong.

>>375822129

sure buddy

>>375821484
But thats the wrong reason anon.
The real reason is that the movement mechanics is generally too simple to allow a waste city. Or navigating streets is a pain, and nothing is done to make it better.

>>375821230
Fuck that looks familiar. I think there was a really similar part of a city in Fable 2.

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Not a pure rpg but Meridian is a sexy as fuck city. One of the best I've seen in years.

>>375820032
Ultima VII

>>375822507
>npcs in yakuza don't even have a schedule to their day


not true, stopped reading, you know nothing about yakuza quest structure revolving around time and place, bye

ps

even worst japanese games like deadly premonition have more complex itineraries and hubs than gothic

>>375821064
>using the dark dangerous alley and tunnels to travel quickly to other parts of the city
>visit underground black market to buy dark trinkets, weapons and potions that are banned by the city's government

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>>375822507
>also the humour in yakuza is "*holds up spork*" tier, very unfunny. spent like 15 minutes watching a cutscene only to go into some weird beat em up combat where the character's hands were on fire, what the fuck?

>>375819215
when did rpgs have big cities?

The only games I think that have large cities are stuff like GTA and Assassins Cred.

>>375819356
???
>have to compete with the graphics of other games

i dont think thats the case at all
graphics have been stalled for like 5 years
only a handful of games stand out when it comes to graphics

Can someone recommend me a comfy rpg game?
I Just can't find one

>>375820714
It looks nice, but it's a fucking bore to look arounf

>>375823332
Persona 5 is comfy af for the first half.

>>375819215
>what is tw3

>>375823332
Skyrim with mods

>>375823332
Trails in the sky

>>375821818
and who gives a shit about your weeb shit?

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>>375823121
>even worst japanese games like deadly premonition have more complex itineraries and hubs than gothic

im not sure if this is bait, or are you actually this stupid

>>375819215
The main city in "The Last Story" was pretty huge.

Also Xenoblade Chronicles.

>>375821748
>every npc has a schedule
So it's a discount Oblivion with less developed npc's and a static world. Nice

>divinity's reach

>>375823121
Wtf are you talking about? Most of them did not have different schedule whereas each and every single one of Gothic does. Ffs play the fucking game