[HN Gopher] Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places...
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Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames
(2024)
Author : vector_spaces
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-12-30 00:54 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (keithburgun.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (keithburgun.net)
| axblount wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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__ wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| 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.
| goda90 wrote:
| One problem is that the more you have happen without it
| being caused by/linked to player interaction, the more you
| need to have be possible to happen. Then you're either
| wrestling with a small chaotic world that doesn't make much
| sense, or you need to scale it up so much that there's no
| way the player will actually get to experience most of it.
| If you have 10 villages in your game world, then how many
| off-screen events can you realistically fit in while the
| player is away and have it still be interesting for the
| player when they come back?
| fennecbutt wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| reactordev wrote:
| Yeah, good game mechanics scarred by an IP royalty
| agreement.
| paragraft wrote:
| Yes here's the patent. The independent claims are
| frustratingly broad if you're trying to think through
| practical NPC world sim systems.
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160279522A1/en
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > 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.
| chongli wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| medwards666 wrote:
| You could try the new remake of Avernum 4: Greed & Glory
| (first part of the second Avernum trilogy - no need to have
| played the first trilogy as this is entirely standalone): h
| ttps://store.steampowered.com/app/3882020/Avernum_4_Greed_a
| ...
| mathgeek wrote:
| Nothing too recent that I know of but a couple of
| discussions:
|
| https://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/topic/26438-good-
| first-g...
|
| https://www.gog.com/forum/general/what_are_your_favorite_sp
| i...
| noelwelsh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Isnt this what Dwarf Fortress aspires to be? Simulated from the
| internal organs of dwarfs up, of course.
| hoten wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ah, UO memories. PK killing as a Great Lord, Blackthorne shield
| in hand. Visiting town was all "bank" "bank" "bank" "lfg"
| "bank"
| reactordev wrote:
| 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.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| 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.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I'm not sure how LLMs or AI could solve that. If anything
| it would make the problem worse, because kids will be more
| used to getting instantly generated plots.
|
| Either way, if it _does_ come to pass, I hope it doesn 't
| become the norm. I am not interested in playing a game
| nobody was interested in making.
| robrtsql wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| 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.
| robrtsql wrote:
| > They all end up in town. At the same time. ... Don't
| spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time.
|
| I hadn't thought about that. The perspective I am coming
| from (Runescape, Final Fantasy XIV) has players starting in
| one (or three) locations when they begin the game.
|
| Thanks for the Ashes of Creation name-drop. I don't know if
| I'll play it but I'm definitely interested in watching the
| trajectory of this game.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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).
| fennecbutt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Rest, risk, random = town, dungeon, overworld.
| RandomBK wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Most of my video game theory is based on manipulating these
| distinctions.
| huevosabio wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fifticon wrote:
| this has been solved in alternate reality for c64. some parts of
| town are dangerous, you may get mugged, others are safe.
| Madmallard wrote:
| 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.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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