City vs Wilderness

Anybody else find "city" content in RPGs less enjoyable?

I tend to prefer exploring dungeons, wildernesses, caves, ruins, etc, and usually find the city-oriented content in RPGs to be less fun. Cities often look amazing but the questing/content in them is bleh. I'm less into the political sfuff, crimelord/underword stuff, and/or running errands for people in town. I like the mysterious/mythical/fantastical fear more than the "human" element types of content.

Like I found the early parts of Divinity to be slow and brutal - exploring that large city and getting thru those quests. Ug. I dread restarting that game (never got close to finishing and would likely restart it if I played it again).

I kind of stopped playing Pillars once I got into the big city. Did a few quests and lost interest (I'll get back to it though, part of it was how many games I have, my backlog, and how easily distracted I can be).

Even in some of the great classics I would rather not be doing city stuff vs the "wild" stuff.

Maybe it's my D&D roots - we tended to be more dungeon crawly and such and cities were just a place to ditch loot and learn about the next dungeon.

Some games mix it up better, for ex I never liked "city" quests as much in Skyrim but many times they'll send you out of the city to do something in the wild, so you're not just slugging it out inside the city limits.

Witcher 3 is an overall amazing game but I'm really, really getting tired of Novigrad. Exploring and doing the Velen stuff before Novigrad was much more enjoyable (to me). Mercifully it's kind of open and there's freedom of movement so I mix it up going out exploring stuff I haven't done yet, playing Gwent, and doing side quests. If the game was linear and you were bound to the city-oriented main quest stuff only I doubt I could go on.

To me it's not necessarily about Cities or Wilderness, but about Dialogue Density / pacing.

And the problem which normally comes with Cities is that they are overloaded with Quests and it makes me feel bad to leave a city without talking to everyone, taking all quests there are.
So once I enter a City I think like "ugh...and now I will spend the next 2h with nothing but reading".

I really love Dialogues but the important part is the pacing between dialogues and the other parts of the game.
In Pillars you spend tons of time with talking once you come to the two big cities and also in dyrford village. Same with Divinity:OS - once you enter the City - yay, walls of text.

So personally I could live without cities alltogether to avoid the risk of having these massive quest hubs. But then again Cities aren't all bad.

Some games just implement cities differently. In the first two Realms of Arkania Games, each city was a great thing to explore as the interactions were limited. Pretty much the same with the Spiderweb games. You only have like 5 NPCs in each city which will talk to you. It's also fine if you "gate" cities. Like if you can only enter Quarter A at first, and they send you away and into combat and at some point you enter Quarter B and much later Quarter C. So that you get these dialogues in portions, but not everything at once.

For me it's ideal if a game has maybe half an hour of dialogues, then 30-90 Minutes of combat, then half an hour of dialogues, or something similar, but not 60-120+ Minutes of Dialogue at once, which mostly happens in Cities.

I'm exactly the same. This is the primary reason why I would rather play Icewind Dale or Planescape over Balder's Gate 2. Both IWD and PST have regular pacing where you can commit your brain to either walls of texts or combat for most of the game, with not much of the other disrupting the flow. With BG2 it's just too much jumping from text walls to combat and back to text walls again in these awkward 1 hour chunks.

I really loathe games where you have massive clumps of talking and massive clumps of combat depending on whether you're in a town or in the wilderness, it's like having two different games on the go IMO.

This would never occur to me as a problem. To me the rhythm of an RPG is pretty much exactly what lackblogger says he dislikes -- battle; dialogue scene; battle; dialog scene.

Maybe that's because my favorites are tactical games where each battle has a very defined beginning and end.

I do sometimes find cities boring, but I think that's because they're often stuffed with petty Fedex quests that are just as irritating wherever they're encountered. A city quest that has some beef to it is fine.

Yes, I tend to find large cities less enjoyable.

I have countless examples of games that "bog down" for me once I enter a city or large settlement. I can get that feeling even in the beginning of a game, with ToEE being a good example - with the relatively small Hommlet. I don't think ToEE is particularly interesting when it comes to exploration or interaction - and the engine doesn't work well for large mostly empty areas, imo. But I digress.

I also tend to dislike extended tutorial sequences that can't be skipped, for this reason.

I don't enjoy running from NPC to NPC - hoping to trigger a quest.

I've stopped playing BG at least 5 times once I arrived at the title city - because of this issue, and also because the layout is abysmally bad.

But I don't think this problem is as much about the city in itself as it's about my approach to content completion.

I tend to want to do "everything" in a game - as long as I'm having fun. But the thing about having fun is that you don't immediately realise when you're having it - and when you stop having it. There can be a significant amount of latency involved.

I tend to create obstacles for myself when it comes to having fun - because I tell myself I NEED to experience everything a place like a city (as opposed to the wilderness) has to offer, before I can get the "full" experience. That's why large cities get to be so exhausting, because you have to run back and forth endlessly due to the proximity of potential content triggers.

What's the alternative? That games stop offering massive amounts of content in large cities?

Nah, I think the alternative is that I stop obsessing and just get on with it. Maybe I need to get a better sense of when I'm actually enjoying myself - or when I'm doing something that SHOULD enable my enjoyment - but gets really exhausting before that happens.

It's very tough to make large cities that are not boring.

Either you limit the city a lot, allowing the player to only visit a few places in the city, which breaks immersion, or you allow the player to explore the entire city, but make it very generic instead. Ultima VII had great cities! To some degree even VIII and IX had it as well.

I'm the same. A town/city/whatever that has me running around the place loses my interest pretty fast. I want to be in and out. Sell my stuff, buy supplies, finish a quest, maybe pick up a new one then I'm gone again. Give me a dungeon crawl, a mountain to explore or just a countryside/wilderness anytime.

DArtagnan said:

I've stopped playing BG at least 5 times once I arrived at the title city - because of this issue, and also because the layout is abysmally bad

Click to expand...

This, so much.

The BG series is a good example of how to do cities wrong and right. Baldur's Gate is a slog that stops the game, but Athkatla in BG2 is a joy because the city quests are meaty enough to be worth doing, rather than just a bunch of trotting back and forth on little errands with loading screens in between.

I think it's mostly an issue with the design approach.

Wilderness don't limit your exploration too much, allow for lots of dungeons and content density is usually spread around a lot. It also comes with different enemies type and biomes.

Cities have building and walls that funnel you around, dungeons are nonexistent or called sewers and the content density is either "everything is thrown at you" or too few that moving around the city is a slog of back and forth. It also lack enemies and biome diversity.

Games that focus on a city only seems to do it much better.

And of course it depends on the type of the game.

I remember how great it was to play Ishar 3, where you first spend a long time in a huge city. But Ishar 3 is a dungeon crawler and it's not like the city is much different besides of having lots of points of interest like inns and stuff like that.

There are always exceptions, and I was probably sounding a bit generalised and over the top in my first post. I'm not sure if it's possible to put into words the correct formula for an ideal framework for such a topic, people just seem to know if it's at the right level for them when they play. River of Time is another game where the entire first chapter is just endless town, but it doesn't detract from the game too much IMO.

I hate cities. I actually prefer cities where you just see the screen with insta-jump icons to places of interest (blacksmith, inn, magic shop, plus whatever needs to be visited when it needs to).

It's not really a city versus the outdoors thing for me. Instead I just look for a decent variety of places to visit at a steady pace. If an area drags on with a lot of quests in it, I do find that I start to lose interest, or at least rush to get out of that area. So, if I'm going to be in the same town for a while doing all sorts of things, at least send me to different neighborhoods, possibly have me infiltrate a huge temple or palace, but take some steps so that it feels like I'm going somewhere new, and not just running around the same streets over and over again.

The same holds true with the wilderness. Even if the foliage is beautiful, eventually I'm going to want to stumble across some ruins, a village, a mysterious statue, or something.

For me, I think it's largely a matter of giving me a decent amount of things to do regardless of whether I'm in town or out in the field. If either happens to lack in those, that's when I start losing interest, so it's not so much cities and the wilderness in and of themselves that can be a problem for me, but how well they are fleshed out.

I like cities. I think the way BioWare handled the first Baldur's Gate was *excellent*. Have a few small villages along the way, but open up the huge, content-dense city much later in the game. It gave the city real weight and a presence to it, not to mention that for most of the game you only saw it on your map as a large city to the north, unsure if you would actually be able to explore it. Then it opens up and blows your mind!

It also came at a good time in the pacing because there was so much wilderness exploration, that finally you are able to relax and take in the sights of a big city. Loved that game for it.

I think the *problem* can be that cities can dump a lot of quests and text on your head at once, thus irritating some people who are more obsessive than others. When you feel like you *need* to see every sight, gather every quest and read every piece of text, it can overwhelm you. However, I think if you are genuinely enjoying the experience, it shouldn't stop when you are exploring a city. If anything, try and adjust your play-style and perhaps just take in the city in small, compartmentalized segments, thus lowering the amount of text and quests you have to explore in one sitting, and opening up some varied exploration as you complete the quests you *do* have.

Cities in RPGs tend to give me a feeling of relaxation, as if I'm not being pushed along too quickly and have plenty of time to explore and see the sights.

Yes, I find I don't enjoy cities as much as other environments in rpgs. My playthru of BG has also come to a halt at the city.

-F

Great topic and I agree to 100% with OP.
Those big quest hubs are the main reason I do not finish many games these days.

It's usually like this:

• start new game X when I have time for a longer gaming session
• have fun
• arrive at quest hub
• turn off game thinking "that's a good moment to take a break and continue later"
• next gaming session I only have time for an hour or less
• I don't play X because I know that I would spend the complete session with dialogue/reading/cutscenes etc. with no actual gameplay at all
• By the time I have enough time for a longer session again, some other game caught my interest and I abandon X completely

Current example is PoE:
I arrived at Defiance Bay three or four weeks ago. Never found time for a longer gaming session since then.
Fortunately my wife and kid are away for the weekend so I had the time to force myself through DB. And I only did this because I backed the game for 165$.
If I had bought PoE for <30$ on sale, I would probably have abandoned it already and moved on to TW3.

For me, it depends on the game. I generally like wilderness better, but I think that's mostly due to the fact that I like combat in RPGs, and you generally encounter more enemies in the wilderness than a city.

I enjoyed exploring Baldur's Gate though, and I'll never understand the complaints about it. Personally, I think it's because some players feel like they're supposed to explore every single building on their first visit, and they find it overwhelming.

I loved the city of Novigrad in TW3 though. It's an Incredible experience even if it's a little slow-paced at times. I think it was the first time I've truly felt like I was in an actual city while gaming.

Khorinis in Gothic II was also great for its time. Although it was more like a town than a city.

I don't think the problem with cities is one that should be inherent to them, it's just so many game developers are stuck with a rather boring design philosophy when making their cities. If the instead of focusing on a lot of small FedEx quests focused on making a handful of larger, more interesting quests, then that would really help alleviate the issue. Also, many games don't have writing that can stand on its own, which becomes all the more apparent when you have an hour of pretty much only dialogue, interspersed with the odd bandit that tries to rob you. Games with very strong writing can get away with having a lot of dialogue dumped on you in one go (which is why Planescape can get away with having very dialogue heavy parts).
And the typical City dungeon, the sewer, tend to be really boring. Far too often they are just filled with monsters that poison you, and poison is, or at least I think it is, not a very fun status ailment. It's just a very long lasting DOT.

For me, it depends in both cases on reactivity.

If I have social skills and attributes in a game, I enjoy cities immensly. Bartering, persuading, information gathering... all can be a lot of fun if I have the feeling it depends on my party composition.

Same for wilderness: I don't care for wilderness areas too much if I can't build my party with survival in mind. Otherwise it's just a map filled with monsters.

Wilderness immerses me much better, but it is also much more difficult to build on the developers' side … No wonder that SWTOR mainly has barren and/or dessert-like environments …