6 ms·

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

118 points by vector_spaces 9mo ago

axblount 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    > 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
    - astrange 9mo ago
      I was surprised that ToTK was so focused on the underworld. The sky islands are much nicer. That said, I was also surprised ToTK had the same plot as BotW. Like, Ganon takes over the castle and then they defeat him and then they go into the basement and he's just there and he takes over the castle again?
    - aezart 9mo ago
      Something I've occasionally wished for is a classic-style Zelda game[1] where partway through the adventure you discover that all the dungeons are actually adjacent to each other, and you can open up passages connecting them turning it all into one big Metroidvania experience. [1]: i.e. one with 4-8 dungeons and new navigation/combat tools in each, not a sandbox like BotW
- AlotOfReading 9mo ago
  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__ 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    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 https://www.soldak.com/Dins-Curse/Overview.html
- jrmg 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
crooked-v 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
Rest, risk, random = town, dungeon, overworld.
RandomBK 9mo ago
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-original-design-pitch-document-for-i-diablo-i- https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/here-s-a-look-at-the-... (scroll down)
philsnow 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
    The idea of the super realistic video game where you can do anything keeps recurring, but it wouldn't actually be any fun to play. I had the idea first, when I was 8 years old and first played a video game. It just gets re discovered
jmyeet 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
Most of my video game theory is based on manipulating these distinctions.
huevosabio 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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.
- btschaegg 9mo ago
  Came here to comment on Gothic, too. I'd have picked the original Gothic even more as an example, though -- there, you are in a prisoner colony, even if you are in a settlement. Anger the wrong people and you won't survive the experience for most of the game. Also the swamp camp is really close to some rather deadly creatures if you're not careful in the early game.
fifticon 9mo ago
this has been solved in alternate reality for c64. some parts of town are dangerous, you may get mugged, others are safe.
Madmallard 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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.
LorenPechtel 9mo ago
One thing he missed: places have names so players can talk about them.

118 points by vector_spaces 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  > 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
  - astrange 9mo ago
    I was surprised that ToTK was so focused on the underworld. The sky islands are much nicer. That said, I was also surprised ToTK had the same plot as BotW. Like, Ganon takes over the castle and then they defeat him and then they go into the basement and he's just there and he takes over the castle again?
  - aezart 9mo ago
    Something I've occasionally wished for is a classic-style Zelda game[1] where partway through the adventure you discover that all the dungeons are actually adjacent to each other, and you can open up passages connecting them turning it all into one big Metroidvania experience. [1]: i.e. one with 4-8 dungeons and new navigation/combat tools in each, not a sandbox like BotW
AlotOfReading 9mo ago
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__ 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 https://www.soldak.com/Dins-Curse/Overview.html
jrmg 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

crooked-v 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

Rest, risk, random = town, dungeon, overworld.

RandomBK 9mo ago

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-original-design-pitch-document-for-i-diablo-i- https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/here-s-a-look-at-the-... (scroll down)

philsnow 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
  The idea of the super realistic video game where you can do anything keeps recurring, but it wouldn't actually be any fun to play. I had the idea first, when I was 8 years old and first played a video game. It just gets re discovered

jmyeet 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

Most of my video game theory is based on manipulating these distinctions.

huevosabio 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

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.

btschaegg 9mo ago
Came here to comment on Gothic, too. I'd have picked the original Gothic even more as an example, though -- there, you are in a prisoner colony, even if you are in a settlement. Anger the wrong people and you won't survive the experience for most of the game. Also the swamp camp is really close to some rather deadly creatures if you're not careful in the early game.

fifticon 9mo ago

this has been solved in alternate reality for c64. some parts of town are dangerous, you may get mugged, others are safe.

Madmallard 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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.

LorenPechtel 9mo ago

One thing he missed: places have names so players can talk about them.