A Sense of Place

So, I really like games with a sense of place. Some days, I think it's the most important part of a game, more important than how the game actually plays.

But only some days: the vast majority of games don't give me any immersive sense of place.

I asked around on Twitter, and nobody chose the same places I did. They all had very different priorities. And it's clear that game devs share their priorities - especially clear, given half the respondents were game devs.

What they mostly liked was a sense of scale. Mostly cities with epic vistas and large scales.

I sure do like pretty cities, but that's not what keeps me coming back to a game year after year. I'd like to talk about what I like in cities and towns, try to nail it down so that I can build it myself.

So, let's start: one video game city that keeps luring me back is in Bloodlines.

It's not big. It's not beautiful. The design is blunt and uninspired. It has no redeeming qualities as a city or a piece of art.

But... I keep replaying the damn game, and a big part of that is how much I enjoy being in the city. There's a little fizz beneath the city that instantly smashes me into the game and keeps me there.

I think that's a good hint. Since there's not much distracting epicness, I can focus on the one thing I want to see more of, even though it's just a fizz.

Pace in Place

In most games with cities, the cities are subordinate to the wider gameplay. The city might host missions or objectives, but living in the city is not an objective.

There are games where the city is the main gameplay. For example, in Crackdown. Surprisingly, this seems to be even worse for my little fizz: it reduces the city to a mechanic.

The experience of being in the hubs in Bloodlines is different.

You are living in the city. Or... unliving, I guess.

You're existing in the city.

Your struggles in the game are simply struggles to continue living in the city. You end up fighting dangerous battles against ridiculously overpowered enemies, but the point is that, at the end, you'll get to go home and take a nap and then tomorrow you can maybe visit your friend downtown. Even the end boss is literally chosen by you deciding what kind of city you want to live in!

Over the course of your adventure, you establish a life in the city, with friends and coworkers and maybe someone to date.

You also get to know the city a bit better. Although exploring the city isn't really the point, you do explore it while you roam around trying to make a life for yourself. There are plenty of things to find - a few topological secrets, like the back entrance to the the pub. A few new people with new missions, such as Ash in the cemetery or the truck vendor that wants you to clear out a parking lot. A few areas that are locked and you'll have to remember later.

The pace of discovery feels right to me. In many video game cities, you explore to find random treasure baubles scattered around. But in Bloodline's cities, you search to find new people with fun new missions, new shortcuts, new locked doors you'll unlock later. You never feel like you came here just to get a mechanical reward: if you go into the back alley, you won't find $5 in a treasure chest. You will find a skeevy guy that wants you to clear out a parking lot.

In a theoretical modern remake, you might feel compelled generate these missions on the fly. But you'd have to be careful: the point is to make a life for yourself. When I clean out the parking lot, the skeevy guy not only gives me a reward, but becomes a better vendor. If you were randomly generating missions, you'd still have to make sure the rewards are about better living... and I don't need more than one skeevy guy selling me stuff.

If you look at the missions in these cities, nearly all of them are about living in the city. Either getting you established, or making the city safer for you, or making friends and allies.

Even though all the NPCs are barely functional weirdo jerks, they somehow become your barely functional weirdo jerks. Mission after mission, day after day.

Counterexample

The most obvious counterexample is Stardew Valley, or any similar game. They are about building a life, but in the most mechanical way possible. You literally build your life: more farmhouses, more crops, more ore, more machines. But the town is not really part of that.

The NPCs are rigid and inflexibly forced into your life. You cannot be allowed to alienate the shopkeep because there are no other shopkeeps. You cannot work for or against the mayor, because there are no other factions. There are few NPCs, and they largely exist to fill specific roles in the gameplay. Dating is the exception, but usually you can only date NPCs with no critical role, and therefore they have no actual place in the town. Moreover, you can typically only date one of them.

Although you can make friends, there's no particular change in the way the game feels, or your lifestyle.

This doesn't mean the games are bad. It means those games aren't what I'm talking about right now.

Extending That

If I were to imagine a game where this little fizz was turned into a torrential waterfall, we would need to punch the Bloodlines up without Stardewing it.

A big part of it is that the city is largely not interested in you. They don't like you, but they don't dislike you, either. If you want to make a place for yourself, that starts with proving yourself to them in their own personal corner of the city.

This is in stark contrast to most game cities, where the inhabitants are intended to pull the player into the game world and narrative. The NPCs in a normal game might welcome the player, or be hostile until a plot point, or they might just talk incessantly about whatever the main plot element in the area is.

These are all the wrong choice if you want to feel like you are making a life for yourself.

This doesn't mean they can't do those things. But the main purpose is make the player figure out how this person fits into their life in the city. Maybe the player decides they're a threat and sabotages them. Maybe the player needs their friendship... for now. Maybe they want to date this person, or just want them around as business partners or something.

And, along the way, the NPCs can be welcoming or hostile or exposit endlessly. But regardless of that, the player knows this is a person that will impact their life in the city, and they have to decide what kind of impact that should be.

Easy example from Bloodlines: when you meet the two-faced bar owner, she's friendly... but you know she can't be trusted, because you haven't earned a life here. Similarly, although the anarchists are unfriendly, you know they can be turned around and made friends if you can earn a life here.

If you're considering how to structure your missions, this is a good thing to keep in mind. Not only in terms of how the initial encounter goes, but in terms of the final outcomes: the player's goal is to be friendlier, sabotage, charm, alienate - therefore, those should be the possible outcomes of the mission, rather than choosing something like a "renegade" or "paragon" ending.



The design of the city itself is also important, because living a life means being in a place.

This doesn't mean the city needs to be beautiful or epic, but rather that these NPCs need to have lifestyles and locales. They have their life in the city, just as you want to have. By choosing who to rely on in what ways, you get an echo of these lifestyles.

This was one thing that really, really worked in Bloodlines: all the NPCs were vampires, meaning they literally don't have day jobs. Whenever you meet them, they're doing whatever they've decided to dedicate their life to, and that includes the lifestyle they've chosen. From the poolhall relaxation of the anarchists to the overly formal, excessively expensive meetings with the town boss, none of the vampires are ever portrayed as simply filling time with sleeping or working a day job. They are always living their life. Unliving their death. Whatever.

Contrast this to games like Fallout 4, where the only thing that defines your settlers is their day job.

Establishing a lifestyle is not something which has to be scripted. It would be relatively easy to randomly generate NPCs with specific lifestyles and specific methods of fitting into your life. But it would be difficult to randomly generate them in the right variety: NPCs come in packs, and often a pack of NPCs will have similar lifestyles and offerings, but subtly different ones.

If you do generate randomly, you'd need to think in terms of generating teams of NPCs rather than individuals that happen to be in the same place. There are a lot of fun scaffolds for this, such as the five-person hero team, but they'd all need to be adapted in order to make sure that the player has something interesting to gain from each one, and perhaps a reason to prefer specific members of the team over others.

All of this would need to be reflected in the construction of the city.

That in mind, the team should probably have a good time hanging out together in places that suit them. If their lifestyle together doesn't seem fun, that would poison the well: the player wouldn't be interested in fitting into their life. There's a lot of different kinds of fun: an annoying overlord can still provide a good lifestyle if the player thinks being rich and powerful looks like fun.

Near Misses

There are a number of cities that make me allllmost feel the fizz, but it fizzes out.

One set is the Citadel and your hub ships in the Mass Effect series. The first impression is very good, but it doesn't end up panning out because you aren't trying to establish a lifestyle. It's about already having a lifestyle, and getting to live it.

That's not bad! I loved hanging out with my buddies. But I never got to choose how people fit into my life. They were written in or out of my life at the scriptwriter's convenience, and that left me unable to get that fizzy feeling.

Most such modern RPGs give that same "alllllmost" feel, like Dragon Age.

Another example is The Sims. While I can choose which characters fit into "my" lifestyles, I can't get a feel for the city. Their lifestyles are encapsulated in their individual homes, and nobody is really integrated into the city.

Even if I go into the city and people are around, I know it's not really an integration. Their existence or lack of existence wouldn't change the feel of the city any.

There is one other example I wanted to talk about: Skyrim (or the modern Fallouts). These have lots of cities of varying size and shape, all stuffed full of NPCs that have opinions and lifestyles.

These cities create an itch I cannot scratch. Their characters have lifestyles and want me to help them, but doing so doesn't lead anywhere or provide me with a life in the city, because there's no reason to have a life in the city. If I decide to track down and kill the weird cultist... nothing changes.

While I do replay these games frequently, I typically spend less and less time being social in cities, more and more time doing other things. Being social doesn't really lead anywhere.

It does in Bloodlines. It always leads to a new life in the city.


... anyway, I wonder whether anyone else feels like this.

It might just be me.