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So, a few months ago, I went back home for my winter break. Ah, there's nothing quite like the good ole homestead, right? Relishing the moment, I put on my coat and shoes and decided to take a stroll through the city. I left my house, went into my neighbor's house to check their drawers, passed the market, the inn, the weapon shop, and about three more residences. Suddenly, what would you know, I'm on the world map!
If this sounds strange to you, it's probably because you don't live at a freeway truck stop...or in the kinds of cities that dot the landscapes of many RPGs.
In the formative days of gaming, it was understandable that a town wasn't much bigger than it had to be. Space and hardware capabilities were limited, so every city had the same buildings with the same roofs, and not much more than the bare minimum number of facilities. You had shops for all your necessary adventuring and monster-slaying goods and an inn to heal up. There were even a few houses full of helpful townspeople living in their one giant room with the stove, the bed, the bookcase, and the treasure chest containing a potion, many who were simply there to "suggest" that you go to the mysterious woods where monsters had recently appeared.
Time passed, and with improvements in other aspects of RPG design, towns seemed to improve. There were more buildings than just the basics, more townspeople to talk to, and even the beginnings of architectural style. A big addition to any town was the town pub, a locale in which one could soak in the town flavor, or meet some seedy contact in the corner by the potted plant. Sometimes there were unique buildings, like shrines, auction houses, libraries, or the residences of important people. Towns grew from being simply what they had to be to what they could and should be – communities.
This sort of growth sprouted in the SNES era, and developed handsomely in the PlayStation's mountain of RPG offerings. Cities and towns became bigger, developed regional style, and had more citizens to speak with, giving the sense that the world was indeed a lived-in place. It was my surprise, then, when the console RPGs of the next generation did little to advance that frontier beyond the point where it already was. Many cases seemed almost a step back. I can still remember being shocked and appalled by the shoddy sense of world design in Wild Arms 3. Sure, I can accept that the world is a "Wild West" type desert wilderness, but when I'm presented with ramshackle towns that include no more buildings than the average NES RPG town, I feel insulted. Some of those buildings you couldn't even go into. It literally felt like you were running through abandoned Hollywood backlots, boarded-up facades straining even the most imaginative gamer's suspension of disbelief. Eventually, I just up and quit playing Wild Arms 3. Its world felt about as alive and compelling as watching a C-SPAN marathon.
Of course, there's a balance to be struck in the design of towns. If towns are too small or basic, as in such games as Tales of Symphonia or the aforementioned Wild Arms 3, the entire world ends up feeling constricted and insular, as though it exists only to be saved by your band of stalwart heroes (who, incidentally, may be 1/10th of the world's population). If towns are too large, however, they court the problem of excess, and a player looking to find their next objective may have to search high and low through a city that seems pointlessly extended. Too little or too much can be a problem, though erring toward more over less would seem preferable.
There are some games that had the right idea – to create towns that make a world feel like a world. The ideal city or town should, regardless of travelable area within it, at least present the appearance that it's sizeable; that people live there. If I wander through a town and see five houses with one or two residents apiece, is that really even a town? Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX took a creative approach to this problem: the use of backdrops. In FFVII, we know that Midgar is a huge industrial metropolis, but we don't have to trudge through every dirty gutter in the city to be aware of that. Rather, we explore two or three of eight sectors. Realizing that we're only visiting a few places in each of these and that there's an entire 'top layer' to the city, we understand the real size of the city. We don't travel it all firsthand, but it is presented in such a way that makes us believe the city is huge.
Final Fantasy VIII took that concept to a more concrete level. In such locales as Deling City and Esthar, the game makes use of backdrops to effectively say, "This city is a lot bigger than the places you can actually go." Maybe Squall and company don't need to run through the streets of a residential area selling SeeD Scout cookies, but it's nice to be able to believe that those suburbs are there. Final Fantasy IX refined the use of backdrops even further to create a sense of grandiose largeness in its cities. Everywhere you walked in any of the cities, there were buildings stretching far off into the distance, rooftop upon rooftop, showing without a doubt that these were living, thriving cities. I didn't have to take it on faith alone that cities were bigger than where you could go, because the game's designers knew that they were, and showed it. Sure, it's an "illusionary" trick to make cities appear larger than they are, but there's no reason not to believe that illusion, and I appreciate its liberal use.
Another game with an interesting take on large cities was Xenogears. There are some small towns in the game, which really are just what you can see. In the larger cities, however, you see a small 'map' of the city, on which one can go from point to point and enter these 'points'. When one explores these town-sized sections and realizes that they're only a few blocks of a much larger city, it becomes that much easier to believe that yes, this is a city, in a world, with people in it.
One thing that can greatly make a difference in not only players' perceptions of towns, but also the world in general, is the presence (or absence) of some form of structured government. Gone are the days of the overly-simplistic town elder. In this last year, I had my first introduction to the Suikoden series with Suikoden III, and what an eye-opener it was! It was like my previous disappointments in world design had served only to make me more acutely aware of how much better Suikoden III handled things. This was a game that did things right – the cities are all believably larger than what we're shown, and politics comes into play often, with power plays between neighboring countries, internal strife in councils, and unions of tribal chiefs into a formidable fighting force to repel a common enemy. A game certainly doesn't need to center around politics, but having a world structured in such a way that they factor sensibly into the happenings of the story tells me, as a player, that the actions of these characters fit into certain contexts and rationales in their own world. Compared to the Suikoden series, many other Japanese RPGs come up short in the world design department – even without taking into account that the Suikoden games all take place in the same world.
I hate to harp on Tales of Symphonia, since I didn't dislike the game per se, but the way it handled its towns and worlds was a big turn-off. Sylvarant was pretty much a rural collection of city-states, with no unifying force whatsoever, and there was no authority higher than a city mayor. It felt too much like a world designed only to accommodate the game that took place in it. It was only when the party arrived in Tethe'alla that we find at least one city with a king, also the first city to imply a grander scope than simply what's directly on screen.
One great truth of world design is that individual cities and people do not exist in a vacuum. They act upon each other, and react to each other, intermingling in sometimes-complex relationships. What happens in one place can have ramifications in many other places, and many people can be affected. When games forget this, the events they portray feel hollow, like a symphony playing to an empty concert hall. If played the right way, however, we can get a sense of true foreboding, and the necessity of our success in guiding the game's characters on their mission to save their people, their countries, or even their world. In saving a well-crafted world, you're not just defeating some malevolent force; you're defending the prosperity and well being of whole nations, from peasant to emperor, cutpurse to knight.
If impressive, believable towns and worlds are so much better than the alternative, why don't all RPGs utilize them? Why did Final Fantasy X have a wonderful sense of architectural style, yet have a world that felt about as large as Central America? Why did Wild Arms 3 have towns that had about as many buildings as NES RPGs? Why did Shadow Hearts: Covenant have good-looking cityscapes that barely let you go in any buildings, causing towns to feel like movie sets? Why aren't more games conscious of their cities' political identities and relationships, like Final Fantasy IX and the Suikoden series? Perhaps it's a matter of effort. Of course you're going to have to exert more effort to make a world or a city feel like more than a collection of movie sets. To me, it's the unnecessary bits of detail and information that increase a game's scope. To have houses you can go into in a town, with people who will talk to you about their misbehaving children, their first love, or how trade has been rough lately; or a book in a city's library in which you can read a local legend – none of that directly builds the narrative, but it does enrich the player's perception of the world. In turn, that strongly contributes to the feel that the world in which the story takes place has its own life.
The best worlds and towns are the ones that feel as if they lived before we ever experienced them, and will go on living long after the game's tale is done. They are imbibed with a sense that there are a million things that go on independent of the main party's actions, whether those be harvests, auctions, council politicking, children playing in the street, fishing, festivals, plays, or even military skirmishes. In these towns, cities, and worlds, the motion of everyday life is perpetual, and we're just passing through, seeing only a bit of what the great, wide world has to offer.
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