The Evolution of the RPG Town

Hello there,

So I have a blog series where I try to rank every game ever, and somehow found myself playing three RPGs at the same time from three different eras: FF6 (SNES), Jade Empire (Xbox), Dragon Quest 9 (Switch), and I found that whenever I came to a new town in DQ9 that I would find myself putting down the game for days if not weeks and I couldn't figure out why. In general I was enjoying the game, but I would walk into a new town find a save and then quit only to pick it up much later. It wasn't until I started really playing the other RPGs that I think I found the reason why, and wanted to examine it with you.

Towns in RPGs really only serve 3 purposes: They give the player a chance to rest and buy equipment, they add lore and move the story along, they offer a place for side quests to level up. I am someone who plays RPGs because I want to get lost in the world, I want to absorb the lore, talk to all the people, solve their problems and then move on. I found that it was easier to move on the earlier the RPG, because quite simply the earlier the game the less space they had to create epic/sprawling/realistic towns. Nowadays, that isn't an issue and developers can create towns with 100s of NPCs who go about their business, many buildings you can go into and look through for items, but I think that this unlocked cap of data has actually made RPGs less engaging.

Lets take a look at the three games here. In FF6 the average town probably has 10-13 NPCs to talk to, 3-4 buildings to go into, and you can probably explore every nook and crevice within a casual 30 minutes. Tien's landing in Jade Empire probably has 15-20 NPCs (7-8 that you can really talk to), 3-4 buildings you can go into, and exploring everything will probably take you about an hour. In DQ9 (which I haven't beat yet) Each town probably has 25+ NPCs, 6-10 buildings to explore, and has roughly taken me over 2 hours to fully explore a town top to bottom.

Now not all these NPCs, buildings, etc are equal either. In FF^ probably 4 NPCs further the lore or give out useful specific info, while others are just filler (40% useful), Jade Empire is probably in the 4-6 (35% useful) area, but DQ9 isn't much better at 7-8 people (25-30% useful). Now this isn't an exact science here, and some players will get more use out of NPCs then I might, but it paints a picture that despite towns and cities getting bigger, the importance that NPCs have hasn't really changed. It also means the time to getting back towards the action is up as well. While I won't get into the nuts and bolts, the quicker you make it through town, the more pressing the story feels because you are marching towards a confrontation or result quicker then if you are loitering in town even longer.

One of my favorite things to do in RPG towns is to search them for hidden items or treasure chests. Obviously these are meant to be found, but not only have the amount of treasure chests stayed relatively consistent through the generations, the treasure inside is actually usually worse the newer the game. While in early final fantasies you were probably more likely to find a potion than equipment, but the few times you did find equipment it was a rush. In DQ 9, I feel the best I find is a mini-medal or crafting material for an item I don't quite have a recipe for.

This post is getting a little long in the tooth, but I wanted to point out my findings and see if anyone agrees with me, that the evolution of towns in RPGs might actually be hurting the genre because it seems like more filler then it was in the past. Now I need to make some things clear, I am actively enjoing all three games that I am playing, so this isn't me trying to justify why I like FF6 over DQ9. Also, I am not really looking for a solution to my problem. I know the solution is to only focus on the important characters or side quests and not talk to everyone, but sadly my brain can't work that way. I was trained by video games hundreds of years ago to explore, to always go left first instead of right for that hidden item. I know I could just do plot point after plot point and beat every game, but I want to be invested in what I am saving as I go along.

Am I just an old man yelling at a cloud, or am I on to something?

My favorite series is Trails so large towns with too much of everything is a precious resource.

@efesell: trails and ys are two rpg series I want to learn more about and play but just haven't had the time yet.

I can see what you mean, I think there's a lot of pieces to the issue. One thing I like as a mitigation is how some games with lots of NPCs will make it so they have a brief speech bubble as you pass them, you get a little snatch of lore/info/just makes the game feel alive/etc that doesn't have to turn into a whole conversation. If a building is open for you to go into, imo it should have some treasure or a decent NPC convo or like, a book you can read, anything to set it apart. Even older jrpgs I think understand that, going by plot escalation, any new towns you find near the end of a game are usually smaller and more focused, basically a place to rest for a minute before the final battle.

Personally, I love jrpgs with lots of town with lots of variation. Different architecture, people, etc. can do a lot to build lore even if you don't get to talk to them, and I think more games should do that. Like, Rabanastre in FF12 is a great example (maybe FF12 in general, though they traded in many small towns in for a couple big cities which isn't my favorite) of having about a million NPCs--they're really crowded in the market area, they walk around the upper town, they congregate in the sunny fountain area of the lower town--and you hardly have to talk to any of them to feel like you and they really exist in that environment.

Trails takes it like the total opposite, which is that you can talk to like, literally anyone and the things they have to say change after plot points and stuff, which is kind of overwhelming in a way but also a good way to figure out how to turn off that part of your brain that insists you talk to every single person unless you want to.

I don't really have a cohesive end thought or anything, but I think it's interesting to think about how rpgs can go about the same thing in different ways. Jrpgs without any towns or minimal towns however totally bum me out though. (Also do you have your roman numerals mixed up or are you emulating or something? cause DQ9 is only on DS, isn't it?)

@snaketelegraph: yeah sorry. I meant 11 and then just kept making the error over and over again. I agree, I like the mitigation effort. Both jade empire and DQ11 does that to a degree, but I think DQ11 could do it even more.

It's a problem I wish I could shut off in my brain, because besides retro inspired rpgs I don't think we are going to go back and have these really small towns anymore. Everything is going to be about pushing realism farther (lots of npcs, daily schedules, buildings to explore).

Witcher 3 has a lot of small towns that I loved exploring, but when I hit a giant city (don't remember the names) I literally was too overwhelmed and stopped playing. Some day I will get back to it and force myself to finish but darn I don't need 500 buildings and npcs to explore.

I think the towns of DQXI are practically characters themselves.

Then there's Shroud of the Avatar, where the towns are disorganized messes with NPC shops largely indistinguishable from each other and intermingled with player houses. They were clearly designed with the intent of selling player housing rather than creating actual functional towns. It could take 5 minutes to run from one side of a town to the other, for no good reason other than they had to squeeze in as many player lots as they could.

I had a similar feeling walking into Novigrad in Witcher 3. I'm not sure what it was about that area, exactly, but it was a bit overwhelming and at that point I felt like it was required too much energy for me to put into a game and I stopped playing. Probably that says more about me than the game - it was generally very engaging and I don't really have complaints.

My favorite RPG town of all time is Athkatla in Baldur's Gate 2. There are just so many damn interesting places to see and people to talk to. There were very interesting quests that could be completed without even leaving the town, and you just never knew what kind of surprising adventure you would run into talking to any NPC.

I think what makes a great RPG town is how memorable and unique the NPCs are. If I have to talk to 30 NPCs who only say variations of the same thing in order to get to the one interesting one to talk to, I lose interest pretty quickly. Although they don't say much, NPCs in games like FF6 or just about any Zelda have a very charming quality to them that makes the places seem more alive.

@sargon: that sounds like I would pull my hair out while playing.

@wollywoo: I loved the boulders gate and BG2 towns and cities. I even love the giant city in Divinity original sin, but I think your last paragraph is a great point.

I don't mind big areas or npcs that are worth talking to, but the majority of people have to be worthwhile, otherwise it kills the momentum to find the one or two useful people. Zelda or ff6 even when the characters don't say much, there are few enough of them and what they say is brief that the time commitment is minimal.

I find it funny that you are using DQ IX as your example how evolution has hurt how towns are done in RPGs. As how towns are handled in DQ has remained more or less the same since it started the console JRPG. That feeling of that you can put the game down when you come to a new town is kind of the point of DQ. The series is designed to feel like that.

Towns are largely the narrative focus of DQ sure there is a big overarching main plot but the meat of any DQ is the specific local problems at any given town. Is there a cursed mirror, a Romeo and Juliet star crossed lovers situation, or are the children disappearing in the night. DQ is structured like a manga and the towns are a volume of the manga. You are meant to be able picked up a volume read it and take your time getting to the next volume. It's why the series is so popular in even among grandparents and business men. You can play the new DQ over the course of a year as your one videogame.

Yeah i can sort of see what you're saying, although i find that nowadays most RPG's almost feel like they're more about the sidequests you uncover instead of the main quest being the main draw. And sidequests are the perfect reason to include some interesting new characters and quest designs that wouldn't make sense to be part of the main quest, but help to flesh out the world nonetheless. These people might not necessarily be 'useful' to the overarching story, but they are definitly a huge factor of my enjoyment of the game.

On one hand, i wouldn't want to throw a bunch of these characters and their sidequests out, because i quite enjoy sidequests. On the other hand, it definitly means that i've spent dozens of hours in Novigrad completing quests and finding new questgivers, which puts a huge brake on the main quest of RPG's nowadays for sure.

@ryuku_ryosake: I mistyped and meant DQ11.. don't know if that changes anything as it's my first DQ game played. That's an interesting analogy, I never thought of it that way, but my issue is that entering a new DQ11 town makes me lose all steam with the game. Whatever the resolution was to the last town perks me up to where I want to keep playing. Hit a robust busy town with so many npcs and buildings to explore and any momentum I had to finish the game goes out the window.

@onemanarmyy: thanks for the read.. yeah it's not so much the sidequests, because there are some good ones, but rather the people who have dialog that doesn't lead to a quest or enrich the plot.

Think the equivalent of early final fantasy npcs who would just say "welcome to [town]"

Yeah this is just hard for me to not read as just... a problem you have made for yourself? If you decide that you have to talk to everyone or whatever you can't be mad that not everyone in the entire game has a defined purpose.

It's also...not really what most NPCs are for? They decorate a world to give it a bit more life, if the only people that were around were utilitarian it seems to me that it'd make things seem a bit off.

I also don't remember NPCs of DQXI being that mundane.

@efesell: no argument here.. it is not a problem I am looking for people to solve for me. I know that if I want to skip everything I can.. the point I'm making is that RPGs as they grow are creating bigger and bigger towns but they are increasingly more filler space and not being used to further the engagement of the player. More buildings to explore, more NPCs to talk to, but not increasing lore, treasure, or even side quests to take part of.

My example from DQ11 is when you enter the desert town that has the plot about helping a prince with a horse race. There are at least 6 NPCs that all talk about prince Faris' opponents (mainly 1). The opponent ends up getting injured before the race anyway (setting the stage for sylvando), but did we really need 6 or more NPCs to all oversell this one NPC? Could we have condensed that to 2 or 3 and had the same effect? Just 1 example.

I don't think it's a fair assessment to say towns are becoming bigger to make more room for filler, it will really vary from game to game. What I'm finding is that as storage space gets bigger on players' devices and graphcis improve enough to allow more going on without another loading screen, many devs are considering how to utilise that space.

You brought up Witcher 3, saying you enjoyed exploring small towns, but the cities overwhelmed you. I can't get behind the idea that this is because of "too much filler content" in the cities, because the fact is a lot of the game's actual content comes from exploring the cities - finding the quests, assignments, loot and characters that don't come up on the job boards. If you class that as filler, you might as well class everything except the main quest as filler.

This doesn't seem like "old man yelling at clouds", but definitely more "I'm trying to rationalise my problem with modern RPGs with evidence". Rather than deciding outright that exploring a big town will break your immersion based on arbitrary factors (if the only value a non-merchant NPC has to you is to get you back on the main quest path, you should probably avoid speaking to most of them and just follow the quest marker), consider that exploring the town is part of the immersion. Towns won't break your immersion if you don't seek to 100% cover them the moment you enter them, and instead treat them as something you can come back to throughout the game and discover more about each time.

Disco Elysium takes place entirely in one town, and is one of the best RPG experiences I have ever had in gaming, if not the best, and considering it's my most played genre across 20+ yrs that's saying a lot. I spent 70 hours in that single town, rivalled only by Divinity Original Sin 2's third act city Arx where I spent maybe 50 hours. If we applied your theory that towns are filler, and then applied a notion of "filler should be skipped", you would miss almost every clue that leads you the core of DE's mystery. If we apply the same ideas to DOS2 act 3, you would still progress with the story but you would be severely under-prepared in terms of gear and levels.

I give these examples not to say you are wrong, because I have experienced my fair share of town bloat (Tales Of Berseria anyone?), but to emphasise that it really does differ from game to game. To blanket suggest "All RPG towns are bloating for filler" denies the reality that many games seek to provide a different experience, a different sense of immersion.

Edit: I forgot to mention Xenoblade Chronicles, which is definitely an egregious example of the possible trend you point out in his thread - there are something like 250 side quests in that game, 95% of which you will pick up from the various settlements, and since the environments are so towering in that game it all makes you feel very small indeed (though that is part of the theming). XC is at least forgiving in that you can ignore any and all of them that you wish if you don't care about completion - level scaling is player-controlled so there's never a danger of missing out on that game's phenomenally good story.

Upon hearing all of this I suspect these games, Trails especially, would be very challenging for you in this regard.

Pokemon Blue was the first JRPG I played a lot of and I remember wishing there was more to the towns, because I wanted to imagine what it was like to live in them. I wanted evidence of infrastructure and daily life. My biggest dream for open world games has always been to be able to go into any building. I think the towns in DQXI might still feel too small for me, but they have other purposes to serve and scaling up to where I'd like them to be would probably hurt their ability to do so.

I don't know how it is in other Final Fantasy games, but in FFX most NPCs seem to give you items after the second or third time you talk to them, which incentivizes talking to everyone multiple times. I don't have that much problem with it, but I wish there was an easy way to tell who was worth talking to.