Is there a fix for RPG towns?

 Yeah one of these random editorial article types was coming eventually.

I've been playing Arx Fatalis lately, and I've been having a blast. Expect a review of that once I'm done because for all it's jank, it's essentially a successor to Ultima Underworld and similar Classic style dungeon crawls. Complete with endearingly janky combat, oddly extremely detailed and engaging magic system, and all the secrets and non-mouselook interactions with the world you could hope for.

Then I reached the major city of the game, Arx, and felt this feeling of dread in my stomach.

I spent about 30 minutes hopping around, trying to keep a mental note of locations while I talked to literally every NPC I found. The guard had told me to talk to Carlo, see. But Carlo was in a nondescript door right next to the entrance no more noteworthy than the other 10 locked ones around me. So I ended up finding the king before I found him. Which added another layer of confusion as I picked up at least 5 clues, 2 shops, a bunch of areas blocked off to me and a good ol' unrelated quest before I reached the first guy I was supposed to meet.... who didn't have anything important to say anyway. I ended up leaving the town before I had even found a blacksmith, and plum forgot to check the full stock regular merchant who I had stumbled upon because I found myself with 5 other things I was keeping in my mental checklist.

I say all this, in this train of thought style, because this is far from the first time I've experienced this feeling before in an RPG. Hell, I dare say I've rarely, if ever, reached a new town in any game without feeling this fear of acquiring so many quests I can't keep track, let alone the shops and items and locked doors that push me to the point of checkcing a guide just to keep my head on straight. 

It happened in Dragon's Dogma, it happened in Divinity: Original Sin, it happened in every Bethesda, Obsidian, and Bioware game I've ever played. The only games that manage to dodge the issue tend to be obscenely linear, with few atmospheric NPCs and little to no sidequesting. Mostly JRPGs or the occasional cheap western RPG that couldn't afford to populate an entire city and relegates it to a single room.

It's such a familiar feeling to me, that I feel nothing but joy whenever you see a town destroyed or otherwise removed from the experience. Since it usually guarantees a complete removal of new sidequests or requirements to talk to every NPC again, just incase one of them decided to have a new epic sidequest unlock at complete random. 

Funnily enough, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Prey, both Arkane games, manage to evoke this exact feeling. Prey to a frankly hilarious degree when the game is painting an NPCs death as a tragedy, meanwhile I'm ecstatic that I never have to think about them again.

I bring all this up, because I wonder how this has felt so universally true for my entire lifetime spent gaming, and to consider what can be done to solve it. As surely, the same measures that seem obvious would double as cost cutting tools during development. Less NPCs, smaller cities, less arbitrary flags on quests and cleaner indicators when an NPC has something new to say. 

Some JRPGs, including Monster Hunter and Xenoblade 2 and 3, have taken this to their logical extreme, having NPC interactions basically highlighted for you whenever there's new dialogue in a way that may not be immersive, but is extremely relieving to see.

But I suppose, in coming to that conclusion, it becomes immediately obvious why it's been an issue for so long. The exact things that solve it, also remove the appeal of the city itself. It's no longer a breathtaking land, where anything is possible, unique NPCs are around every corner, and it can serve as both a base for your adventure and a catalyst for discovery and excitement in and of itself.

I wonder if we've just been going about it the wrong way. I think of games with cities that did evoke that feeling in me, places of interest and beauty that drastically overwhelmed the usual RPG town dread. All I can come up with are cities that nonetheless put their critical NPCs in front of me on a silver platter, and left the rest of the town as exploration for it's own sake. 

Again Xenoblade is a key candidate; the GTA and Red Dead Redemption games are basically built on the idea of organic discovery, at least on the exploration sense; Final Fantasy XIV would again fall into the aggressively marking NPCs solution. Being an MMO often practically was considered in it's design to begin with. While easter eggs and secrets are saved for solo quests and idle exploration.

Actually, thinking on it, this is absolutely a problem I have never had with even my least favourite MMO experiences. Not with Guild Wars 2, not with WoW, not with Firefall and not with Conquer Online. (Nobody remembers that one, and they shouldn't)

Yet, all of these games, (Yes even Conquer...) had absolutely lovely, huge cities with tons to discover and experience well beyond the scope of the core gameplay loop. The reasons for this are beyond my understanding on design. Maybe it's out of the expectation that the players would share the information freely, that the cities need to stand as hubs for possible years at a time, maybe the time investment on the player side made me less fearful of missing something important, or maybe it's something as simple as Everquest did it well and everyone copied it's homework. I wouldn't know.

I'm not expecting to reach a solution here, I'm just hoping this might provoke some thought in a designer or player out there. Maybe make you consider what can be done to reduce that overwhelming feeling upon entering a town, or maybe even embrace it and make it so deliberately overwhelming that the player is forced to accept that they will miss things. I know that's how I feel for my eventual play through of Cyberpunk 2077.

Or maybe just give us a good map to use as soon as we walk in the door. All you're doing at that point is saving us time, especially if the game's got automapping to begin with.

Quick Edit: A discussion with a friend about this article quickly revealed one attitude that totally works. "A city is not a sidequest hub, a city is a biome. Like a forest, like a field, like mountains." Aka a literal concrete jungle as a design philosophy. Which is exactly what New Kaineng was in Guild Wars 2. Plus it's basically what you could call Night City in Cyberpunk. Witcher 1 did the same thing too, food for thought.