19/3/2018 0 Comments Open World CitiesI love Skyrim, in fact I love all the Elder Scrolls games I've played since Morrowind. Something struck me as I was playing through the latest version I've acquired, the Skyrim Special Edition on PS4, and that was that the population of Skyrim must be about 80... The "cities" in the game have around 6-8 houses in (one of which is put aside for you to buy) and if each has 1-3 people living in them, then that doesn't add up to much. The Imperial City in Oblivion felt far more grand, but the general copy/paste nature of the architecture and the "same-ness" of the layout detracted from that somewhat. The outlying cities in Cyrodil however, had a more unique feel but in scope fell into the same trap as Skyrim. The inverse of this problem was a game I remember playing on the PS2, True Crime: Streets of L.A. The map was huge, the trailer boasted "400 square miles of true L.A. streets" but by jove it was boring. Getting from mission checkpoint to mission checkpoint felt like a morning commute. Most people play video games to escape the drudgery of their daily lives, not to role-play the part of California highway traffic jam simulator. I think this is why Rockstar's approach to their open world design is the winning formula: Don't accurately recreate a city, but design a pastiche, a caricature. Take all the interesting bits, all the landmarks the aspects that define the city and eliminate the dull stuff in between. Driving around Los Santos feels like a "best of" hits tape of L.A. You have Venice Beach and Hollywood Boulevard, South Central and Beverly Hills, but the areas that link them have been truncated to keep things constantly interesting. Another game which has a good city is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Novigrad is the main city in the base game, and has a balance of size to scope which feels just about right. When you first arrive it all feels a bit overwhelming, with numerous houses, stalls, warehouses and taverns. Nestled between are a selection of shops, guard towers, cattle pens and temples. The game also orients you by sending you to the main town square to complete a few objectives, and from here you also get to know the Kingfisher Inn, which houses a lot of the early quests. By becoming familiar with the location of the Kingfisher you also quickly get to know that the main square is a hub for the city and each subsequent district can be accessed via this plaza. It’s a clever merging of urban design and quest design which gradually eases the player into the space and unobtrusively orients them.
With all this in mind I thought it would make for an interesting project to design and layout a 3D city, and if I used Unreal Engine 4 would be relatively easy to make a playable prototype, which players could navigate around. For inspiration and content I approached my brother, who for years has been crafting a fantasy world to use in his attempts to become a fantasy author. I thought it would be a good test of design skills to take a space he had already dreamt up and convert it from the written passage to a fully realised 3D space. This way I could work through the process of adapting existing works into a game environment. I started by asking him for a suitable place and he sent me a passage he had written detailing a dwarvern party encountering the human city of Overkember. My challenge was to adapt the city into something manageable. For anyone interested, the original text passage is available at the link on the main game page.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorIan is an avid player of video games, a watcher of movies, a reader of comics and books and occasionally a dad. Archives
May 2018
Categories |