I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to this area to xp, then go to this area, then this area.

For once I would like a Skyrim experience but where you're given free roam to unfold the story as you see fit. Crafting your unique story in the process.

I also don't think games should cater to safety or make towns "safe" from other players. I think the games should allow crime but also have punishment for it if caught by the NPC police or Players. Some of my best memories are from a public execution of a murderer on Ultima Online back in 1999. We had like 100 people gather (on a server that supported maybe 2000 tops).

One thing that is really useful about the distinction is that almost necessarily, there are different scales involved.

Ultima VI was the first of its (mainline, not 'online' or 'underworld') series to not really have the "town/dungeon/overworld" distinction. It got fairly awkward to have towns and the overworld be on the same "layer", because the towns could really only have a dozen or so buildings because otherwise they'd take up the entire overworld.

Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom kind of have the same issue: there appear to only be a few dozen Gerudo for instance, and only a few hundred people total in the entire world.

Town, outside, and dungeon represent decreasing levels of safety. In most games, players want a clear indication of how much danger they are in just walking around. Some games, like Dark Souls, do blur these lines. I think it would be easy to go overboard.

This strikes me as one of those things that sounds better on paper than in practice.

I'm reminded of a diagram from the pitch doc for the original Diablo [0] that made its rounds across the web recently. The dungeon/town split was particularly sharp back then, but the broad design has stuck with modern ARPG design, either in the form of safe zones around town or explicit town zones.

A lot of this seems to be due to modern multiplayer design, with shared town instances and (usually) private dungeon/outside instances.

[0] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/here-s-a-look-at-the-... (scroll down)

I really like the balance that Morrowind offered: it all felt like one big world and going from town to outside to dungeon was smooth and unannounced. You really felt like you were discovering a place, and you really got lost in a pre-gmaps sense.

A modern version I like is Bg3. It has a much more linear playthrough than Morrowind and Toen/Outside/Dungeon is more clearly marked, but it's still smooth. Also, you have a sense of uncertain danger in all three setups. And dungeons can be fightless if you play them well!

Also, it's interesting how both Morrowind and Bg3 are both able to integrate the environment and the NPCs neatly into the battle system. Both feel like you're fighting in a live world. But they do it very differently. I think in bg3 it is much more fun to fight, but Morrowind allows for more silliness and out of the box thinking.

I think Gothic II did this really well. While there are some clear borders a lot of the transitions between the three categories are gradual and organic. You're mostly safe in the secondary settlements but go too far into someone's backyard and you might suddenly find yourself fighting for your life. It also managed to make the place feel expansive without any place feeling like repetitive filler content.

Early Star Wars Galaxies was like this. You could run seamlessly from the town center through the wilderness into a busy dungeon (the Tusken fort is a memorable example). Planets were not zoned and there was a ton of pure exploration. Players constructed functional towns with governments.

That game and UO were so ahead of their time (the fun version of the metaverse), and at this point it's gonna take a revolution in gaming to pick up where they left off.

this has been solved in alternate reality for c64. some parts of town are dangerous, you may get mugged, others are safe.

The 2024 D&D starter set literally has 3 adventure books for Wilderness (Outside), Caves of Chaos (Dungeon), and Keep on the Borderlands (Town). Of course that game has infinite possibilities for how to 'implement' those areas but kind of an interesting parallel.

We need a Valheim-like where there are other factions of creatures that play the game similarly to you and independently make decisions on what they want to do.

I believe the grand vision for Tarkov was for basically the whole world to be outside/dungeon. Kinda sad they didn't have the technical skill to pull off open world. That would have been an interesting gaming experience.

A game that (IMHO) handled this really well was Assassin's Creek Odyssey.

Athens takes up a huge part of the map but is on the same scale. Of course it's still a fraction of the size that the ancient Athens would've been but it's still impressive.

The real issue here is time scales. Nobody wants to spend an IRL week riding between towns so those distances get compressed for the sake of storytelling. This problem haunts pretty much every game genre. Take the Civilization games where a unit is moving 1-5 spaces per turn and a turn is 1-20 years. the WW2 time scale is about 6 turns. If you ever played Civ1 on the Earth map, Europe is also about 12 squares so the European theater of WW2 cmes down to a couple of riflemen or modern infrantry and 1-2 Armor units smacking into each other if you get stuck on the time and distance scales.

Books, comics, TV shows, movies, etc don't have this problem because they don't have a constant scale (24 notwithstanding). And the goal is to tell a story. Even in an open world open ended game, you're telling a story.

I miss the old D&D turn-based games, even including the later more graphical entries like Eye of the Beholder. It was kinda funny to duck into a room and camp for 200 hours to heal and recover.

You just don't worry about these scale issues if you're immersed. That's what I learned.

Most of my video game theory is based on manipulating these distinctions.

Rest, risk, random = town, dungeon, overworld.

I'm surprised the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games aren't mentioned at all here. They're pretty well known for not always having these boundaries, sometimes very effectively (getting ambushed in town in Oblivion by a secret cultist) and sometimes comically (like some of the nonsense that happens with raiders and settlements in Fallout 4).