We've all seen/played/fantasized about RPGs with a massive world map, sometimes covering the whole world, sometimes just a single continent. But what about smaller RPGs? I mean, where the player's quest involves only a single city, a fairly large castle, or a small valley? I mean, other than the possible lack of variety/territory to eplore (even THAT can be overcome, if you're creative enough) what game design issues are different in such a situation?

The first thing that comes to mind is that a broader area of exploration generally allows developers more creative freedom with enemies and allies simply because of geography. If the player is able to travel across a jungle and snow capped hills, he will experience different enemies and allies (which could be good to keep the player interested) -- whereas if he is stuck in the same castle....it might just be the same enemies over and over again.

A good point, but couldn't you set it in a microcosm of the world? Use the Imperial Capital, for instance. You have Magictown, and the Wharfs, and Upperclass Hill, and a half-dozen other districts and regions. Throw in the hundred-acre Imperial Garden for foresty bits, a nice sewer/cave for dank bits, and you have a pretty good set-up coming together.

Variety, but not mind-blowingly complex variety, and all within a space that you could conceivably cover in a day without a teleportation ray.

Of course, it costs you the nice train ride that covers your loading time between texture sets, but I'm sure there are other solutions.

If you've played KOTOR 2, Nar Shaddaa is a good example of how to do this, although you'll need to scale up somewhat.

RPGs historically seem to rely on fairly minimal interaction with people -- just enough to get you on your vaguely defined quest to a vaguely described city/dungeon/cavern to do something or the other. The time in between is mostly just filled with fighting monsters who appear out of nowhere and attack you for no particularly apparent reason. (I am, of course, a long time Final Fantasy player. But this trend seems to be fairly common.)

Instead, you have to model interactions with people. People who have problems with other people, things going wrong, people who could use your help or are willing to pay for your time. If you're going to base an RPG entirely in one city...a city is a big place, not an inn with a store across the road. But there aren't monsters wandering around in the streets. The storyline needs to be driven by believable people, with believable problems which you can help solve. It's a lot like Grand Theft Auto, in some sense. And the better you can write these interactions to be, the more subtle but far reaching you can make them, the better. Throw in some unintended side effects when a player does a seemingly minor task. Give the player some kind of ethical dilemma, where it's not clear who's the Good Side. People will always try to convince you that their point of view is the right one (because they themselves believe it to be so), and that should come across in games.

Those are just my ideas, as a gamer.

An Action-RPG for PlayStation called Azure Dreams simply had a town and a big scary tower next to it. The tower was massive in height, finding new "environments" within certain areas of the tower weren't unusual. Very fun game over all. The tower had similarities to the usual open environment RPG (or whatever you want to call it), big difference is that it only went in one direction.

Vagrant Story for PS1 was (except for the prologue and epilogue) set in one abandoned city which all the characters were trying to get to the center of. It had a pretty good variety of settings - grassy and bucolic with a river aboveground, a foggy forest elsewhere aboveground, hellish or icy underground, varying architecture for workshops, warehouses, cathedrals.

One of the issues I think with small-setting games is whether you design each area to be closed off once the player has completed it, or whether you want the player to have to go through an area repeatedly, for example returning after they have acquired some new key or item which they have to try different places to see if it works. With an adventure game having access to too many areas can be really frustrating because you don't know which items are supposed to be used where, and if you know you've missed something it can be really frustrating if there are 20 rooms you might have missed it in.

What era? modern, fantasy, futuristic.

Cities are friggin huge, not a pissy little collection of houses ("this door is locked from the other side and you can't get in!") / stores like you get in most RPGS - even baldur's gate 2 (athketla sp) was pretty small in comparrison.

If you want an example of seriously geographically challenged, look up Arx Fatalis. The entire game takes place underground in a cubic mile worth of space.

My 2 gil so to speak.

The first question to ask is...

What type of RPG are you going to make? If it is a Dungeon Crawl. Then one large city works very well and is pretty "easy" to make. Look at DND Pool of Radience or Diablo.

However, if you are talking of a true RPG of the type of NPC interactions, spaced together with various dungeons, explorations and other such things, I think that its completely possible, but not as easy to do.

Problems to overcome, include.

Providing Exploration (and I don't really believe that you should have to "earn" your way to different parts of a city...it should be open from pretty near the beginning) This could mean a large city, or lots of underparts. The key here is to make it seem as if the dungeons you have actually belong. Not just that you have a city and various adventure areas tacked on.

Character Development.
If you are building a traditional RPG, then you get to make lots of paper thin characters for your main characters to interact with. The only people you have to really work with are the main characters. In a game set in a small area, you need to really work on expanding the character development of so many more characters and NPCs. This is because due to the way you make your story, odds are you'll be interacting with the same people over and over again. This is not a bad thing, it just requires more work and writing.

STORY
One city RPGS require a really good story. Usually one with more plot twists than available in standard RPG's. This makes the game more interesting. Since the landscape isn't going to provide alot of interest after a while I believe you need a truly gripping story to keep the player interested.





All in all I think it has alot of potential. But you Definately need to work harder on it in my opinion. The reason alot of RPGs have a huge world is that its easier than making one interesting city.

The Back to the Future movies all took place in a common setting that changed to reflect the timeframe.

Also even a bland setting such a single house can become more interesting once the player eats the Alice in Wonderland type cookie, shrinking down to three inches tall.

A lot could be done in a single small setting, and still be interesting to explore.