I thought the first part of Final Fantasy 7 did a fairly good job of this; there were hours of gameplay, and all sorts of different places to wander through just in Midgar, and you never even got to see more than maybe 1/4th of the entire city. The sense of size and scale was really impressive.

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Original post by sunandshadow 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.

I think Metroid games have always done well with this sort of thing. Once you do something "the hard way", there's usually some kind of bypass or simplifying item available to turn an obstacle course into a freeway for backtracking. You struggle over the lava pit of moving platforms, but next time you have to pass through there you have the grapple beam, which makes it a breeze. It allows a comprehendably small world with minimal repetitiveness.

You can also see some more examples from games such as Fate the Game, and Ys Ark of Naphistim and Ys Oath in Felghana. All 3 of them are action rpgs.
And all 3 concentrate on 1 town.

Variety is the spice of life.

You could probably use small suburban house as the only location for the game, so long as new and interesting events continue to unfold. For example, the the film Jumanji the house was gradually overtaken by a jungle.

I think resticting the geographical area encourages you to create more interesting environments, not visa versa. Too many RPGs enlarge the world just so they can have a city level, rural level, snow level, desert level ...... Yawn!

I was thinking, personally, of using a World Map, but one of just a single city. With few exceptions, the various locations wouldn't be accesible until you got the address of the place (the building is there, but you don't know it's important, or don't even know it's there in the first place). The navigation of said map would be similar to the Super Mario RPG--you have a cursor that you move around the map, moving around the city more-or-less instantly, without having to battle anything.

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Original post by Brokenimage I was thinking, personally, of using a World Map, but one of just a single city. With few exceptions, the various locations wouldn't be accesible until you got the address of the place (the building is there, but you don't know it's important, or don't even know it's there in the first place). The navigation of said map would be similar to the Super Mario RPG--you have a cursor that you move around the map, moving around the city more-or-less instantly, without having to battle anything.

I like this. You could have a massive town without having to micromanage every boring sub-street, "Joe" NPC and boilerplate. Have a couple of really exciting locations you bolt on at will, kind of like a LucasArts adventure game.

I'm a big fan of creativity thriving when given a limited series of constraints to work with\against and you can see this here. Given a constraint of being in a city has yielded everything from time travel to changing areas.

I think Robert4818 made great observations. The story really does have to be superb but by focussing on that you are already creating a better game - its almost what you don't put in being more important than what you do (games are only just catching up with this age old concept). Character development is the same, the more you concentrate on this (for an RPG anyway) the better game you will produce, if the NPC's change on a regular basis depending upon what has happened around them and what the PC is doing then the player will really feel part of the story. However, I don't think there's anything wrong with closed off areas of the city, if you start as a beggar then you can't be expected to be allowed entry to the Castle or Mage Tower or Upper Class Sector until you have , ahem, 'bettered' your status so to speak. This sort of thing would add your exploration element.

I think with the land mass exploration element limited in the game there will be more exploration of NPC's and interaction and story.

Your main game design issue is altering all your NPC's to react to different portions (or missions) in the game. A lot of work, but incredibly refreshing and rewarding for the player.