It's a Small World

Or it would be, if I were designing it.

Game design is weighing heavily upon my mind at the moment, given that work on our Super Secret Game is supposedly under way now. What I've noticed with the RPG genre lately is that a great amount of emphasis is placed on the size of the game "world." A bigger world means more quests, more places to explore, more things to find, and in general just more entertainment value. "Will the world be as big as Oblivion's?" is a common inquiry the developers of Fallout 3 are peppered with.

But at what point do we decide that worlds are becoming too big? and perhaps some more time and effort on a smaller world would be more efficient? I'm intrigued by the idea of a very small yet very rich world, just a handful of small locations, that continuously evolve and create gameplay as the user interacts with them. NPCs that interact with each other, as well as the player, in real time, rather than at certain static points in the game, would create an awesome environment. They would also cut down on the sheer volume of content that goes into making these massive worlds, which is something a small development team just can't really do.

Better immersion is another of the main advantages here. There is only so far that shinier graphics and audio can take the player's sense of immersion. With every RPG I have ever played there is always a distinct lack of a "real time" feeling. A sequence of events that should take a certain amount of time, but instead happens either instantly or is triggered at some predictable moment. For example, lets say I'm an evil character and I've just killed some poor helpless man in front of his wife. Instantly the wife would form a negative opinion of me (depends on the husband I guess), which is fine, but the entire town/city/game world(!) would also know about my evil acts without delay. It's little things like this that break immersion, but that are pretty much required in such large worlds because so little attention can be paid to every single NPC and how they interact with each other.

With a small, real time game world, I would kill the man, the woman would run out the door screaming and alert the nearest neighbours, the local law enforcement might then be informed and there would be a man hunt. The important point is the amount of time, real time, I would have to react to the situation. This is a pretty trivial example, but the premise would apply to larger scale decisions the player makes as well. There must be a feeling that things are happening in real time for immersion to be complete.

Another important point is that this must all be going on for NPCs interacting with each other, independent of and simultaneously with the player's own actions. If Bob the blacksmith doesn't like the price Joe the alchemist charged for his fake gold he should go and kill him, and the same process described above would ensue. This is where quest generation from random NPC encounters could happen. Lets say Joe's apprentice wants some revenge for his master's death, knows of the player's reputation and asks him/her to deal with Bob. That's a simple quest, and repeated a number of times would be very boring, so finding methods of generating more interesting plot lines from these random encounters is the key.

I suppose it becomes a bit of a "why bother, just play MMOs with real human interaction" kind of situation. But where's the fun in that? Making the AI to run a game world like this would be the fun part. Granted, creating a game world like this has obvious technical problems, but some initial steps could at least be made. The world being small is important, as is an emphasis on AI rather than shiny graphics.