cdaccess has Shadows over Riva (nostalgia-fuelled aside: also the first Dark Sun, though I fear that'll turn out to suck if I try to play it again), but the Arkania trilogy-on-CD is sold out. I'll keep an eye out for the first two, or seek them out as abandonware when I actually have time to play them, if other avenues fail miserably.
suibhne said:
I'd rather see 3,000 inhabitants in a small town than the 12 who seem to live in small towns in Oblivion[...]Towns like those in Oblivion make sense (to the meager extent to which they do...) only when players have the expectation that virtually every NPC has a role to play in some plot or quest. In any well-designed RPG, that should never be true; there should always be large population centers with lots of peripheral residents who really are peripheral.
I absolutely agree that some form of abstraction is inescapable if you want a game to do a half-decent job of presenting any settlement larger than a couple of caravans - that supposed 'large towns' in many games consist of a handful of buildings and 20 NPCs is undeniably absurd. To be fair, even this is just another form of abstraction, if a pretty strained one - the obviously-much-larger-in-reality town is represented in-game by a smaller cluster of buildings and, in extreme cases, NPCs with whom you have no need or reason to interact are 'abstracted away' altogether. More usually, a town's peripheral population is covered by using a small handful of 'representative' cookie-cutter NPCs who spout one or two canned lines.
I don't agree that a large number of peripheral NPCs is a prerequisite of a well-designed RPG, though. I think part of the problem here is the common attempt in modern games to present a continuous 3D world - it more or less necessitates scaling everything down to a manageable level, unless you do a Daggerfall and populate procedurally-generated towns (that rarely look an awful lot like towns) with randomly-named NPCs, most of whom aren't really worth talking to (ok, they were kind of ok as walking signposts) - and even Daggerfall's towns tended to be a bit small to feel really plausible. This scaling down (referencing Daggerfall again) is necessary not only because of technological limitations, but because the vast majority of any real town has bugger all going on in it, and there needs to be some way of pushing players towards the meaningful interactions you've set up for them. Personally, I prefer an approach that just doesn't bother representing most of the land mass and population of a town directly; BG2 is a kind of recent game (ok, not that recent, but I finally played it recently) that I thought did this pretty well, in that Amn was clearly supposed to have substantial areas full of residences, doubtless small convenience stores, and people, that you never saw, because you only had to Infinity Engine your way around the bits where anything important was going to happen. I thought Darklands handled settlements exceptionally well, though they admittedly weren't well differentiated, and that was just verbose menus with static backdrops.
I should note that none of these objections would apply to a game that incorporates some kind of life-sim approach - such a game might well be interesting, and you likely
would want it operating, as much as possible, on the scale of a real town. I'm not convinced the technology exists to pull that off, though, never mind the will on the part of anyone with the money to finance it, so I'm assuming we're stuck in a world of important NPCs with branching dialogue, and peripheral, nameless ones who spout one comment about the weather, or having seen a mudcrab yesterday, or whatever. It's 3,000 of those that I can't see adding anything to a game - honestly, I'd
prefer NPCs of this sort are kept to whatever minimum is necessary to ensure an area looks plausibly populated, and maybe even stick with ridiculous names like 'Thug' or 'Commoner', especially if there's a lot of them, otherwise I'll just waste time trying to talk to them all.
