(04-21-2014, 03:23 PM)Naunet Wrote: Playing the need vs. want game is a bit silly. We're talking about video games. We don't need anything, but there's a lot we want. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting things.I meant more that the cost/benefit analysis in game company's heads isn't going to pan out for us at this particular moment.  I used to love the Park district in Stormwind in WoW because that's what it was.  Just a bunch of buildings based on the templates for an inn and a couple shops.  That place was RP central.  I was a bouncer twice a week at an inn in the Park for a year on Thorium Brotherhood.  And we actually made money doing it!  I got paid 50 gold a night back when 50 gold was worth something.
I just love being able to go inside buildings. I get a thrill every time I find an enterable building. One more potential setting for rp! FFXIV has a lot of enterable buildings, but not in their cities. Two of the three cities in XIV don't feel like cities so much as... a cluster of market places and pathways. I mean, where the heck to people live in Limsa? There's not a single place where you could conceivably point and be all, "Yup, that's a home."
Obviously we don't need enterable buildings. I've used the balcony outside Ruby Road Exchange numerous times as a pretend stage for an inn room. We've used the building out in Highbridge as a stage for a Brass Blades office that's supposed to be in Pearl Lane. There's a little hermit house in La Noscea that we've used as a stage for a character's home in Limsa. In TERA, one of our characters owned a medical clinic, and frequently we just stood at the corner at the edge of the street where we'd decided the clinic would be and just rp in party chat (or sometimes /say, which got entertaining results). We've pretended the empty, probably never-to-be-used "housing" areas in Velika were jail cells, and psychotherapy rooms, and multistoried mansions, and inn rooms.
Obviously pretend is a powerful thing. It's still nice to be able to go inside buildings, and it is frustrating when you're walking around in a city but all the doors (if there are any) are impenetrable.
The Cataclysm destroyed the Park. Â It was a great idea though. Â God only knows why Blizz felt the need to get rid of it. Â Maybe it was the feeling that they'd have to either provide those areas in all major cities or get rid of Stormwind's, and RPers just aren't a big enough chunk of the playerbase.
As far as games go, though, there's a difference between having a few enterable buildings (as there have been) and having EVERY building in a massive city be enterable and often have something in it. Â It'd be great to have if we could afford it in terms of system resources, but the reason we don't have many games like that is that there's not much payoff in terms of gameplay that you don't get out of creating a mass and bump mapping a few doors in.
I can think of a few, though. Â You could get a Fable/Assassin's Creed thing going on where the people who work in shops need somewhere to live and often their families stay home. Â You could break into those buildings and steal from them or even perhaps purchase property (although hard-coding the livable spaces in a city might be a bit counterproductive at a point when the lack of player housing is becoming a relatively major issue even for non-RPers).
Another issue might be that most buildings in a major city aren't residences and aren't entertaining, they're just boring. Â A populated building in your city might be a local office park. Â While IT consultants are an important part of any city and you'll find their office spaces in a great many buildings, in the game world, what buildings will see frequent use? Â Weapons, armor, et cetera. Â We don't need a great variety of food choices, but (speaking as a man living in Columbus, OH) probably 1/4 of all the places I see on the roadside are restaurants. Â Carson St. in my birth city of Pittsburgh is the most amazing place in town, seriously just block after block of knocked out bars.
There can be times where you might need those things, though. Â I could think of a way to have shifting stock float around so that when you go shopping, you get, say, all the "auction house" items in shops and have to literally shop around for good deals. Â You wouldn't know where they were. Â Or, you could have a game with a lot more going on in it. Â Or you could also give players supply quotas from those places, meaning you could be getting your "quests" from those stores and thus it would be better to have them exist. Â Mimicking a real supply chain, in a way.
In the end, I think you'd definitely see that more except for one major problem: MMORPGs, so far, have been very country-centric. Â In essence, town is a safe place to get gear and relax before you go back into the "game-world", meaning outside town. Â Real towns at the scale you're talking aren't meant to be stopping stations, they're meant to be lived in, worked in, and relaxed in. Â I think you'd get a lot more mileage out of cities that size if they were more the setting rather than a stopping shop. Â We're thinking like Midgard or New Seattle size metroplexes where having every building be habitable and useful would be a distinct advantage.
Which, in the end, doesn't sound like a bad idea. Â I'd love to see the game where city is setting. Â Any MMOs like that around or are they all doing the windswept vista thing?