Image Thread 27 : the trilogy cubed

[classicdrogn]

Well, how many item, weapon, and armor shops on how many streets do you want in one place, and how many blocks do you want to have to search through random NPCs to find a single one with something relevant to so much as a side quest, let alone the main story plot? Game design was always a tradeoff, but even with storage and data handling mostly up to dealing with huge (often procedurally generated) environments, going bigger like that translates directly to spending more on testing and bug fixes even if you don't have to pay a level designer to do more than set up the procedural rules, so having a market square and a couple of streets to connect it to the local lord's castle and the main gate (or functional equivalents de[ending on genre and forms of governance) plus scenery-only backdrops of a huge city ends up making sense from both gameplay and financial viewpoints.