Compressed map vs slice

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm curious which design you guys prefer.
Slice means you just get to experience a slice of a bigger implied whole. So you get a small district of a big city, for example.
If you can think of more examples that would be neat too

compressed map design tends to pull me out of my immershun

[Tangerine]

Sliced. I like the idea of the location being big, but I prefer not having to travel across a bunch of filler to get to where I need.

[rusty_shackleford]

Sliced. I like the idea of the location being big, but I prefer not having to travel across a bunch of filler to get to where I need.

I didn't even include "to scale" because it's so rare and arguably never really done. Daggerfall is arguably compressed map despite its size, Cyberpunk 2077 is maybe to-scale of a city, but I didn't play long enough to find out.

[Tangerine]

Sliced. I like the idea of the location being big, but I prefer not having to travel across a bunch of filler to get to where I need.

I didn't even include "to scale" because it's so rare and arguably never really done. Daggerfall is arguably compressed map despite its size, Cyberpunk 2077 is maybe to-scale of a city, but I didn't play long enough to find out.

I took compressed to be a city that fits contiguously on a few screens, so everything of note is next door to each other. Daggerfall/Cyberpunk/etc. are still compressed relative to what they'd be in the real world, but they're attempting the illusion of a to-scale location. They have different feels to them.

[Rienen]

Sliced. I like the idea of the location being big, but I prefer not having to travel across a bunch of filler to get to where I need.

I didn't even include "to scale" because it's so rare and arguably never really done. Daggerfall is arguably compressed map despite its size, Cyberpunk 2077 is maybe to-scale of a city, but I didn't play long enough to find out.

Funny that you mention DF, as it was OG Oblivion that killed/broke my illusion of the compressed map after playing DF. Having the Imperial City, the capital of Cyrodiil and the entire Empire, depicted in such a tiny, barren, and unimpressive manner was a huge letdown, even when I was fully aware of the reasoning behind it, namely, hardware limitations. The illusion was broken even more so when Skyrim was released with small, fishbowl cities containing a population of 20 people.

[logincrash]

A lot of cities in BioWare games are Slice locations. Denerim in Dragon Age Origins is a good example. The Deep Roads too, those are awesome.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I almost always prefer getting a few city plaza/districts of a much larger city you can see out of the playable area. I have always been annoyed by walking into small "cities" that have maybe 200 NPCs there at most and looks like a girl's doll house, being told that it is actually this humongous metropolitan area with 500,000+ people (a lot of these visual media entertainment writers don't understand scale. That would fill up a huge valley nestled between two mountain ranges with nothing but houses). The devs can also add further city districts in sequels or patches with them having always been there in lore, whereas if you build out the whole city you can't do that.

Getting the whole settlement I think only works if your setting is very small scale with very low population, and thus a "city" of 200 NPCs would actually be one of the biggest settlements in the world.

[J1M]

Tangent: movies use montages to show more to time/growth has occurred than the runtime allows for. What is the game equivalent of that for expressing a larger scope/scale of the world?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Tangent: movies use montages to show more to time/growth has occurred than the runtime allows for. What is the game equivalent of that for expressing a larger scope/scale of the world?

Restricting how far you can zoom out on the world map, so that you have to pan your screen/camera to move around the map, and when you run up against a wall preventing you from dragging the map around further, you still see more countries or lands extending offscreen. Don't let the player zoom out their map and see the whole world at once.

[logincrash]

Also, speaking of Cyberpunk, The Night City feels huge, mostly because the entire game is set in one city. Another reason is verticality - you can explore several levels of the city, which overlap onto themselves. And the architecture plays a big part in bolstering the illusion. Everything is huge and oppressive and claustrophobic. It truly feels like an overpopulated urban hellscape that was hastily added onto existing buildings to suit the needs of swelling population.

Don't let the player zoom out their map and see the whole world at once.

That's a very good point. Vvardenfell and San Andreas both look huge because of the low draw distance. Remove that (OpenMW with no fog, botched GTA SA remaster) and you suddenly see how tiny the world map actually is.

[Valter]

Sliced. I like the idea of the location being big, but I prefer not having to travel across a bunch of filler to get to where I need.

I didn't even include "to scale" because it's so rare and arguably never really done. Daggerfall is arguably compressed map despite its size, Cyberpunk 2077 is maybe to-scale of a city, but I didn't play long enough to find out.

Apparently Night City is way smaller than its tabletop counterpart, though it still feels huge.
Which RPGs out there are pushing the boundaries for large, to-scale maps? I feel like Kingdom Come Deliverance 1 and 2 maps are up there

[DagothGeas5]

I myself like Slice as well as, in my opinion, an implied beautiful world is much better than opening a door and be met with a spit of a city that was, instead, hailed. Skyrim I feel is the worst example of this for me, High Hrothgar doesn't even feel that high up, for example, nor any of the cities feel like actual capitals to me. In games such as those that then block your path with an invisible wall, I was always more interested in the open lands that lay beyond those borders than what the developers constructed in the traversable areas. Oblivion and Morrowind felt quite alright by comparison, but I wouldn't be able to say what is the difference.

As for Slice, Icewind Dale (both 1 and 2) immediately comes to mind. When I was traveling in Icewind Dale 2 across a mountain range, for example, I could imagine the journey and what the party must have seen on the way before they ended up where they were. I think the imagination is what makes it all the more special, and the care a smaller map can have feels more cared for, so to speak.

[aimlesshealer]

Slice for sure. The implication of a larger city/world goes a long way.

I recall that the cities in FFXII like Rabanstre and Archades felt massive despite the limited map. You could look around and see bustling thoroughfares, back alleys, and towering buildings within sight but just out of reach. Oftentimes the barrier to entry was not an invsible wall or randomly impenetrable crowd, but something natural like the railing on a bridge or a change in elevation. I think this was important for the illusion, because it put distance between "the cool place I want to go" and "the arbitrary barriers placed due to game limitations." So the inacessible vistas seemed accessible if you could just wander around for a bit, but the random barriers had nothing remarkable behind them, making it feel like nothing was lost anyway.

It filled me with a sense of longing that stuck with me to this day. Much preferable to the disappointment of a miniaturized "city." Imagination is a powerful thing, but it needs blank (unrealized) space to work its magic.

[Rand]

I prefer like the original Dragon Age. There are locations and a travel map.
I no longer prefer the Morrowind style, unless they can make a realistically large, realistically laid out map (thus necessitating a relatively small area of a few hundred to a couple of thousand square kilometers).
The Witcher games didn't do too badly in this regard either.

[Rand]

Cyberpunk 2077 is maybe to-scale of a city, but I didn't play long enough to find out.

It's missing some stuff due to development time issues. A couple of outlying districts were cut. And there are a couple of questionable areas. But overall, it's decent sized for a new-ish city.

Apparently Night City is way smaller than its tabletop counterpart, though it still feels huge.

From what I can tell, it's about half to a third of the size. Still, impressively large.

[Rand]

I almost always prefer getting a few city plaza/districts of a much larger city you can see out of the playable area. I have always been annoyed by walking into small "cities" that have maybe 200 NPCs there at most and looks like a girl's doll house, being told that it is actually this humongous metropolitan area with 500,000+ people (a lot of these visual media entertainment writers don't understand scale. That would fill up a huge valley nestled between two mountain ranges with nothing but houses). The devs can also add further city districts in sequels or patches with them having always been there in lore, whereas if you build out the whole city you can't do that.

Getting the whole settlement I think only works if your setting is very small scale with very low population, and thus a "city" of 200 NPCs would actually be one of the biggest settlements in the world.

Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 went both ways.
In the original game, Baldur's Gate was a reasonably large set of maps for a quasi-medieval city.
Whereas Baldur's Gate 2 only depicted some places in Athkatla, but smaller towns and cities got their own city core maps.

[Oyster Sauce]

Developers who make cities with fake doors should be shot in the head

[Norfleet]

Funny that you mention DF, as it was OG Oblivion that killed/broke my illusion of the compressed map after playing DF. Having the Imperial City, the capital of Cyrodiil and the entire Empire, depicted in such a tiny, barren, and unimpressive manner was a huge letdown, even when I was fully aware of the reasoning behind it, namely, hardware limitations. The illusion was broken even more so when Skyrim was released with small, fishbowl cities containing a population of 20 people.

It's not even actually "hardware limitations". There ARE means of operating much larger, even potentially to-scale, environments, within computers much older than what was available now, and even then. Elite (The OLD ones) had entire to-scale solar systems. Desert Bus has you driving across 8 hours of featureless desert between two cities.

The problem: Things get really ******* empty. I don't necessarily mean physically empty: You could fill the intervening space with procgen slop. I mean empty of anything of interest. The to-scale solar system of Elite is filled with, surprise surprise, the EMPTY VOID OF SPACE. Some random Japanese game whose name I forget had you hike across an entire to-scale mountain trail. When they said it was a hours-long hike, they were NOT kidding. It was not a fade-to-black moment. You literally spend hours real time hiking in-game. You don't explore any dungeons, fight monsters spaced 20 feet apart, or anything like that. You just hike. That's what non-compressed maps are like. They're doable. But like in real life, there's nothing there.

[Norfleet]

Developers who make cities with fake doors should be shot in the head

What about making cities with fake doors in real life?

[wndrbr]

I prefer slice in regular rpgs since they already have a lot of abstractions, but in a simulation-focused games like Ultima/TES/KCD/etc compressed cities is a mandatory element.

[Stack of Turtles]

I prefer for all space and time to be exactly to scale.

[Dorateen]

Abstraction?

[Tangerine]

Abstraction?

Like Wizardry V, where the town is a menu of POI, or something else?

[ThulsaDoomer]

A good chunk of my game modding was in level design, landscapes and such. I learned a lot about the necessity of illusions, and faking scale. In Morrowind, the main roads are all sunken down to give the illusion of a much taller and larger landscape around you, thus briefly granting the player the belief the island is indeed, quite large. A simple but effective solution. Or in the case of World of Warcraft, mainly early on, where the cities and dungeons had bits and pieces set up just on the visible horizon to give a larger sense of scale of your environment, making the dungeon actually feel accurate to its location.

The ideal is full scale, but not the reality. Slice is my preferred option as ultimately I want substance over pure visual. Compressed is alright if the illusion is handled well, and Skyrim arguably didn't do that bad of a job by separating the major areas with mountain ranges to maintain scale. And at least with older Bethesda you knew every single door lead somewhere. If anything, I'd argue developers have simply become lazy with maintaining this illusion, or simply aren't aware of how to create it due to total lack of creativity or competency.

[Norfleet]

In Morrowind, the main roads are all sunken down to give the illusion of a much taller and larger landscape around you, thus briefly granting the player the belief the island is indeed, quite large.

As an engineer, that always bugged me, since roads like that would end up as a flooded swamp in short order. It's right up there with how game developers don't understand how fortifications work. So every time you're offered a scenario where you're supposed to defend a preexisting fort from attackers...the fort is actually an impediment to doing so and you tend to end up fighting in the open in front of it, like that one ****** Game of Thrones scene.

[ThulsaDoomer]

In Morrowind, the main roads are all sunken down to give the illusion of a much taller and larger landscape around you, thus briefly granting the player the belief the island is indeed, quite large.

As an engineer, that always bugged me, since roads like that would end up as a flooded swamp in short order. It's right up there with how game developers don't understand how fortifications work. So every time you're offered a scenario where you're supposed to defend a preexisting fort from attackers...the fort is actually an impediment to doing so and you tend to end up fighting in the open in front of it, like that one ****** Game of Thrones scene.

In Morrowind's case it was less about realism and more about maximising the illusion, not that I believe you can't achieve both. It's just with the time they had, the engine they were stuck with, etc, that's what we got, which could have been worse.

On that note, ever since I learned the basics of road infrastructure and what not, every time I go for a cycle on the backroads out here I can't help but identify the low drainage areas where they concentrate overflow, the location of drainage pipes, etc. I appreciate the engineering that gets put into such basic necessities.

[Norfleet]

The weird thing is that as much as they utilize compression, understandably at least, for playability, they ALSO do the exact OPPOSITE: Making structures unnecessarily and obnoxiously large to the point of dysfunctionality. See: Forts with battlements you can't even see over, let alone shoot, because they're TOO ******* HUGE, resulting in a "fort" that is completely useless as a defensive structure because the defenders cannot shoot at the attackers. Absolutely GIGANTIC gates, so large you could march a double column of Brontosaurii (are Brontosaurii real again?) through. WHY is this?

[rusty_shackleford]

WHY is this

Looks cool

[Norfleet]

Looks cool

It does not. It looks ******* ********. Anyone who knows anything about fortifications can immediately tell. And I mean ANYONE, including random players trying to defend it, not just engineers.

[Dorateen]

Abstraction?

Like Wizardry V, where the town is a menu of POI, or something else?

Menu towns are a good example. Also "slide show" towns that depict buildings of interest, allowing the player to scroll between screens (Wizards & Warriors, Demise).
But even old school games could represent a hub of civilization on a 16 x 16 map that the player can move around in. It is about content density. (Pool of Radiance, Might & Magic).

I just found it odd, seeking accurate portrayal of city scope in a genre that is all about mechanical abstraction and imagination.