I always hear people say they want massive towns with tons of explorable buildings, but is that really a good thing?

I always hear people say they want massive towns with tons of explorable buildings, but is that really a good thing?

consider a town with only 3 buildings. it's pretty much a no-brainer for any player to look inside all 3 of them. even if only one of them has something interesting in it, every player's experience will be about the same. now consider a town with 30 buildings you can go inside. how many players will actually look in all of them? say player A decides to wait until a quest or something sends him to a sepecific building and doesn't look inside any of them. you can think of this as a neutral experience. player B chooses 3 buildings at random to explore and finds a useful item in one of them. think of this as a positive experience. player C also chooses 3 buildings at random to explore, but doesn't find anything. this would be a slightly negative experience. player D doesn't want to miss anything so systematically explores all 30 buildings, finding the useful item player B got, but also finding almost 10 times as much nothing as player C. this is overall a large net negative experience.

the only player who would have had more fun with the 30 building example than the 3 building example is the one who got lucky, and the player who was most dedicated to finding any secrets was the one who was punished most. how is this supposed to be good game design? this doesn't just apply to town layouts either. the same thing applies to sprawling dungeons and even sidequests where most of them are basically pointless. you end up with a situation where you either have to play like a casual who doesn't care about finding everything, look up a guide online, or put up with the tedium of looking for diamonds in a pile of shit.

Well no shit, useless assets are a waste, that doesn't mean there isn't a balance between the two extremes

For me, I prefer larger areas with lots of exploration in buildings but only in 3d games.
2D games tend to space things out way, way to much that it feels like a slog

do you explore every building? people often complain that skyrim has tiny towns, but even in oblivion it was annoying trying to look in every house and only finding shit in 99% of them.

I genuinely had an interest in it in Oblivion because of the NPC schedule. I would rarely explore shops, for example, unless I knew I could steal good stuff.

But I would usually try most of the buildings in the game, yes.
Skyrim is more of a "hey, the world revolves around you" so there was less emphasis on it. All the quests givers were either in the open or in obvious places, like shops or inns. No real reason to go to homes

look at sun and moon. you don't have to be able to go inside all buildings. same with earthbound and all kinds of rpgs. just make a big town and have the enterable buildings obvious.

Bigger towns are more immersive but smaller towns make more gameplay sense, it just depends on what you want

>the only player who would have had more fun with the 30 building example

Fun is subjective. All of your examples assume that everyone experiences “fun” in the same way. They don’t.

The genre is incredibly popular so it must be doing something right.

What do you mean by that?

that doesn't work for rpgs with lockpicking

so you have fun going down a street one building at a time finding nothing but potatox5 waterx8 until you finally find the one with a magic sword in a closet?

Why does Cred Forums always tie how much fun a game is with how much it rewards you? Maybe those houses should be fun to explore regardless of rewards and that would fix your dilemma.

Maybe the npcs in that house have something interesting to say, maybe the design and layout of the houses is unique with an attention to detail thats neat to see, a physical item doesnt need to be the only impetus for exploring for everyone.

Bigger towns are more realistic, which makes them feel more like a real town, which makes immersion easier. In most real towns most buildings don't have anything special in them so the immersion seeking player probably doesn't mind if the majority of buildings don't have much going on in them. However it's much more difficult to put anything interesting gameplay-wise in all those buildings so the player who wants all killer and no filler gameplay moments would probably rather have only the buildings that serve a clear gameplay purpose. Whichever is better mostly depends on what you're trying to do with your game, I wouldn't want games like Morrowind to have pokemon towns because the game relies on world building so much. Then again Morrowind type cities would be wasted space in lots of other games which rely more on the moment to moment gameplay to be engaging.

tl;dr escapism vs gameplay

This, if you enjoy the type of game that lets you do this, obviously your're doing it for the immersion not for any reward hidden in said buildings. Though it can work both ways, have residences be locked and have a bunch of stores and other public buildings be open that you can explore and get misc stuff in

What I prefer are towns that are built to look like actual towns, even if you're only able to explore a select few buildings.

>so you have fun going down a street one building at a time finding nothing but potatox5 waterx8 until you finally find the one with a magic sword in a closet?

Not me, no. I know that quite a lot of people do find this enjoyable in their own way though. I guess it depends on what your definition of “fun” is. The word doesn’t mean anything by itself.

>no game will let you catch em all
>no game will spare you the incessant cutscenes and overbearing sugary story that nobody gives a fuck about

I wouldn't complain if every house was unique or had something interesting in it. 99% of the time they are copy paste with the same randomized junk in them.

gameplay considerations are impossible to avoid in a video game. in real life I don't worry about what my neighbor has under his bed because it's none of my business and stealing is illegal anyway. in a video game there's a meta expectation that every town has shit hidden in the houses that you're supposed to find.

That depends completely on the player and/or the game

Too much dead space in that pic OP.

Don't try to force this meme

I want massive towns that I have the option I exploring every building while I explore none of them and just rush through the main quest

>game has no minimap
>no detailed maps
>no quest markers
>map is as large as continent
>cities have tens of thousands of buildings
>get lost in the cluster fuck
>have to actually use your brain to navigate in said cluster fuck

This is what I call fun. Millennium kids just wouldn't have enough brain capacity to handle such thing.