Video games have largely become settings for me. The actual content of the game has mostly become irrelevant to me. Case in point; Fallout New Vegas. The actual game content doesn't really matter to me so much as the really cool setting does. I love the idea of vaults where things went terribly wrong and you are uncovering the sequence of events as you delve deeper into it. I love the idea of a town formed in an old motel or an air force base.
This has been a staple of the Fallout series, perhaps why I love it so much. Ever since I crawled into the ruins of Vault 15, I fell in love. The Glow remains one of my all time favorite environments. The Posideon Oil Rig, Vault City, Rivet City, the National Mall as a war zone, etc. These things are just awesome. And they trigger much stronger memories than just fighting pig rats in a random encounter or the combat statistics of some gun.
My favorite scene in any video game ever is the detonation of the bomb in Megaton from the Tenpenny Tower in Fallout 3.
Seems to me like the CRPGs that are really memorable to people have fantastic location design; Mass Effect, Fallout series, Oblivion/Morrowind, KOTOR series, etc.
Furthermore, the really really powerful moments come from very large environments where you can see further than you can reach. There is a great scene in Alien vs Predator 2 where you are climbing along a cliff edge and see events unfolding the valley below. In Fallout New Vegas, early in the game you find a graveyard on top of a hill where you can see a huge amount of space that has a foreboding danger to it. In Mass Effect, the scene where you are climbing on the side of the space station, all sorts of things are occuring all around you. Navigating the National Mall in Fallout 3 is mostly an exercise in avoiding detection while you try to skirt along the edge and get to a new location. Seeing Rivet City from afar is just an awesome experience. Things like that.
I think a big charm of the beach/lake as a vacation is that people have a really wide angle view of a lot of their environment without obstruction. People like space. They like big open space. They like a bigger view of reality than what they have on a day to day basis, where their view is frequently broken by obstructions. So not only must a location be fantastical, but it must involve a lot of space.
This holds true for movies as well. Great movies tend to have fantastic environments involving a lot of space and distance; Cloud City, the Death Star, the factory at the end of Terminator 2, the scene with Indiana Jones on the rope bridge, the Nakitomi building in Die Hard, the jungle in Predator, that room where Mal fights the Operative over a whirling power generator, or that great scene where the Reaver armada comes out of the ion cloud.
In RPGs, I feel like there is often a desire to limit space. The dungeon IS a limitation of space. It is the earth with a few passage cut out of it. Towers, fortresses, and other common tabletop RPG environments have confined spaces. But the truly great underground environments in other media, like that huge staircase in Moria in LOTR, are all about open space.
Perhaps the big divide between dungeon delving RPG players and free-form story-oriented ones is an issue of space. I don't have anything definitive to say on that little morsel right now (too little data either way), but I think it is interesting to ponder.
Someone recently (within the past 3 months, not super recently) made a blog post about how stairways in dungeons are often used as choke points when maybe they shouldn't be. I want to say Paladin in Citadel, but I cannot be sure and I don't have the time to research it. If you know, chime in. Anyway, I totally agreed with that post. Stairways are used to control flow. And this is not a video game, so they shouldn't. Especially if you are aiming for sandbox play. That post made me think more about dungeons as potentially open environments and less as constraining ones.
So to continue on my previous post, going forward I am going to be putting a lot of thought into space.
Expect to be dazzled.
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