Both BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age 4 and Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls 6 have the potential to revolutionize the ways cities are rendered in fantasy RPGs. Often shrunk down to fit the relative scales of their worlds, RPG cities have often been an immersion-breaking reminder of gaming’s inability to truly bring a realistically scaled world to life.
Between BioWare’s Dragon Age 4 trailer at The Game Awards 2020 and Todd Howards comments on The Elder Scrolls 6 at Brighton Digital 2020, it appears both studios are interested in improving their in-game cities. The two developers also appear to be taking different approaches, however, and the one that succeeds could help set a new standard for RPGs on the next-gen.
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The future of the RPG genre is in question as gaming enters the next generation of consoles. The infamous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, long hoped to kick off the next-gen of RPGs, has left CD Projekt Red’s future up in the air.
BioWare, having recently suffered from the disastrous release of Anthem, is now turning back to its strongest IPs with Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Mass Effect 4, while also working on Dragon Age 4. Bethesda, best known for sticking to The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, is taking the opposite approach, working on a new IP named Starfield that's set for release before The Elder Scrolls 6. This has left many RPG fans with one pressing question: what does a “next-gen” RPG really look like? Beyond the same promises of dynamic worlds and realistic AI that players have been hearing for years, the genre’s end to the decade has made answering that question particularly difficult in theory, let alone in practice.
While that question remains unanswered, there are two upcoming RPGs which have the potential to realize an aspect of their worlds in a way that could raise the bar for the next-gen: many RPG towns and cities are disappointingly small. Skyrim’s cities had as few as 20 inhabitants, making them a stark reminder that despite the cleverly disguised scale of the game’s wilderness, fans were still only experiencing a massively shrunken version of the province. Similarly, Dragon Age’s cities like Denerim and Kirkwall only maintained the illusion of size by having most of the city locked off, limiting players to just a few streets, squares, and back-alleyways.
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At Brighton Digital 2020, Todd Howard revealed that both Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 would make significant use of procedural generation to create large worlds. Procedural generation does not mean that parts of the world will be randomly generated, but rather uses a computer to create the broad strokes of the landscape automatically, then allowing the developer to go in and add its own flare and detail. This isn’t news in and of itself – both Skyrim and Oblivion used procedural generation to create parts of their wildernesses.
However, Howard paired this with comments expressing a desire for the towns and cities in The Elder Scrolls 6 to take on a more realistic size than previous games. Procedural generation could help create a world for The Elder Scrolls 6 that is big enough to accommodate far more exciting cities than Skyrim’s which, while often visually unique, were only the size of forts at best. Bigger cities in The Elder Scrolls could lead to more questlines which take place entirely within those hubs. Quests like "Blood on the Ice" show the potential of city-based questing, and it's a shame that Skyrim's small towns and cities made quests like it few and far between.
A version of "Blood on the Ice," however, in a larger version of Windhelm where the Grey District was more than a novelty Morrowind-themed street and where the alleys of the town actually felt isolated could have brought so much more out of what was already one of Skyrim’s best quests. It’s still unknown where The Elder Scrolls 6 will be set, though Hammerfell, High Rock, and even the lost continent of Yokuda have all been theorized. Wherever the next game goes, larger towns and cities could hugely diversify the roleplaying opportunities and kind of questlines the next game has to offer, finally helping Bethesda step out of Skyrim’s shadow.
Dragon Age 4 could be taking a very different approach to its city. Instead of creating a larger world to allow for larger towns, the recent trailer for BioWare’s upcoming fantasy game focused almost exclusively on a single large city which, judging by the banners hanging from the storefronts, is almost certainly in the Tevinter Imperium. It's likely even be Minrathous, the Imperial Capital and the largest city on the continent. In other words, while there's likely to be other towns visited through the Imperium, the most stock may be put into Minrathous.
Dragon Age has limited its scope to a single city before–Dragon Age 2 took place almost exclusively in the free city state of Kirkwall. However, Dragon Age 2 also extensively reused interiors, and Kirkwall ended up feeling constricting for many fans. If Dragon Age 4 creates a large in-game world that mostly focuses on a single city like Minrathous, it could realize the depth of that city in a way rarely seen in RPGs.
If both TES6 and Dragon Age 4 attempt to bring their urban centers to life on a greater scale than their previous titles, the next generation of RPGs reveal which approach has better footing as the genre moves forward. With RPG fans looking for that generational leap, only time will tell which approach will be more successful: a balance of relatively larger towns in an even larger open world, or a very realistically sized city potentially taking the fore.
BioWare has one advantage: Dragon Age 4 is likely to come out sooner than The Elder Scrolls 6 and could set a new standard for cities if Minrathous is realized to its full potential. However, Bethesda has the opportunity to experiment with more extensive procedural generation and potentially larger towns in Starfield, a less risky IP for experimentation than The Elder Scrolls. Whether either approach will help steer the direction of the RPG genre as gaming settles into the next-gen remains to be seen.
The Elder Scrolls 6 and Dragon Age 4 are currently in development.
