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[Lidku]

CDDA also never actually got around to making actual urban regions. I haven't played it recently, but I remember the "city" option in the world generation only just made a large amount of suburban housing (which to my knowledge to the only default regional settlement type, the other being rural; but that factor is only essentially 1 or 3 buildings in one area, in contrast to the suburban regions where there are a moderate number of buildings clustered in a single area).

Though they have put in Z-levels in full effect at this point, right? Maybe they will begin on real urban cities soon.

[heydude6]

Urban cities honestly sound like a slog to get through and explore, which makes it perfect for DDA.

[Random_Dragon]

I can just about 500 cookie-cutter apartments, full of food and clothes due to the half-finished SUS itemgroup system, but with nothing interesting spawning in them nor any essential tools for progression...

[MrRoboto75]

The 'burbs already have too many zeds to deal with tho...

[heydude6]

Jokes aside, if we had to find a practical way of doing this that makes sense from a gameplay perspective, I would make urban areas have very few free-standing buildings. Most of the ones that were originally there collapsed due to things like a lack of maintenance or zombie hulks smashing things. Perhaps all cities were carpet bombed by the military in an early but doomed attempt to contain the plague.

Regardless of how you fluff it, the end result is that you're exploring an urban wasteland that mostly consists of large piles of rubble swarming with zeds alongside the occasional half-destroyed structure.

Spoiler: Something like this, but with less buildings and more rubble (click to show/hide)

Very rarely you might find an intact high-rise that could serve as a big dungeon to explore, like malls currently do in vanilla, but I'm at a loss for ideas to make exploration actually interesting. Most apartments are just one floor copy and pasted over and over again after all.

[Egan_BW]

Given that Cataclysm is pretty cyberpunk, a fun dungeon for cities might be like, a giant corporate tower.

[Arbinire]

Jokes aside, if we had to find a practical way of doing this that makes sense from a gameplay perspective, I would make urban areas have very few free-standing buildings. Most of the ones that were originally there collapsed due to things like a lack of maintenance or zombie hulks smashing things. Perhaps all cities were carpet bombed by the military in an early but doomed attempt to contain the plague.

Regardless of how you fluff it, the end result is that you're exploring an urban wasteland that mostly consists of large piles of rubble swarming with zeds alongside the occasional half-destroyed structure.

Spoiler: Something like this, but with less buildings and more rubble (click to show/hide)

Very rarely you might find an intact high-rise that could serve as a big dungeon to explore, like malls currently do in vanilla, but I'm at a loss for ideas to make exploration actually interesting. Most apartments are just one floor copy and pasted over and over again after all.

From a gameplay standpoint I can understand your take here, though "dungeon" isn't necessarily the only use one may have for wanting high rise buildings.  In a setting where your most pressing worry are zombies, whose motor functions aren't great at the best of times, being up high with a lot of obstacles would be practical for basing.  Also, the close proximity of many of these buildings would make them ideal for NPC city ideas when one of the forks nails NPC's down.

As to the idea that they'd be mostly rubbled and destroyed...being bombed would be the only real scenario where that would be feasible.  Concrete, steel, stone, and brick are very resilient building materials, many of which are engineered to withstand catastrophic earthquake damage in some areas.  Lack of maintenance might take a toll on surface level appearances, but dude, we have stone structures whose interiors are still completely intact thousands of years later.  There are even examples of brick buildings lasting centuries.

[heydude6]

Given that Cataclysm is pretty cyberpunk, a fun dungeon for cities might be like, a giant corporate tower.

Would probably the only building type that would be technologically advanced enough to survive the bombings.

And it seems like it would have to be bombings because as corrosivechains said, it’s the only scenario where all of this rubble makes sense, short of inventing brand new disasters like Richter 20 earthquakes or super hurricanes.

[Salmeuk]

Given that Cataclysm is pretty cyberpunk, a fun dungeon for cities might be like, a giant corporate tower.

Would probably the only building type that would be technologically advanced enough to survive the bombings.

And it seems like it would have to be bombings because as corrosivechains said, it’s the only scenario where all of this rubble makes sense, short of inventing brand new disasters like Richter 20 earthquakes or super hurricanes.

pretty sure it's not one or the other but all of the above. kind of a tone deaf implementation, since the only environmental queues are the presence of weird mobs.

the cities are important for gameplay, as they represent a density of loot paired a higher challenge than simple countryside thievery. if you remove most of the buildings for piles of rubble, you not only remove the only safe route for sneaky-types (crawling from window to window is much safer than running around in the open, assuming you haven't got a horde closing in) and also like the whole allure of the city is that you can set fire to it, break all the windows, and leave that path of destruction. Cata gets it right when the zombies pound and crush entire buildings in their attempt to get to your flesh, no matter how unrealistic that is it's pretty dang awesome. Start a new game with like city sizes >6 and try to see how long you can survive.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

inb4 you ironically kill yourself in an attempt to have fun since just 'surviving' is seriously tedious in this game

the last thing cata needs is more voices screaming 'realism above all!' guys you can only kill a game so hard

[heydude6]

I think you misunderstand us. Cataclysm currently has cities, but those "cities" are nothing more than very dense suburbs along with a scattering of various stores and maybe an occasional mall. This works fine and has all of the gameplay benefits you describe, but we can only call them towns at best.

Some people though, want Cataclysm to have real cities. That is, clusters of multistory high rises where each individual floor can be explored. They want a playable Manhattan.

There are not only technical challenges to this (Z levels come to mind), but there are also design challenges as well. Mainly that exploring and looting a single 20-story building would take too long, let alone dozens of them. You'd get sick of it very quickly.

The whole rubble idea was an attempt to keep the spectacle of venturing into a big city, without causing the game's pace to slow to a crawl. Realism has nothing to do with it. Classic "cities" would still be in the game and would be the more common location by far (no need to remove something that works so well), but if you were in the mood for some novelty, you could try to venture inside the ruins of a metropolis to see what you could find.

[Egan_BW]

It does seems like it could be fun to get lost inside of a horribly tangled urban maze which you could never possibly explore fully. Just so long as the player isn't expected to clear every floor of every building, because that's simply not feasible for one person to do.

[King Zultan]

I don't think cities would be that interesting if they were mostly rubble, I mean if parts of it were that'd be okay but not the entire thing.

[ZebioLizard2]

I mean like all things you could have both. Cities that spawn like rubble and some that are intact. Why limit it to just one or the other?

[Egan_BW]

Well, because why would we want to have a 50% chance that our city spawns as a square mile of rubble if that doesn't make interesting gameplay?

[BigD145]

Making such a city more manageable would be to have the outer edge be nonstop rubble and source of nails and such. As you go deeper into the center you find more intact buildings and higher enemy spawns. You could make a basecamp anywhere you like. The outer edge has building materials. The interior has intact rooms. It's your choice to dig in or move on.