Even more disappointment.
Not giving me a lot of hope for mino city.
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One of the best feelings in RPGs (to me, at least) is when you slog through overland areas and a dungeon with a gatekeeping boss to reach a brand new region, and (after a little more travel) unlock the major hub town there.
Then you go around talking to everyone, snooping through the houses, picking up a whole log of sidequests, yadda yadda. Exploring the town is a great reward in itself, much better than the loot from the boss you fought to get to the town.
For a game with actual graphics you'd also get to admire how the architecture/scenery/NPCs were different, immersing yourself in a new environment. For a text-based game more emphasis would be placed on interesting NPC dialogs since you don't have graphics to carry you.
CoC2 has the earlier process (with the filler zones and dungeon + boss) down, but then you reach the new town and realize it's kinda crappy and barely worth the trip (except you gotta do it because of the main quest). Winter City was an especially big letdown, after realizing it was just an L-shaped road with
nothing of note.
Even an inn and some shop selling local goods would have helped a lot (and that's the absolute barebones amenities that you'd expect of a small village, let alone a grand city). Let us interact with more of the elves, let us get a proper idea of the commonfolk in the area so we have a reason to give a shit about them (aside from blindly playing the hero). And let us find that gate guard again for repeated scenes.
I think the Marefolk Village is also pretty dull (even though he uses it as an example of a non-barren town). To put a twist on Savin's own words from the attached image, the I think the Marefolk Village "just exists as a backdrop for
a dungeon some marefolk NPCs you can fuck"; nothing about it makes me feel like it's a cozy home base. It's literally just a fuck-menu with extra WASD to navigate between the sex.
Hawkethorne is decent, and admittedly, as much as I dislike Tobs' writing style and personality, the Kitsune Den actually feels cozy by the standards of CoC2 settlements. The rest is blah.
On the whole, TiTS does towns/settlements
much better than CoC2. Wish they'd take a leaf from that side of the team's book.