Veteran RPG designer Josh Sawyer of Obsidian Entertainment has offered a blunt accounting of why cities are a luxury in role-playing games: compared to a dungeon, he says, a town runs roughly four times the expense per square foot, per PC Gamer.

The math tracks with how the two spaces are built. Dungeons are largely combat containers — enemy placement, loot, and traps in reusable tilesets. Towns demand named characters, dialogue, quest hooks, schedules, shops, and architecture that has to read as lived-in, all of which multiplies writing, art, and scripting costs for every block of space the player can walk through.

Sawyer has shipped some of the genre's most beloved city-heavy games — from Fallout: New Vegas to Pillars of Eternity — so the figure carries weight as a window into the tradeoffs studios make when scoping a world. When an RPG's hub city feels smaller than its sprawling dungeon network, there's a budget line explaining why.