Dismounted gameplay

While the main attraction in Dragontwin is the dragon gameplay, it's important to also give some love to the human element of the game and include the option to dismount the dragon and play on foot. However, this also introduces a lot of challenges as the game has to be designed for two different scales with different requirements.

When on foot, the requirements for fidelity in both graphical details and interactions are higher while the requirements for scale are lower. For example, in a typical open world RPG you will rarely see a crowd of more than 100 NPCs, but each NPC may be relatively complex with their own name and backstory and it is expected that you can interact with them in some interesting way. The world is usually quite small but more densely packed as well since you traverse it so slowly.

When on dragonback it's the complete opposite and it's much more important with scale, and less so with complex interactions. 100 NPCs looks tiny from the skies but since they don't need to be very complex, you can sacrifice some complexity to crank up the numbers instead. The same goes for the world, it needs to be significantly larger to be big enough for flying, which results in more area but less densely packed details.

The graphical things are not that much of an issue, it's mainly the NPC interactions that complicate things when you add dismounted gameplay, in particular for battles and somewhat for settlements. For battles, it means that the battle system needs to support close quarters melee combat with soldiers, while at the same time supporting the scale of strategy games like Total War which rely on units being very simple to achieve said scale. This isn't as much of an issue for ground movement on dragonback as you can just stomp any units that get in the way instead of requiring complex melee combat interactions.

Technical challenges like this can sometimes be solved if you have enough money and bodies to throw at it, but I like to also have some backup alternatives if that doesn't work out.

One workaround / trade off that I quite like is that the player is always mounted when out in the open world, but that there are separate interior locations where you play on foot, like dungeons, court rooms, halls, maybe even taverns. These could then feature more regular NPCs that don't need to be hyper optimized for large battles and crowds, capable of more advanced melee combat and interactions like face to face conversations. The way settlement interactions could work in this case is that when you fly close to a settlement, you get a prompt to signal your intent to the settlement using the dragon horn or by raising a banner with a certain color. Then a delegation appears outside the walls, you land nearby and approach them to initiate a conversation (similar to the scene from HotD S2 where Daemon and Amos Bracken meet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN-Fze_jv5U ) . From there, you can choose between different options like requesting an audience with the lord/lady (which takes you to their hall/court room dismounted), asking to be housed for the night (dragon sleeps outside the walls, you enter the tavern or a room in the keep depending on relations), some ways to improve or deteriorate relations like compliments/threats, etc.

Of course in an ideal world you could dismount anywhere and it just works, but if that turns out to introduce too many issues that can't be solved with the finite resources at hand then this could be an option that still provides the most important bits of dismounted gameplay without negatively impacting the dragon gameplay.