Every town is a dungeon if you accidentally aggro everyone.
I’ve been playing some of the old Might and Magic games lately, and while certainly there are straight examples of all three, I think they offer interesting examples of blurring the lines.
In most of them, towns aren’t completely safe zones. There are often baddies in town for you to clear out, and sections of town that lead to or serve as mini-dungeons which you can easily stumble into just by kicking the wrong board or opening the wrong door. Sometimes there are also NPCs providing vital town services, who you can only find in a dungeon.
In MM7, in the last act you choose to follow Light or Dark. The opposite town essentially becomes a large open-air dungeon for you, but still has all the trappings of a regular town.
I would love a dungeon that connects to the back of someone’s house in a town. Or one part in town that is kind of more Outside-like, like a little forest in there. Or maybe something that’s like 50% dungeon, 50% town.
I want the borders of these places to be a little blurrier
Play Minish Cap!
Isn’t that also, literally what skyrim is? Like, I love minish cap, and it certainly plays a lot with the idea of how settled areas can be pretty wild if you look at a nonhuman scale of existence, but in skyrim, most houses are involved in at least one quest line, while also housing a SIGNIFICANT number of people, and many literally have entrances to dungeons inside them, from collapsing walls leading to caves and tombs, to sewer system connections. Also, most towns still have enemy spawns, or are within a 2-minute walk from an “outside” POI, without a loading screen. Staying in the Zelda line, Breath of the Wild certainly did this to an extent, but I feel like most modern RPGs, e.g. The Witcher 3, do this to a great extent.
