Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer on RPG cities: ‘Compared to a dungeon, generally speaking, a town is 4x the expense per square foot’
Josh Sawyer, design director at Obsidian Entertainment, has highlighted a major economic barrier to creating RPGs set in contemporary urban environments. In a Q&A video on his YouTube channel, Sawyer addressed why cities remain relatively rare in RPG settings, pointing to a fundamental cost differential: towns cost approximately four times as much per unit of map space to develop compared to dungeons.
According to Sawyer’s experience at both Obsidian and Black Isle Studios, urban environments demand substantially more resources due to their inherent complexity. Cities require denser environmental detail, more NPC interactions, detailed building architecture, street layouts, and environmental storytelling—all elements that dungeon interiors can largely avoid. In contrast, dungeons allow developers to create engaging spaces with more streamlined art and design requirements.
This economic analysis reveals how technical and artistic constraints directly influence game design decisions across the industry. The higher cost-per-square-foot makes urban settings a less viable option for most RPG projects, especially those operating under budget constraints. As a result, developers frequently opt for dungeon crawls, wilderness areas, or fantasy settings where production costs are more manageable, effectively shaping the types of environments players experience in RPGs.