Nicol Bolas
Terrarian
Ehh, I don't really understand much of the criticism with it. You can still create big cities, you'll just need to space things out more with "filler" buildings without npc in them just for visual purposes; just terraforming and decorating the natural scenario. Things like playgrounds, parks (as in, tree farms and stuff. The new tree types are pretty cool.), waterfalls among many other things.
Let's look at the numbers. In order to space them out enough that unhappiness doesn't build up, you can only have 4 NPCs every 120 squares in any direction. 120 squares is pretty big; it's well over a screen-width at 1080p in normal scaling.
So if you have 16 NPCs, that requires an area approximately 500 squares wide. That's over 10 percent of the entire land area of a small world. How would you qualify that as a "city"? That's a lightly-populated rural area at best.
Oh, and there are more than twice that many NPCs in the game. So you'll need more than 20% of the land area devoted solely to your "city".
You seem to have made this suggestion off the cuff, without thinking too hard about how the numbers work out. Once you do that, it seems apparent that what you want is nothing at all smiliar to current building placement. Not to mention the time it would take to build all of that. You're talking about hours of time investment.
And there's the thing: if you want to spend hours manicuring 20% of your world's terrain, more power to you. That's wonderful, and you have my full support. But, Pylons aside, you could have been doing that in Terraria 1.0; the happiness mechanic isn't what allows you to do any of that.
Furthermore, it is unreasonable to expect everyone to want to do that, all the time, just to play the game normally.
Having a few houses for 2~3 npcs in each biome with pylons is not only a faster way to move around the world, but also faster to access a specific npc in general.
Well, it certainly has not been my experience that it's faster. Even if I know exactly where a particular NPC is, if that NPC's Pylon is not immediately visible on the teleportation map screen, you have to scroll around to get to it. It's so much faster to just navigate your character over to them.
But here's the thing: if you personally find it faster to Pylon-teleport yourself to an NPC, OK fine. But why should I be punished if I don't find it faster?
Also, the argument isn't that Pylons are bad; the argument is that happiness is bad. Don't link the two mechanics; there was no reason we couldn't have Pylons without happiness. Or even have happiness, but without the penalty.