Winterfall is a sandbox RPG influenced, gameplay-wise, by experiences as diverse as Mount and Blade, Mass Effect, DayZ, The Sims, the Elder Scrolls games and, of course, the latter Ultima games (7, 8 and Online), set in a fictional late antiquity/early dark ages setting. Contrary to most RPGs where the player is in control of a single hero character from beginning to end, the focus of Winterfall is on a House, or Household, which is grown and developed through deeds performed by the player's successive characters.
Winterfall uses the same "neighborhood" design as in The Sims 3 where a village is made of many inhabitable houses (most of them here hidden under tree cover), populated by other households with a life of their own. Rather than merely being pre-attributed houses with the same NPCs perpetually in it, each settlement has its own populations generation parameters, organically producing history and relationships between households.