Grand theft auto
Smaller parking lots than building code requires
Videogame towns feel like an amusement park facade. Very few dont require you suspend your disbelief.
Same goes for living on college campus dorms.
It’s the one time in american life that anyone gets to live in a walkable community.
They’re beautiful because they’re fake.
They often have enough room for 12-50 people, yet in lore they house thousands.
Video game travel always has that weird feel to it, too. For instance, in the Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim, you can run from one city to another in roughly a minute. Even if we very generously assume you’re running at ~15 MPH (which would be crazy fast for any distance), that would put them about a quarter mile apart. At more realistic speeds, 1/8 or so.
There is (was) rather infamously a mod for Morrowind which removes the fog. Said fog was required to conceal the render distance limitations of the hardware of its time, but these days basically any random computer can render the entire Morrowind map in one go which reveals that in fact it’s smaller than Disney World. Morrowind has the smallest map out of any of the Elder Scrolls titles to my knowledge, and it’s surreal to see all the towns and landmarks all nestling practically shoulder to shoulder like that.
Skyrim does an excellent job of making its lands look vast, but the geography is similarly compressed. The climb from lush valleys to frozen windswept peaks is only something like the equivalent of a two thousand real world feet, which wouldn’t even qualify as anything more than a foothill to the Rockies here in reality. The Throat of the World which is canonically supposed to be the tallest mountain is actually only 766.5 meters or 2514 feet tall in map scale terms, which isn’t even a third of the way to breaking the treeline in most places.
San Andreas has a similar effect when removing the fog. The map looks comically small.
Gotta suspend some reality though. I get walking simulators are a thing, but to do a quest you would need to travel a couple full days by horse? And filling in that content too, just doesn’t work in most games.
That explains all the beautiful driving games I guess.
Blighttown is beautiful this time of year
Nope. Some are beautiful, some are ugly, depending on artistic intent.
Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American
Videogame cities are all dead and creepy… I can’t imagine what anybody finds beautiful about them.
Of course, they are this way because they are literally designed, by a tiny number of people, and with sole focus on the player. But still, no idea why anybody can think they are beautiful.
Ok but KCD2 though. Wonderful villages.
I spent I think over ten hours just hanging out in Gerudo town in breath of the wild. I remember watching my “hero’s journey” thing and when I got there it was just stuck scribbling over the town for ever lol. Super chill vibes
I’ve been playing Arknights: Endfield, and just got to Wuling, the second major area, and it definitely has a nice water-filled, natural utopia feeling to it. Quite often in fiction that theme ties into an area being “too good to be true”, or driven by wealthy corruption, but so far it’s just playing it straight.
Generally, yeah, I see cities as all being an ugly place with a problem the hero must solve - so they’re filled with evil creatures, or corrupt soldiers, or other forms of ruin. It’s hard to find nice places to enjoy.
You should check out Cyberpunk 2077
That’s… one designed around being able to travel in a car…
Not realy. Like Manhattan it has roads for cars, but it kinds sucks. Much better on foot until you get out of the city.
And both the fun and the realism suffer because of it. 2077 is a great game, but it could be even better if they cut the car stuff from inside Night City. Leave the Aldecaldos and Claire’s quest, maybe have Delamain specifically for moving around the exurbs, but make everything else more dense.
God, could you imagine a game with a cyberpunk Kowloon Walled City for a map? Maybe not the actual KWC, but something of similar scale and density could make for both a fascinating mapmaking constraint and an incredibly memorable game world, if done well.
I would pay for that even if it weren’t a good game.
And you can kill all the homeless people \s
GTA & Cyberpunk 2077
I wouldn’t consider the Night City beautiful, especially with all the trash but I was a bit impressed that it has more walkable places than some real cities.
