Click here: sponsr.is/bootdev_daryltalksgames and use my code DARYLTALKSGAMES to get 25% off your first payment for boot.dev! That’s 25% your first month or your first year, depending on the subscription you choose. What Megastructure did I miss? What is your favorite example? Let me know below!
The megastructure that really resonates with me the most are the towering supercomputers of rain world. These giant computaional cities are at the epicenter of the game's story, and exploring them as a small, insignificant being really hammers home the wonder of something much, much bigger than you. But the thing they do best is show you how it feels when structures like these decay. The death of these opressing, overempowering gods makes up the crux of this game's fantastic story, ESPECIALLY in the DLC. Exploring these great structures at the different times in their lives and seeing their gradual decay and death is something that will mark me for the rest of my life, and really makes this game such a joy to play.
NaissanceE is a game (free on steam) in which you get to explore a megastructure. It's particularly relevant to this video since it is quite overtly inspired by Blame!
Bleak Faith's Omnistructure was the first thing I thought about, when reading the video-title. it was heavily inspired by "Blame!". one of the weirdest and most fascinating structures / game-world in a video-game.
Starsector hypershunts, space rangers 2 terron, rainworld obviously, things one builds in Oxygen Not Included (!!), Portal 2 Aperture Science complexes
Around 32:46 reminds me of an experience I had. When I was a kid I remember going to a restaurant in Thailand with my family, it became our usual restaurant and we would go there every night because the staff was incredibly nice and the owner had a very touching story.. We eventually came back from Thailand and 10 years later I flew back. The exact same place disappeared, the street disappeared, the road disappeared only to show a wall. We asked locals where the restaurant was in case we just went to the wrong address. But no, it was just simply gone, the people, the restaurant, everything gone.. The only thing that remains of this place is the memories we made there. To the people reading this comment, it might just seem like a story that resembles another but to me, it hit deep.
The undercity of Coruscant is terrifying. Typically in Star Wars, the further away you get from Coruscant, the more uncivilized and crime-ridden the galaxy gets. Yet on Coruscant itself, the further down you go, the closer you get to the actual surface and humanity's original home, you see the same thing. What on the surface is a beautiful, luxurious city, is a metal hell of anarchy and filth. Many residents of the lower levels never see the sky, and long for a day they can ride up the elevator just once and experience the sun on their face. The very lowest levels are all but forgotten, and nobody knows if anything even lives down there. There could be entire nations down there, in the darkness, completely unknown to the galactic government above.
Its like us living in the luxury on the west while everything we consume is made by slaves in China. Its not science fiction, its both our future and our present, also our past. Can humanity ever be free from having to work, we create machines to do our work, then we are free, but we're still slaving away the machines, something has to do the work.
This is why I want a game set in Coruscant. There are so many levels in Coruscant. They call it a ecumenopolis where its a metropolis expanded to a whole city. There was one game, Star Wars 1313. But it never materialized. That in my opinion is the dream game.
I always thought it would be incredible to play a game where you're an unknown bounty hunter scavenging the ruins of a later-day, post-films, post-most of (if not all) of our known Star Wars media. very few people are living in the city as something went wrong/is wrong on the planet, causing it to become more and more unlivable -- whole fragments of the planet are going dark and the remaining population thinks its an ecological crisis causing parts of the city-planet to blink out of contact, but its actually because fragments of the planet itself are cracking and sinking into the planet's core. and yet, nobody knows about the cult existing in the planet's guts... until the player starts literally digging deeper (note I at first had written "until the player goes down" -- not optimal) into the depths of the surface city and blah blah blahs. as the game progresses you learn no, there isnt something wrong in the core, nor did the force abandon *Coruscant * in specific, nor did anything else go wrong "by accident" per se. what is happening is that there's a sith cult who have unearthed new texts that will give them a shortcut to power through the ritual force-digestion of the planet. if they can feed the entire planet to whatever they're chatting with down there, it promises them the power to do the same trick at will to any planet, anywhere, on demand (with practice). and also, its not the force they're in communion with, its (somehow) Palpatine who has been to the realm of the dead and stopped at the gift-shoppe on his way out and thought of a sick new dance he wants to teach you, or something. it doesn't matter, none of this matters. the part about the planet's crust breaking apart in front of the player in actual real-time is entirely possible now on a technical level. just massive islands of city heaving up and then crashing down -- it gives me bonerz imagining the possibilities
The star wars city planet sounds like a hive city, and mixes it with my idea of a litteral ice berg= its vitrue signalling at the top= but if you go under the ice= theres a huge building underneath, and it gets worse the more you go down. =nazis made it=(the vitrue signalling above the ice.), pun=😘when nazis fall from buildings onto the ice,theyre metaphysicall snowflakes,not just metaphoricoll 1s...
@@mvrk4044the game sounds cool too,i would want to watch or play it=if i knew half of the comnent when it was on youtube=i would watch like 5 videos=or =to short videos for how long it is. My ice berg is ment to be a game too. =the 1st 1 is inspired by let it die/mixed with the fair part and is extremelly😆😆dark...
Blame is not about humanity overreaching with their construction. It's about their construction slipping away from them. They lose control and the builders just keep on going without sense or reason for who knows how long. The megastructure is a result of a drive without will and thought.
The best part of Blame! is the moment when the main character wanders into a huge open space, and an annotation on the page says that it's the room _Jupiter_ was used to be in. As in, _the planet._ The City of Blame! is so much worse than just being a mere uninspired planetary-scale building, it's an entire solar system filled up to the brim with endless corridors, rooms and utility closets, build with no sense, rhyth, function or even purpose, because the humans are long gone and the building robots just continue at random.
Not to forget that humans had no part in the majority of the construction. Builder bots, left unattended and unmaintained for millennia have gone senile and expand the city now that their masters no longer can tell them to cease. The City has been expanding for what could be millions of years. The humans that inhabit the different strata of the City are genetically and dymorphically distinct from each other so much so that there are meters of height difference between one *species* of human and another. Two humans in Blame from different levels of the City might not even recognize each other as human
Where are the robots supposed to have got the material to make that? I can't even conceive of how much volume it would take or how many other solar systems' worth of planetary material they would have had to have flown out to, broken down and transported back to ours. We're not talking generations, we're talking aeons.
@@lozg8887 IIRC it is implied they take it straight from alternative dimensions or something like this. The setting have a lot of batshit insane tech, else the whole thing would collapse into a black hole.
Not much of a mega structure, but the Destiny 1 Taken King mission where you climb a colony ship was amazing. Seeing the ruined Kazakhstan cosmodrome and distant structures 3 thousand years into the future is amazing.
I’m a civil engineer, so seeing infrastructure in games that actually looks structurally sound, constructable (soneone could actually build it), and appears functional is very cool to me. Anyone can draw up a massive structure, but when you see aspects of actual civil design (trusses, load bearing columns, soil anchors, erosion control, etc) it really adds to it.
Very true. In fact becoming an engineer i realise that "beauty" of technological things are alway about practicality. If a ship is practical, then its beautiful to me. Haha
Eve online gave me a fear of the vastness of space. Every time you jump into warp, you see your velocity go from thousands of meters per second to millions to billions, but if you look at the distant planets, they arent yet moving, then you start moving at speeds that are related to lightspeed, 0.5c 1c 10c and the planet whizzes by, those seconds you spend travelling at billions of meters per second, dont make even a dent to even a fraction of the distance you cover in a second of going at your top speed. Zooming out and being surrounded by darkness, especially when you can be jumped at any moment feels like having your belly exposed on every side of you.
if you love that, you'll def love star citizen if you have a pc. yes its still in alpha but in terms of what you are talking about it EXELS, no loading screens, and just beautiful
This may sound weird but I’m not afraid of dark futures like that depicted in Blame!, because I have faith in birds, and rats, and bugs. If the world became only cities a lot of animals would go extinct, but not all of them. Do you know that in very urban areas there is a type of squirrel that has evolved to have black fur, so that people driving cars can more easily see it and it doesn’t get run over as much. Life finds a way, because surviving is the definition of what life does. Even in giant megastructures life would find a way that humans could never have planned for.
If humans can survive the monstrosities of _Blame!,_ then 100% them cockroaches can as well. Which is good news, because insects are great sources of protein.
I think we hope that "Nature finds a way" to comfort ourselves into the belief that we aren't the true villians. Maybe cockroaches will survive our scourge, but I wonder if we ought to be acting as if perhaps they won't. Maybe our behavior here will leave Earth a sterile rock. I appreciate the hope, though
Blame!, Kowloon, and Midgar are all huge inspirations for my work-in-progress project Urban Jungle. The idea of a world where humans have created an ecumenopolis so expansive that it becomes alien and uninhabitable to humans, only for it to be reclaimed by nature and force us to live and survive in a hostile world that we built for ourselves... it's beautiful and haunting and it drives me every day to share that vision.
Rainworld to me is the definitive superstructure game, the ecosystem that flourished in the desolate machinery makes everything seem so enormous, while playing the game you learn that every little crevice and pipe is the home of a dozen or so creatures, so when you see the scale of the world with thousands of components not only does it make these structures seem endless, but it also makes you feel like a simple rodent, crawling at random gods.
I came here to mention rainworld as well. While the megastructure in question may not have fit as neatly with the themes brought up in this video, it's probably the best example of actually exploring a megastructure in gaming. Without going into too much spoilers, there is a megastructure in rainworld which is so large that you explore several different parts of it throughout distinct biomes. The sheer size of this megastructure also explains why an entirely seperate region of the game is perpetually in darkness (because it's under the shadow of the megastructure). And on a final note there is a crucial game mechanic that is influenced by this megastructure (though revealing that would be major spoilers). I know it's one of the games you ended up writing off from your backlog @DarylTalksGames but if you (or anyone) are reading this and want to feel what it's like to explore one of these megastructures then you owe it to yourself to play Rain World.
Climbing to the top of The Wall to reach 5 pebbles really cemented the feeling of wandering around a mega structure. In fact, and perhaps ironically, Rainworld is probably the closest one would get to living in a mega-structure world like Blame!
A thing to add about the mega structure of blame is that it isn’t just a planet, it is a Dyson sphere in its most original form. A mega structure that fully encapsulates the entirety of our sun, and by impossible means stretches out to the farthest parts of our solar system. The entirety of Sol eaten to make this infinitely growing construct. That is the size of this megastructure, and is something that is so impossible big it breaks the mind a bit to think about.
I wondered about what they did when they reached the sun, they never explicitly state it, but I feel that the power Mensab uses at the end of the Toha arc is her just opening a portal to the sun and vaporizing everything. Except Killy, of course.
@@Grasses0n I feel like the sun would be the starting point. If we’re going off the idea that this is a Dyson sphere like megastructure then it would start with the sun and eventually eat it’s way through the solar system
@@metronicmagician1816 I thought that too after watching this video. Although as far as the Blame universe goes, if you've read the prequel Noise, or Biomega, it implies that the city started its growth on Earth. It could also be both, and the city was always connected with the Dyson sphere and that's why it continued out into space and consumed the solar system.
This is maybe not quite a megastructure, but the massive, sprawling structure of Aperture Laboratories in Portal 2 always got me. Falling all the way down to what felt like the centre of the earth, seeunf the massive caverns filled with gigantic metal spheres, each one given exact measurements, everything felt so real and so horrific. The main imagery that sticks with me to this fay is the last thing you do before you make it into "Wheatley Laboratories", you have opened the gate, ascended up an elevator and theres just one staircase leading you up to the next area. All that surrounds you is spring scaffolds, each is at least 20 metres wide and 10 metres tall, and they all hold up a metal plate. And those scaffolds don't end in any direction. You know this is just one area of the undefinable modern Aperture Labs, but there is STILL no end. Then you walk up the ladder and that scale is once again hidden by walls, doors, and elevators.
wow, you have phrased that beautifully... i've always loved the endless-ness of Aperture, especially the bottom parts. like, when you fall, looking up and seeing the giant pillars holding up the rest of the facility, being at the BOTTOM of the bottomless pits... it's just breathtaking. in Portal Revolution there is a giant tower that goes from the absolute bottom of the facility all the way up to the surface. and that area you mentioned of the in-between place, right after you open the giant vault, with the chainlink fences around it... seriously underrated area; i remember exploring it in noclip quite a few times... and then there's the part, i think the main menu scene for one of the chapters, where it's right before you get into a funnel, you can see out over the facility and being illuminated by this yellow light, all the test chambers and everything. you can also see that kinda thing from the very first area, the relaxation vault container ride, if you look up you see all the relaxation vaults just sprawling into the distance... everywhere.
Man, I just finished watching the video, and this one thing has been on my mind ever since I discovered Daryl Talks Games back during Covid. Daryl just has a way with words. This man can make me feel emotions in ways no other thing ever can. Not music. Not movies. Not games. Nothing. The way he can put such complex thoughts into words almost seems inhuman. If this man was a poet a good two hundred years ago people would be looking back on his works, confidently proclaiming him to be one of the smartest minds to ever grace the planet. It is out of this world how he can make people feel such otherworldly emotions with nothing more than words and video game backdrops. And the craziest part is that it’s not just this video. Far from it. Nearly every video has a conclusion that summarizes such complex emotions with mere words. It honestly really motivates me whenever I watch a video of his cause the emotions I feel by the end are always so otherworldly. I don’t even care that he doesn’t post super consistently. With how well his scripts are I’m shocked he can even put out more than one video a year. These scripts read as something that the smartest minds took months meticulously crafting. This man deserves way more recognition for that in my opinion. TLDR: If I were to bet on one person from all of history being able to describe colors to a blind person, I’d pick Daryl in a heartbeat.
my favourite tidbit from Blame! is there's a giant empty chamber that's where Jupiter used to be before the builders harvested it for resources until it was gone. This isn't a plot point, this is just a thing that happens. It's not even explicitly stated iirc.
I love the superstructures in armored core VI, it's such an incredible world and the sense of scale truly makes you speechless, if you haven't I really suggest checking it out!
I love the world of Stray because it's a (moderately sized) megastructure, its former inhabitants are long gone and it's somewhat derelict. But also robots are now living there and have built a home in that place.
Hey there :) I would love to buy a physical copy of the book (just not a fan of pdf's) but it's sold out on the site he linked, I assume it was limited print, and I'm out of luck, or is there another place it could be purchased?
@@FelunyaI’m talking to the printer right now about adding some extra prints since it sold out. Check back in a week and if all goes well there will be some extra! And thanks for your interest!
The great spirit robot from bionicle is probably my favorite thing like this. The fact that it took 8 years before the whole story was revealed to have taken place in and around a planetary sized sleeping metal man was so crazy. The abyss from made in abyss is another favorite. Uniquely, it seems to be mostly natural. Natural, or at least made by some unimaginable beings an unimaginably long time ago, if there's even a difference.
There's one more megastructure that had me in awe ever since I was a kid: the "moon" from Disney's Treasure Planet. Particularly the way it is shot, closing in from a distant scene of a gaze at the sky and slowly showing a moon made out of buildings, streets and people boarding ships. It's breathtaking to watch the first time and still refreshing nowadays. I miss that kind of animation.
Great video! I'm a little surprised there was no mention of Sagrada Familia, a Basilica in Barcelona. Construction was started in 1882 and it is STILL being built. It's a building that will be finished over 100 years after the architect who designed it died. Ever since watching the original Mobile Suit Gundam, I've always held a soft spot for O'Neill Cylinder colonies, but I've always felt a bit of sorrow over the fact that there's no way I'll see construction a space colony be started, let alone completed. And yet Sagrada Familia will be finished in 2026. This is a construction site that has outlived generations, and yet we DO get to see the end of it in our lifetimes.
The scale of Blame! is unlike anything I've ever seen in other media. Slight spoils for around the middle of the manga below: At one point, Killy enters into a room that is just pure blackest dark as far as the eye can see. There is a strange person here, who is surprised to see him. He explains that he is studying this room which is just a giant emptiness...the size of JUPITER. The implication is that at one point, the City has reached the orbit of Jupiter, built around it, completely drained the planet of all of it's resources and just left a giant Jupiter-sized hole behind. Your mind cannot even comprehend the scale of that one room, and it's only a small part of the City.
OMG, that is insane. Fascinating stuff some minds can come up with. Thank you for the heads up. May I ask; has the manga ended or is it still going? I ask because I got burned before following a manga that released at random times with looong breaks that it eventually got too annoying so I dropped it (Berserk). Or others that just go on forever without big revelations. If this manga ended, I can peruse at my leisure.
@@shmookins it ended , it isn't about the story though. It's more about the panels and the structures in the manga . Manga has an average to good story but prepare for long silences . Character sometimes never communicate for many chapters
"the cost" part of the video really made me stop and think because I've only ever thought of abandoned megastructures in the context of when civilizations die out, and never for when they become obsolete. It's not abandoned because of some tragedy but because everyone was told to leave so something new can be created in it's place. Like when an old office building is being demolished and a new, more modern built in the same spot. Can't believe I've never thought about that.
I love how this video is about megastructures and the vastness of us as humans, but the most touching/meaningful moments in the video for me were the small human moments like the "what is land" quote or the summary of Ghost Story
@@demdelthepoet8885 It's absolutely worth a watch, but you need to make certain you're in the mood for it. There's a lot of sitting and staring. One of my favorite movies of recent years.
Imagine if Luke fell into the clouds on cloud city. Guy would be falling for hours before succumbing to pressure but imagine how hopeless it would feel just constantly falling with no ground in sight just endless, ever denser clouds.
honestly! Your mech is gigantic but once you roam around in the different levels, the model shrinks down significantly, putting into perspective how insanely big the structures around you really are
There's a whole video specifically about the scale of it all. And also a bunch of much smaller ones, comparing it with more familiar things, like porting ACVI maps into Elden Ring ( as an example, the Xylem is big enough that it goes beyond render distance, and that you can literally put the entirety of the Lands Between on its ring )
@@draghettis6524 ik abt Zullie's vids, I'm moreso talking about the more emotional weight hinging on these mega structures and the wonderful presentation FromSoft put together for them, rather than the scale on a technical level. They're VERY impressive and monumental.
Those final levels in that game are really impressive in emphasising scale. But I think my biggest hype moment was fighting the Ice Worm and having Rusty shoot off a laser beam from so far away.
I love how Outer Wilds manages to be adorably miniaturized but still captures the vibe of impossibly large superstructures. The way that game toys with your sense of scale is so unique.
no, no no, this is actually a valid question. A lot of megastructures look cool, but they have no way of reasonably sustaining human life. Take that really cool looking flying apartment counterbalanced by an asteroid. does it have any way of powering itself? I don’t mean, physics wise, I mean, “how do its residents literally keep the lights on”? how do these people get water? How do they get food? Do they just use drones all the time constantly? How does this thing have a sewage system the crap over the side of the building or do they have poop collecting drones? What about your social life being disconnected from all of your loved ones living in this apartment? most importantly, how do you get on and off this thing? so I think the question of “does it have an arby’s” is a useful way to find out if your megastructure is actually livable
I think a great way to get perspective on these megastructures is taking a close look at skycrapers. I remember visiting London back in 2014 and standing right in front of one of the skyscrapers and looking up. On pictures they always look so... normal I guess, but standing there, knowing how big I am and how high this tower goes just feels so unreal. I'd also like to mention a favorite example of a megastructure in gaming for me, though I guess it's not that big compared to many of the examples in the video, it just stuck with me since I've known about it since I was a kid: The Haven City Palace in Jak 2. You wander around the city, completing mission on foot or on a vehicle, for quite a while, often with a view of the massive palace, until you get to actually climb one of the support cables in a later mission. You ride the elevator and once you are up and walking on that massive cable, you take a peek at the city below. The slums, the harbor, the bazaar and the gardens suddenly seem so tiny, you can barely recognize the layout from that high up. Even the massive wall of the city, which was always blocking the view of the outside, suddenly becomes small. You are even able to see past it slightly. I loved it and still do, that mission has a special place in my heart for sure. Anyways, great video. The effort really shows and I also really hope it gets a lot of traction, lord knows you've earned it!
I'd love to make a video on the difference between giant things in person vs in pictures. We visit the mountains like twice a year and I'm always flabbergasted when I get there at just how... no game or picture or VR can ever quite replicate the scale you feel in person. When your eyes suddenly capture the true depth and distance of your surroundings it's very humbling haha. So yeah, I completely hear where you're coming from. I haven't seen the Haven City Palace before but that sounds incredible! Thanks so much Skubo :)
I vividly remember getting out of an airport in Barcelona and seeing mountains on the horizon for the first time. Of course I knew what mountains looked like and I was almost 20 years old at the time, but actually seeing them out there in person was just so... different. It's one of the key memories I took home with me from that trip. That, and getting my wallet stolen by someone who looked like a mirror image of one of my friends from home while drunk at a bar.
I do not enjoy cities for this reason. That sense of scale immediately translates into fear in my brain. Don't know what kind of irrational fear that is but it's not fun.
I still revisit Jak II to this day to take in that view. Something about it captivated me when i was younger, and it still does. I think part of it is that you spend so much time in those trench-like streets. The tower from Destiny doesn’t have that same feeling for me, for that reason. Both are pretty skyboxes, but one’s got the “i’ve been in that specific canal there, that’s where i hid the police cruiser i stole!” While the other dosn’t have that recontextualization
@@valettashepard909 I guess playing the Jak games as a kid has that kind of effect on people who enjoyed the games. I've never played Destiny but I totally know what you mean!
This video was beautiful, in every layer and level. From concepts tangling in the sky to metal choked corridors spanning distance in meters to eons, it was a heartbeat amidst the engineering.
I feel like the sheer scale of the BLAME! mega-structure isn't properly conveyed in this. At one point he gets on an elevator and the computer on-board tells him he will arrive at his destination in 33 DAYS, he encounters a room that is revealed to be the size of Jupiter, I don't recall is its actually stated but it's implied that the structure has fully enveloped the solar system and is perpetually being built further and further out by automatons with nobody left to give them orders. In fact the entire premise of BLAME! is Killy (the MC) searching for someone still carrying the net terminal gene so the robots can be brought back under human control, though it is unclear whether such a person even exists for Killy to find
There's quite a few panels in Blame! That say decades have passed since the previous thing of note too. The story spans literally thousands of years because he has to travel from earth out past Saturn on foot
The City is relatively spherical up to around Jupiter's orbit, but the overall structure eventually becomes more irregular and tendril-like as you go further away. If I'm not wrong, the "tendrils" go as far as the Oort Cloud.
@@THICCTHICCTHICC After the month-long elevator ride reveal, there is a casual 250-year flashback to a character who is introduced in the present at the end of the elevator.
"Blame" at it's core is more of a "warning" against automation. The entire "story" revolves around an artificial, fully automated expansion program, running rampant without oversight, that became too big to control or to stop. Fascinatingly the Artworks perfectly imply a base goal of "life preservation" through machine build "living spaces", that got lost in it's code-goal over an unimaginable amount of time. It's truly haunting.
The explanation is so contrived and silly that it robs the manga of any weight though. Big spoilers (?): it was designed to only be controllable by humans with a certain gene, and all other humans trying to interface with it get killed. (And then some terrorists removed that gene from humanity with a virus and the robots ran wild for millenia). Who designs something like that? Assinine. You'd only do that if you WANTED a distopia- like the manga writer clearly did. Most sci fi dystopias fall apart if you think about them for two minutes.
Hi Daryl, small correction, gravity doesn't get "a little lazy" above 100km of altitude, around the ISS, the gravity is actually around 90% the one on the surface. The difference is that because the ISS is moving very fast it remains in free fall and therefore you don't experience gravity as you and the station are falling at the same speed in the same direction. Both are linked.
I've been searching for this comment and if it didn't exist I would have made it myself. I just want to add that the Kármán line is roughly the altitude where the atmosphere gets so thin that it's theoretically no longer possible for an airplane to generate enough lift to stay in the air (or something very similar). At least that was the historical definition, today it's basically just a convention.
@@MichaelGrundler Wasn't the Definition that, above the Karman Line, a Plane would have to Fly faster than the Orbital Velocity at that Height to generate enough Lift to stay at that Height?
Blame! is so good. The size of the "city" is on such a different scale it's litterally impossible to imagine. It's super cool to see Blame! being talked about, it doesn't have nearly the following it deserves.
The free indie game Naissancee also has this feel I think. The entire game (heavily inspired by Blame!) Is basically you walking through different levels of a massive megastructure/city and it captures that feeling of being a minute speck in the middle of eternity
@@DarylTalksGames I imagine you like watching video essays about video games as well; here's one by Jacob Geller about Naissancee and it's architecture th-cam.com/video/Zkv6rVcKKg8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=p9bcs8Ii8XKVyXBr
I was surprised not seeing it mentioned, so I'm glad it's here in the comments and that Daryl saw this comment. It starts out weird, unnatural, inhuman, and gets weirder as you go on. Do take your time to explore.
Man... this really hits home. Even the timing, I've always been a very deep thinker and lately I've been looking back onto my childhood. I can still go there but everyone that was once there is now gone. The little apartment I grew up in, the school I went to, the small library, and grocery store I would walk to with my mom... it's all gone now and something new built upon it all. All except this small patch of grass between the apartment buildings I use to play in everyday. That little yard was my whole world once long ago, and now it's all that remains of that time. I feel like a part of me is still there, forever bound there. A place where I was of innocents and everything beyond that was undiscovered and of mystery. I remember feeling like I was never alone there even though I was always the only one, and now when I go back there, I feel as if I'm there back so long ago watching over myself like that of a silence guardian... not of ghost of the past but a ghost of a time not yet happened...
theres a page turn in blame where hundreds of years pass, and its just the main character travelling a small section of the mega structure. That's how insanely large the megacity is in blame
You should check Girls' Last Tour if you haven't yet, it reminds me soo much of BLAME. The megastructures on Girls' Last Tour is soo bleak. For me it gives you a sense of hope at one moment, where the crumbling structures of humanity is soo beautiful and in another moment it feels soo hopeless. *Bit of spoiler* on one of the chapter the girls arrive on a flat slab structure full of safe after safe stacked upon each other, the girls opened them to find random items, this items are explained to be a keepsake item, an item that is dearest for the person who has passed, this stacked of safes are graveyards, the graveyards spans as far as the girls can see. No physical body remains, they're long dead, they have been forgotten, but their Items are the ones that remains, their keepsakes are the only proof of their existence. The girls took the items that they could find without knowing the purpose of the safes, they found a bullet casing, a piece of cloth, a button, and a radio. The girls find them useless, as they move, they took a picture of a Nuko statue, (not explaining that) there they talk about the person who gave them the camera, one of them has forgotten the person's name, saying if he didn't gave them the camera they would've forgotten about him by now. (Idk where i was going with this, but you should read or watch it). Essentially the girls put back the items they took, realizing it was a graveyard.
I would like to add rain world to this list you basically explore a natural environment that grew out of a long abandoned but still functioning megastructure that's essentially a big computer, so massive it uses entire lakes as cooling
Oh definitely! Same vibes as a lot of these, too, where the original inhabitants are gone and we're exploring the massive skeletons of their homes. Sorry for waxing poetic a bit below, I just really love what Rain World does with scale amd understanding. The world is _meant_ to be beyond our character's comprehension, and it's beautifully conveyed. There's this awe-inspiring moment where... well, you've been climbing for a while. Probably hours, on your first run. Up and up and all you see is sky and wall and more wall. The rain has been ever-present, overwhelming, deadly, looming... and here you realize it's gone. You are so high up, you are above the clouds. Then you go *inside* the structure and realize it is a single massive, computer that you've been scaling. You start to wonder, for what _possible_ purpose would anyone build a computer that big? ...And then you come out again on top. You see the view from there. And there's a city. In the distance, but not on the horizon - *built on top of that structure*. A supercomputer so large a metropolis fits on it. ...And if you went up that way, by then you'd also have already talked to someone who adds another layer to that sense of awe. Two layers, really. First: You aren't just above the rain. This _behemoth_ is the _source_ of that rain. Indirectly, it has probably killed you by drowning many, many times by now. It does not care. Second: That city-bearing superstructure? It is very much alive. You are a tiny, tiny rodent who spent the last few hours scaling and crawling about in a thinking being to whom you are about as large and significant as gut bacteria. _And some people, somewhere, _*_built_*_ it._ "Ant on a keyboard" is I guess what I'd call that feeling. .... Like, geez, a player can say, "I think I'll go talk to [a certain NPC]" and make that climb to "get" to him... but you're _already there_. As soon as you touch that wall, you're there. The puppet is a puppet. You are talking, also, to The Wall, and The Underhang, and the incomprehensible and beautiful music and neurons and light that is the General Systems Bus. You have been living in its shadow and dying to its deluge. From any comprehensible scale of perspective, you may as well have just climbed a god. ........a god who is a downright _bastard_, at that
This is exactly why I loved the environments and structures of Armored Core 6. Every structure was so ridiculously massive and imposing that I'd always ask myself "how did they build that?!" and "how much did this cost?!"
Yeah, and there isn’t even a single precedent for how space travel works there except the lone example of the Xylem. That’s just one colony ship. The Vascular Plant has a top size that would only loose eight percent of its total top aspect area if the area of both BOTW and Elden Ring’s maps were removed.
the last part brought me to tears because it was so horrifyingly awakening. That the totality of earth or the solar system may be demolished and renovated is truly a concept i've never imagined before... beautiful video
I think my favorite thing about Blame! Is all the empty space. There are tight hallways that look almost organic, but there are also city sized spaces in between them, with skyscraper hight drops to an unseen floor. It shows how big the structure is, that they could be so careless with space or that most likely this is where two structures became one is awe inspiring. Blame! Is a masterpiece.
Not to mention the chamber that is literally the size of Jupiter, which basically confirms that most of the solar system had been swallowed up by the city.
This is your best one yet. I am a writer and the worldbuilding aspect of this, combined with you phenomenal writing really did it for me. thank you so much for all the time you spent on this. It was well worth it!
There's another beautifully tragic layer to the truly absurd megastructures, that not only will we never see them, but the people who start building them will never see them finished. A dyson sphere, even for a VERY advanced civilisation, could easily take several generations of dedication and unimpeded work to complete. What would the first generation of architects, engineers, and supply teams think of this marvel, one even their grandkids may not see finished? A complete megastructure that required many generations of coordinated and uninterrupted or at least unsabotaged work to complete, is not just a wonder of ingenuity and resourcefulness, but a wonder of collaboration across generations. Some might take so long to complete, that the society that drafted the initial plans would be completely unrecognisable and alien to the society living in the finished product. That, I think, is as haunting as it is enchanting.
This already happened with buildings like medieval cathedrals, some of which were being built for over hundred years and went through several generations on constructors and architects. In some ways those cathedrals are megastructures of medieval era and they are still impressive hundred years later. Building them with technology so limited compared to now was truly an insane achievement
On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine that a society capable of building a Dyson Sphere wouldn't also have developed some means of extending the lifespan of its people, possibly into perpetuity. Such that the people who start building a Dyson Sphere would live long enough to see it completed.
@@tbotalpha8133 unfortunately technology doesn't work like that. Advancements in one field do not equate advancements in another. Case in point, we have tiny supercomputers that can do millions of calculations in an instant. Fifty years ago, would you believe that we could do THAT but still not reliably reach mars?
@@LineOfThy You see the scale is much more different. The difference between a civilization actively building Dyson Sphere, and Modern humans, is similar to the difference between Modern Humans and Ancient Egypt/Mesopotamia etc. Like, can you believe that if tens of thousands of years ago we started thinking and working on life extension, and still haven't made progress, even though we(at that point in time) are currently building a Dyson sphere(which means the solar system is heavily industrialized). Also, technology does scale like that. If we have people so far out from home working and being healthy, that means we have made an incredible amount of progress in medical science, robotics would have also improved to such an extent, that some form of smart nanobot medicine could be a reality, we would have access to orbital manufacturing at unthinkable scales(we're only starting to even begin stuff like this). So, yes, Technology does work like that. Also, your example sounds a bit erroneous. We can reach Mars, and we can reach it way more reliably than like the 60s.
@@shinigamisenpai3303 We don't even know if nanobots can exist, much less the possibility of manufacturing them. That level of molecular control is way beyond the technological possibility of dyson spheres.
I unironically jumped with joy the moment you've mentioned Stellaris and Alderson Disk which were the only two reasons I opened this video. I am so happy :)
Humans have built megastructures before, we just don't recognize them as such. Think of road network infrastructure that spans continents or sprawling internet cables which connect the planet. We even create megastructures unintentionally, the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch for example, which is twice the size of Texas; or Earth Orbital Debris Field, which envelops the planet and contains 10,000 tons of man-made detritus. Most megastructures are built out of a very specific humanitarian need, or as a consequence of those needs.
Small nitpick, the garbage patch and debris field aren't really structures. The garbage patch is that big, but it's not like a landmass you can stand on, the huge majority of it is "just" regions of the ocean that have much higher densities of micro plastics and beads and the like. Similarly, the debris field is a loose scattering of stuff. 10,000 tons isn't actually that much material to stretch across the entire planet in orbit.
@@HopperDragonThat's a good point, but structures aren't defined as always being a contiguous object; they just need to share a common arrangement and relationship. A Dyson Swarm of many parts, rather than a Dyson Sphere, would still be considered a structure. Expanded onto a galactic scale, galaxies themselves are also considered structures, and are themselves parts of structures of superclusters, which are then part of galactic filament structures. It's structures all the way down!
Megastructures are more often built as statements of power, grandiosity & splendor than out of "humanitarian needs"; IE. The Colosseum, Great Pyramids of Giza, Circus Maximus, Baths of Caracalla, Versailles in its prime etc. The works of Étienne-Louis Boullée illustrate this central theme of grandiosity & awe which are core to megastructures. They are as much an aesthetic statement as they are a practicality, if not more-so.
@@Nykandros I'll counter your examples with the great wall of china, the basilica cistern, the aquaducts of rome, etc. Perhaps it is that massive essential structures are in fact more numerous than more "boastful" structures, but are simply not often noticed exactly because they usually aren't boastful or eye-catching.
Amazing video, it really resonated with me when you mentioned how well be long gone when the mega structures are finished but it can still make you feel so alive. Just the sight and the idea of multi-generational projects on planetary size is so unfathomably large and out of reach, it leaves me in awe. One of the scenes from Sword Art Online season 3 the Alicization arc, Eugeo mentions how he’s now filling the role of his father to cut the tree down. He mentions something along the lines of being the 7th generation to be tasked with cutting the tree down. Seeing how the progress bar is barely a tenth diminished, it’s just left my mind to wander and think about what that town would look like when the tree is on its last hit point.
You should already feel that way simply by existing in this universe. But I understand you completely, as a physicist I wonder as much about what the future will bring and how humans will continue their ascension to higher scales as I cherish every walks in forest I can do.
20:51 Blame isn't the best example of what ecumenopolis could be because it's about the machines going out of control and expanding without human consideration. There are vast lifeless spaces that would not be built by humans
I’ll go for the obvious one. The Halo rings are a great example of the splendor of fictional megastructures. Every single time I boot up a Halo game and see the see the ring in the skybox, I get chills. There’s something so magical in the implementation that Bungie nailed as early as CE. I think the Citadel from Half-Life gets a close second, especially in Alyx, where Valve gives you as long as you want right at the start to adjust to their VR environment design.
so much of the Forerunner stuff is just mind-bending. Halo is already huge but compared to Installation 00 it's tiny. another one that got me was Titanfall 2 where at some point i came into an underground facility stretching on for kilometres and I wondered what is this place I ended up following a manufacturing line that builds entire city blocks and when it finally became clear what this entire facility was for I just shook my head it was lunacy.
@@ADMNtekEven then the Ark is nothing compared to Sarcophagus, a shield world 1 AU in diameter and so large the Forerunners never finished it by the time the Flood arrived. But then Forerunner tech comes into play that this 1 AU Dyson sphere fit in a 23cm sphere at the center of a slightly-larger-than-Earth sized artificial planet.
Don't know if this fuled or healed my depression, but it made me think about life, time, sorrows and memories in general. One of the best videos I've seen on TH-cam
Rain World has this but in 2D and it's so well done. After finding out about the megastructure you realize that many of the game's locations that you traveled through were actually parts of it and the environment, it's ecosystems and thus the gameplay are greatly affected by it's existence. Then the DLC expanded upon it exponentially. Rain World is such an amazing game
Only Daryl can make me and my wife tear up thinking about architecture (and the existentialism of a life that lives beyond us, but mainly the architecture)
The Halo Array and the Arc from Halo are some of my favorite superstructures in science fiction, they're simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. Death Island or the mission Silent Cartographer in the original Halo CE feel like tiny islands in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a sea stretching out to the horizon in every direction... and then you look up at the skybox, and see the curvature of the ring superstructure way off in the distance stretching far into the sky, tapering to a point so far away you can no longer see it through the ring's atmosphere. As large as Silent Cartographer is, it's just a tiny spec within a tiny ocean in this incomprehensibly huge Halo Ring. The horror sets in once you learn of the Rings' true purpose: to annihilate all intelligent life within a radius of thousands of lightyears. We've seen footage of atomic bomb tests before, we've seen the Death Star blow up a planet in Star Wars, but Installation 09 is capable of destruction on a scale of multiple entire solar systems that makes even these weapons seem utterly insignificant. The lush Earth-like scenery on the ring isn't just there for show. The Ring is like Noah's Arc, and all the flora and fauna on board is there to repopulate the cosmos with if the Ring ever fires. Together, the 9 Halo Rings combined have the ability to kill all sophisticated sentient life in the galaxy. It's hard to even imagine that these ancient superweapons can wipe out all human life and humanity's future, because no matter how advanced humanity has become by the time the game takes place and how far we've explored, we've never even made it outside the range of the Array.
Shoutouts to the Vascular plant from Armored Core 6, a giant funnel sticking out of the side of the planet meant to suck up all the coral energy from within the planet's core. Zullie The Witch made a really good video showcasing it's scale.
What I found interesting is when fighting ibis, it already dwarfs the city around it. And it gets even bigger once you wake back up again, dwarfing most of the Planet. And all of this is from the perspective of a 30m tall mech not a meter tall human.
It's wild that at one point I was amaze at the sheer scale of these structures and then contemplate about life at the end of the video. Life truly has its UPS and DOWNS.
Your description of Ghost Story reminds me of a picture book I read a lot as a child - 'The Little House', it's similar in themes with a small home being swallowed by a city over time as the world moves on without it, but told from the house's perspective instead. It does have a happy ending, where it gets moved back out to the countryside, but I always wondered as a kid if that wasn't just the start of another cycle.
It reminded me of The Giving Tree. I hated that book as a kid, it's so sad. The kid plays with the tree every day, but then grows up and is more interested in girls, work, family, whatever, but every time he comes back the tree wants to play with his friend because the tree hasn't aged. The kid takes and takes and takes from the tree, who just wants to relive the good times, but he never can.
@@chux4w values dissonance. the story has been rightfully critiqued as "the taking man". and offers insight how nature was viewed before: inexhaustable and to serve mankind.
When you started talking about the space station moving around Earth, I was thinking about how fast the Earth actually moves around Sol. What's 1600mph when compared to over 60,000mph that the Earth is moving? Relative speed is an interesting thing because it's only changes in relative speed that makes a difference to us. I loved this video
Fun fact, in a 0G environment, if both you and the object are moving along the same vector, in your perspective both are stationary. Not to mention the near zero resistance in that environment would not produce the effect of traveling at high speeds as it would on earth. Its Einstein's elevator thought experiement, but just that you have a massive satellite inside with you xD
Yeah, I was going to say, it's all about relativity. Goggling at building things while at orbital speeds is kind of like being amazed that you can build skyscrapers on the equator while the Earth is spinning at 1000 mph and also orbiting the Sun at 67,000 mph!
@@smc9207 for sure, you experience no motion relative to a vehicle such as a train or plane if it's travelling at a constant speed in a straight line. But as EquesTofu mentioned, travelling at high speed in an atmosphere or in contact with the ground leaves you open to interference from turbulence and friction, or from the acceleration experienced while cornering. And if you're not in a contained vehicle, then wind resistance is going to be a problem!
@@CraigJuddI think it's the fact that to get anything up to say, the ISS, you have to reach and match its speed, while also not dropping anything lest it fly around and smack a hole through what you're building. Sure in deep space in the middle of nowhere you'd have no frame of reference beyond your own so speed wouldn't necessarily matter, but in orbit gravity is still at play thus its acceleration still matters.
We're already in Einstein's elevator. We're spinning on Earth, which is orbiting our star, which is orbiting our galactic center, which is _also_ flying through space. If you were suddenly stuck in the same spot relative to the center of the universe, you'd be yanked away from Earth faster than you can say "oops."
I swear if you didn't bring up Arby's a few times, I would have fallen down the rabbit hole of anxiety. Who'd have thunk that that would be such a great hook to keep viewers sane.
I recently played a game called Bleak Faith: Forsaken. The game didn't do super well on release on account of being rather clunky and janky and unpolished, but I had been looking forward to it for so long that I pushed through until I was able to get used to it, and the 3 dev team that's been making it has been adding improvements constantly and making it far better than it was on launch. That aside, the game is heavily inspired by Blame!, specifically the imagery. And there was something so special about wandering through this colossal space. Seeing the imagery in Blame! Is one thing, but actually controlling the act of wandering was something entirely different. At one point, I found a monorail with nothing on it and no way to call for a train or anything, so I started walking across it. It reached out over an abyss below and an abyss above, the sight of steel in the distance the only thing to tell me that I was still moving. I spent several minutes walking across this monorail until eventually I reached a space with skyscrapers and cars, that were completely abandoned. The monorail kept going but was blocked by a broken down train, and the cityscape I was in was completely ruined and empty. There wasn't even an item or reward for my making this journey. But instead of being disappointed by the lack of reward, I was just in awe. The game wasn't perfect and had many flaws, but there were still moments like this, where my wandering was so endless and yet completely fruitless, that really hit the mark of what this game was meant to accomplish. In later parts of the game, you can be walking in what looks like a sort of Nier Automata city ruins type landscape, but if you looked down at a crack in the ground there was nothing below, and if you looked up, it was just an abyss, but through the fog in the far distance, occasionally you could see some giant structure that was moving, it was bone chilling to imagine what it might be. And the last moment from playing this game I wanted to highlight was one many people complained about on launch. I was exploring an area that was rich with structures and enemies and whatnot, it was super dense and felt populated, with many structures stretching up into the sky. I came across an elevator with no markings or anything, and I stepped on it to bring me up or maybe down. The elevator started moving upwards and I sat in that closed off space for a few minutes, which is a long time to sit in a videogame elevator (hence many people's complaints). The thing is, the elevator was moving fast, and when it finally reached the top, I was standing at the top of a massive tower, looking around me there was absolutely nothing but the abyss, and other towers of similar height. Some connected by bridges, others had to be jumped to. In any other game, jumping between towers in the sky would be a normal feat, because if I fell I'd get a quick death animation and respawn to try it again. And while the same thing would happen here, I was terrified to jump out over that void. The looooong elevator ride had conveyed to me just how high up I was, and just how long I would fall for. Many people complained that the elevator was too long, but I believe that it lead me to experience the most vertigo I've ever felt in a game, where I was already feeling so much dread. I highly recommend this game, despite its issues it has some of the greatest world design, environment art (all of that done by 1 single guy btw!), and exploration ever. Not to mention they've made several improvements since release.
As someone who always took his time to explore and observe buildings and architecture\sceneries in games, this video is amazing. I was not expecting for the video to take a philosophical turn and makes me contemplate about death though, and this is amazing. This why YT is still good, because of content creators like you.
The section about the alderson disk, that just clicked with me, you've inspired my to start writing again, after about 8 years of procrastination. So thank you, I think I may have finally found the concept that will take me all the way.
Just started the video and your obsession is so validating to me. I have always been star struck in awe with fictional megastructures for as long as I can remember. Put a bright big smile on my face to hear someone else express this as well.
The most depressing thing about this video is that even after all this time passes, all this technological innovation and progress comes to pass, the flow of time stretching on until we don't even know what land is anymore, and Arby's will still be revolting.
One time I was in awe of a megastructure in a game and made me stop and stare is the Halo ring in Halo. Seeing 'normal' land then above the horizon and clouds you see the ring arching up, disappears again above you then you see is come back behind you. That was insane. I later learned it was inspired by Ringworld (novel). and the halo ring there is so much more insane than in the Halo game.
Armored Core, and other mech games, explore this idea too, as they usually end up using mechs to build even taller, bigger structures. You could also check out the Wandering Earth movies!
Great video! The existential feelings i got when you talked about "A ghost story", combined with the topic of megastructures really reminded me of the manga "Girls' Last Tour". It's about two girls wandering a massive megacity. It's a fairly slow, more laid back manga/show, but it touches on some of the things you bring up in the video. It's a very good manga that I can't recommend enough.
For some reason it feels weird to hear my name. But you're welcome for the Patreon bucks. 😏 Anyway particularly fascinating video. That's a topic that I've been thinking about too, although not to that extent. The first game to give me that impression of being overwhelmed by the size and emptiness of the structures was probably Ico. But obviously sci-fi like Blame is the pinnacle of this. It's so absurd that it feels like it can only make sense in the mind of an AI or something.
This reminds me of a Fanfic I read recently. The fic was based on Medieval times with the corresponding technology. No Electricity, no radio, no guns or skyscrapers, just swords and magic and stone buildings. However the cast eventually end up fighting these bad guys which are much more technologically advanced. Despite this, the technology they encounter is quite limited, they don't even encounter guns, just giant mechs, which they barely have the means to defeat. Eventually, the cast fight those bad guys and win, allowing them to discover what those villains had been working on, a portal to another time, aka Time Travel. By an accident of one of their allies, they go through that portal and at first, everything seems normal. It seems like they are in a large empty cavern (really a warehouse for those Mechs they fought). They go through a doorway, exploring this new area... and promptly experience existential dread... because the sky doesn't exist... because the ground is upside down above them. The characters literally fall to the ground and clutch the grass expecting themselves to fly down to the ground above them, despite there being ground below. In fact, they try and warn additional allies from coming through because of how horrifying the experience is for them, and most of them promptly stumble back into the warehouse where they puke and have a mental breakdown. The scene was written in a way where even I didn't know what was going on at first because the character's couldn't rationalize the scope they were experiencing. It was only when 1 character pointed out that the ground in the distance was not Hills, but CURVED that I realized they were on a Ringworld, a megastructure functioning as both a planet and a spaceship. I think the scene accurately portrays the majesty and dread that Megastructures like those provoke, how incredibly fascinating and equally horrifying a concept.
That reminds me of the Slags in Fallout. They were basically a race of humans living underground after the nuclear war, and were able to stay there for a long time since they were self sustaining. Eventually though they struggled with overpopulation so they had to go above ground to start a farm. When they went above ground they had a similar experience to the characters you talked about, they feared falling into the sky and were just simply mortified by the scope of the world. They ended up only going out at night because it was better on their eyes which had been adapted for the darkness of underground, and only sent the few who were brave enough to stand the sensation of possibly falling upward.
The megastructures in Armored Core 6 always blew me away. Very cool backdrop of a world that used to be, but is no more, only to be fought over for scraps by warring factions from another star system….
It gives the same vibes as abandoned Appalachian coal mines just on an absolutely massive scale. A huge boom and an import of tons of mining equipment, money flowing in, and then suddenly everybody ups and leaves when there's no more money to be made. Then you have a bunch of rusted mining equipment and abandoned structures with nobody around.
I’ve had this EXACT existential crisis watching Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. GOT takes place two centuries after HOTD, and it really got me thinking about permanence, legacy, and how much a space can change in the span of generations. Will Westeros ever get an Arby’s? Who’s to say.
When will public education be established? When will a maintained road system be implemented? How will these things affect the trout population? All of these questions and more will be answered... never.
I think, the perfect word to describe the feeling you get, when experiencing such structures is "humility". Not humiliation, humility. That feeling of awe when you are at peace with yourself, knowing your own vulnerability and accepting it. This feeling is one, that has been fascinating me for years now. Looking at the stars and try to imagine a glimpse of this sheer endless universe, surrounding us. What you feel, when you're looking at pictures of - for example - Chernobyl, where the nature is actively taking back those spaces, that where once stolen by us and plastered with buildings and streets. The feeling that makes "apocalypse" something romantic, weirdly enough. I just love everything about it. Also, in terms of games, I would like to make an addition to a structures that made me feel this way: Even though the whole world of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West could be taken as such examples, the hatcheries from ZD have a special place in my heart.
I'm so glad you mentioned Blame! It's a great manga, and I was thinking about it while watching the beginning of the video :) One thing that people don't often mention about the manga though, there is a scene in I don't remember which volume, where our protagonist comes upon structures being actively built. In this world, there is still active machinery building more and more structures. Why? For whom? We see maybe a few hundred, maybe a few thousands living people throughout the immensity of the mechanical word depicted in the manga, and yet giant machines are building more, building still, building, building, building. This is one of the most fascinating aspect of the book for me. Machines programmed to build ever more, because we need to keep building, even if there are no longer people who need those new structures. And this has seemingly been going on for a looong time. Are those the same machines that were when humanity was at its most populous? Are the machines still following the original building plans, or are they following new, or corrupted plans? Some of these structures are clearly not fit for human society. Enormous walkways next to bottomless pits with no rail are a huge safety risk for people. But they're not building for people anymore. Right? Fascinating book, I highly recommend it.
Another banger video once again! I love the feeling of sublime, when it feels like my existence is too small to even compare to huge towering structures and environment. I thought I can only get this feeling from standing on top of a mountain, or looking at the view of an endless night sky in pitch black darkness. You now put the idea of megastructures in my mind, and I feel an obsession about to bubble up. Thank you for dunking me head first into a new endless abyss of researching this topic and grappling the science around these structures
Incredible video, another incredible megastructure in a game is the Iterators/Iterator Cities in Rain World. Massive, towering, sentient computer structures meant to figure out the species' purpose, with cities built atop them to avoid the rain that results from the megacomputer's water cooling system. Its incredible to think about and look at.
Really enjoy how you bring together such mixed media threads here - manga, film, and video games, melded with a little reality. Fab stuff, and love the A Ghost Story representation!
One of the most fascinating moments in Blame is when Killy looks up some stairs and the exit is 3000 km away. And when he reaches the top he sees nothing, but ground with no buildings for miles and then there is a person that explains that the whole space is 143.000 km. Also I am pretty sure Killy isn't young, some time stretches are pretty long and his age doesn't change if I remember correctly.
First half I was in awe for the architecture, moving on the second half I was sighing out and distressed (but inn a good way) at the theme of moving on and acceptance. What a great video, I resonated with the feeling of dread that I feel when I see a vast horizon when playing RPG games.
Awesome video! Thought-provoking, depressing and uplifting all at the same time. ... and I can't accurately explain the feeling of watching a video youtube recommended... being very impressed by the production value... and then seeing my own video and name in there. Very surreal. Thank you for the shout-out!
I watched the whole video thinking about Panchaea in Deus Ex HR. It is also a structure that we can see being built, something that's rare to see when talking about these kinds of buildings. And it becomes even more interesting to think that it is a structure that doesn't feel that hyper-futuristic, something that doesn't seem out of this world... Something like Control's Oldest House deserves a mention as well, it is an impossible building, yes, but it's very appealing as well, and it makes us fantasize about working there. Great video as always!
This video was... beautiful. It really got my brain to tick in a way I longed desperately for, and yet surprised me anyway. This kind of thinking inhabits my mind constantly, it ripples in and out like the tide yet never fully surrenders itself. I needed this. I want to add something to it. When you were talking about perspective and persception I was reminded of an indy game called Rain World. In it you are a small slugcat, a creature at the bottom of the food chain, and you travel through a massive industrial world. It was once inhabited by intelligent life but now the wild has taken over. In this post apocolyptic setting you travel onwards, and there is structure you soon find yourself climbing. A structure so massive that it takes up two full massive areas of the game, and yet you can only see the thing screen-by-screen, never are you allowed to observe its true scale and intention. Now this structure is massive, who cities are built on top of it, but in relation to the structures you discussed it does not compare. Yet, more than its size speaks to you, it is the fact that you cannot see everything and can never see or understand everything that really makes the structure fell gargantuan. It sits their in the mists, and you cannot immagine anything larger or more powerful. Yet, as you play through the game time moves on, and these structures which once molded the landscape and folded it to their every need, crumbles. A new cycle unfolds, one that we need not be a part of.
Oh- so, if you’re interested in the duality of megastructures, wonder and loss, then I recommend Girls’ Last Tour. It’s a slice of life manga set in the copse of a megacity. It also has a sort of . . . Inverse? The author’s next work is called Shimeji Simulation and is set in, well, a simulation. It’s quite fun as well.
Not quite the Analemma Tower, but Battle Angel Alita had something similar with its Jeru-Salem structure - basically a barbell held in place by equally gravitational pull and centrifugal force. I loved the concept (especially since almost nobody on earth knew about it). My personal favorite is BLAME! though. If you haven't, read NOiSE; it's the prequel to BLAME! and tells how the Megastructure came to be.
What’s that about? The tower was very cool, you know until it slams into a mountain or whatever! And just imagine having to clear air traffic around it! Doesn’t sound too bad doesn’t sound too hard to stay out of the way of some thing hundreds of miles long up until you realize it’s moving at about 20,000 miles an hour!
The scale of the facility in Portal 2 has always stuck with me. Every time you feel like you're approaching the surface, that maybe you're seeing some natural light peek through, you always inevitably come across some monolithic constructs towering overhead. Love it.
Hatey jokes aside, I can tell you worked super hard on this video. The extra subtleties in your narration, all the outside media you sourced, and just the sheer length. Excellent job, it’s a banger
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What Megastructure did I miss? What is your favorite example? Let me know below!
"Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon" and "NaissanceE" have some of my favorite recent examples of existential, near-megalophobic architecture.
The megastructure that really resonates with me the most are the towering supercomputers of rain world. These giant computaional cities are at the epicenter of the game's story, and exploring them as a small, insignificant being really hammers home the wonder of something much, much bigger than you. But the thing they do best is show you how it feels when structures like these decay. The death of these opressing, overempowering gods makes up the crux of this game's fantastic story, ESPECIALLY in the DLC. Exploring these great structures at the different times in their lives and seeing their gradual decay and death is something that will mark me for the rest of my life, and really makes this game such a joy to play.
NaissanceE is a game (free on steam) in which you get to explore a megastructure. It's particularly relevant to this video since it is quite overtly inspired by Blame!
Bleak Faith's Omnistructure was the first thing I thought about, when reading the video-title. it was heavily inspired by "Blame!". one of the weirdest and most fascinating structures / game-world in a video-game.
Starsector hypershunts, space rangers 2 terron, rainworld obviously, things one builds in Oxygen Not Included (!!), Portal 2 Aperture Science complexes
bro i was like "eh its just architecture can't be that interesting" and now 36 minutes later im contemplating my existence and inevitable death
I am a studying architect and it also got me feeling that way.
For real. I was not ready for this level of oof while eating my microwave burritos.
it is natural dying my friend, once you accept that, everything become clear like water
😅I dont want to die
I want to be an immortal human
@@shoobzy3431
Will
Becoming immortal witnessing the advances of technology
, exploration of space etc
Around 32:46 reminds me of an experience I had. When I was a kid I remember going to a restaurant in Thailand with my family, it became our usual restaurant and we would go there every night because the staff was incredibly nice and the owner had a very touching story.. We eventually came back from Thailand and 10 years later I flew back. The exact same place disappeared, the street disappeared, the road disappeared only to show a wall. We asked locals where the restaurant was in case we just went to the wrong address. But no, it was just simply gone, the people, the restaurant, everything gone.. The only thing that remains of this place is the memories we made there. To the people reading this comment, it might just seem like a story that resembles another but to me, it hit deep.
The undercity of Coruscant is terrifying. Typically in Star Wars, the further away you get from Coruscant, the more uncivilized and crime-ridden the galaxy gets. Yet on Coruscant itself, the further down you go, the closer you get to the actual surface and humanity's original home, you see the same thing. What on the surface is a beautiful, luxurious city, is a metal hell of anarchy and filth. Many residents of the lower levels never see the sky, and long for a day they can ride up the elevator just once and experience the sun on their face. The very lowest levels are all but forgotten, and nobody knows if anything even lives down there. There could be entire nations down there, in the darkness, completely unknown to the galactic government above.
Its like us living in the luxury on the west while everything we consume is made by slaves in China. Its not science fiction, its both our future and our present, also our past.
Can humanity ever be free from having to work, we create machines to do our work, then we are free, but we're still slaving away the machines, something has to do the work.
This is why I want a game set in Coruscant. There are so many levels in Coruscant. They call it a ecumenopolis where its a metropolis expanded to a whole city. There was one game, Star Wars 1313. But it never materialized. That in my opinion is the dream game.
I always thought it would be incredible to play a game where you're an unknown bounty hunter scavenging the ruins of a later-day, post-films, post-most of (if not all) of our known Star Wars media. very few people are living in the city as something went wrong/is wrong on the planet, causing it to become more and more unlivable -- whole fragments of the planet are going dark and the remaining population thinks its an ecological crisis causing parts of the city-planet to blink out of contact, but its actually because fragments of the planet itself are cracking and sinking into the planet's core. and yet, nobody knows about the cult existing in the planet's guts... until the player starts literally digging deeper (note I at first had written "until the player goes down" -- not optimal) into the depths of the surface city and blah blah blahs.
as the game progresses you learn no, there isnt something wrong in the core, nor did the force abandon *Coruscant * in specific, nor did anything else go wrong "by accident" per se. what is happening is that there's a sith cult who have unearthed new texts that will give them a shortcut to power through the ritual force-digestion of the planet. if they can feed the entire planet to whatever they're chatting with down there, it promises them the power to do the same trick at will to any planet, anywhere, on demand (with practice). and also, its not the force they're in communion with, its (somehow) Palpatine who has been to the realm of the dead and stopped at the gift-shoppe on his way out and thought of a sick new dance he wants to teach you, or something. it doesn't matter, none of this matters.
the part about the planet's crust breaking apart in front of the player in actual real-time is entirely possible now on a technical level. just massive islands of city heaving up and then crashing down -- it gives me bonerz imagining the possibilities
The star wars city planet sounds like a hive city,
and mixes it with my idea of a litteral ice berg=
its vitrue signalling at the top=
but if you go under the ice=
theres a huge building underneath,
and it gets worse the more you go down.
=nazis made it=(the vitrue signalling above the ice.),
pun=😘when nazis fall from buildings onto the ice,theyre metaphysicall snowflakes,not just metaphoricoll 1s...
@@mvrk4044the game sounds cool too,i would want to watch or play it=if i knew half of the comnent when it was on youtube=i would watch like 5 videos=or =to short videos for how long it is.
My ice berg is ment to be a game too.
=the 1st 1 is inspired by let it die/mixed with the fair part and is extremelly😆😆dark...
Blame is not about humanity overreaching with their construction. It's about their construction slipping away from them. They lose control and the builders just keep on going without sense or reason for who knows how long. The megastructure is a result of a drive without will and thought.
The best part of Blame! is the moment when the main character wanders into a huge open space, and an annotation on the page says that it's the room _Jupiter_ was used to be in. As in, _the planet._ The City of Blame! is so much worse than just being a mere uninspired planetary-scale building, it's an entire solar system filled up to the brim with endless corridors, rooms and utility closets, build with no sense, rhyth, function or even purpose, because the humans are long gone and the building robots just continue at random.
I was really hoping someone would mention the Jupiter room
oh wow, that's entirely different!
Not to forget that humans had no part in the majority of the construction. Builder bots, left unattended and unmaintained for millennia have gone senile and expand the city now that their masters no longer can tell them to cease. The City has been expanding for what could be millions of years. The humans that inhabit the different strata of the City are genetically and dymorphically distinct from each other so much so that there are meters of height difference between one *species* of human and another. Two humans in Blame from different levels of the City might not even recognize each other as human
Where are the robots supposed to have got the material to make that? I can't even conceive of how much volume it would take or how many other solar systems' worth of planetary material they would have had to have flown out to, broken down and transported back to ours. We're not talking generations, we're talking aeons.
@@lozg8887 IIRC it is implied they take it straight from alternative dimensions or something like this. The setting have a lot of batshit insane tech, else the whole thing would collapse into a black hole.
Not much of a mega structure, but the Destiny 1 Taken King mission where you climb a colony ship was amazing. Seeing the ruined Kazakhstan cosmodrome and distant structures 3 thousand years into the future is amazing.
or the Dreadnought in Saturn's rings
@@omolon-scout-riflesay what you want about Destiny, but they sure as hell nailed the settings.
I’m a civil engineer, so seeing infrastructure in games that actually looks structurally sound, constructable (soneone could actually build it), and appears functional is very cool to me. Anyone can draw up a massive structure, but when you see aspects of actual civil design (trusses, load bearing columns, soil anchors, erosion control, etc) it really adds to it.
Have you played INFRA? For a civil engineer it's akin to a horror game.
Very true. In fact becoming an engineer i realise that "beauty" of technological things are alway about practicality. If a ship is practical, then its beautiful to me. Haha
Most of the architecture in vdo games is usually legit definitely not functional or economic but most of the time it's legit
Eve online gave me a fear of the vastness of space. Every time you jump into warp, you see your velocity go from thousands of meters per second to millions to billions, but if you look at the distant planets, they arent yet moving, then you start moving at speeds that are related to lightspeed, 0.5c 1c 10c and the planet whizzes by, those seconds you spend travelling at billions of meters per second, dont make even a dent to even a fraction of the distance you cover in a second of going at your top speed.
Zooming out and being surrounded by darkness, especially when you can be jumped at any moment feels like having your belly exposed on every side of you.
Wow. That inside out effect is also amplified by the warp tunnel.
if you love that, you'll def love star citizen if you have a pc. yes its still in alpha but in terms of what you are talking about it EXELS, no loading screens, and just beautiful
@@SonnyPlayz2-wo7jx ive played SC and the bugs kinda put a damper on any immersion or fun. That being said im biding my time with it.
This may sound weird but I’m not afraid of dark futures like that depicted in Blame!, because I have faith in birds, and rats, and bugs. If the world became only cities a lot of animals would go extinct, but not all of them. Do you know that in very urban areas there is a type of squirrel that has evolved to have black fur, so that people driving cars can more easily see it and it doesn’t get run over as much. Life finds a way, because surviving is the definition of what life does. Even in giant megastructures life would find a way that humans could never have planned for.
That's a hell of a point! My mind shudders to imagine what Ecumenopolis rats would look like knowing how big New York rats are lmao
If humans can survive the monstrosities of _Blame!,_ then 100% them cockroaches can as well. Which is good news, because insects are great sources of protein.
You might like Rain World then. Very much a 'nature moves on' type of game.
I think we hope that "Nature finds a way" to comfort ourselves into the belief that we aren't the true villians. Maybe cockroaches will survive our scourge, but I wonder if we ought to be acting as if perhaps they won't. Maybe our behavior here will leave Earth a sterile rock.
I appreciate the hope, though
Where did you get this black squirrel thing from?
Blame!, Kowloon, and Midgar are all huge inspirations for my work-in-progress project Urban Jungle. The idea of a world where humans have created an ecumenopolis so expansive that it becomes alien and uninhabitable to humans, only for it to be reclaimed by nature and force us to live and survive in a hostile world that we built for ourselves... it's beautiful and haunting and it drives me every day to share that vision.
Sounds interesting. Got a link?
have you released this idea to the public in any form? I'd totally read a book about this
im more than in support of this. pls share immediately
Rainworld to me is the definitive superstructure game, the ecosystem that flourished in the desolate machinery makes everything seem so enormous, while playing the game you learn that every little crevice and pipe is the home of a dozen or so creatures, so when you see the scale of the world with thousands of components not only does it make these structures seem endless, but it also makes you feel like a simple rodent, crawling at random gods.
I really wanted him to talk about rain world too
I came here to mention rainworld as well. While the megastructure in question may not have fit as neatly with the themes brought up in this video, it's probably the best example of actually exploring a megastructure in gaming. Without going into too much spoilers, there is a megastructure in rainworld which is so large that you explore several different parts of it throughout distinct biomes. The sheer size of this megastructure also explains why an entirely seperate region of the game is perpetually in darkness (because it's under the shadow of the megastructure). And on a final note there is a crucial game mechanic that is influenced by this megastructure (though revealing that would be major spoilers). I know it's one of the games you ended up writing off from your backlog @DarylTalksGames but if you (or anyone) are reading this and want to feel what it's like to explore one of these megastructures then you owe it to yourself to play Rain World.
I was genuine awestruck hearing Stargazer for the first time there
@@jm56585 thats the moment slugcat became Heisenberg
Climbing to the top of The Wall to reach 5 pebbles really cemented the feeling of wandering around a mega structure. In fact, and perhaps ironically, Rainworld is probably the closest one would get to living in a mega-structure world like Blame!
A thing to add about the mega structure of blame is that it isn’t just a planet, it is a Dyson sphere in its most original form. A mega structure that fully encapsulates the entirety of our sun, and by impossible means stretches out to the farthest parts of our solar system. The entirety of Sol eaten to make this infinitely growing construct. That is the size of this megastructure, and is something that is so impossible big it breaks the mind a bit to think about.
I wondered about what they did when they reached the sun, they never explicitly state it, but I feel that the power Mensab uses at the end of the Toha arc is her just opening a portal to the sun and vaporizing everything. Except Killy, of course.
@@Grasses0n I feel like the sun would be the starting point. If we’re going off the idea that this is a Dyson sphere like megastructure then it would start with the sun and eventually eat it’s way through the solar system
@@metronicmagician1816 I thought that too after watching this video. Although as far as the Blame universe goes, if you've read the prequel Noise, or Biomega, it implies that the city started its growth on Earth. It could also be both, and the city was always connected with the Dyson sphere and that's why it continued out into space and consumed the solar system.
This is maybe not quite a megastructure, but the massive, sprawling structure of Aperture Laboratories in Portal 2 always got me. Falling all the way down to what felt like the centre of the earth, seeunf the massive caverns filled with gigantic metal spheres, each one given exact measurements, everything felt so real and so horrific. The main imagery that sticks with me to this fay is the last thing you do before you make it into "Wheatley Laboratories", you have opened the gate, ascended up an elevator and theres just one staircase leading you up to the next area. All that surrounds you is spring scaffolds, each is at least 20 metres wide and 10 metres tall, and they all hold up a metal plate. And those scaffolds don't end in any direction. You know this is just one area of the undefinable modern Aperture Labs, but there is STILL no end. Then you walk up the ladder and that scale is once again hidden by walls, doors, and elevators.
I was thinking of the same thing! Portal 2 has such a unique atmosphere this way.
wow, you have phrased that beautifully... i've always loved the endless-ness of Aperture, especially the bottom parts. like, when you fall, looking up and seeing the giant pillars holding up the rest of the facility, being at the BOTTOM of the bottomless pits... it's just breathtaking. in Portal Revolution there is a giant tower that goes from the absolute bottom of the facility all the way up to the surface. and that area you mentioned of the in-between place, right after you open the giant vault, with the chainlink fences around it... seriously underrated area; i remember exploring it in noclip quite a few times... and then there's the part, i think the main menu scene for one of the chapters, where it's right before you get into a funnel, you can see out over the facility and being illuminated by this yellow light, all the test chambers and everything. you can also see that kinda thing from the very first area, the relaxation vault container ride, if you look up you see all the relaxation vaults just sprawling into the distance... everywhere.
It also makes you wonder WTF Aperture was getting their money from if they could afford to build a mile deep Mega Facility.
1950s Aperture must have had a Too Big To Fail mindset around it if it can make its own testing chambers that are seemingly infinite.
It kinda makes me feel like blame! Megastructures
Man, I just finished watching the video, and this one thing has been on my mind ever since I discovered Daryl Talks Games back during Covid. Daryl just has a way with words. This man can make me feel emotions in ways no other thing ever can. Not music. Not movies. Not games. Nothing.
The way he can put such complex thoughts into words almost seems inhuman. If this man was a poet a good two hundred years ago people would be looking back on his works, confidently proclaiming him to be one of the smartest minds to ever grace the planet.
It is out of this world how he can make people feel such otherworldly emotions with nothing more than words and video game backdrops. And the craziest part is that it’s not just this video. Far from it. Nearly every video has a conclusion that summarizes such complex emotions with mere words. It honestly really motivates me whenever I watch a video of his cause the emotions I feel by the end are always so otherworldly.
I don’t even care that he doesn’t post super consistently. With how well his scripts are I’m shocked he can even put out more than one video a year. These scripts read as something that the smartest minds took months meticulously crafting. This man deserves way more recognition for that in my opinion.
TLDR: If I were to bet on one person from all of history being able to describe colors to a blind person, I’d pick Daryl in a heartbeat.
my favourite tidbit from Blame! is there's a giant empty chamber that's where Jupiter used to be before the builders harvested it for resources until it was gone. This isn't a plot point, this is just a thing that happens. It's not even explicitly stated iirc.
Blame! Is amazing.
I love the superstructures in armored core VI, it's such an incredible world and the sense of scale truly makes you speechless, if you haven't I really suggest checking it out!
I love the world of Stray because it's a (moderately sized) megastructure, its former inhabitants are long gone and it's somewhat derelict. But also robots are now living there and have built a home in that place.
the term people seem to have agreed on for planetary-scale megastructures is 'kilostructures'
I also absolutely love the environment in Stray, i think its my favorite out of any work of art ever
a lot of the setting was inspired by kowloon walled city!
Yeah, what captivated me in that part of Stellar Blade was also the "view" of something "massive"... What were we talking about again?
Hey Daryl! Thanks for mentioning my Megastructure book, I really appreciate it!
Hey there :)
I would love to buy a physical copy of the book (just not a fan of pdf's) but it's sold out on the site he linked, I assume it was limited print, and I'm out of luck, or is there another place it could be purchased?
@@FelunyaI’m talking to the printer right now about adding some extra prints since it sold out. Check back in a week and if all goes well there will be some extra! And thanks for your interest!
@@ArtOfSoulburn Will do!! Thank you! :)
I only had a faint hope that it might be possible to get a copy, super happy!
@@Felunyareminder to go check !
@@ArbiterBlu :o Thank you for the reminder!!! I checked for some days, but then forgot about it the last days when I got busy. Thank you so much :)
The great spirit robot from bionicle is probably my favorite thing like this. The fact that it took 8 years before the whole story was revealed to have taken place in and around a planetary sized sleeping metal man was so crazy.
The abyss from made in abyss is another favorite. Uniquely, it seems to be mostly natural. Natural, or at least made by some unimaginable beings an unimaginably long time ago, if there's even a difference.
There's one more megastructure that had me in awe ever since I was a kid: the "moon" from Disney's Treasure Planet. Particularly the way it is shot, closing in from a distant scene of a gaze at the sky and slowly showing a moon made out of buildings, streets and people boarding ships. It's breathtaking to watch the first time and still refreshing nowadays. I miss that kind of animation.
Great video! I'm a little surprised there was no mention of Sagrada Familia, a Basilica in Barcelona. Construction was started in 1882 and it is STILL being built. It's a building that will be finished over 100 years after the architect who designed it died. Ever since watching the original Mobile Suit Gundam, I've always held a soft spot for O'Neill Cylinder colonies, but I've always felt a bit of sorrow over the fact that there's no way I'll see construction a space colony be started, let alone completed. And yet Sagrada Familia will be finished in 2026. This is a construction site that has outlived generations, and yet we DO get to see the end of it in our lifetimes.
The scale of Blame! is unlike anything I've ever seen in other media. Slight spoils for around the middle of the manga below:
At one point, Killy enters into a room that is just pure blackest dark as far as the eye can see. There is a strange person here, who is surprised to see him. He explains that he is studying this room which is just a giant emptiness...the size of JUPITER. The implication is that at one point, the City has reached the orbit of Jupiter, built around it, completely drained the planet of all of it's resources and just left a giant Jupiter-sized hole behind.
Your mind cannot even comprehend the scale of that one room, and it's only a small part of the City.
The idea that a room is so large people have dedicated their lives to documenting it is unbelievable to me.
....how? People have dedicated life to much smaller things @@Sleeper____1472
OMG, that is insane. Fascinating stuff some minds can come up with. Thank you for the heads up.
May I ask; has the manga ended or is it still going?
I ask because I got burned before following a manga that released at random times with looong breaks that it eventually got too annoying so I dropped it (Berserk). Or others that just go on forever without big revelations.
If this manga ended, I can peruse at my leisure.
@@shmookins it ended , it isn't about the story though.
It's more about the panels and the structures in the manga . Manga has an average to good story but prepare for long silences . Character sometimes never communicate for many chapters
@@shmookins The manga is fully completed.
"the cost" part of the video really made me stop and think because I've only ever thought of abandoned megastructures in the context of when civilizations die out, and never for when they become obsolete. It's not abandoned because of some tragedy but because everyone was told to leave so something new can be created in it's place. Like when an old office building is being demolished and a new, more modern built in the same spot. Can't believe I've never thought about that.
I love how this video is about megastructures and the vastness of us as humans, but the most touching/meaningful moments in the video for me were the small human moments like the "what is land" quote or the summary of Ghost Story
Definitely had me feeling sentimental. I want to go watch Ghost Story now
@@demdelthepoet8885 It's absolutely worth a watch, but you need to make certain you're in the mood for it. There's a lot of sitting and staring. One of my favorite movies of recent years.
Imagine if Luke fell into the clouds on cloud city. Guy would be falling for hours before succumbing to pressure but imagine how hopeless it would feel just constantly falling with no ground in sight just endless, ever denser clouds.
Armored Core 6's Rubicon is fascinating on every level.
honestly! Your mech is gigantic but once you roam around in the different levels, the model shrinks down significantly, putting into perspective how insanely big the structures around you really are
There's a whole video specifically about the scale of it all.
And also a bunch of much smaller ones, comparing it with more familiar things, like porting ACVI maps into Elden Ring ( as an example, the Xylem is big enough that it goes beyond render distance, and that you can literally put the entirety of the Lands Between on its ring )
@@draghettis6524 ik abt Zullie's vids, I'm moreso talking about the more emotional weight hinging on these mega structures and the wonderful presentation FromSoft put together for them, rather than the scale on a technical level. They're VERY impressive and monumental.
Those final levels in that game are really impressive in emphasising scale. But I think my biggest hype moment was fighting the Ice Worm and having Rusty shoot off a laser beam from so far away.
@@leithaziz2716 wasn't a laser... It was an electromagnetic *cannon.* Emphasis on *Cannon.*
I love how Outer Wilds manages to be adorably miniaturized but still captures the vibe of impossibly large superstructures. The way that game toys with your sense of scale is so unique.
The existential question that confounds all philosophers for ages to come. “Does it have an Arby’s”?
no, no no, this is actually a valid question. A lot of megastructures look cool, but they have no way of reasonably sustaining human life. Take that really cool looking flying apartment counterbalanced by an asteroid. does it have any way of powering itself? I don’t mean, physics wise, I mean, “how do its residents literally keep the lights on”? how do these people get water? How do they get food? Do they just use drones all the time constantly? How does this thing have a sewage system the crap over the side of the building or do they have poop collecting drones? What about your social life being disconnected from all of your loved ones living in this apartment? most importantly, how do you get on and off this thing? so I think the question of “does it have an arby’s” is a useful way to find out if your megastructure is actually livable
Ok damn, I knew Stellar Blade was cool, but the architecture, the environment, the massive vistas, they look outstanding!
I think a great way to get perspective on these megastructures is taking a close look at skycrapers. I remember visiting London back in 2014 and standing right in front of one of the skyscrapers and looking up. On pictures they always look so... normal I guess, but standing there, knowing how big I am and how high this tower goes just feels so unreal. I'd also like to mention a favorite example of a megastructure in gaming for me, though I guess it's not that big compared to many of the examples in the video, it just stuck with me since I've known about it since I was a kid: The Haven City Palace in Jak 2. You wander around the city, completing mission on foot or on a vehicle, for quite a while, often with a view of the massive palace, until you get to actually climb one of the support cables in a later mission. You ride the elevator and once you are up and walking on that massive cable, you take a peek at the city below. The slums, the harbor, the bazaar and the gardens suddenly seem so tiny, you can barely recognize the layout from that high up. Even the massive wall of the city, which was always blocking the view of the outside, suddenly becomes small. You are even able to see past it slightly. I loved it and still do, that mission has a special place in my heart for sure. Anyways, great video. The effort really shows and I also really hope it gets a lot of traction, lord knows you've earned it!
I'd love to make a video on the difference between giant things in person vs in pictures. We visit the mountains like twice a year and I'm always flabbergasted when I get there at just how... no game or picture or VR can ever quite replicate the scale you feel in person. When your eyes suddenly capture the true depth and distance of your surroundings it's very humbling haha. So yeah, I completely hear where you're coming from.
I haven't seen the Haven City Palace before but that sounds incredible! Thanks so much Skubo :)
I vividly remember getting out of an airport in Barcelona and seeing mountains on the horizon for the first time. Of course I knew what mountains looked like and I was almost 20 years old at the time, but actually seeing them out there in person was just so... different. It's one of the key memories I took home with me from that trip. That, and getting my wallet stolen by someone who looked like a mirror image of one of my friends from home while drunk at a bar.
I do not enjoy cities for this reason. That sense of scale immediately translates into fear in my brain. Don't know what kind of irrational fear that is but it's not fun.
I still revisit Jak II to this day to take in that view. Something about it captivated me when i was younger, and it still does. I think part of it is that you spend so much time in those trench-like streets. The tower from Destiny doesn’t have that same feeling for me, for that reason. Both are pretty skyboxes, but one’s got the “i’ve been in that specific canal there, that’s where i hid the police cruiser i stole!” While the other dosn’t have that recontextualization
@@valettashepard909 I guess playing the Jak games as a kid has that kind of effect on people who enjoyed the games. I've never played Destiny but I totally know what you mean!
This video was beautiful, in every layer and level. From concepts tangling in the sky to metal choked corridors spanning distance in meters to eons, it was a heartbeat amidst the engineering.
I feel like the sheer scale of the BLAME! mega-structure isn't properly conveyed in this. At one point he gets on an elevator and the computer on-board tells him he will arrive at his destination in 33 DAYS, he encounters a room that is revealed to be the size of Jupiter, I don't recall is its actually stated but it's implied that the structure has fully enveloped the solar system and is perpetually being built further and further out by automatons with nobody left to give them orders. In fact the entire premise of BLAME! is Killy (the MC) searching for someone still carrying the net terminal gene so the robots can be brought back under human control, though it is unclear whether such a person even exists for Killy to find
There's quite a few panels in Blame! That say decades have passed since the previous thing of note too. The story spans literally thousands of years because he has to travel from earth out past Saturn on foot
What are they building the structure out of? Do they have FTL and are hauling solar systems to build with? And how do they deal with the heat?
The City is relatively spherical up to around Jupiter's orbit, but the overall structure eventually becomes more irregular and tendril-like as you go further away. If I'm not wrong, the "tendrils" go as far as the Oort Cloud.
@@THICCTHICCTHICC After the month-long elevator ride reveal, there is a casual 250-year flashback to a character who is introduced in the present at the end of the elevator.
"Blame" at it's core is more of a "warning" against automation.
The entire "story" revolves around an artificial, fully automated expansion program, running rampant without oversight, that became too big to control or to stop.
Fascinatingly the Artworks perfectly imply a base goal of "life preservation" through machine build "living spaces", that got lost in it's code-goal over an unimaginable amount of time.
It's truly haunting.
The explanation is so contrived and silly that it robs the manga of any weight though. Big spoilers (?): it was designed to only be controllable by humans with a certain gene, and all other humans trying to interface with it get killed. (And then some terrorists removed that gene from humanity with a virus and the robots ran wild for millenia). Who designs something like that? Assinine. You'd only do that if you WANTED a distopia- like the manga writer clearly did. Most sci fi dystopias fall apart if you think about them for two minutes.
Hi Daryl, small correction, gravity doesn't get "a little lazy" above 100km of altitude, around the ISS, the gravity is actually around 90% the one on the surface. The difference is that because the ISS is moving very fast it remains in free fall and therefore you don't experience gravity as you and the station are falling at the same speed in the same direction. Both are linked.
I've been searching for this comment and if it didn't exist I would have made it myself.
I just want to add that the Kármán line is roughly the altitude where the atmosphere gets so thin that it's theoretically no longer possible for an airplane to generate enough lift to stay in the air (or something very similar). At least that was the historical definition, today it's basically just a convention.
Another small correction: the manga Blame! Is actually pronounced Blam (like with long a we in "father")
Sounds "a little" lazy to me.
@@MichaelGrundler Wasn't the Definition that, above the Karman Line, a Plane would have to Fly faster than the Orbital Velocity at that Height to generate enough Lift to stay at that Height?
He has a very bad understanding of space maneuvering and orbital construction TBH.
Blame! is so good. The size of the "city" is on such a different scale it's litterally impossible to imagine. It's super cool to see Blame! being talked about, it doesn't have nearly the following it deserves.
The free indie game Naissancee also has this feel I think. The entire game (heavily inspired by Blame!) Is basically you walking through different levels of a massive megastructure/city and it captures that feeling of being a minute speck in the middle of eternity
This game is an incredible experience! Free and only takes a few hours
I’ll definitely be playing that 👀
@@DarylTalksGames I imagine you like watching video essays about video games as well; here's one by Jacob Geller about Naissancee and it's architecture th-cam.com/video/Zkv6rVcKKg8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=p9bcs8Ii8XKVyXBr
Added to the steam library, thanks for the game
I was surprised not seeing it mentioned, so I'm glad it's here in the comments and that Daryl saw this comment.
It starts out weird, unnatural, inhuman, and gets weirder as you go on.
Do take your time to explore.
Man... this really hits home. Even the timing, I've always been a very deep thinker and lately I've been looking back onto my childhood. I can still go there but everyone that was once there is now gone. The little apartment I grew up in, the school I went to, the small library, and grocery store I would walk to with my mom... it's all gone now and something new built upon it all. All except this small patch of grass between the apartment buildings I use to play in everyday. That little yard was my whole world once long ago, and now it's all that remains of that time. I feel like a part of me is still there, forever bound there. A place where I was of innocents and everything beyond that was undiscovered and of mystery. I remember feeling like I was never alone there even though I was always the only one, and now when I go back there, I feel as if I'm there back so long ago watching over myself like that of a silence guardian... not of ghost of the past but a ghost of a time not yet happened...
theres a page turn in blame where hundreds of years pass, and its just the main character travelling a small section of the mega structure. That's how insanely large the megacity is in blame
You should check Girls' Last Tour if you haven't yet, it reminds me soo much of BLAME.
The megastructures on Girls' Last Tour is soo bleak. For me it gives you a sense of hope at one moment, where the crumbling structures of humanity is soo beautiful and in another moment it feels soo hopeless.
*Bit of spoiler* on one of the chapter the girls arrive on a flat slab structure full of safe after safe stacked upon each other, the girls opened them to find random items, this items are explained to be a keepsake item, an item that is dearest for the person who has passed, this stacked of safes are graveyards, the graveyards spans as far as the girls can see. No physical body remains, they're long dead, they have been forgotten, but their Items are the ones that remains, their keepsakes are the only proof of their existence. The girls took the items that they could find without knowing the purpose of the safes, they found a bullet casing, a piece of cloth, a button, and a radio. The girls find them useless, as they move, they took a picture of a Nuko statue, (not explaining that) there they talk about the person who gave them the camera, one of them has forgotten the person's name, saying if he didn't gave them the camera they would've forgotten about him by now. (Idk where i was going with this, but you should read or watch it). Essentially the girls put back the items they took, realizing it was a graveyard.
I would like to add rain world to this list you basically explore a natural environment that grew out of a long abandoned but still functioning megastructure that's essentially a big computer, so massive it uses entire lakes as cooling
Oh definitely! Same vibes as a lot of these, too, where the original inhabitants are gone and we're exploring the massive skeletons of their homes.
Sorry for waxing poetic a bit below, I just really love what Rain World does with scale amd understanding. The world is _meant_ to be beyond our character's comprehension, and it's beautifully conveyed.
There's this awe-inspiring moment where... well, you've been climbing for a while. Probably hours, on your first run. Up and up and all you see is sky and wall and more wall.
The rain has been ever-present, overwhelming, deadly, looming... and here you realize it's gone. You are so high up, you are above the clouds.
Then you go *inside* the structure and realize it is a single massive, computer that you've been scaling. You start to wonder, for what _possible_ purpose would anyone build a computer that big?
...And then you come out again on top. You see the view from there. And there's a city. In the distance, but not on the horizon - *built on top of that structure*. A supercomputer so large a metropolis fits on it.
...And if you went up that way, by then you'd also have already talked to someone who adds another layer to that sense of awe. Two layers, really. First: You aren't just above the rain. This _behemoth_ is the _source_ of that rain. Indirectly, it has probably killed you by drowning many, many times by now. It does not care.
Second: That city-bearing superstructure? It is very much alive.
You are a tiny, tiny rodent who spent the last few hours scaling and crawling about in a thinking being to whom you are about as large and significant as gut bacteria. _And some people, somewhere, _*_built_*_ it._
"Ant on a keyboard" is I guess what I'd call that feeling.
....
Like, geez, a player can say, "I think I'll go talk to [a certain NPC]" and make that climb to "get" to him... but you're _already there_. As soon as you touch that wall, you're there. The puppet is a puppet. You are talking, also, to The Wall, and The Underhang, and the incomprehensible and beautiful music and neurons and light that is the General Systems Bus. You have been living in its shadow and dying to its deluge. From any comprehensible scale of perspective, you may as well have just climbed a god.
........a god who is a downright _bastard_, at that
Not the fact the moment he said "Even planets become parking lots" sirens start going off outside my window
This is exactly why I loved the environments and structures of Armored Core 6. Every structure was so ridiculously massive and imposing that I'd always ask myself "how did they build that?!" and "how much did this cost?!"
Yeah, and there isn’t even a single precedent for how space travel works there except the lone example of the Xylem. That’s just one colony ship. The Vascular Plant has a top size that would only loose eight percent of its total top aspect area if the area of both BOTW and Elden Ring’s maps were removed.
the last part brought me to tears because it was so horrifyingly awakening. That the totality of earth or the solar system may be demolished and renovated is truly a concept i've never imagined before... beautiful video
I think my favorite thing about Blame! Is all the empty space. There are tight hallways that look almost organic, but there are also city sized spaces in between them, with skyscraper hight drops to an unseen floor. It shows how big the structure is, that they could be so careless with space or that most likely this is where two structures became one is awe inspiring.
Blame! Is a masterpiece.
Not to mention the chamber that is literally the size of Jupiter, which basically confirms that most of the solar system had been swallowed up by the city.
@@fungisrock8955 god I need to re read it
This is your best one yet. I am a writer and the worldbuilding aspect of this, combined with you phenomenal writing really did it for me. thank you so much for all the time you spent on this. It was well worth it!
There's another beautifully tragic layer to the truly absurd megastructures, that not only will we never see them, but the people who start building them will never see them finished.
A dyson sphere, even for a VERY advanced civilisation, could easily take several generations of dedication and unimpeded work to complete.
What would the first generation of architects, engineers, and supply teams think of this marvel, one even their grandkids may not see finished?
A complete megastructure that required many generations of coordinated and uninterrupted or at least unsabotaged work to complete, is not just a wonder of ingenuity and resourcefulness, but a wonder of collaboration across generations.
Some might take so long to complete, that the society that drafted the initial plans would be completely unrecognisable and alien to the society living in the finished product.
That, I think, is as haunting as it is enchanting.
This already happened with buildings like medieval cathedrals, some of which were being built for over hundred years and went through several generations on constructors and architects. In some ways those cathedrals are megastructures of medieval era and they are still impressive hundred years later. Building them with technology so limited compared to now was truly an insane achievement
On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine that a society capable of building a Dyson Sphere wouldn't also have developed some means of extending the lifespan of its people, possibly into perpetuity. Such that the people who start building a Dyson Sphere would live long enough to see it completed.
@@tbotalpha8133 unfortunately technology doesn't work like that. Advancements in one field do not equate advancements in another. Case in point, we have tiny supercomputers that can do millions of calculations in an instant. Fifty years ago, would you believe that we could do THAT but still not reliably reach mars?
@@LineOfThy You see the scale is much more different. The difference between a civilization actively building Dyson Sphere, and Modern humans, is similar to the difference between Modern Humans and Ancient Egypt/Mesopotamia etc.
Like, can you believe that if tens of thousands of years ago we started thinking and working on life extension, and still haven't made progress, even though we(at that point in time) are currently building a Dyson sphere(which means the solar system is heavily industrialized).
Also, technology does scale like that. If we have people so far out from home working and being healthy, that means we have made an incredible amount of progress in medical science, robotics would have also improved to such an extent, that some form of smart nanobot medicine could be a reality, we would have access to orbital manufacturing at unthinkable scales(we're only starting to even begin stuff like this). So, yes, Technology does work like that.
Also, your example sounds a bit erroneous. We can reach Mars, and we can reach it way more reliably than like the 60s.
@@shinigamisenpai3303 We don't even know if nanobots can exist, much less the possibility of manufacturing them. That level of molecular control is way beyond the technological possibility of dyson spheres.
I unironically jumped with joy the moment you've mentioned Stellaris and Alderson Disk which were the only two reasons I opened this video. I am so happy :)
Humans have built megastructures before, we just don't recognize them as such. Think of road network infrastructure that spans continents or sprawling internet cables which connect the planet. We even create megastructures unintentionally, the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch for example, which is twice the size of Texas; or Earth Orbital Debris Field, which envelops the planet and contains 10,000 tons of man-made detritus. Most megastructures are built out of a very specific humanitarian need, or as a consequence of those needs.
Small nitpick, the garbage patch and debris field aren't really structures. The garbage patch is that big, but it's not like a landmass you can stand on, the huge majority of it is "just" regions of the ocean that have much higher densities of micro plastics and beads and the like. Similarly, the debris field is a loose scattering of stuff. 10,000 tons isn't actually that much material to stretch across the entire planet in orbit.
@@HopperDragonThat's a good point, but structures aren't defined as always being a contiguous object; they just need to share a common arrangement and relationship. A Dyson Swarm of many parts, rather than a Dyson Sphere, would still be considered a structure. Expanded onto a galactic scale, galaxies themselves are also considered structures, and are themselves parts of structures of superclusters, which are then part of galactic filament structures. It's structures all the way down!
Megastructures are more often built as statements of power, grandiosity & splendor than out of "humanitarian needs"; IE. The Colosseum, Great Pyramids of Giza, Circus Maximus, Baths of Caracalla, Versailles in its prime etc.
The works of Étienne-Louis Boullée illustrate this central theme of grandiosity & awe which are core to megastructures. They are as much an aesthetic statement as they are a practicality, if not more-so.
I believe there is an oil well or something that's extremely tall but most of it is underwater and underground so you can't tell.
@@Nykandros I'll counter your examples with the great wall of china, the basilica cistern, the aquaducts of rome, etc.
Perhaps it is that massive essential structures are in fact more numerous than more "boastful" structures, but are simply not often noticed exactly because they usually aren't boastful or eye-catching.
Amazing video, it really resonated with me when you mentioned how well be long gone when the mega structures are finished but it can still make you feel so alive.
Just the sight and the idea of multi-generational projects on planetary size is so unfathomably large and out of reach, it leaves me in awe.
One of the scenes from Sword Art Online season 3 the Alicization arc, Eugeo mentions how he’s now filling the role of his father to cut the tree down. He mentions something along the lines of being the 7th generation to be tasked with cutting the tree down. Seeing how the progress bar is barely a tenth diminished, it’s just left my mind to wander and think about what that town would look like when the tree is on its last hit point.
BLAME! is the definition of MEGASTRUCTURES. Its world always creeps me out and makes me feel existentially minuscule.
You should already feel that way simply by existing in this universe.
But I understand you completely, as a physicist I wonder as much about what the future will bring and how humans will continue their ascension to higher scales as I cherish every walks in forest I can do.
I also recommend reading BioMega, at the end there is something you will like.
20:51 Blame isn't the best example of what ecumenopolis could be because it's about the machines going out of control and expanding without human consideration. There are vast lifeless spaces that would not be built by humans
But it definitely goes with the theme of this video but Blame! is definitely much more than just the incomprehensible world building.
I’ll go for the obvious one. The Halo rings are a great example of the splendor of fictional megastructures. Every single time I boot up a Halo game and see the see the ring in the skybox, I get chills. There’s something so magical in the implementation that Bungie nailed as early as CE. I think the Citadel from Half-Life gets a close second, especially in Alyx, where Valve gives you as long as you want right at the start to adjust to their VR environment design.
so much of the Forerunner stuff is just mind-bending. Halo is already huge but compared to Installation 00 it's tiny. another one that got me was Titanfall 2 where at some point i came into an underground facility stretching on for kilometres and I wondered what is this place I ended up following a manufacturing line that builds entire city blocks and when it finally became clear what this entire facility was for I just shook my head it was lunacy.
@@ADMNtekEven then the Ark is nothing compared to Sarcophagus, a shield world 1 AU in diameter and so large the Forerunners never finished it by the time the Flood arrived. But then Forerunner tech comes into play that this 1 AU Dyson sphere fit in a 23cm sphere at the center of a slightly-larger-than-Earth sized artificial planet.
I think that high charity in halo 2 anniversary is a better example of a megastructure that makes you take a moment to awe at.
Installation 00 is just the smaller Lesser Ark, the Greater Ark is much bigger@@ADMNtek
@@sideburngthepeacebringer27 I know but somehow those didn't wow me like seeing the new delta also rising from below.
Don't know if this fuled or healed my depression, but it made me think about life, time, sorrows and memories in general. One of the best videos I've seen on TH-cam
Rain World has this but in 2D and it's so well done. After finding out about the megastructure you realize that many of the game's locations that you traveled through were actually parts of it and the environment, it's ecosystems and thus the gameplay are greatly affected by it's existence. Then the DLC expanded upon it exponentially. Rain World is such an amazing game
Daryl being a Blame! fan makes me so happy. Nihei's works are really undertated.
Only Daryl can make me and my wife tear up thinking about architecture (and the existentialism of a life that lives beyond us, but mainly the architecture)
Oh, good. Not just me then.
The Halo Array and the Arc from Halo are some of my favorite superstructures in science fiction, they're simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.
Death Island or the mission Silent Cartographer in the original Halo CE feel like tiny islands in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a sea stretching out to the horizon in every direction... and then you look up at the skybox, and see the curvature of the ring superstructure way off in the distance stretching far into the sky, tapering to a point so far away you can no longer see it through the ring's atmosphere. As large as Silent Cartographer is, it's just a tiny spec within a tiny ocean in this incomprehensibly huge Halo Ring.
The horror sets in once you learn of the Rings' true purpose: to annihilate all intelligent life within a radius of thousands of lightyears. We've seen footage of atomic bomb tests before, we've seen the Death Star blow up a planet in Star Wars, but Installation 09 is capable of destruction on a scale of multiple entire solar systems that makes even these weapons seem utterly insignificant. The lush Earth-like scenery on the ring isn't just there for show. The Ring is like Noah's Arc, and all the flora and fauna on board is there to repopulate the cosmos with if the Ring ever fires. Together, the 9 Halo Rings combined have the ability to kill all sophisticated sentient life in the galaxy. It's hard to even imagine that these ancient superweapons can wipe out all human life and humanity's future, because no matter how advanced humanity has become by the time the game takes place and how far we've explored, we've never even made it outside the range of the Array.
Shoutouts to the Vascular plant from Armored Core 6, a giant funnel sticking out of the side of the planet meant to suck up all the coral energy from within the planet's core.
Zullie The Witch made a really good video showcasing it's scale.
What I found interesting is when fighting ibis, it already dwarfs the city around it. And it gets even bigger once you wake back up again, dwarfing most of the Planet. And all of this is from the perspective of a 30m tall mech not a meter tall human.
It's wild that at one point I was amaze at the sheer scale of these structures and then contemplate about life at the end of the video. Life truly has its UPS and DOWNS.
Your description of Ghost Story reminds me of a picture book I read a lot as a child - 'The Little House', it's similar in themes with a small home being swallowed by a city over time as the world moves on without it, but told from the house's perspective instead. It does have a happy ending, where it gets moved back out to the countryside, but I always wondered as a kid if that wasn't just the start of another cycle.
It reminded me of The Giving Tree. I hated that book as a kid, it's so sad. The kid plays with the tree every day, but then grows up and is more interested in girls, work, family, whatever, but every time he comes back the tree wants to play with his friend because the tree hasn't aged. The kid takes and takes and takes from the tree, who just wants to relive the good times, but he never can.
@@chux4w values dissonance. the story has been rightfully critiqued as "the taking man". and offers insight how nature was viewed before: inexhaustable and to serve mankind.
When you started talking about the space station moving around Earth, I was thinking about how fast the Earth actually moves around Sol. What's 1600mph when compared to over 60,000mph that the Earth is moving? Relative speed is an interesting thing because it's only changes in relative speed that makes a difference to us. I loved this video
Fun fact, in a 0G environment, if both you and the object are moving along the same vector, in your perspective both are stationary. Not to mention the near zero resistance in that environment would not produce the effect of traveling at high speeds as it would on earth. Its Einstein's elevator thought experiement, but just that you have a massive satellite inside with you xD
Yeah, I was going to say, it's all about relativity. Goggling at building things while at orbital speeds is kind of like being amazed that you can build skyscrapers on the equator while the Earth is spinning at 1000 mph and also orbiting the Sun at 67,000 mph!
I thought you can do that without 0G, you can do this on Earth too. As long as you are not accelerating then you cannot feel the effect of high speed.
@@smc9207 for sure, you experience no motion relative to a vehicle such as a train or plane if it's travelling at a constant speed in a straight line. But as EquesTofu mentioned, travelling at high speed in an atmosphere or in contact with the ground leaves you open to interference from turbulence and friction, or from the acceleration experienced while cornering. And if you're not in a contained vehicle, then wind resistance is going to be a problem!
@@CraigJuddI think it's the fact that to get anything up to say, the ISS, you have to reach and match its speed, while also not dropping anything lest it fly around and smack a hole through what you're building. Sure in deep space in the middle of nowhere you'd have no frame of reference beyond your own so speed wouldn't necessarily matter, but in orbit gravity is still at play thus its acceleration still matters.
We're already in Einstein's elevator. We're spinning on Earth, which is orbiting our star, which is orbiting our galactic center, which is _also_ flying through space. If you were suddenly stuck in the same spot relative to the center of the universe, you'd be yanked away from Earth faster than you can say "oops."
I swear if you didn't bring up Arby's a few times, I would have fallen down the rabbit hole of anxiety. Who'd have thunk that that would be such a great hook to keep viewers sane.
thunk...
thought.
Who would've thought that grammar keeps people sane...
I recently played a game called Bleak Faith: Forsaken. The game didn't do super well on release on account of being rather clunky and janky and unpolished, but I had been looking forward to it for so long that I pushed through until I was able to get used to it, and the 3 dev team that's been making it has been adding improvements constantly and making it far better than it was on launch. That aside, the game is heavily inspired by Blame!, specifically the imagery. And there was something so special about wandering through this colossal space. Seeing the imagery in Blame! Is one thing, but actually controlling the act of wandering was something entirely different. At one point, I found a monorail with nothing on it and no way to call for a train or anything, so I started walking across it. It reached out over an abyss below and an abyss above, the sight of steel in the distance the only thing to tell me that I was still moving. I spent several minutes walking across this monorail until eventually I reached a space with skyscrapers and cars, that were completely abandoned. The monorail kept going but was blocked by a broken down train, and the cityscape I was in was completely ruined and empty. There wasn't even an item or reward for my making this journey. But instead of being disappointed by the lack of reward, I was just in awe. The game wasn't perfect and had many flaws, but there were still moments like this, where my wandering was so endless and yet completely fruitless, that really hit the mark of what this game was meant to accomplish. In later parts of the game, you can be walking in what looks like a sort of Nier Automata city ruins type landscape, but if you looked down at a crack in the ground there was nothing below, and if you looked up, it was just an abyss, but through the fog in the far distance, occasionally you could see some giant structure that was moving, it was bone chilling to imagine what it might be. And the last moment from playing this game I wanted to highlight was one many people complained about on launch. I was exploring an area that was rich with structures and enemies and whatnot, it was super dense and felt populated, with many structures stretching up into the sky. I came across an elevator with no markings or anything, and I stepped on it to bring me up or maybe down. The elevator started moving upwards and I sat in that closed off space for a few minutes, which is a long time to sit in a videogame elevator (hence many people's complaints). The thing is, the elevator was moving fast, and when it finally reached the top, I was standing at the top of a massive tower, looking around me there was absolutely nothing but the abyss, and other towers of similar height. Some connected by bridges, others had to be jumped to. In any other game, jumping between towers in the sky would be a normal feat, because if I fell I'd get a quick death animation and respawn to try it again. And while the same thing would happen here, I was terrified to jump out over that void. The looooong elevator ride had conveyed to me just how high up I was, and just how long I would fall for. Many people complained that the elevator was too long, but I believe that it lead me to experience the most vertigo I've ever felt in a game, where I was already feeling so much dread.
I highly recommend this game, despite its issues it has some of the greatest world design, environment art (all of that done by 1 single guy btw!), and exploration ever. Not to mention they've made several improvements since release.
As someone who always took his time to explore and observe buildings and architecture\sceneries in games, this video is amazing.
I was not expecting for the video to take a philosophical turn and makes me contemplate about death though, and this is amazing.
This why YT is still good, because of content creators like you.
05:49 Doggy was like *"what the fuck dude?"* 😂
I couldn't stop laughing at this moment! Thanks for timestamping it.
I thought the same lol
I appreciate just enough of the interstellar soundtrack to make it recognizable but not enough to be picked up lol.
honestly fk him for that audio jump
The section about the alderson disk, that just clicked with me, you've inspired my to start writing again, after about 8 years of procrastination.
So thank you, I think I may have finally found the concept that will take me all the way.
Just started the video and your obsession is so validating to me. I have always been star struck in awe with fictional megastructures for as long as I can remember. Put a bright big smile on my face to hear someone else express this as well.
The way you play with visuals, your tone and the background music is so good, I cant put it in words
What a great video!
The most depressing thing about this video is that even after all this time passes, all this technological innovation and progress comes to pass, the flow of time stretching on until we don't even know what land is anymore, and Arby's will still be revolting.
but- but... they have the meat!
One time I was in awe of a megastructure in a game and made me stop and stare is the Halo ring in Halo. Seeing 'normal' land then above the horizon and clouds you see the ring arching up, disappears again above you then you see is come back behind you. That was insane.
I later learned it was inspired by Ringworld (novel). and the halo ring there is so much more insane than in the Halo game.
Armored Core, and other mech games, explore this idea too, as they usually end up using mechs to build even taller, bigger structures. You could also check out the Wandering Earth movies!
well i didnt expect a video about this top make me cry at the end. well done
Great video! The existential feelings i got when you talked about "A ghost story", combined with the topic of megastructures really reminded me of the manga "Girls' Last Tour". It's about two girls wandering a massive megacity. It's a fairly slow, more laid back manga/show, but it touches on some of the things you bring up in the video. It's a very good manga that I can't recommend enough.
For some reason it feels weird to hear my name. But you're welcome for the Patreon bucks. 😏 Anyway particularly fascinating video. That's a topic that I've been thinking about too, although not to that extent. The first game to give me that impression of being overwhelmed by the size and emptiness of the structures was probably Ico. But obviously sci-fi like Blame is the pinnacle of this. It's so absurd that it feels like it can only make sense in the mind of an AI or something.
This reminds me of a Fanfic I read recently. The fic was based on Medieval times with the corresponding technology. No Electricity, no radio, no guns or skyscrapers, just swords and magic and stone buildings.
However the cast eventually end up fighting these bad guys which are much more technologically advanced. Despite this, the technology they encounter is quite limited, they don't even encounter guns, just giant mechs, which they barely have the means to defeat.
Eventually, the cast fight those bad guys and win, allowing them to discover what those villains had been working on, a portal to another time, aka Time Travel.
By an accident of one of their allies, they go through that portal and at first, everything seems normal. It seems like they are in a large empty cavern (really a warehouse for those Mechs they fought). They go through a doorway, exploring this new area... and promptly experience existential dread... because the sky doesn't exist... because the ground is upside down above them.
The characters literally fall to the ground and clutch the grass expecting themselves to fly down to the ground above them, despite there being ground below. In fact, they try and warn additional allies from coming through because of how horrifying the experience is for them, and most of them promptly stumble back into the warehouse where they puke and have a mental breakdown.
The scene was written in a way where even I didn't know what was going on at first because the character's couldn't rationalize the scope they were experiencing. It was only when 1 character pointed out that the ground in the distance was not Hills, but CURVED that I realized they were on a Ringworld, a megastructure functioning as both a planet and a spaceship.
I think the scene accurately portrays the majesty and dread that Megastructures like those provoke, how incredibly fascinating and equally horrifying a concept.
That reminds me of the Slags in Fallout. They were basically a race of humans living underground after the nuclear war, and were able to stay there for a long time since they were self sustaining. Eventually though they struggled with overpopulation so they had to go above ground to start a farm. When they went above ground they had a similar experience to the characters you talked about, they feared falling into the sky and were just simply mortified by the scope of the world. They ended up only going out at night because it was better on their eyes which had been adapted for the darkness of underground, and only sent the few who were brave enough to stand the sensation of possibly falling upward.
I require the name of this fic for acquisition! Lol.
You are evil for not saying the name of the fic.
I'll never stop loving the way you look at games and media in general. You give me such a bliss in indulging in details
The megastructures in Armored Core 6 always blew me away. Very cool backdrop of a world that used to be, but is no more, only to be fought over for scraps by warring factions from another star system….
It gives the same vibes as abandoned Appalachian coal mines just on an absolutely massive scale. A huge boom and an import of tons of mining equipment, money flowing in, and then suddenly everybody ups and leaves when there's no more money to be made. Then you have a bunch of rusted mining equipment and abandoned structures with nobody around.
I really... I cried a little when you mentioned Castle in the Sky. It's my favorite film, and anyone talking about it at all is so heartwarming to me.
I’ve had this EXACT existential crisis watching Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. GOT takes place two centuries after HOTD, and it really got me thinking about permanence, legacy, and how much a space can change in the span of generations. Will Westeros ever get an Arby’s? Who’s to say.
This comment wins TH-cam for today. Pack it in, y’all
Well idk about an Arby's, but there MUST be a Starbucks based on that cup on the table in the last season of GOT 😂
@@DarylTalksGames 😂
When will public education be established?
When will a maintained road system be implemented?
How will these things affect the trout population?
All of these questions and more will be answered... never.
I think, the perfect word to describe the feeling you get, when experiencing such structures is "humility". Not humiliation, humility. That feeling of awe when you are at peace with yourself, knowing your own vulnerability and accepting it. This feeling is one, that has been fascinating me for years now. Looking at the stars and try to imagine a glimpse of this sheer endless universe, surrounding us. What you feel, when you're looking at pictures of - for example - Chernobyl, where the nature is actively taking back those spaces, that where once stolen by us and plastered with buildings and streets. The feeling that makes "apocalypse" something romantic, weirdly enough. I just love everything about it.
Also, in terms of games, I would like to make an addition to a structures that made me feel this way: Even though the whole world of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West could be taken as such examples, the hatcheries from ZD have a special place in my heart.
I'm so glad you mentioned Blame! It's a great manga, and I was thinking about it while watching the beginning of the video :)
One thing that people don't often mention about the manga though, there is a scene in I don't remember which volume, where our protagonist comes upon structures being actively built. In this world, there is still active machinery building more and more structures. Why? For whom? We see maybe a few hundred, maybe a few thousands living people throughout the immensity of the mechanical word depicted in the manga, and yet giant machines are building more, building still, building, building, building.
This is one of the most fascinating aspect of the book for me. Machines programmed to build ever more, because we need to keep building, even if there are no longer people who need those new structures. And this has seemingly been going on for a looong time. Are those the same machines that were when humanity was at its most populous? Are the machines still following the original building plans, or are they following new, or corrupted plans? Some of these structures are clearly not fit for human society. Enormous walkways next to bottomless pits with no rail are a huge safety risk for people. But they're not building for people anymore. Right?
Fascinating book, I highly recommend it.
Another banger video once again! I love the feeling of sublime, when it feels like my existence is too small to even compare to huge towering structures and environment. I thought I can only get this feeling from standing on top of a mountain, or looking at the view of an endless night sky in pitch black darkness.
You now put the idea of megastructures in my mind, and I feel an obsession about to bubble up. Thank you for dunking me head first into a new endless abyss of researching this topic and grappling the science around these structures
Incredible video, another incredible megastructure in a game is the Iterators/Iterator Cities in Rain World. Massive, towering, sentient computer structures meant to figure out the species' purpose, with cities built atop them to avoid the rain that results from the megacomputer's water cooling system. Its incredible to think about and look at.
Really enjoy how you bring together such mixed media threads here - manga, film, and video games, melded with a little reality. Fab stuff, and love the A Ghost Story representation!
One of the most fascinating moments in Blame is when Killy looks up some stairs and the exit is 3000 km away. And when he reaches the top he sees nothing, but ground with no buildings for miles and then there is a person that explains that the whole space is 143.000 km. Also I am pretty sure Killy isn't young, some time stretches are pretty long and his age doesn't change if I remember correctly.
Killy is most definitely not young, considering the stretches of time mentioned in the manga, plus he's mostly synthetic.
@@fungisrock8955 Yeah that's what I thought
First half I was in awe for the architecture, moving on the second half I was sighing out and distressed (but inn a good way) at the theme of moving on and acceptance. What a great video, I resonated with the feeling of dread that I feel when I see a vast horizon when playing RPG games.
That thumbnail is so perfect. I was literally about to start playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition as this was uploaded.
Awesome video! Thought-provoking, depressing and uplifting all at the same time.
... and I can't accurately explain the feeling of watching a video youtube recommended... being very impressed by the production value... and then seeing my own video and name in there. Very surreal.
Thank you for the shout-out!
Darryl is low key becoming a sci Fi nerd
I watched the whole video thinking about Panchaea in Deus Ex HR. It is also a structure that we can see being built, something that's rare to see when talking about these kinds of buildings. And it becomes even more interesting to think that it is a structure that doesn't feel that hyper-futuristic, something that doesn't seem out of this world... Something like Control's Oldest House deserves a mention as well, it is an impossible building, yes, but it's very appealing as well, and it makes us fantasize about working there. Great video as always!
My hunch is that any civilization that still has Arby's is not one capable of completing these types of megastructures
This video was... beautiful. It really got my brain to tick in a way I longed desperately for, and yet surprised me anyway. This kind of thinking inhabits my mind constantly, it ripples in and out like the tide yet never fully surrenders itself. I needed this.
I want to add something to it. When you were talking about perspective and persception I was reminded of an indy game called Rain World. In it you are a small slugcat, a creature at the bottom of the food chain, and you travel through a massive industrial world. It was once inhabited by intelligent life but now the wild has taken over. In this post apocolyptic setting you travel onwards, and there is structure you soon find yourself climbing. A structure so massive that it takes up two full massive areas of the game, and yet you can only see the thing screen-by-screen, never are you allowed to observe its true scale and intention. Now this structure is massive, who cities are built on top of it, but in relation to the structures you discussed it does not compare. Yet, more than its size speaks to you, it is the fact that you cannot see everything and can never see or understand everything that really makes the structure fell gargantuan. It sits their in the mists, and you cannot immagine anything larger or more powerful. Yet, as you play through the game time moves on, and these structures which once molded the landscape and folded it to their every need, crumbles. A new cycle unfolds, one that we need not be a part of.
Oh- so, if you’re interested in the duality of megastructures, wonder and loss, then I recommend Girls’ Last Tour. It’s a slice of life manga set in the copse of a megacity.
It also has a sort of . . . Inverse? The author’s next work is called Shimeji Simulation and is set in, well, a simulation. It’s quite fun as well.
i love the potatoes
Blame! Is incredible! So glad you touched on it.
Not quite the Analemma Tower, but Battle Angel Alita had something similar with its Jeru-Salem structure - basically a barbell held in place by equally gravitational pull and centrifugal force.
I loved the concept (especially since almost nobody on earth knew about it).
My personal favorite is BLAME! though. If you haven't, read NOiSE; it's the prequel to BLAME! and tells how the Megastructure came to be.
What’s that about? The tower was very cool, you know until it slams into a mountain or whatever! And just imagine having to clear air traffic around it! Doesn’t sound too bad doesn’t sound too hard to stay out of the way of some thing hundreds of miles long up until you realize it’s moving at about 20,000 miles an hour!
The scale of the facility in Portal 2 has always stuck with me. Every time you feel like you're approaching the surface, that maybe you're seeing some natural light peek through, you always inevitably come across some monolithic constructs towering overhead. Love it.
Hatey jokes aside, I can tell you worked super hard on this video. The extra subtleties in your narration, all the outside media you sourced, and just the sheer length. Excellent job, it’s a banger