It reached zero this week in England so I’ve been hiding at home under blankets, rewatching your backlog of videos, and wow you’ve made so much incredible content, some of the best on TH-cam 🙏🏻 thanks for sharing such consistency phenomenal work! All the best from Oxford to you and the lady you live with 🇬🇧🫶🏻
My favourite new niche subgenre of TH-cam video is the videos where people analyse game worlds in great detail. Stuff like employment rates, power lines, railroads, rivers connecting to oceans etc.
One little thing that annoys me is structures that make no sense. For example a sniper is shooting at me from the third floor, but there are no stairs or ladders to get there. How did he get up there??? 😅
Night City is stuffed so full of buildings, messy cables, bridges, roads, trash and filth that it feels overwhelming and suffocating. Incidentally, that is exactly what you're supposed to feel like in this cybernetically enhanced hell. The city looks like a hundred years ago it may have been somewhat sensible, but over the decades, more and more layers were just built on top of the old ones, and nobody stopped to consider to how it's going to look or function.
Funnily enough, Night City didn't even exist 100 years ago. It was first established in 1994. The speed with which hit developed certainly contributed to how messy it is. The fact that a nuke went off in the very middle of the city, and it had to be rebuilt, certainly didnt help either.
@@Askorti a nuke went off in the very middle of the city, and it had to be rebuilt, certainly didnt help either. Most cities would be rebuilt better after such an event. That Night City didn't speaks more to the position of the corps that people don't matter.
I would say Cyberpunk has one of the best designed cities in video games, because it manages to feel exactly how it's meant to feel: vast, oppressive and anonymous. In other games, the cities always feel too small and controlled. They feel like 'video game cities'. In games like Spiderman or Arkham, your ease of travel gives you a tremendous sense of control, because you can get anywhere you need to, especially due to lack of NPC interactions. But Night City is vast, chaotic and random, and you have to traverse the whole thing on foot or car. Yes, you can fast travel, but there's no flying or jumping or anything like that. I hope more games take note of Cyberpunk's city design, and how alive it feels. Even when the game was 'bad', due to the lack of content, this particular feeling was still achieved.
@@libervitaexaltis4551 One of the tiny details that made it work for me, was when you were walking on the streets, oncoming npc's would meet your eyes just before you passed them.
What's really cool about the dev process of the cities design, is that they went to various massive cities to make NC feel more real. It's basically a combination of the biggest and best cities in the world, LA, Tokyo, New York City. As someone who's been to NYC and LA it's crazy how real it feels
10:17 to add on to the point of the cities in AC feeling accurate, my dad found me playing revaltions one day and since he was a sailor and has been around the world, he immediately stopped and asked "Is that Istanbul?" which absolutely shocked me in that the accuracy of the cites that AC managed to portray was spot on. To this day I still think about that day
My parents just came back from Venice when they saw me playing AC. They weren't able to get inside (or to the inner courtyard) of many of the signature buildings, and my mom asked me for a tour. So I showed her around for several hours, while apologising occasionally when I had to murder some soldiers to get further.
I watch a review of watch dog legion done by a Englishman and he went into a bit about how it matches. "Hey I used to live near here . Used to walk this street to school " he said it was weird because the city was correct but scale down so things that were 20 mins away were just a few blocks away.
@@SaltyChickenDipHad the same thing happen with me and the Honest Hearts DLC for Fallout New Vegas. I lived in Zion National Park at the time, and the specific road I lived on was in the game. Alongside plenty of other nearby places, though the distance was far off, of course.
Ages ago (I think around the time 3 came out), I was able to visit Rome for a few days with my dad. Amazingly we were in a great location near both the castel san angelo and vatican. But as I loved Brotherhood so much and had played it loads in the year prior, I was able to apply that knowledge of the roads and general city to the vacation. Now I wasn't all knowing but it did help to keep us knowing where we were, a bunch of points of interest to see as well as some smaller places. My dad ofc added to this with his general knowledge on a lot of stuff and I think my favourite combo of our knowledge coming together was how he showed me that going to churches was both free and a great thing to do as the inside of each was unique and my knowledge of how to get to places and where we may find churches was amazing
@@SaltyChickenDip When Spider-Man 2 came out, I streamed it to a friend who has family in NYC (who couldn't play the game), and he loved how accurate it was and it was a similar thing, pointing out where family lived, a school he had gone to and certain other stuff as well as explaining the significance of certain locations I had no idea about.
I think a large part of why the worldbuilding in the Witcher 3 rings so true, is because the devs actually started by building the blank landmass, then placed their landmarks and towns/villages where they believed it felt most realistic i.e. almost all villages are near some kind of water source, and when they aren't, for the sake of a quest for example, they made sure to include the appropriate infrastructure to justify why the town was there, and how the town was there. So, when they needed a town to be located near mountains for the purpose of a quest, they made it into a mining town, with all the appropriate infrastructure, as there were ore deposits in the nearby mountains.
That's not entirely true. They've already had a map that they'd worldbuilt around (and had done a good job of doing so). They most likely had a rough blockout of the landmass done with ideas of where Novigrad would go but it's only AFTER that, that they stuck to planning around the landmass. It works really well to emulate a medieval european city because they never flatten out a location to build on it. Which is something us casual players would instinctually do because we're used to flattened terrain for cities (especially in the US).
There's no such thing as a "town" in Poland. You either have a village or a city. You're talking about villages. It's so funny and bizzare to call villages towns. The closest you have to a town in medieval Poland would be an oppidium, which was a village with a market. Yes, back then CDPR was a Polish company still.
One of my pet peeves is how video game cities funnel you into the destination. Real world cities are built on city blocks, and you can take multiple routes to get to the destination. And this is not just limited to modern cities, it applies to old cities as well. In my country there are old Spanish colonial cities and they are arranged in city blocks for the horse carriages to pass through. In many games there's just one path to the destination because the city is designed like a dungeon above ground.
@@Halo_Legend "In some cases, town is an alternative name for "city" or "village" (especially a small city or large village; and occasionally even hamlets). Sometimes, the word town is short for township." i think it's just usage difference, but they can be generally called towns (and the fact you understood what they were getting at means the message is clear enough and so it doesn't need your pedantry).
5:49 I like how from a lore and world building perspective, the the city's location is dependent on the position of the river. But from a world design perspective, the river's position is dependent on the location of the city
When you start making fantasy maps you put rivers and mountains where you think they look cool or are interesting for the story. But, at some point, you start researching about geography, climate and ecosystems, and making a map turns into a constant decision between reality and fiction.
@EnabiSeira yeah. as someone who really enjoys world building and stuff, getting to constantly fit puzzle pieces into a world and making it slowly make sense with things like the history and geography and such is incredibly fun to do, imo.
@@EnabiSeira That's why the Witcher route is so unique, Sapkowski's original writing is very sparse in geographical details because the world is treated just as a background, subserviant to the story and characters. The games of course expand a lot on the books but still the focus is on the characters and not some deeper lore. A kind of anti-worldbuilding approach.
Technically, there are switch to Michael and Franklin encounters that show the character being stuck in a traffic jam with them complaining about it. But you never encounter such things organically unless you purposely block traffic.
....and even if you do block traffic @@GTAVictor9128 there is still a chance the NPCs will just drive right on ahead anywhere to their likely fiery demise but I have a feeling I am getting even further from the original point at hand here
@@GTAVictor9128 As you mentioned there are those scripted character switching scenarios, but as someone who typically likes to drive around in GTA a bit more normally rather than always speeding and crashing into things, there actually are some instances where I'll find myself backed up waiting behind a ton of cars with a bunch more lining up behind me, at least on the PS4 version in either story or director mode. Overall I feel that the traffic in the enhanced version of GTA V can at times be the densest it's ever been in the entire series thus far. Really makes me pine for a GTA IV remaster or, better yet, a new GTA set in a bigger, even more accurate version of Liberty City (with the surrounding areas of course, and depending on what they're capable of by that point, perhaps even more than that).
GTA V's map feels lifeless on foot, but is good for speeding on sport cars. That's the vibe. In GTA IV, the driving is slower, the streets are tighter. And it's more interesting walking around. Two games from the same series. The pace of the game counts as well.
I think that’s true for GTA online which has always felt empty and dead. But the single player of GTAV feels alive and vibrant to me no matter where you are in the game
Night City is my favorite video game world. Often I just walk around, buy food, shop for new clothes, drive my car around in the rain with the radio on. It felt so natural I wanted to know more about the city, which in turn led to a much greater attachment to the game.
Night City was the first time I ever felt a real feeling of fear from a video game. Not in like a "OOOO spooky Jumpscare horror!" way but like a fear I've actually had, when I was alone on my own in a city for the first time. Not understanding signs, not sure where I am, surrounded by people but completely isolated. Like I didn't fit in and the city knew that. It felt like it wanted me out. But after getting used to it both in and out of game that fear became a small memory. I think night city is a great city by feeling and really captured that feeling for me.
One trick that a dev can use to make a city seem to have true scale is by actually limiting how much of the city you have access to, it doesn't work so well in open world games but with the right setup it creates a great illusion. Rudimentary geometry in the distance and creative skyboxes can add to the illusion. Abstractions of cities require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief and some people find this easier then others.
It's an ironic approach when you think about it; they put you in one of the largest manmade settlements possible then heavily limit where you can travel within it. Though it's also why I hate open world cities; most of the buildings are set decoration with nothing of value.
The gold standard to me is Leyndell from Elden Ring. You feel its scale while not being able to reach many areas. Unlike Anor Londo, though, it feels like your access is unrestricted and that there’s so much more than there really is.
I feel like I remember a game or more than one game where NPCs will grow and change throughout the course of the story. Some will get married or move to different areas or get new jobs. Maybe it was something in older RPGs?
I believe the word you might be looking for at the end is verisimilitude: we want video games to feel real and believable, even if technically speaking they aren’t realistic.
As a historian i love that the witcher 3 borrows so much design (costumes, architecture, amor) from real life reinassance northern europe. That sets novigrad apart from pretty much anything in fantasy. Nothing feels like fantasy except the monsters, and that is only because they knew their sources. Of course, exclude skellige from what i am saying lol
You are right, but to be fair, a medieval city is much smaller than a modern one. Around 1000 ad London had 18 000 inhabitants, and many less important cities would have barely been in the 4 digits, so depending on when your game plays, the factor by which they are off, is a lot less than if you take a modern metropolis as comparison.
True, but that's still many many times larger than the Elder Scrolls cities, that have a few hundred inhabitanst and can be walked end to end in about 3 minutes.
@@xezor488 Worth a Buy said it best in his review. It's a great game for casual console players who only ever played and think other AAA games (like Assassin's Creed) are great games.
You couldve mentioned Kingdom Come Deliverance which has fully simulated NPCs, completely accessible buildings, the most accurate depiction of historical towns ever and even some beautiful landscapes.
And they put up wall, yes you CAN explore every nook and cranny but that comes with risk of getting caught and labeled a thief and so on with little to no reward in return. It simply isn't worth it to root through everyone's house because the hassle isn't worth the few grosshen or dried meat.
Seriously, Kingdom Come Deliverance blows away TW3 for me in terms of doing well scaled, immersive population centers. It's got that Skyrim-esque 'you can go in any building' design, and there's just so much attention to detail put on making it feel realistic and not just a bunch of set dressing.
Kamurocho is definitely one of the best detailed cities in video games. Even in older games where they haven't gone with the Dragon Engine yet, no part of the map ever feels lifeless, even if half the npcs you bump into are basically there to wander about aimlessly, and the other half being there to pick a random fight with you. Each street has its own thing, theme, and environmental storytelling. Play it long enough and you even stop referring to the map altogether when doing quests, because the characters already mentioned which street you're supposed to go to, and you already know where that is and how to get there.
I love the world building philosophy of the yakuza series director. He explicitly set out to make the most interactive and living feeling 2 blocks he could.
Also I think virtual tourism is an explicit goal of these games. Any Yakuza fan who visits Kabuki-cho or Dotonbori or Onomichi will absolutely be able to recognize places, restaurants, etc. It's the only game I've ever played set in Japan that really felt like being in Japan, but it absolutely does.
8:15 not only from attacks, but it follows what I've come to know as the "Law of Fecal Dynamics", toilets and sewage for every house didn't exist back then, so if it was going to flow, it was going down hill through the gutters
Novigrad is pretty great but i thing the first city that made me feel like it was real was Khorinis from gothic 2. While I had a lot of fun exploring the (then) vast map of Morrowind and all its fantastical mushroom cities and ashlands, the world was rather stagnant. But in the same year you started up gothic and were blown away. People sawing wood, cooking food, talking in the street, smoking water pipes and more. A walled of "rich district" that you had to WORK to get into. People commenting on the clothes you were wearing (mage, or paladin etc). NPC's that knew you from the previous game (that I haven't had the chance to play until years later), while one of the comments on the various ways you got into the city in the first place. It was great. And the fact that to progress the story you needed to FIND A JOB and actually become an apprentice of an alchemist, blacksmith or hunter made it even more real.
I didn't expect to see his videos referenced, but his content was immediately what I thought of when I clicked on this video. I'm thrilled to know that Raz is also a fan!
In the Witcher 1, you can follow many NPCs around like Zoltan and you will actually see him move to different areas at different times of day like walking to the bar early at night and going back home later in the night and wandering around Vizima.
KCDs cities don't present to be cities is part of it, they are slightly bigger than skyrims biggest cities, but in the context of the story they are barely even towns. they're exactly as big as they are in real life, little castle towns and villages and their surroundings, presented in a realistic scale. the whole game takes place in an area where almost everyone could realistically know everyone. it's a shame that most games cannot narrow their scope like this because it feels very special in kcd
@@renaigh that's correct. there are castle towns and there's sasau, but these are still bigger than the "cities" in skyrim. covers an absolutely tiny area. try going on google maps and searching for Rataje nad Sázavou and Sazava, those are the two biggest "cities" in kcd, and they are just a few fields apart, this is how the game manages to make things to scale without feeling empty, it's a very very nice design decision imo, I also think the story is elevated by the scope feeling more intimate and less saving the world/country
@@renaigh in KCD 2 there will be Kutná Hora City (today it's a small city) but back then it was one of the biggest and most important cities in central europe, so it will be interesting to walk the city in game and then compare it to the real world city.
I finished a playthrough of the Witcher 3 a while ago playing every quest and choosing every dialogue option in every DLC cause of how much I loved the game. Haven't revisited it since as it was meant to be my final playthrough. You reminded me a bit why I love the game so much
One thing about AC and the World Design: European Cities have way more buildings closer together, so that made sense. A reason why i dislike AC3 so much are the really far apart buildings with at best a second floor giving no real elevation. Which could be realistic, but reality just suited the games better in other places imo.
Dying Light has a similar problem. The first map has lots of dense higgildy-piggildy buildings with limited elevation, which perfectly suited the skillset of the player and made getting around via parkour on the rooftops and whatnot satisfying and fluid. And always being close-ish to the ground keeps the zombie threat ever present. But then the second map is more spread out big, tall buildings and it loses like ALL the fluidity. And then Dying Light 2 took the 'big tall building' problem and made it even worse. I knew from the instant they showed DL2 that they'd misunderstood what made the parkour and game design of DL1 so fun.
That's why they added climbing on trees and cliffs to AC3, to have more use for the parkour mechanics outside the much smaller cities. Problem there is that it's much harder to build an entire wilderness to feel like you actually have total freedom of movement than it is to build a city like that, so they pretty much ended up putting a few clearly climbable cliffs and some parkour tree lines wherever.
@@maynardburgerThe second map in DL1 is meant to highlight the grappling hook. The difficulties in moving around the area at first are also meant to push you to the ground if you don't have it, exposing you to more zombies to convey the idea that it is more dangerous than the slums.
Especially during the middle ages, it was very common for buildings to be designed with overhangs and you can still see this in old preserved districts. The practice ended because it created an obvious fire risk.
The LEGITIMATE hype I felt from the Any Austin nod. Love every single video he makes. Love that in depth, over analysis of the minutiae of the games we've played for countless hours, without sparing a second thought to.
After playing the Witcher 3 and cyberpunk 2077 and exploring Novigrad, Oxenfurt, Beauclair and Nightcity. In my opinion nobody does cities in videogames better than CD Projekt Red.
Haven't played many of the games talked about here, but driving around Night City with the radio on is one of the most immersive experiences I've ever had playing a video game
Nightcity is a landmark for cities in games. It's the first time I've played a game where the city itself is a main character. People focus too much on the realism of little interactions with useless stuff from sandbox games like GTA games do, or the AI of npcs. Of course it's important but it depends on the type of game. Cyberpunk main point is the setting, the whole city is build for it and, for it, it nails perfectly.
I agree. It really is it's own character, and the characters in the game treat it that way too. It's what happens when corporations control everything and there are no regulations they have to follow. They do whatever they want, to hell with if it causes life to be more difficult for the population of that city.
Closest I've ever seen to a fully simulated city was Shadows of Doubt, a procedural detective sandbox. A lot of randomization, not 1:1, and up to the eyeballs in jank, but you can enter any room inside any building, see the person who lives there with their own work schedule and acquaintances, and then beat them to within an inch of their life and rifle through their belongings, because you're absolutely positive that they're in some way connected to your only lead which you couldn't possibly be wrong about because you've terrorized half the neighborhood at this point and oh crap you never checked the security camera footage, break into the management office and see if anyone entered the room before the estimated time of the victim's death, wait just a minute that's the cop you thought was securing the crime scene when you first got there, turns out she's in a weird coca-cola cult and was doing ritualistic sacrifices, the fact that all three victims were from the same workplace and all disliked the same coworker was a complete coincidence. So you just spent your whole evening off playing an absolute public menace all because you overthought one piece of potential evidence, and the game gave you this entire fully explorable city with all these interconnected working pieces, sat back, and let you make yourself its problem.
I'm from Los Angeles and when I was 22 I moved out of my hometown to go live abroad for 5 years, until moving back recently. Unfortunately for me, 22 years old meant that was 2019 and the pandemic struck the following year. I was in Japan which had a very strict travel policy during this time which meant that for a while I couldn't go home and risk being locked out of the country I lived in. It was really sad for me a lot of the time and I was often homesick. I eventually came to realize that driving around Los Santos in GTA V was capable of quelling some of that homesickness in the sort of soft vibe based way. To me, LA born and raised, it very much feels like home even if it's not perfect. It's an indescribable feeling to have had that during those dark times. Also, I'm someone who's always loved a cruise in the car and consider myself good at navigation, it's more accurate than you might think! Just scaled a little weird in most spots. 😂
I just found out that the road that goes up from the freeway by the beach, close to where you met the jogging lady - is an actual place in LA. I was scrolling Insta and sorta did a double-take: "Holy fuck, that 'make video games look real' AI is really coming alo... Wait a minute, that's actually real life..".
Baldurs gate 3 has a pretty good city; it escapes the "small city" feeling by only giving the player access to vertain districts. With the heavy implication that there are other districts we dont have access to where more of the people live and work.
Baldur's Gate struggles with immersion for me because it's always the same time of day, always the same lighting, the same weather, the NPCs are always in the same spot, spouting the same repeating dialogue, no matter how many times you long rest through the night. The only time anything changes is when you the player change it yourself. It feels like I'm trapped in a single moment in time rather than spending weeks in a living city. Larian games have been notorious for this, too. "Smells worse over here than a dozen rotten eggs dropped in a vat of vinegar." I love BG3, but I don't actually think Baldur's Gate is a well made city where immersion is concerned.
@@biggooberfish7774 I think BG3 as a whole kinda suffers from the absence of day/night cycle. I started it recently, and was taken aback by eternal day, with night only available so far in the camp. I understand that they probably had limited resources and decided that it is not very important for what they are trying to do, but it really irks me, I'd rather not have ability to pickpocket every single NPC or pick up every single random barrel and have some day/night cycle with maybe some variety in NPC activities, even rudimentary.
@@NazgNurglych If I'm not mistaken they tried to implement day/night cycle, but yes, resources problems; I'm sure their next game will have a day/night cycle, or at least I hope it
Denerim in Dragon Age Origins always felt huge to me because of how much of it is inaccesible. You only ever see small pockets, and travel through it via a map with random encounters, allowing the "real" size to live in your head while not taking up a whole game's worth of resources
I think DA2 is interesting in this regard. You spend the whole game in the city, you can navigate it easily, and the relationship between you and the city feels very intimate.
@@jankdotTV I agree. Quite a few people said that they prefer Skyrim cities to Novigrad specifically because they don't like the "empty" NPCs and buildings that are there just for scale and you can't interact with, and I think that for all the shortcomings of DA2 compared to DA1, the city was pretty interactive and you could learn a lot about it and its inhabitants. Also, knowing that the game was developed in such a short time on a budget of five cents and a couple of sandwiches - it's impressive what they managed to accomplish, and reusing locations seems like a smart streamlining strategy instead of lazy gamemaking. They cut the right corners, IMO.
@@katerynasirko1832 I actually think nameless NPCs and inaccessible buildings make the world better. If you take a random walk around your city you'll not be able to enter most homes and you won't know the names of most people. They'll be just random guy 194 to you. I find that quite immersive.
@Xalantor I like both approaches for what they are, I was just reading a lot of comments and it was interesting that quite a few people have a problem with the very thing that Raz was praising throughout the video)
When I got to the titular Baldur's Gate in Baldur's Gate 3, it made me fundamentally realize that I *despise* cities in games as much as I do in real life, which was kind of hilarious. The sheer density of *things,* eyes always on you, voices always around you, the sort of feeling that "there is nowhere that knows a little bit of tranquility"-- When my players finally made it to a capital city in the DnD game I run I was overwhelmed by the mere location, and had to divert the way I approached the idea completely to stay focused on characters instead of the place itself, because I just *do not vibe* with an urban setting. I mean my friends jokingly call me a fey, and it's comical whenever something adds more fuel to the fire like that lmao
First time I rolled up to the city in BG3, I was really overwhelmed. After days and days in the wilderness, cursed lands or deep under ground it kinda stressed me out. Which is quite funny since IRL I'm urban man, almost to the bone.
With great regret I have to inform you that they will be using the unoptimized, generic, cookie cutter Unreal Engine 5 which basically means no more dense cities, because crowds are simply unachievable. RED engine, the one for The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, was PERFECT for big crowds and living worlds. But since almost everyone who worked on it left the company, they will not be using it :((( Sad times....
12:49 this is where Skyrim shines imo: yep, the cities are smaller, but you can enter pretty much any building and interact with most objects. Add to that the fact that you can loot anything an NPC has on them (and uses agains you), this makes other games feel like "theme parks" in comparison, where things are just props glued to the scenery.
that's literally been done by Gothic games an eon ago. i hate the same thing as you, for example KOTORs would be perfect had some interactivity been added. the way they are, those spaces could be as furnished as they wanted but the rooms and outsides still feel so cold. the whole thing is just wrong, fatally ungamey
Yeah I like that about Skyrim and the earlier TES games. Skyrim was pretty sloppy though and the cities limited compared the the previous game, Oblivion, which shows more was possible than what they actually did. I'd hope that if and when TES6 comes out it would build on what Skyrim has and add far more features that make the cities actual cities (not villages and hamlets), feel alive and more interactive. I'd like to see freerunning and climbing implemented as options like Assassins Creed - bring back Acrobatics as a skill!
idk why my algorithm hasnt sent me any of your stuff in a long time. but its absolutely wild to me that after all these years youre still out here putting out incredibly high quality, well researched, thought provoking videos like this. very well done sir
Cd project red really outdid themselves with night city from cyberpunk, its a character all of its own, one of the best 'characters' i have had the pleasure of exploring in my 30 years of gaming.
Funnily enough the video game city that felt the most alive to me has always been clock town from Majora's mask, even though it's only a place with 4 small maps and less than 30 NPCs it feels so dynamic, there's movement everywhere, sounds of people living and going about... Even though it's barely even a simulacrum i think the "less is more" feeling really hits
Zelda and bethesda rpgs made me enjoyed that type of "city" more. I don't particularly care to be convinced something is as big as jt would make sense to be, or as filled with crap as you'd expect. Of course in games like gta it makes sense to focus ln believable scale cities But RPGs in medieval-esque settings, i more so value the immersive sim aspect lf being able to interact with any npc and any building in a dynamic way. In a sense games like bg3 does it, though it also makes 99,9% of the city purely a background image in the distance.
@@UlissesSampaioThats why I love oblivion and Skyrim, and more recently shadows of doubt. You can enter any interior. Sure the inside might be uninspired but I prefer that over a false facade.
@@kotor610 besides that, in Oblivion, the first time I defeated a guard at low levels (using orc's superpower ability) and as able to loot *all* his equipment, It felt so damn mind-blowing. They strive to make the world as "real" as possible, with junk, physics (and a spinkle of jank :D )
Because the NPCs do have a full real life over the 3 days before everyone dies. I liked to just follow them and they all did something for the entire duration.
At least GTA:SA had those burglary missions where at night you could enter some homes to rob them, and by entering homes I mean getting teleported to a generic interior. But still.
A game described at that 19:00 minute mark, does exist. It's called Pathologic 2, and its rough. I could never get into it due to the difficulty, but the people I know who did swear it makes the game 200x better
The original Pathologic is somehow even rougher and messier despite being nearly the exact same map, and I love it to death for that. Something about how un-intuitive the layout of the town is, how fences will snake around and cordone off areas you need to get to in almost the exact path you're most likely to take to get there, and the way you're forced to walk at a snails pace the entire time while terrified about what new threat might pop up to derail your path entirely, the atmosphere is so damn suffocating. They did a fantastic job of creating a place where it feels like the ground itself hates you.
You skipped kingdom come deliverance in this analysis. An easter egg in the game is drone stuck in a tree, as their dedication to realism was such that they mapped out the local terrain themselves to match it as accurately as possible. These are towns and not cities perhaps but the dedication to realism is nuts in that game
Baldur's Gate in BG3 is one of my favourite video game cities. It feels so alive, it's very confusing to navigate at first but you eventually get to know it. The city seems a lot like the one in Witcher described here!
It feels like the city exists without you, and their citizens are not waiting for you to meet them. It also helps that whoever you click has a voiced line to say even if it’s just for flavor.
Skyrim blunders so much on their scale. Theres this huge attack on Whiterun, and there's like what... 10 soldiers active from each side, at a time? I remember just being super deflated and this anticlimactic feeling when playing and going "oh... this is what it amounts to..?"
I mentioned this on another vid it Skyrim quests like ‘Defend our capital from the invading hordes!’ take about ten minutes But ‘Find my grandfathers fishing rod’ takes you halfway across the map, into the most complex dungeons with five tie-in journals of lore and a new lovable npc who’ll tragically die
To be fair, Skyrim came out in 2011. And it was made by Bethesda, so with an engine that’s another ten to twenty years older than that. (But really, they did quite a good job with the landscape as all the hills and mountains make it seem bigger than it is and the cities are the parts that deliver the least on that promise. The viking-inspired setting lessened the impact of this at least a bit in my opinion as we don’t associate the medieval north with huge population centers. Also the engine really couldn’t handle big numbers of NPCs well at the time.)
@@btarczy5067 Bethesda REALLY needs to let go of the Creation Engine. It is old and decrepit and holding them back. Starfield was a lesser game for having been made with it. I believe if Bethesda doesnt let go of their ancient engine, they will choke on it.
Being fair, the engine would probably implode if it tried to have more than ten soldiers to a side. On the other hand, maybe if your engine can’t handle large groups of NPCs fighting each other maybe you shouldn’t make one of your core plot lines about an active civil war with battalions meeting on the field of battle.
I think the only thing you missed in this great video, is that a lot of people don't say they want realism or they confuse the term realism with what games actually need, which is: Immersion I'm not sure you said "immersion" a single time in this video, despite the fact you defined it lol I'd say it's pretty impossible to design realism, the closest we could get is emergent behavior out of simulations.
@traior246 We wouldn't want total realism anyway. If you look at stories, dialogue is not how people talk, and you only ever see as much of the characters as drives the plot, gets information across of is just fun to watch. Stories aren't real life and emulating them too hard simply makes them boring or bloated or difficult to penetrate, which is just as immersion breaking as "unrealistic" things going on.
@ZachBobBob yeah and my point is that there's really not a lot of people that are looking for realism, as he is implying a lot of people are looking for "realism". The closer to realism a game gets, the more niche its community is. He was fixated on "realism", when we all know it's immersion people want and need from video games and as the previous person replied, there's one mention of the term immersion in the video.
Night City is even more interesting because it feels like an Entity sometimes. Even in Dialogue people always talk about Night City in that way. Its a City you have to actively work with or you will go under. But on the other hand the City doesnt care for you. You are nothing but another individual trying to survive in it.
I absolutely love this video. It feels like you are one of the only content creators who actually looks at gaming tech/philosophy/architecture the same way I do. I think that's what makes these games so great! Thanks
I love when a game isn't afraid to look the player right in the eye and say, either directly or through its design, "this world was here long before you got here and it'll be here long after you're gone. It doesn't need saving, least of all from you. Now go try and make something of yourself." Witcher 3 does that well-the Wild Hunt isn't Alduin. The apocalypse Ciri is destined to prevent in the good ending won't actually end the world for quite awhile. And Geralt is just one witcher. Mount&Blade does it well too. Yeah, you can conquer all of Calradia like you're a latter-day Alexander the Great, but it's not going to go quietly, nor will it hand you anything along the way. Places like Novigrad sell that illusion...or the shattering of the illusion that Skyrim's world constantly reinforces.
I fully agree with you and nontheless a game in which you actually deal (spoilers avoided and below) in apocalypse is baldurs gate. The world feels like it would exist without you and if you didn't exist someone else would to fill the gap. Like you don't matter in a weird way that you are the master chief but if it wasn't John Sierra 117 it would be John Doe 118. Like it is inevitable and like the citizens couldn't care less that you exist, only that you broke into their house and you deserve to die. (SPOILERS prevent or cause it)
Exactly, my man I never bothered finishing Skyrim cause for something asking for roleplay I couldn't get immersed for a second, everything, the places and the story felt so fake and videogame-y. Didn't expect anything starting TW3, lo and behold, I stopped to catch up on all the books cause I loved feeling that this world has history and I hated that I didn't know it
@@Tim_Belay Cities and towns are probably the top reasons a lot of Elder Scrolls fans have nostalgia for the older titles. TES II & III actually had cities where they added a bunch of low-detail places and npcs in order to get the scale up there. TES IV was when they made the decision to give every npc a radiant AI and a personality quirk. And I never liked Skyrim's choice of making the player the messiah and the main quest almost mandatory. The problem is the engines of the older titles really hasn't held up.
@@Helycon I love that world building. Make me random guy 153 and not some chosen one prophesized to save the world with that one special ability only he has. Just think if the chosen one (tm) slipped and broke his neck. How would the world react? If it goes up in flames in 2 seconds it's a terribly made world. No one ever is that important. Some other guy will step up. It won't be the same, sure, but the world keeps turning. I want to be the hero because I chose to do heroic deeds and not because I literally did not have even a choice in the matter.
@@Tim_Belayif you love exploring a fantasy world's history then I would really recommend morrowind. It can be a bit intimidating to get into gameplay and graphics wise but the writing and worldbuilding is fantastic, and after you get over the first hump (and maybe install some QoL mods if you're having trouble) it's a unique and fascinating story.
I wouldn’t say it’s a realistic city, but on of my favourites is from Sinking City, the flooded streets, boarded off sections, the fog and rotting fish, the creepy npcs It does feel alive it feels sick and rotting
My favorite game city is still the city of Ark in the Skyrim total conversion mod Enderal. It really doubles down on the whole up=rich; down=poor thing - the city spans from a controlling religious order/government on the top of a mountain to a seedy and desperate undercity sprawling deep underground. The mod's creators made these areas distinct both in aesthetic and gameplay. The religious order are your nominal allies, and interaction on their campus involves long philosophical conversations and weighty narrative choices. The under city is a constant fight to survive against attacks by lowlife and a variety of horrifying creatures, if you venture deep enough. In between are your more typical dockworkers, merchants, farmers, and the like, somewhat connecting the two worlds. Long comment but this was the first game city I ever truly got lost in and it really left an impression.
An interesting game to check out in terms of citybuilding is Kingdom Come Deliverance. It's possibly the one and only example of a video game world in which settlements are built to a realistic scale relative to how many inhabitants they accommodate, and those places truly feel real. Granted, they are mostly small villages and like one or two small-sized towns. But that particular developer team probably spent the most amount of time researching the historical accuracy of said settlements out of any developer team ever, so it makes sense that it's perhaps the only such example of a video game settlement that feels like it could be a real place that people live in.
Novigrad was the first video game city that truly wowed me. It's the first rpg city that feels scaled appropriately and the city is dense and feels like it's actually a medieval/rpg liveable city.
Do you know the feeling when you have been outside of a city for a while. Somewhere in nature, maybe farmland. And then you come back to the city while you mind is still processing nature. You see the city as an outsider, you see it not as a whole but what it truly is a bunch of human made buildings near each other. It feels like another world. After a while your brain assimilates back into the city life and you start to feel like a part of it. Its real life immersion. That kind of feeling of being an outsider looking in is something I have ONLY seen The Witcher 3 replicate and its amazing
The way you feel about Novigrad and the way the citizens have daily schedules, I was so amazed by with Shenmue when it first came out. Games have come a LONG way in that time, but that innovation feels incredible.
@ I haven’t played them, so I can’t say. When I was a kid, though, Shenmue felt like I was playing something that should have been an impossibility due to weather, time, date, phone numbers that you could call-the minute, boring details of life made the game feel like the closest thing to interacting with a false reality.
Hell, just world design in general. I still cant get over how good those forests are in the game. It's almost a rule in game design that 'realism for realism's sake isn't fun', but somehow KCD gets around it and makes the adherence to realism work for it.
@@maynardburger 100% especially if you play "hardcore" as in, you don't see yourself on the minimap or have a functioning compass, so you really need to navigate with landmarks.
I haven't played Shadows of Doubt, but based on the limited information I've heard, I'm curious how it would fit into this discussion. I do feel like we're approaching a point where procedural generation might provide a means for fully-enterable cities - where the devs can carve out bespoke areas for the story, but anything else can be there if it strikes your fancy. Even if (or when) that's feasible, it still rolls back around to the fundamental question of whether that would meaningfully improve the experience.
Novigrad is actually not that far from the size of an actual medieval town. The building where a bit more packed back then, but fortified towns where often quite small by current standards, apart from some metropolis like London.
I think the thing I particularly enjoy about discussing cities in video games is seeing how video games incorporate the motifs of real world architecture to immerse players. Even those inexperienced with architecture beyond understanding the definition are affected by architecture every day. In video game cities, the architecture (or simulated architecture) does a great deal to inform players about the setting they are in. Novagrad does great at displaying architectural principles common in the midevil era of our real world and Cities in Horizon Zero Dawn blend a variety of architectural styles and signatures from across cultures to help express the values of a culture that doesn't exist.
Cyberpunk is one of the only games i essentially never travel. The driving mechanics are decent, but even if they weren't the views and feel of the city is so sick (the sick radio stations help too)
I love the point you made about travelling around the roads in witcher, even the historical districts of old european cities like paris have mostly straight roads that continue for miles, while in games the roads wind and split in places that make no sense to make it feel more like an adventure
One of my favorite things about xenoblade chronicles 1 is the way the colonies feel lived in. Having each and every NPC in colony 9 have their own schedules makes the world feel so lived in. The people dont feel like props, but actual people. They have their own connection to you as a resident of the colony, and they have relations to the other characters as well. It feels like a home
The thing I think is kinda cool about Novigrad is the fact that in the books Novigrad is brought up but the actually look of the city isn't really brought up at all so CD PR designed the entire city and you can kinda say the same thing for the entire Witcher world sense the Witcher books focus so heavily on characters
@@Vagrant-Hex Yeah the author of the books even said that the Witcher world is an illusion a fake that is just barley in the background made simply to make the characters feel more reel I don't remember the exact quote but its something like that
@ That’s pretty cool. I have the Last Wish, but it has been so long since I’ve read it. Now I feel like cracking it open again. Thanks for the info, brother (or sister)
@@Rompstirdg I love how Sapkowski unintentionally ripped a giant hole in books like the Hunger Games series (a former girlfriend of mine loved the books and the movies, which led me to quip "you're 30 going on 13, aren't you?"), which has absolutely the worst, most utterly "it's cute that you think you are anything other than a hack, Suzanne Collins, but hey, you're the one with the money so what do I know" worldbuilding I've ever seen-if she and Emil Pagliarulo had a kid together, I think they'd have spawned a sort of writer's anti-Christ. "Who cares, it's not important" is often the best medicine when it comes to sacrificing plot and pacing for world building (heck, it's the reason I needed the Cliffs Notes to get through Moby Dick in high school because Nathaniel Hawthorne was practically the trope maker for the 'leave this to the fanfic writers' school of excessive worldbuilding exposition.)
@@SimuLordI'm a little confused how the rips a hole in the hunger games can you please explain how I mean some books have basically no world building and focus almost entirely on the character like the Witcher and some focus almost entirely on the world kinda like LOTR that doesn't make any of them inherently worse it just means they have a different style
Exactly. Doing a video like this without mentioning that game is a crime lol! If you're in search of an open world map done right, that's your goto game.
Cyberpunk is the only game I’ve played where its city feels alive. Night City truly feels like a futuristic city…even though there’s nothing much to do in it outside missions. The pure scale of buildings, noisy streets, demographics of each district, etc. feels authentic.
Id be interested im your take on the city simulation in Gothic 1&2. Despite their age (and not matching the scale) the sense of place these managed to create is quite unique to this day, and every inhabitant feels like they have a purpose. Honorable mention to Kingdom Come. I dont think I ever felt as close to walking in an actual medieval town as in that game.
I'm barely a minute and 8 seconds into the video. But something i've always considered is that. Video game worlds are always shrunk down from how big they're actually supposed to be. (With exceptions) Skyrim being my primary example when I think of this. The distance between everything is an afternoon jog all thing's considered. If you really wanted to go from markarth to winterhold. If you sprinted the whole way you could probably do it before 24 in game hours have passed ... I haven't tested this but i'm fairly sure you could, If you didn't stop the whole time. ... but in reality skyrim would be so much bigger than that. And it's cities equally grand. (Weather you take the elder scrolls mmo into account or not is irrelevant.) Because most consoles and pc's can't handle a full blown world with billions of people constantly moving and interacting across several thousands of miles all at once! (Although it is improving on that front.) A lot of game worlds have their spaces and populations trimmed down to "Anything important" and some side stuff left in so it doesn't feel totally empty. We're meant to fill in the "empty space" that isn't there/visible with our minds. Yes we can travel from one city to another in minutes. But in reality it could take days or even months depending. We just have to imagine a lot of that time is spent inbetween. .... Think of it like nether travel in minecraft. Every block in the nether is 8 blocks in the overworld. Every step in skyrim "the game" is a good 10-20 feet in "lore" .... Does this matter? No. Not really. But it's a way I like to interpret things. Again there are exceptions to this. Fuel (That car game with the enormous playable map.), Elite dangerous, No man's sky (Really any procedurally generated world can count. Minecraft. The long drive. Etc) You get the point.
One city has three buildings... and the excuse? A natural disaster 80 years ago! TES4: Oblivion has more and bigger cities than TES5: Skyrim. And before any smart-ass says, yes Cyrodiil the province where Oblivion is set has larger cities in lore than the province of Skyrim, but that's not a justification for even smaller villages to represent cities in-game when the game engine should be levelling thr size of cities up, not down.
@@RandalGravesNN So? My point is significantly less effort went into the "cities" in Skyrim than Oblivion. If the game engine is the same, then we should expect an equivalent number of equivalent sized cities, not far less and far smaller.
@@antiochus87 "less effort" yet oblivion is so fucking hideous it's unplayable without nostalgia while skyrim holds on 15 years later with just one update, not counting mods.
Despite not being the typical video game city, I think Yharnam (and to a lesser extent other FromSoft cities) also really creates that illusion of actually being a functioning city despite all its inherents weirdness and it clearly existing in order to "funnel" the player through the "storyline"/game.
Really? Wouldn't agree at all. For me, basically all the Souls games have a distinct feeling of being terribly unrealistic, disjointed and out of scale, but they get away with it cuz it's beautiful and fun to explore. They are distinctly 'gamey' in design and that's perfectly ok, especially for a non-open world.
Agree. Aside from Yharnam, Leyndell from Elden Ring is one the most impressive video game cities I've seen. The level design and environmental storytelling is topnotch.
Night City is the most realistic game city I've been in, at least in terms of contemporary city, not medieval or pre-modern time. It feels more alive and lived in than Los Santos or Liberty City despite they are based on real world places. It feels more like Hong Kong than Sleeping Dogs or latest Test Drive Unlimited. The environmental cues, the background sounds, the smell the visual evokes, the density of people, Night City makes you feel like you're in a real city. The next closest game that features a city that feels real is New York City from the Spiderman games.
Novigrad is tiny though. Assassin's creed has come the closest to balancing the two. But even they sacrificed city size in their bigger open world titles. Baghdad and Paris are two of the closest to real size that come to mind though.
Honestly I'm surprised you never mentioned Kamurocho in the Yakuza/RGG series. That "city" (just a district technically) is one of the densest locations in a video game. There are stores and activities in corners of almost every building, night life is swarming around you, and to account for the density it's a comparatively tiny plot of space. It's sort of the inverse of Los Santos; you're expected to walk among it and become intimately familiar with this small little space while being endlessly distractable by it all. It becomes a sort of home without ever feeling mundane.
Vice City was my first exposure to a world in a video game that was believable. The NPCs have very distinct accents depending on which part of town you’re in and the layout is very reminiscent of 80’s Miami.
Rockstar are masters of this. GTA 4/5 and red dead 1/2 are so immersive, but if you go back, even games like GTA 3 have this incredible immersion to them that nothing else around that time could capture.
it is that time of year again where I call something weird. hope you're well.
I am thank you for asking ^^
Needed a reminder. Thanks brother.
It reached zero this week in England so I’ve been hiding at home under blankets, rewatching your backlog of videos, and wow you’ve made so much incredible content, some of the best on TH-cam 🙏🏻 thanks for sharing such consistency phenomenal work! All the best from Oxford to you and the lady you live with 🇬🇧🫶🏻
You used simulacrum correctly.
Watched arcane so no lol (also the world is messed up) otherwise hanging on. Hope you're doing well :)
Babe wake up. Raz is here to gush over the Witcher 3 again despite not liking it
I promise I hate it!!
@@razbuten Do you actually? 😥
@@cavemann_Valid question
@@razbutenI must say I didn't vibe with it as well...
makes sense tho, it has great presentation and attention to detail. but when it comes to its actual core gameplay it’s very lackluster
My favourite new niche subgenre of TH-cam video is the videos where people analyse game worlds in great detail. Stuff like employment rates, power lines, railroads, rivers connecting to oceans etc.
So basically AnyAustin 😊 I love his stuff too
By people do you just mean AnyAustin or do you have some other recommendations for others who also like this niche subgenre?
One little thing that annoys me is structures that make no sense. For example a sniper is shooting at me from the third floor, but there are no stairs or ladders to get there. How did he get up there??? 😅
@@One.Zero.One101 Grappling hook
@@cleonanderson1722another one is adef, that recently studied the economy recession of the Hoenn Region in Pokémon Emerald
Night City is stuffed so full of buildings, messy cables, bridges, roads, trash and filth that it feels overwhelming and suffocating. Incidentally, that is exactly what you're supposed to feel like in this cybernetically enhanced hell. The city looks like a hundred years ago it may have been somewhat sensible, but over the decades, more and more layers were just built on top of the old ones, and nobody stopped to consider to how it's going to look or function.
Funnily enough, Night City didn't even exist 100 years ago. It was first established in 1994. The speed with which hit developed certainly contributed to how messy it is. The fact that a nuke went off in the very middle of the city, and it had to be rebuilt, certainly didnt help either.
@@Askorti a nuke went off in the very middle of the city, and it had to be rebuilt, certainly didnt help either.
Most cities would be rebuilt better after such an event. That Night City didn't speaks more to the position of the corps that people don't matter.
I would say Cyberpunk has one of the best designed cities in video games, because it manages to feel exactly how it's meant to feel: vast, oppressive and anonymous.
In other games, the cities always feel too small and controlled. They feel like 'video game cities'. In games like Spiderman or Arkham, your ease of travel gives you a tremendous sense of control, because you can get anywhere you need to, especially due to lack of NPC interactions.
But Night City is vast, chaotic and random, and you have to traverse the whole thing on foot or car. Yes, you can fast travel, but there's no flying or jumping or anything like that.
I hope more games take note of Cyberpunk's city design, and how alive it feels. Even when the game was 'bad', due to the lack of content, this particular feeling was still achieved.
@@libervitaexaltis4551 One of the tiny details that made it work for me, was when you were walking on the streets, oncoming npc's would meet your eyes just before you passed them.
What's really cool about the dev process of the cities design, is that they went to various massive cities to make NC feel more real. It's basically a combination of the biggest and best cities in the world, LA, Tokyo, New York City. As someone who's been to NYC and LA it's crazy how real it feels
I enjoyed this video and have now taken one more step towards actually playing The Witcher 3.
"not being able to rob any house does still have a slight negative impact on the experience the game is trying to cultivate" love this
Can't wait for the 3-hour employment rate video
i yearn for the novigrad/oxenfurt/crow's perch employment/sewage system assessment video
Amazing Austin, we need an in depth video from you re: the Witcher 3. ❤
@@robertwilliams5979 30 hour.
10:17 to add on to the point of the cities in AC feeling accurate, my dad found me playing revaltions one day and since he was a sailor and has been around the world, he immediately stopped and asked "Is that Istanbul?" which absolutely shocked me in that the accuracy of the cites that AC managed to portray was spot on. To this day I still think about that day
My parents just came back from Venice when they saw me playing AC. They weren't able to get inside (or to the inner courtyard) of many of the signature buildings, and my mom asked me for a tour. So I showed her around for several hours, while apologising occasionally when I had to murder some soldiers to get further.
I watch a review of watch dog legion done by a Englishman and he went into a bit about how it matches. "Hey I used to live near here . Used to walk this street to school " he said it was weird because the city was correct but scale down so things that were 20 mins away were just a few blocks away.
@@SaltyChickenDipHad the same thing happen with me and the Honest Hearts DLC for Fallout New Vegas. I lived in Zion National Park at the time, and the specific road I lived on was in the game. Alongside plenty of other nearby places, though the distance was far off, of course.
Ages ago (I think around the time 3 came out), I was able to visit Rome for a few days with my dad. Amazingly we were in a great location near both the castel san angelo and vatican. But as I loved Brotherhood so much and had played it loads in the year prior, I was able to apply that knowledge of the roads and general city to the vacation. Now I wasn't all knowing but it did help to keep us knowing where we were, a bunch of points of interest to see as well as some smaller places.
My dad ofc added to this with his general knowledge on a lot of stuff and I think my favourite combo of our knowledge coming together was how he showed me that going to churches was both free and a great thing to do as the inside of each was unique and my knowledge of how to get to places and where we may find churches was amazing
@@SaltyChickenDip When Spider-Man 2 came out, I streamed it to a friend who has family in NYC (who couldn't play the game), and he loved how accurate it was and it was a similar thing, pointing out where family lived, a school he had gone to and certain other stuff as well as explaining the significance of certain locations I had no idea about.
I think a large part of why the worldbuilding in the Witcher 3 rings so true, is because the devs actually started by building the blank landmass, then placed their landmarks and towns/villages where they believed it felt most realistic i.e. almost all villages are near some kind of water source, and when they aren't, for the sake of a quest for example, they made sure to include the appropriate infrastructure to justify why the town was there, and how the town was there. So, when they needed a town to be located near mountains for the purpose of a quest, they made it into a mining town, with all the appropriate infrastructure, as there were ore deposits in the nearby mountains.
That's not entirely true. They've already had a map that they'd worldbuilt around (and had done a good job of doing so). They most likely had a rough blockout of the landmass done with ideas of where Novigrad would go but it's only AFTER that, that they stuck to planning around the landmass. It works really well to emulate a medieval european city because they never flatten out a location to build on it. Which is something us casual players would instinctually do because we're used to flattened terrain for cities (especially in the US).
There's no such thing as a "town" in Poland. You either have a village or a city. You're talking about villages.
It's so funny and bizzare to call villages towns.
The closest you have to a town in medieval Poland would be an oppidium, which was a village with a market.
Yes, back then CDPR was a Polish company still.
One of my pet peeves is how video game cities funnel you into the destination. Real world cities are built on city blocks, and you can take multiple routes to get to the destination. And this is not just limited to modern cities, it applies to old cities as well. In my country there are old Spanish colonial cities and they are arranged in city blocks for the horse carriages to pass through. In many games there's just one path to the destination because the city is designed like a dungeon above ground.
@@Halo_Legend "In some cases, town is an alternative name for "city" or "village" (especially a small city or large village; and occasionally even hamlets). Sometimes, the word town is short for township."
i think it's just usage difference, but they can be generally called towns (and the fact you understood what they were getting at means the message is clear enough and so it doesn't need your pedantry).
Eastern European game devs have had an insane respect for their own countries and the land they live on
5:49 I like how from a lore and world building perspective, the the city's location is dependent on the position of the river. But from a world design perspective, the river's position is dependent on the location of the city
When you start making fantasy maps you put rivers and mountains where you think they look cool or are interesting for the story. But, at some point, you start researching about geography, climate and ecosystems, and making a map turns into a constant decision between reality and fiction.
@EnabiSeira yeah. as someone who really enjoys world building and stuff, getting to constantly fit puzzle pieces into a world and making it slowly make sense with things like the history and geography and such is incredibly fun to do, imo.
@@ologames1185 yes yes! It is really entertaining building your own world.
@@EnabiSeira That's why the Witcher route is so unique, Sapkowski's original writing is very sparse in geographical details because the world is treated just as a background, subserviant to the story and characters. The games of course expand a lot on the books but still the focus is on the characters and not some deeper lore. A kind of anti-worldbuilding approach.
if you look at continent of Witcher, most booming major cities are located near the sea where sea trade is possible.
"Despite Los Santos being based on LA, you'll never find yourself in a traffic jam"
Damn, shots fired >XD
This has been an ongoing joke since 2013 but is still funny
Technically, there are switch to Michael and Franklin encounters that show the character being stuck in a traffic jam with them complaining about it.
But you never encounter such things organically unless you purposely block traffic.
....and even if you do block traffic @@GTAVictor9128 there is still a chance the NPCs will just drive right on ahead anywhere to their likely fiery demise but I have a feeling I am getting even further from the original point at hand here
@@GTAVictor9128 As you mentioned there are those scripted character switching scenarios, but as someone who typically likes to drive around in GTA a bit more normally rather than always speeding and crashing into things, there actually are some instances where I'll find myself backed up waiting behind a ton of cars with a bunch more lining up behind me, at least on the PS4 version in either story or director mode. Overall I feel that the traffic in the enhanced version of GTA V can at times be the densest it's ever been in the entire series thus far. Really makes me pine for a GTA IV remaster or, better yet, a new GTA set in a bigger, even more accurate version of Liberty City (with the surrounding areas of course, and depending on what they're capable of by that point, perhaps even more than that).
@@LanceVanceDance84yeah, it’s easy to not hit traffic when you’re driving like a maniac. Do that irl and see how long you get away with it for
GTA V's map feels lifeless on foot, but is good for speeding on sport cars. That's the vibe.
In GTA IV, the driving is slower, the streets are tighter. And it's more interesting walking around.
Two games from the same series. The pace of the game counts as well.
This is probably also how it feels to drive and walk in NYC vs. in LA so in a way they really got the cities right lol
I think that’s true for GTA online which has always felt empty and dead. But the single player of GTAV feels alive and vibrant to me no matter where you are in the game
Dude, nobody walks in LA. We only have joggers so like you said, it's lifeless on foot.
@@Pencilman246 A game mode where randoms usually bring out a tank and start shooting everyone is empty and dead
Have you ever tried walking in GTA V? There are random other walkers that talk to each other and interact with you. It’s extremely impressive
Night City is my favorite video game world. Often I just walk around, buy food, shop for new clothes, drive my car around in the rain with the radio on. It felt so natural I wanted to know more about the city, which in turn led to a much greater attachment to the game.
Night City was the first time I ever felt a real feeling of fear from a video game. Not in like a "OOOO spooky Jumpscare horror!" way but like a fear I've actually had, when I was alone on my own in a city for the first time.
Not understanding signs, not sure where I am, surrounded by people but completely isolated. Like I didn't fit in and the city knew that. It felt like it wanted me out.
But after getting used to it both in and out of game that fear became a small memory. I think night city is a great city by feeling and really captured that feeling for me.
Welcome to new york
Idfk i just knew its a video game so i started jumping around like mario
First time I had that feeling with a game was Ready or Not, I think its just the sheer realism and amazing attention to detail that gets me
Yeah, I'm a pretty experienced traveler and I've learned my way around a number of cities IRL, but Night City was just... oppressive.
Me in São Paulo for the first time
One trick that a dev can use to make a city seem to have true scale is by actually limiting how much of the city you have access to, it doesn't work so well in open world games but with the right setup it creates a great illusion. Rudimentary geometry in the distance and creative skyboxes can add to the illusion. Abstractions of cities require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief and some people find this easier then others.
Vizima in the Witcher 1)
It's an ironic approach when you think about it; they put you in one of the largest manmade settlements possible then heavily limit where you can travel within it.
Though it's also why I hate open world cities; most of the buildings are set decoration with nothing of value.
Mass Effect 1's Citadel and 2's Omega and Ilium come to mind. They're ultimately not that big, but they FEEL huge
That’s how Anor Londo in DS1 feels to me; I love it.
The gold standard to me is Leyndell from Elden Ring. You feel its scale while not being able to reach many areas. Unlike Anor Londo, though, it feels like your access is unrestricted and that there’s so much more than there really is.
4:25 - “Who cares about a nameless NPC‘s ability to meaningfully change their life?”
Me 😢😂
Me :(
I feel like I remember a game or more than one game where NPCs will grow and change throughout the course of the story. Some will get married or move to different areas or get new jobs. Maybe it was something in older RPGs?
@@Amins88Maybe Fable
NPC lives matter!
@@Amins88Stardew Valley?
I believe the word you might be looking for at the end is verisimilitude: we want video games to feel real and believable, even if technically speaking they aren’t realistic.
Simulacrum was literally the perfect word for what he was saying -- having the appearance of something without the substance.
Verisimilitude is very important to me. I want that sense of place, with minimal cognitive dissonance.
As a historian i love that the witcher 3 borrows so much design (costumes, architecture, amor) from real life reinassance northern europe. That sets novigrad apart from pretty much anything in fantasy. Nothing feels like fantasy except the monsters, and that is only because they knew their sources. Of course, exclude skellige from what i am saying lol
You are right, but to be fair, a medieval city is much smaller than a modern one. Around 1000 ad London had 18 000 inhabitants, and many less important cities would have barely been in the 4 digits, so depending on when your game plays, the factor by which they are off, is a lot less than if you take a modern metropolis as comparison.
True, but that's still many many times larger than the Elder Scrolls cities, that have a few hundred inhabitanst and can be walked end to end in about 3 minutes.
For someone who says he hates The Witcher 3, Raz really seems to love The Witcher 3.
Hate/love relationship maybe? 😂
Witcher 3 lore and worldbuilding and attention to detail: Great
Witcher 3 gameplay: not so great.
Gameplay is great too. It just depends on what you like. @@aryabratsahoo7474
@@aryabratsahoo7474 that's not true
@@xezor488 Worth a Buy said it best in his review. It's a great game for casual console players who only ever played and think other AAA games (like Assassin's Creed) are great games.
You couldve mentioned Kingdom Come Deliverance which has fully simulated NPCs, completely accessible buildings, the most accurate depiction of historical towns ever and even some beautiful landscapes.
man of culture
God I hope the sequel coming out next year is good
And they put up wall, yes you CAN explore every nook and cranny but that comes with risk of getting caught and labeled a thief and so on with little to no reward in return. It simply isn't worth it to root through everyone's house because the hassle isn't worth the few grosshen or dried meat.
@M0USEP0TAT0 though I did just that in lots of places lol
(Indeed great point KCD is dearly missed in this video)
Seriously, Kingdom Come Deliverance blows away TW3 for me in terms of doing well scaled, immersive population centers. It's got that Skyrim-esque 'you can go in any building' design, and there's just so much attention to detail put on making it feel realistic and not just a bunch of set dressing.
Kamurocho is definitely one of the best detailed cities in video games. Even in older games where they haven't gone with the Dragon Engine yet, no part of the map ever feels lifeless, even if half the npcs you bump into are basically there to wander about aimlessly, and the other half being there to pick a random fight with you. Each street has its own thing, theme, and environmental storytelling.
Play it long enough and you even stop referring to the map altogether when doing quests, because the characters already mentioned which street you're supposed to go to, and you already know where that is and how to get there.
I love the world building philosophy of the yakuza series director. He explicitly set out to make the most interactive and living feeling 2 blocks he could.
Also I think virtual tourism is an explicit goal of these games. Any Yakuza fan who visits Kabuki-cho or Dotonbori or Onomichi will absolutely be able to recognize places, restaurants, etc. It's the only game I've ever played set in Japan that really felt like being in Japan, but it absolutely does.
8:15 not only from attacks, but it follows what I've come to know as the "Law of Fecal Dynamics", toilets and sewage for every house didn't exist back then, so if it was going to flow, it was going down hill through the gutters
Trickle-down economics.
Novigrad is pretty great but i thing the first city that made me feel like it was real was Khorinis from gothic 2. While I had a lot of fun exploring the (then) vast map of Morrowind and all its fantastical mushroom cities and ashlands, the world was rather stagnant. But in the same year you started up gothic and were blown away.
People sawing wood, cooking food, talking in the street, smoking water pipes and more. A walled of "rich district" that you had to WORK to get into. People commenting on the clothes you were wearing (mage, or paladin etc). NPC's that knew you from the previous game (that I haven't had the chance to play until years later), while one of the comments on the various ways you got into the city in the first place. It was great. And the fact that to progress the story you needed to FIND A JOB and actually become an apprentice of an alchemist, blacksmith or hunter made it even more real.
2:57 Any Austin was mentioned, I'm happy
I didn't expect to see his videos referenced, but his content was immediately what I thought of when I clicked on this video. I'm thrilled to know that Raz is also a fan!
Any Austin is legit. When the world needs a hero to map out all employment rates in he answers!
Was literally thinking the same thing!!! Love Any Austin!!!
I'd like to see a collaboration between Any Austin and Razbuten, or perhaps Naked Jakey.
Direct survey!!!
In the Witcher 1, you can follow many NPCs around like Zoltan and you will actually see him move to different areas at different times of day like walking to the bar early at night and going back home later in the night and wandering around Vizima.
And you have to pester questgivers in their own houses at night unless your Geralt has a normal sleep schedule :D
Kingdom Come Deliverance vs Skyrim would've been an interesting comparison, as KCD's cities are on the same scale, but feel so much more immersive
KCDs cities don't present to be cities is part of it, they are slightly bigger than skyrims biggest cities, but in the context of the story they are barely even towns. they're exactly as big as they are in real life, little castle towns and villages and their surroundings, presented in a realistic scale. the whole game takes place in an area where almost everyone could realistically know everyone. it's a shame that most games cannot narrow their scope like this because it feels very special in kcd
KCD has a very rural focus to it's game world, to my knowledge there aren't any metropolitan areas at all.
@@renaigh that's correct. there are castle towns and there's sasau, but these are still bigger than the "cities" in skyrim. covers an absolutely tiny area. try going on google maps and searching for Rataje nad Sázavou and Sazava, those are the two biggest "cities" in kcd, and they are just a few fields apart, this is how the game manages to make things to scale without feeling empty, it's a very very nice design decision imo, I also think the story is elevated by the scope feeling more intimate and less saving the world/country
@@renaigh in KCD 2 there will be Kutná Hora City (today it's a small city) but back then it was one of the biggest and most important cities in central europe, so it will be interesting to walk the city in game and then compare it to the real world city.
Kingdom Come is most imersive game I played. To bad I didn't have means to visit real life locations when I was in Czech Republic.
This made me more deeply respectful and amazed on the amount of details the world in rdr2 has
I finished a playthrough of the Witcher 3 a while ago playing every quest and choosing every dialogue option in every DLC cause of how much I loved the game. Haven't revisited it since as it was meant to be my final playthrough. You reminded me a bit why I love the game so much
One thing about AC and the World Design:
European Cities have way more buildings closer together, so that made sense. A reason why i dislike AC3 so much are the really far apart buildings with at best a second floor giving no real elevation. Which could be realistic, but reality just suited the games better in other places imo.
Dying Light has a similar problem. The first map has lots of dense higgildy-piggildy buildings with limited elevation, which perfectly suited the skillset of the player and made getting around via parkour on the rooftops and whatnot satisfying and fluid. And always being close-ish to the ground keeps the zombie threat ever present. But then the second map is more spread out big, tall buildings and it loses like ALL the fluidity. And then Dying Light 2 took the 'big tall building' problem and made it even worse. I knew from the instant they showed DL2 that they'd misunderstood what made the parkour and game design of DL1 so fun.
That's why they added climbing on trees and cliffs to AC3, to have more use for the parkour mechanics outside the much smaller cities. Problem there is that it's much harder to build an entire wilderness to feel like you actually have total freedom of movement than it is to build a city like that, so they pretty much ended up putting a few clearly climbable cliffs and some parkour tree lines wherever.
@@maynardburgerI think the second map was designed around the grappling hook.
@@maynardburgerThe second map in DL1 is meant to highlight the grappling hook. The difficulties in moving around the area at first are also meant to push you to the ground if you don't have it, exposing you to more zombies to convey the idea that it is more dangerous than the slums.
Especially during the middle ages, it was very common for buildings to be designed with overhangs and you can still see this in old preserved districts. The practice ended because it created an obvious fire risk.
The LEGITIMATE hype I felt from the Any Austin nod. Love every single video he makes. Love that in depth, over analysis of the minutiae of the games we've played for countless hours, without sparing a second thought to.
rdr2 made me feel like I was a free bird and just slowly got forced into progressively smaller cages which ended up in a hell called saint denis
It has people walking slowly in front of you, can’t get more realistic than that
After playing the Witcher 3 and cyberpunk 2077 and exploring Novigrad, Oxenfurt, Beauclair and Nightcity. In my opinion nobody does cities in videogames better than CD Projekt Red.
Haven't played many of the games talked about here, but driving around Night City with the radio on is one of the most immersive experiences I've ever had playing a video game
Cyberpunk nailed their city.
Same here, near the end of my playthrough i had all my radio stations memorized and would just drive aimlessly when a song i liked came on
Being a passenger in a car in first person and observing is soo relaxing
Nightcity is a landmark for cities in games. It's the first time I've played a game where the city itself is a main character.
People focus too much on the realism of little interactions with useless stuff from sandbox games like GTA games do, or the AI of npcs. Of course it's important but it depends on the type of game. Cyberpunk main point is the setting, the whole city is build for it and, for it, it nails perfectly.
Los Santos is a weak setting anyway
Crazy. I've always felt like night city felt suuuper fake
I agree. It really is it's own character, and the characters in the game treat it that way too.
It's what happens when corporations control everything and there are no regulations they have to follow. They do whatever they want, to hell with if it causes life to be more difficult for the population of that city.
It could use a strip club and a tattoo parlor tbh. I feel like its beautiful but lacks interaction.
@@trombonegamer14 to a degree it's meant to feel fake though
Closest I've ever seen to a fully simulated city was Shadows of Doubt, a procedural detective sandbox. A lot of randomization, not 1:1, and up to the eyeballs in jank, but you can enter any room inside any building, see the person who lives there with their own work schedule and acquaintances, and then beat them to within an inch of their life and rifle through their belongings, because you're absolutely positive that they're in some way connected to your only lead which you couldn't possibly be wrong about because you've terrorized half the neighborhood at this point and oh crap you never checked the security camera footage, break into the management office and see if anyone entered the room before the estimated time of the victim's death, wait just a minute that's the cop you thought was securing the crime scene when you first got there, turns out she's in a weird coca-cola cult and was doing ritualistic sacrifices, the fact that all three victims were from the same workplace and all disliked the same coworker was a complete coincidence. So you just spent your whole evening off playing an absolute public menace all because you overthought one piece of potential evidence, and the game gave you this entire fully explorable city with all these interconnected working pieces, sat back, and let you make yourself its problem.
Glad to see somebody acknowledge the greatness of Novigrad! Too many game worlds are juat generic landscapes with no busting urban areas.
I'm from Los Angeles and when I was 22 I moved out of my hometown to go live abroad for 5 years, until moving back recently. Unfortunately for me, 22 years old meant that was 2019 and the pandemic struck the following year. I was in Japan which had a very strict travel policy during this time which meant that for a while I couldn't go home and risk being locked out of the country I lived in. It was really sad for me a lot of the time and I was often homesick.
I eventually came to realize that driving around Los Santos in GTA V was capable of quelling some of that homesickness in the sort of soft vibe based way. To me, LA born and raised, it very much feels like home even if it's not perfect. It's an indescribable feeling to have had that during those dark times.
Also, I'm someone who's always loved a cruise in the car and consider myself good at navigation, it's more accurate than you might think! Just scaled a little weird in most spots. 😂
Interesting channel you have there, subbed!
- Adûnâi
I just found out that the road that goes up from the freeway by the beach, close to where you met the jogging lady - is an actual place in LA. I was scrolling Insta and sorta did a double-take: "Holy fuck, that 'make video games look real' AI is really coming alo... Wait a minute, that's actually real life..".
Baldurs gate 3 has a pretty good city; it escapes the "small city" feeling by only giving the player access to vertain districts. With the heavy implication that there are other districts we dont have access to where more of the people live and work.
Baldur's Gate struggles with immersion for me because it's always the same time of day, always the same lighting, the same weather, the NPCs are always in the same spot, spouting the same repeating dialogue, no matter how many times you long rest through the night. The only time anything changes is when you the player change it yourself. It feels like I'm trapped in a single moment in time rather than spending weeks in a living city.
Larian games have been notorious for this, too. "Smells worse over here than a dozen rotten eggs dropped in a vat of vinegar."
I love BG3, but I don't actually think Baldur's Gate is a well made city where immersion is concerned.
@@biggooberfish7774 I think BG3 as a whole kinda suffers from the absence of day/night cycle. I started it recently, and was taken aback by eternal day, with night only available so far in the camp. I understand that they probably had limited resources and decided that it is not very important for what they are trying to do, but it really irks me, I'd rather not have ability to pickpocket every single NPC or pick up every single random barrel and have some day/night cycle with maybe some variety in NPC activities, even rudimentary.
@@NazgNurglych If I'm not mistaken they tried to implement day/night cycle, but yes, resources problems; I'm sure their next game will have a day/night cycle, or at least I hope it
Denerim in Dragon Age Origins always felt huge to me because of how much of it is inaccesible. You only ever see small pockets, and travel through it via a map with random encounters, allowing the "real" size to live in your head while not taking up a whole game's worth of resources
I think DA2 is interesting in this regard. You spend the whole game in the city, you can navigate it easily, and the relationship between you and the city feels very intimate.
@ verry true. It doesn’t necessarily feel big as a game space, but it *feels* complex socially
@@jankdotTV I agree. Quite a few people said that they prefer Skyrim cities to Novigrad specifically because they don't like the "empty" NPCs and buildings that are there just for scale and you can't interact with, and I think that for all the shortcomings of DA2 compared to DA1, the city was pretty interactive and you could learn a lot about it and its inhabitants.
Also, knowing that the game was developed in such a short time on a budget of five cents and a couple of sandwiches - it's impressive what they managed to accomplish, and reusing locations seems like a smart streamlining strategy instead of lazy gamemaking. They cut the right corners, IMO.
@@katerynasirko1832 I actually think nameless NPCs and inaccessible buildings make the world better. If you take a random walk around your city you'll not be able to enter most homes and you won't know the names of most people. They'll be just random guy 194 to you. I find that quite immersive.
@Xalantor I like both approaches for what they are, I was just reading a lot of comments and it was interesting that quite a few people have a problem with the very thing that Raz was praising throughout the video)
Seeing you mention AnyAustin here was wild, I've been watching him since the Eggbuster days and it's amazing to see his channel take off.
I still call his channel Eggbusters in my head...
When I got to the titular Baldur's Gate in Baldur's Gate 3, it made me fundamentally realize that I *despise* cities in games as much as I do in real life, which was kind of hilarious.
The sheer density of *things,* eyes always on you, voices always around you, the sort of feeling that "there is nowhere that knows a little bit of tranquility"--
When my players finally made it to a capital city in the DnD game I run I was overwhelmed by the mere location, and had to divert the way I approached the idea completely to stay focused on characters instead of the place itself, because I just *do not vibe* with an urban setting.
I mean my friends jokingly call me a fey, and it's comical whenever something adds more fuel to the fire like that lmao
First time I rolled up to the city in BG3, I was really overwhelmed. After days and days in the wilderness, cursed lands or deep under ground it kinda stressed me out.
Which is quite funny since IRL I'm urban man, almost to the bone.
Night City has got to be the most immersive place I’ve ever been to in a video game. I’m so glad I put off playing Cyberpunk until the 2.0 update.
The happiness I experienced when he shows Milwaukee at 2:23 demonstrates that any reference to Wisconsin will make a Wisconsinite happy.
😂I was like yooo that's my city lol 414🎉
CDPR are so good at creating dense and believable cities, can't wait for their next title!
Love your vids!
@@MaazQureshi12 I appreciate that!
With great regret I have to inform you that they will be using the unoptimized, generic, cookie cutter Unreal Engine 5 which basically means no more dense cities, because crowds are simply unachievable. RED engine, the one for The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, was PERFECT for big crowds and living worlds. But since almost everyone who worked on it left the company, they will not be using it :((( Sad times....
12:49 this is where Skyrim shines imo: yep, the cities are smaller, but you can enter pretty much any building and interact with most objects. Add to that the fact that you can loot anything an NPC has on them (and uses agains you), this makes other games feel like "theme parks" in comparison, where things are just props glued to the scenery.
Also Kingdom Come Deliverance
that's literally been done by Gothic games an eon ago. i hate the same thing as you, for example KOTORs would be perfect had some interactivity been added. the way they are, those spaces could be as furnished as they wanted but the rooms and outsides still feel so cold. the whole thing is just wrong, fatally ungamey
@@lovrepetric skyrim is not even the first Elder Scrolls that did it, but it's a relatable one thus why I picked it.
"you can loot anything an NPC has on them"
So, like props glued to the scenery?
Yeah I like that about Skyrim and the earlier TES games. Skyrim was pretty sloppy though and the cities limited compared the the previous game, Oblivion, which shows more was possible than what they actually did.
I'd hope that if and when TES6 comes out it would build on what Skyrim has and add far more features that make the cities actual cities (not villages and hamlets), feel alive and more interactive. I'd like to see freerunning and climbing implemented as options like Assassins Creed - bring back Acrobatics as a skill!
idk why my algorithm hasnt sent me any of your stuff in a long time. but its absolutely wild to me that after all these years youre still out here putting out incredibly high quality, well researched, thought provoking videos like this. very well done sir
I was NOT expecting an Any Austin crossover but I am HERE FOR IT.
Cd project red really outdid themselves with night city from cyberpunk, its a character all of its own, one of the best 'characters' i have had the pleasure of exploring in my 30 years of gaming.
Funnily enough the video game city that felt the most alive to me has always been clock town from Majora's mask, even though it's only a place with 4 small maps and less than 30 NPCs it feels so dynamic, there's movement everywhere, sounds of people living and going about... Even though it's barely even a simulacrum i think the "less is more" feeling really hits
I agree that smaller but more flashed-out cities feel much better than big full of props ones.
Zelda and bethesda rpgs made me enjoyed that type of "city" more.
I don't particularly care to be convinced something is as big as jt would make sense to be, or as filled with crap as you'd expect.
Of course in games like gta it makes sense to focus ln believable scale cities
But RPGs in medieval-esque settings, i more so value the immersive sim aspect lf being able to interact with any npc and any building in a dynamic way.
In a sense games like bg3 does it, though it also makes 99,9% of the city purely a background image in the distance.
@@UlissesSampaioThats why I love oblivion and Skyrim, and more recently shadows of doubt. You can enter any interior. Sure the inside might be uninspired but I prefer that over a false facade.
@@kotor610 besides that, in Oblivion, the first time I defeated a guard at low levels (using orc's superpower ability) and as able to loot *all* his equipment, It felt so damn mind-blowing. They strive to make the world as "real" as possible, with junk, physics (and a spinkle of jank :D )
Because the NPCs do have a full real life over the 3 days before everyone dies. I liked to just follow them and they all did something for the entire duration.
At least GTA:SA had those burglary missions where at night you could enter some homes to rob them, and by entering homes I mean getting teleported to a generic interior. But still.
A game described at that 19:00 minute mark, does exist. It's called Pathologic 2, and its rough. I could never get into it due to the difficulty, but the people I know who did swear it makes the game 200x better
The original Pathologic is somehow even rougher and messier despite being nearly the exact same map, and I love it to death for that. Something about how un-intuitive the layout of the town is, how fences will snake around and cordone off areas you need to get to in almost the exact path you're most likely to take to get there, and the way you're forced to walk at a snails pace the entire time while terrified about what new threat might pop up to derail your path entirely, the atmosphere is so damn suffocating. They did a fantastic job of creating a place where it feels like the ground itself hates you.
You skipped kingdom come deliverance in this analysis. An easter egg in the game is drone stuck in a tree, as their dedication to realism was such that they mapped out the local terrain themselves to match it as accurately as possible. These are towns and not cities perhaps but the dedication to realism is nuts in that game
Baldur's Gate in BG3 is one of my favourite video game cities. It feels so alive, it's very confusing to navigate at first but you eventually get to know it. The city seems a lot like the one in Witcher described here!
imo it's better coz u have actual bigtime quests there
It feels like the city exists without you, and their citizens are not waiting for you to meet them. It also helps that whoever you click has a voiced line to say even if it’s just for flavor.
Tho it’s just funny how every building in the game has their own super dungeon underneath it
@@marcusaaronliaogo9158 bro has never heard of basements
@@Pingviinimursu are all basements super dungeons that have entire cults and monsters?
Skyrim blunders so much on their scale.
Theres this huge attack on Whiterun, and there's like what... 10 soldiers active from each side, at a time?
I remember just being super deflated and this anticlimactic feeling when playing and going "oh... this is what it amounts to..?"
Yeah the civil war becomes so unbelievable when both armies combined feels like less than 50 soldiers.
I mentioned this on another vid it Skyrim quests like
‘Defend our capital from the invading hordes!’ take about ten minutes
But ‘Find my grandfathers fishing rod’ takes you halfway across the map, into the most complex dungeons with five tie-in journals of lore and a new lovable npc who’ll tragically die
To be fair, Skyrim came out in 2011.
And it was made by Bethesda, so with an engine that’s another ten to twenty years older than that.
(But really, they did quite a good job with the landscape as all the hills and mountains make it seem bigger than it is and the cities are the parts that deliver the least on that promise. The viking-inspired setting lessened the impact of this at least a bit in my opinion as we don’t associate the medieval north with huge population centers. Also the engine really couldn’t handle big numbers of NPCs well at the time.)
@@btarczy5067 Bethesda REALLY needs to let go of the Creation Engine. It is old and decrepit and holding them back. Starfield was a lesser game for having been made with it. I believe if Bethesda doesnt let go of their ancient engine, they will choke on it.
Being fair, the engine would probably implode if it tried to have more than ten soldiers to a side. On the other hand, maybe if your engine can’t handle large groups of NPCs fighting each other maybe you shouldn’t make one of your core plot lines about an active civil war with battalions meeting on the field of battle.
I think the only thing you missed in this great video, is that a lot of people don't say they want realism or they confuse the term realism with what games actually need, which is: Immersion
I'm not sure you said "immersion" a single time in this video, despite the fact you defined it lol
I'd say it's pretty impossible to design realism, the closest we could get is emergent behavior out of simulations.
3:42 Immersion spotted
And I think true Realism is achievable, just not cost and storage effective for a commercial product
@traior246 We wouldn't want total realism anyway. If you look at stories, dialogue is not how people talk, and you only ever see as much of the characters as drives the plot, gets information across of is just fun to watch.
Stories aren't real life and emulating them too hard simply makes them boring or bloated or difficult to penetrate, which is just as immersion breaking as "unrealistic" things going on.
I mean the point he made at the end of the video is that people don't really want realism.
@ZachBobBob yeah and my point is that there's really not a lot of people that are looking for realism, as he is implying a lot of people are looking for "realism". The closer to realism a game gets, the more niche its community is. He was fixated on "realism", when we all know it's immersion people want and need from video games and as the previous person replied, there's one mention of the term immersion in the video.
Night City is even more interesting because it feels like an Entity sometimes. Even in Dialogue people always talk about Night City in that way. Its a City you have to actively work with or you will go under. But on the other hand the City doesnt care for you.
You are nothing but another individual trying to survive in it.
I absolutely love this video. It feels like you are one of the only content creators who actually looks at gaming tech/philosophy/architecture the same way I do. I think that's what makes these games so great! Thanks
Shout-out to Milwaukee at 2:24 not sure why out of all cities he chose us but hey I will take it!
Because it’s my city!
@@razbuten Feels weird knowing you're in the same place as redlettermedia.
Love our city of Milwaukee. Did a double take when I saw it flash😂
@@razbuten crazy how much our skyline has grown over the last couple years 😊
I love when a game isn't afraid to look the player right in the eye and say, either directly or through its design, "this world was here long before you got here and it'll be here long after you're gone. It doesn't need saving, least of all from you. Now go try and make something of yourself."
Witcher 3 does that well-the Wild Hunt isn't Alduin. The apocalypse Ciri is destined to prevent in the good ending won't actually end the world for quite awhile. And Geralt is just one witcher.
Mount&Blade does it well too. Yeah, you can conquer all of Calradia like you're a latter-day Alexander the Great, but it's not going to go quietly, nor will it hand you anything along the way.
Places like Novigrad sell that illusion...or the shattering of the illusion that Skyrim's world constantly reinforces.
I fully agree with you and nontheless a game in which you actually deal (spoilers avoided and below) in apocalypse is baldurs gate. The world feels like it would exist without you and if you didn't exist someone else would to fill the gap. Like you don't matter in a weird way that you are the master chief but if it wasn't John Sierra 117 it would be John Doe 118. Like it is inevitable and like the citizens couldn't care less that you exist, only that you broke into their house and you deserve to die.
(SPOILERS prevent or cause it)
Exactly, my man
I never bothered finishing Skyrim cause for something asking for roleplay I couldn't get immersed for a second, everything, the places and the story felt so fake and videogame-y. Didn't expect anything starting TW3, lo and behold, I stopped to catch up on all the books cause I loved feeling that this world has history and I hated that I didn't know it
@@Tim_Belay Cities and towns are probably the top reasons a lot of Elder Scrolls fans have nostalgia for the older titles. TES II & III actually had cities where they added a bunch of low-detail places and npcs in order to get the scale up there. TES IV was when they made the decision to give every npc a radiant AI and a personality quirk.
And I never liked Skyrim's choice of making the player the messiah and the main quest almost mandatory.
The problem is the engines of the older titles really hasn't held up.
@@Helycon I love that world building. Make me random guy 153 and not some chosen one prophesized to save the world with that one special ability only he has. Just think if the chosen one (tm) slipped and broke his neck. How would the world react? If it goes up in flames in 2 seconds it's a terribly made world. No one ever is that important. Some other guy will step up. It won't be the same, sure, but the world keeps turning. I want to be the hero because I chose to do heroic deeds and not because I literally did not have even a choice in the matter.
@@Tim_Belayif you love exploring a fantasy world's history then I would really recommend morrowind. It can be a bit intimidating to get into gameplay and graphics wise but the writing and worldbuilding is fantastic, and after you get over the first hump (and maybe install some QoL mods if you're having trouble) it's a unique and fascinating story.
as soon as he mentioned powerlines in LC i knew exactly who he was gunna shout out. gotta love it!
If he hadn't done it then, I would've expected it from the discourse about rivers. AnyAustin's really burst onto the scene this year.
@@SimuLord hes easily become one of my favourites!
That AnyAustin vid on the GTA IV Power Lines was sooo good!!!!
That’s sooo cool you referenced it in this vid
* Talks to Nazeem *
* Immediately draws Sword *
Me: Slowly Nods in Approval
I wouldn’t say it’s a realistic city, but on of my favourites is from Sinking City, the flooded streets, boarded off sections, the fog and rotting fish, the creepy npcs
It does feel alive it feels sick and rotting
My favorite game city is still the city of Ark in the Skyrim total conversion mod Enderal. It really doubles down on the whole up=rich; down=poor thing - the city spans from a controlling religious order/government on the top of a mountain to a seedy and desperate undercity sprawling deep underground.
The mod's creators made these areas distinct both in aesthetic and gameplay. The religious order are your nominal allies, and interaction on their campus involves long philosophical conversations and weighty narrative choices. The under city is a constant fight to survive against attacks by lowlife and a variety of horrifying creatures, if you venture deep enough. In between are your more typical dockworkers, merchants, farmers, and the like, somewhat connecting the two worlds.
Long comment but this was the first game city I ever truly got lost in and it really left an impression.
Agree, Ark is one of the most well designed cities in any game I've played, both visually, thematically, and from an interactivity perspective.
Agree!
It saddens me that this mod isn't widely known. It should be discussed just as often as Skyrim or The Witcher
An interesting game to check out in terms of citybuilding is Kingdom Come Deliverance. It's possibly the one and only example of a video game world in which settlements are built to a realistic scale relative to how many inhabitants they accommodate, and those places truly feel real. Granted, they are mostly small villages and like one or two small-sized towns. But that particular developer team probably spent the most amount of time researching the historical accuracy of said settlements out of any developer team ever, so it makes sense that it's perhaps the only such example of a video game settlement that feels like it could be a real place that people live in.
I am looking forward to Kuttenberg in KCD2.
Novigrad was the first video game city that truly wowed me. It's the first rpg city that feels scaled appropriately and the city is dense and feels like it's actually a medieval/rpg liveable city.
Do you know the feeling when you have been outside of a city for a while. Somewhere in nature, maybe farmland. And then you come back to the city while you mind is still processing nature. You see the city as an outsider, you see it not as a whole but what it truly is a bunch of human made buildings near each other. It feels like another world. After a while your brain assimilates back into the city life and you start to feel like a part of it. Its real life immersion.
That kind of feeling of being an outsider looking in is something I have ONLY seen The Witcher 3 replicate and its amazing
The way you feel about Novigrad and the way the citizens have daily schedules, I was so amazed by with Shenmue when it first came out. Games have come a LONG way in that time, but that innovation feels incredible.
what should be said about Gothic games then :)
@ I haven’t played them, so I can’t say. When I was a kid, though, Shenmue felt like I was playing something that should have been an impossibility due to weather, time, date, phone numbers that you could call-the minute, boring details of life made the game feel like the closest thing to interacting with a false reality.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance can also be a bit of a masterclass in medieval city design.
Hell, just world design in general. I still cant get over how good those forests are in the game. It's almost a rule in game design that 'realism for realism's sake isn't fun', but somehow KCD gets around it and makes the adherence to realism work for it.
@@maynardburger 100%
especially if you play "hardcore" as in, you don't see yourself on the minimap or have a functioning compass, so you really need to navigate with landmarks.
I haven't played Shadows of Doubt, but based on the limited information I've heard, I'm curious how it would fit into this discussion.
I do feel like we're approaching a point where procedural generation might provide a means for fully-enterable cities - where the devs can carve out bespoke areas for the story, but anything else can be there if it strikes your fancy. Even if (or when) that's feasible, it still rolls back around to the fundamental question of whether that would meaningfully improve the experience.
If you see the framework, you can’t unsee it anymore.
Novigrad is actually not that far from the size of an actual medieval town. The building where a bit more packed back then, but fortified towns where often quite small by current standards, apart from some metropolis like London.
I think the thing I particularly enjoy about discussing cities in video games is seeing how video games incorporate the motifs of real world architecture to immerse players. Even those inexperienced with architecture beyond understanding the definition are affected by architecture every day. In video game cities, the architecture (or simulated architecture) does a great deal to inform players about the setting they are in. Novagrad does great at displaying architectural principles common in the midevil era of our real world and Cities in Horizon Zero Dawn blend a variety of architectural styles and signatures from across cultures to help express the values of a culture that doesn't exist.
"Let's pretend that this transition was... good."
Best transition I've ever witnessed, tbh
Cyberpunk is one of the only games i essentially never travel. The driving mechanics are decent, but even if they weren't the views and feel of the city is so sick (the sick radio stations help too)
I love the point you made about travelling around the roads in witcher, even the historical districts of old european cities like paris have mostly straight roads that continue for miles, while in games the roads wind and split in places that make no sense to make it feel more like an adventure
I was hoping for some kingdom come deliverance cities to be included since that feels perfect for this video but alas. This was great regardless, ty 🙏
One of my favorite things about xenoblade chronicles 1 is the way the colonies feel lived in. Having each and every NPC in colony 9 have their own schedules makes the world feel so lived in. The people dont feel like props, but actual people. They have their own connection to you as a resident of the colony, and they have relations to the other characters as well. It feels like a home
The thing I think is kinda cool about Novigrad is the fact that in the books Novigrad is brought up but the actually look of the city isn't really brought up at all so CD PR designed the entire city and you can kinda say the same thing for the entire Witcher world sense the Witcher books focus so heavily on characters
Oh, wow, I didn’t know that
@@Vagrant-Hex Yeah the author of the books even said that the Witcher world is an illusion a fake that is just barley in the background made simply to make the characters feel more reel I don't remember the exact quote but its something like that
@ That’s pretty cool. I have the Last Wish, but it has been so long since I’ve read it. Now I feel like cracking it open again. Thanks for the info, brother (or sister)
@@Rompstirdg I love how Sapkowski unintentionally ripped a giant hole in books like the Hunger Games series (a former girlfriend of mine loved the books and the movies, which led me to quip "you're 30 going on 13, aren't you?"), which has absolutely the worst, most utterly "it's cute that you think you are anything other than a hack, Suzanne Collins, but hey, you're the one with the money so what do I know" worldbuilding I've ever seen-if she and Emil Pagliarulo had a kid together, I think they'd have spawned a sort of writer's anti-Christ.
"Who cares, it's not important" is often the best medicine when it comes to sacrificing plot and pacing for world building (heck, it's the reason I needed the Cliffs Notes to get through Moby Dick in high school because Nathaniel Hawthorne was practically the trope maker for the 'leave this to the fanfic writers' school of excessive worldbuilding exposition.)
@@SimuLordI'm a little confused how the rips a hole in the hunger games can you please explain how I mean some books have basically no world building and focus almost entirely on the character like the Witcher and some focus almost entirely on the world kinda like LOTR that doesn't make any of them inherently worse it just means they have a different style
feel like kingdom come deliverance deserves a shout out for having really fucking believable cities
absolutely! I am basically just searching the comment section for comments praising kcd :D
Exactly. Doing a video like this without mentioning that game is a crime lol! If you're in search of an open world map done right, that's your goto game.
Cyberpunk is the only game I’ve played where its city feels alive. Night City truly feels like a futuristic city…even though there’s nothing much to do in it outside missions. The pure scale of buildings, noisy streets, demographics of each district, etc. feels authentic.
I thought the same thing about Novigrad. Probably the most blown away I have ever been by a videogame😂
Cyberpunk 2077, red dead 2 and GTA 4 and 5 are some of the most immersive worlds I've ever played in.
This - but without GTA V.
Id be interested im your take on the city simulation in Gothic 1&2. Despite their age (and not matching the scale) the sense of place these managed to create is quite unique to this day, and every inhabitant feels like they have a purpose.
Honorable mention to Kingdom Come. I dont think I ever felt as close to walking in an actual medieval town as in that game.
0:46 This man hated the question so much he was ready to see blood 🤣
That sword came out so fast 😭😭
I'm barely a minute and 8 seconds into the video. But something i've always considered is that. Video game worlds are always shrunk down from how big they're actually supposed to be. (With exceptions) Skyrim being my primary example when I think of this. The distance between everything is an afternoon jog all thing's considered. If you really wanted to go from markarth to winterhold. If you sprinted the whole way you could probably do it before 24 in game hours have passed ... I haven't tested this but i'm fairly sure you could, If you didn't stop the whole time. ... but in reality skyrim would be so much bigger than that. And it's cities equally grand. (Weather you take the elder scrolls mmo into account or not is irrelevant.)
Because most consoles and pc's can't handle a full blown world with billions of people constantly moving and interacting across several thousands of miles all at once! (Although it is improving on that front.) A lot of game worlds have their spaces and populations trimmed down to "Anything important" and some side stuff left in so it doesn't feel totally empty. We're meant to fill in the "empty space" that isn't there/visible with our minds. Yes we can travel from one city to another in minutes. But in reality it could take days or even months depending. We just have to imagine a lot of that time is spent inbetween. .... Think of it like nether travel in minecraft. Every block in the nether is 8 blocks in the overworld. Every step in skyrim "the game" is a good 10-20 feet in "lore" .... Does this matter? No. Not really. But it's a way I like to interpret things.
Again there are exceptions to this. Fuel (That car game with the enormous playable map.), Elite dangerous, No man's sky (Really any procedurally generated world can count. Minecraft. The long drive. Etc) You get the point.
The word you are looking for is verisimilitude: the act of making something fictitious feel real or true
As someone who devoutly played basically every Pokemon game, I always thought Skyrim cities felt pretty big lol
They all have like 8 total buildings tho lol
One city has three buildings... and the excuse? A natural disaster 80 years ago! TES4: Oblivion has more and bigger cities than TES5: Skyrim.
And before any smart-ass says, yes Cyrodiil the province where Oblivion is set has larger cities in lore than the province of Skyrim, but that's not a justification for even smaller villages to represent cities in-game when the game engine should be levelling thr size of cities up, not down.
@@antiochus87 the game engine is the same
@@RandalGravesNN So? My point is significantly less effort went into the "cities" in Skyrim than Oblivion. If the game engine is the same, then we should expect an equivalent number of equivalent sized cities, not far less and far smaller.
@@antiochus87 "less effort" yet oblivion is so fucking hideous it's unplayable without nostalgia while skyrim holds on 15 years later with just one update, not counting mods.
Is it just me or do the big gaming video essay channels often have very similar video ideas at the same time?
Inspiration and imitation.
Despite not being the typical video game city, I think Yharnam (and to a lesser extent other FromSoft cities) also really creates that illusion of actually being a functioning city despite all its inherents weirdness and it clearly existing in order to "funnel" the player through the "storyline"/game.
Really? Wouldn't agree at all. For me, basically all the Souls games have a distinct feeling of being terribly unrealistic, disjointed and out of scale, but they get away with it cuz it's beautiful and fun to explore. They are distinctly 'gamey' in design and that's perfectly ok, especially for a non-open world.
Agree. Aside from Yharnam, Leyndell from Elden Ring is one the most impressive video game cities I've seen. The level design and environmental storytelling is topnotch.
My favourite fantasy City is and always will be Khorinis from Gothic II. Small but feels right in place and a good layout and atmosphere.
Those talking points you made at the start about Skyrim... I feel like I've heard about them almost exactly from someone else.
This video definitely lacks any city/village from KCD as well as Los Angeles from L.A. Noire.
19:22 dwarf fortress?
No no, 3D dwarf fortress
@@crestFall1Dwarf Fortress is 3D its just rendered in 2D slices
Night City is the most realistic game city I've been in, at least in terms of contemporary city, not medieval or pre-modern time. It feels more alive and lived in than Los Santos or Liberty City despite they are based on real world places. It feels more like Hong Kong than Sleeping Dogs or latest Test Drive Unlimited. The environmental cues, the background sounds, the smell the visual evokes, the density of people, Night City makes you feel like you're in a real city. The next closest game that features a city that feels real is New York City from the Spiderman games.
Novigrad is tiny though. Assassin's creed has come the closest to balancing the two. But even they sacrificed city size in their bigger open world titles. Baghdad and Paris are two of the closest to real size that come to mind though.
Honestly I'm surprised you never mentioned Kamurocho in the Yakuza/RGG series. That "city" (just a district technically) is one of the densest locations in a video game. There are stores and activities in corners of almost every building, night life is swarming around you, and to account for the density it's a comparatively tiny plot of space. It's sort of the inverse of Los Santos; you're expected to walk among it and become intimately familiar with this small little space while being endlessly distractable by it all. It becomes a sort of home without ever feeling mundane.
You should really look at Radiata Stories on PS2, where every single NPC have week long schedules. Nearly every single NPC can be recruited as well.
I was waiting all video for it to be mentioned, and then it wasn't. Yeah, Radiata Stories is a great example of the video's topic.
Vice City was my first exposure to a world in a video game that was believable. The NPCs have very distinct accents depending on which part of town you’re in and the layout is very reminiscent of 80’s Miami.
Rockstar are masters of this. GTA 4/5 and red dead 1/2 are so immersive, but if you go back, even games like GTA 3 have this incredible immersion to them that nothing else around that time could capture.
Most might disagree but I think Night City is one of the best Open World cities in any video game
The city is good. The NPC’s ruined the immersion for me way too much though.
i dont like cyberpunk 2077 much as a game but night city is definitely my favorite city setting in gaming from a design and aesthetics standpoint
Best looking but any city RDR2 is much more immersive
Sim City is hands down the goat! Come fight me 😅😸😄😆
@@smartiechuco bro give the game another chance Damn 😭
Great video essay, and analysis! Throughly enjoyable and feel like this was really well made. Just putting in some engagement for ya
Love how the background music changes with each game! :)