Vidya Cities

There are too few good urban environments in video games.

They can be gorgeously detailed levels that have signage, graffiti, bars and shops, highway traffic, garbage, and other decorations that give it an organic feel but they also don't let you explore very much of it and are over before you know it and your next level is in a completely different environment.

They can also be boring. They can also be barren, either as bland corridors or labyrinths where everything looks the same and one can get frustrated trying to find a way out.

Worse yet, they can be theme parks with levels rigidly defined around one specific motif like Hospital Land, Wharf Land, Garden Land, or Science Lab Land.

Most games with memorable cities are guilty of the first attribute and include Resident Evil 2, Final Fantasy 7, and beat-em-ups like the Double Dragon games; even Bioshock is guilty of this by having an introductory level that feels like an organic city before it shoves you into its rigid theme park structure (but at least it was more memorable and felt a little more like a city than Bioshock Infinite's Columbia).

The only good urban environment I've ever come across was Resident Evil 3 because the entire game is a lovingly detailed city that you spend exploring in; it's immersive enough to give the impression that you're really in a city.

I would be grateful to know if there are more games like it.

Oh yeah, there's another city I'd like to talk about: the one in Hotline Miami parts 1 and 2. As good as those games are: there's this psychedelic color gradient that substitutes the ground in most of the levels so there are no lawns, sidewalks, or streets to look at (oddly enough, there is ground in Beard's levels which is a quirky trait for his levels to complement his quirky playstyle).

The problem I have with this is that it doesn't really give a good impression of taking place in Miami: it might as well be taking place in Iowa or whatever. Plus, your characters apparently live in houses that have locked doors that lead directly outside because you can walk over where it's suggested other rooms or apartments would be and it completely breaks the immersion.

...

Sleeping Dogs had pretty much the best city design in any other vidya I've played. The first areas were the most comfy.
And rain during nighttime was godlike.

And its all ruined cause car driving was shit.

What is the best open world city anyway? I just wanna fuck around for an hour or two in a car.

GTA4

No screen space reflections, just a badly misplaced cubemap? Disgusting.

The best vidya open world cities aren't in settings featuring cars. What you want, though, is burnout paradise.

The game looks great. I just didn't have any screenshots saved so I simply found one on google.
Most likely a consoleshit screenshot.

Watch Dogs also has a nice city, also ruined by awful driving controls.

Hengasha in DXHR is a flawless example of this. It's gorgeously detailed, and you can explore a lot of places, but it's so good that it ends up being too small. Mankind Divided suffered from the opposite issue, the main hub was massive but fairly boring because it's all identical eurotrash.


Agreed, Sleeping Dogs was excellent and felt more cyberpunk than some cyberpunk games I've played, even though it was just a kung-fu cop movie in game format.

I have high hopes for Cyberpunk 2077, given that Pondsmith talked about rainy nights specifically when discussing it.


It was mediocre at best, tbh. If you strayed off the beaten path, you could run into some really janky shit. Pic related.

Again, though, the nighttime rain ambiance was amazing. Even better when you modded back in the fancy effects they showed off at E3. And the stealth driving missions were amazing, probably the best part of the game.

What about the games where the cities themselves are the central characters of their respective games?

That's a valid point but RE3 has very photo-realistic visuals (for it's time anyway).


Thank you. That screenshot made me say to myself "Why did I stop playing that game?".


I don't like anything that advertises its settings as characters. That's what Hugo Weaving said about the titular church in his book, the Humpback of Notre Dame, that it was a character.

Unless Los Santos and Liberty City are secretly robots that can sprout legs and talk to humans: they're not real characters.

Environments are not characters unless it's some Xenoblade Chronicles shit where you're actually living on a giant mecha. Although I will content that Liberty City is great and I know the streets as if I actually lived there because I played GTA IV so much Los Santos sucks though. The city isn't as big as it oughta be and the forest and desert areas don't make up for it

Liberty City in GTA IV was gritty and ugly as hell in the good way but Los Santos in V had no soul.

The pre-rendered backgrounds do look good, but you're railroaded even more than Bioshock.

Has no soul just like Los Angeles, which makes it a good interpretation imo.

San Andreas is probably the best for that. The ability to drive around a city, then go cross country, and into another entirely different city is pretty comfy.

>liking (((urban))) enviroments

Fuck off nigger

Even though it was smaller, San Andreas' version of Los Santos felt bigger. Every district had a distinct feel to it, you could tell when you were in the ghetto vs down town. Not just the city either, every area across the whole map had a unique feeling. V's Los Santos was bigger scale-wise, but everything just just feels the same no matter where you are.

i dunno if they fixed ai in this because i have the an old pirated version where ai can just blast though puddles on the ground while you fucking spin out

But this is just wrong.

Name five inanimate objects from famous stories that are characters.