Video Game Cities Are Weird

0:00 When I first played The Witcher 3, I thought I had the full measure of what it

0:03 was capable of after a dozen or so hours of playtime,

0:06 but then I reached Novigrad and it kind of blew my mind.

0:09 I had played plenty of massive open-world games by that point in my life,

0:13 but while some had incredible and expansive wilds to journey

0:16 across and others had dense and detailed cities to explore,

0:20 I had never played one that did both convincingly.

0:22 In the ones that tried to, the cities never felt realistic.

0:26 For instance, take Skyrim.

0:27 While each of the cities are intriguing

0:30 and impressive in terms of theming and visual design,

0:33 they don’t really feel like proper cities;

0:35 they are far too small and singular in focus,

0:38 and their populations are miniscule, with each city having the amount of people

0:41 you’d historically expect to find in a small village,

0:43 and not a place with a fortified keep.

0:45 I don’t know, like when Nazeem asks if you’ve been to the Cloud district lately,

0:48 it’s a bit baffling because how could you not as there

0:51 is barely any separation between it and the rest of Whiterun.

0:54 Now, the choice to have smaller cities

0:56 makes sense given the general design goals

0:58 of Skyrim—they want you to feel like you can interact with anyone and anything,

1:02 and creating bigger cities where most of the inhabitants and buildings

1:05 largely act as set dressing would take away that aspect.

1:08 Also trying to scale the cities to something closer

1:11 to reality probably would have broken Skyrim’s engine irrevocably.

1:14 Regardless, of it being the right choice for the game,

1:17 it does still have the effect of making the world feel weaker.

1:21 It makes it all the more obvious that it is

1:23 just a representation of a city and not an actual one.

1:26 Novigrad however really feels like a city.

1:29 There are people everywhere you look,

1:31 all going about their business—and more often than not it isn’t

1:34 them just doing one task in one place for all time.

1:37 They move around, they seemingly have schedules

1:40 and jobs and important places to be.

1:42 Along with that, there are more buildings than

1:45 you can reasonably keep track of, the majority

1:47 of which tower over you making it feel like

1:49 the city itself is a world of its own.

1:51 It can’t be understood in just one glance and is as easy to get

1:55 lost within as the vast marshes and mountains of the world outside the walls.

1:59 Novigrad feels alive.

2:00 There is an energy to it that’s undeniable

2:03 and makes the game far richer because of it.

2:06 The city matches the scale of the rest of the world,

2:09 and how it operates as well as the fact that it exists within a larger context,

2:13 provides a sort of realism to it.

2:16 It could be a real city in a real world.

2:20 Now, of course in reality it couldn’t and isn’t meant to be.

2:23 The design goal of cities in real life is to adequately provide housing,

2:23 utilities, transportation, and work to those living in or around it.

2:24 Major cities are made to accommodate hundreds of thousands of people,

2:27 and require countless considerations in order to build something

2:30 that supports the people who reside within it simultaneously.

2:33 In games however, the design goal generally

2:35 is to support just one person: the player.

2:38 The infrastructure of a video game city doesn’t need to provide

2:41 anything for the NPCs living in it because their needs don’t exist.

2:45 It doesn’t matter that new ships will never come into Novigrad’s

2:48 harbor or that these carts in Assassin’s Creed 2 are

2:50 always stationary or that the powerlines in Liberty City don’t really

2:54 make any sense—although it does make for a fire AnyAustin video.

2:58 Actually, in that video he makes a point about

3:01 how video games are top down representations of real spaces.

3:04 The aim of developers is to capture a vibe, not create a functional place,

3:08 so they aren’t focused on creating practical cities—they’re

3:11 focused on creating something that feels close enough.

3:14 With the exception of stuff like City Skylines,

3:18 the vast majority of video game cities aren’t truly simulations,

3:23 they’re simulacrums—a word I only know from Dungeons and Dragons

3:27 and therefore am almost certainly missing its full philosophical context.

3:31 They are an imitation that doesn’t have the components to truly operate,

3:34 but when viewed from a certain perspective,

3:36 they are able to convincingly fake it.

3:39 Novigrad is not a functioning city,

3:40 however it has all the trappings of one that is,

3:43 making it extremely easy to suspend disbelief and feel that sense

3:46 of immersion we so often hope to find in games.

3:49 This illusion only takes a tiny amount of investigation to shatter though.

3:53 If you spend time following different people in the city,

3:55 you’ll find that each is not an individual, they are an archetype.

3:58 One who is assigned a zone to operate within and then move

4:02 around interacting with environmental prompts that align

4:04 with whatever their assigned tasks are.

4:06 She’ll clean clothes in any washtub she comes across,

4:08 he’ll pick up boxes to take from one spot to another,

4:12 he’ll count the inventory of every pile of stuff he sees,

4:14 but there is no rhyme or reason for any of it;

4:17 doing these things doesn’t give them new clothes to wear or earn them

4:20 money to help support their lifestyle or change the resources the city has,

4:24 because why would it?

4:25 Who cares about a nameless NPCs ability to meaningfully change their life?

4:30 What does matter is that at a glance,

4:32 it seems as if whatever they’re doing could.

4:34 And, in all likelihood, you’ll only give them a glance.

4:37 In the game, you’re a witcher and have better things to do

4:40 than watch this guy saw this piece of wood without ever making progress.

4:44 You’ve got a daughter to find and monsters to slay,

4:47 so while you may take a moment to appreciate the moving piece of the city,

4:50 the game is designed in a way where you’re

4:53 most likely just going to run by these people

4:55 because what you have going on is more important

4:57 and interesting than any single person’s mundane life here.

5:00 The game doesn’t need to do anything more because all that matters is

5:04 that it adds to the player’s sense that this is a real place,

5:07 giving more weight to the aspects of the gameplay

5:10 and story that actually do matter to them.

5:12 When Ciri feels like a missing part of a place with a sense of life to it,

5:16 it makes finding her feel even more important.

5:18 Designing a city in a way that enhances the player’s

5:21 experience obviously goes beyond how it operates or seems to operate,

5:24 it also can be seen in its layout.

5:27 Historically, major cities in the real world sprung up near

5:30 various water sources that best allowed for agriculture and trade,

5:33 and then had to take the natural environment

5:35 into account when developing their infrastructure; in games,

5:37 devs aren’t having to figure out how to build around the natural landscape,

5:41 they’re making the landscape.

5:43 The two can be developed together to match the architect's

5:46 vision and not have to compromise to account for reality.

5:49 The existence of a river might be used

5:51 in the lore to justify why a city is there,

5:53 but the actual reason is to give the player something to interact with.

5:57 So whether it be Novigrad’s river, terrain,

5:59 or placement of buildings—they all exist for the player and have the dual

6:02 purpose of seeming like a plausible feature

6:04 while also being engaging to play around.

6:06 Now, this all can be a hard line to walk,

6:09 especially when certain goals may be at odds with one another.

6:12 For instance, it seems pretty clear that CD

6:14 Projekt Red wanted Novigrad to feel like

6:15 a maze of a city that anyone could get lost in, but at the same time,

6:19 as the game puts a lot of emphasis on exploration,

6:22 they almost certainly wanted it to feel

6:24 navigable as to not create constant friction

6:26 for players whenever they try to go from one spot in the city to the another.

6:30 Depending on the quests the player pursues and choices they make,

6:33 one can spend an inordinate amount of time in just the city alone,

6:36 so making sure that moving through it didn’t feel worse than

6:39 moving through any other area of the game mattered a fair bit.

6:42 To their credit, as confusing as Novigrad may seem,

6:45 it is one of the few areas in The Witcher 3

6:48 where I feel like not using a mini-map is extremely viable,

6:51 and this is done through the inclusion

6:53 of clever landmarks and terrain that help guide players.

6:55 For instance, a few branches of the Pontar River cut through Novigrad,

7:00 creating distinct sections of the city.

7:02 To the south are the docks and various gang controlled neighborhoods,

7:05 in the center is the market district

7:07 which is also alongside some gang controlled neighborhoods,

7:09 and to the north is temple isle,

7:11 which is controlled by the worst gang of them all, the church of eternal fire.

7:16 There is a lot of space to get lost within,

7:18 but the various water features around Novigrad tend

7:20 to make it easy to get your bearings.

7:22 Finding the river gives you a straight shot to the docks and out of the city.

7:26 It also is right near Heirarch’s square which is

7:29 where many shops and quests are based out of.

7:31 Following the coast gives an easy path

7:34 through the docks and also to Temple Isle,

7:36 and even when further away from the bay, the sails of the ships docked in it can

7:41 be spotted from many different places across the city,

7:43 giving players something to orient themselves when a bit lost.

7:47 As for how it uses the terrain,

7:49 there are exceptions to this, but generally when going

7:51 north the elevation increases and when going south it decreases.

7:54 There are exceptions,

7:55 but generally when heading north there is an increase in elevation.

7:56 I imagine this choice stems from how we tend

7:57 to associate north with up and south with down,

8:00 so having that reflected in the topography feels pretty natural.

8:05 They also tie different social classes to various elevations,

8:08 with the upper class being at the top

8:10 of the hill and the lower class being at the bottom.

8:13 This has a fair bit of historical basis as nobles and royalty were often

8:17 settled at the top of hills

8:18 as they offered more protection from potential attacks,

8:20 but here it mostly serves to further create

8:23 a distinction between the various spots in the city.

8:25 Quest design even plays a role in making

8:27 the city more manageable to navigate by having

8:29 the starting locations for main quests and major

8:32 side quests all pretty easy to keep track of.

8:34 You can pretty much draw a straight line from the Rosemary

8:38 and Thyme to Hierarch’s Square to Sigimund’s bathhouse to the Passiflora,

8:41 And these are all places that are significant to the story being told.

8:45 While there are tons of streets that weave throughout Novigrad,

8:47 many end up funneling players down this line through the center of the city,

8:51 so if you can just have an understanding of that line,

8:53 you’ll typically be able to figure out where

8:55 to go without needing to overly rely on your mini-map.

8:58 Of course, some players still will just focus on their mini-map,

9:01 but those who don’t or have turned it

9:03 off completely won’t really be that disadvantaged for it.

9:06 Now, the inclusion of these aspects don’t mean that players

9:09 will never get lost or struggle to find a location,

9:11 but the general layout and the natural guides it

9:14 has most likely will lessen how often it happens.

9:17 These aspects aren’t necessarily things you will

9:19 actively think of when exploring the city, but they can be felt,

9:22 and this sort of subtle approach can have a huge

9:25 impact on how comfortable a player feels within a space.

9:28 Novigrad’s clever design leads to a city that not

9:30 only feels lived in, but feels lived in by you,

9:33 and by the end of your quest to find Ciri within it,

9:36 it goes from a city you thought you’d never understand to one you largely do.

9:40 I think it’s worth mentioning that despite being an entirely fictional city,

9:44 Novigrad does take cues from real medieval ones,

9:46 and its similarity to them kind of provides a level of legitimacy.

9:50 Some titles of course take this a step

9:52 further by being set in real world locations.

9:55 In Assassin’s Creed II for instance Ubisoft constructed mildly

9:58 faithful recreations of famous cities like Florence and Venice.

10:01 The layout of the land is mostly the same,

10:04 and they contain many real world buildings

10:05 that the game regularly points out to the player

10:08 and provides information on, and this gives a sort

10:10 of validity to the city as a whole.

10:12 Almost like if these buildings are right, then the others must be as well,

10:15 and of course that’s not really the case.

10:17 The buildings that fill in the rest

10:19 of each city are plausible, but not accurate.

10:21 Doing a perfect one-to-one recreation of what a city

10:24 looked like over 500 years ago would be impossible, and more importantly,

10:28 it wouldn’t support the main goal of the game which is to make

10:32 Ezio’s climbing and freerunning feel as fun and interesting as they can.

10:35 Everything is scaled so that the player always has

10:38 an opportunity to make a daring escape or an undetected approach.

10:41 Buildings tend to be perfect jumping distances from each other,

10:44 windows and other ornamentations are spaced at just the right

10:47 distance to almost never halt Ezio in his tracks,

10:50 and, of course, hay bales are never far from the highest lookouts in the city.

10:54 It takes just enough from reality to make the city believable,

10:57 but then every aspect of how it operates

10:59 from the people walking around who you can

11:01 blend in with to scaffolding that helps you

11:03 get from the street level to the rooftops, is in service of gameplay.

11:07 Another, more modern example of this can be

11:09 seen in Grand Theft Auto 5 with Los Santos.

11:12 Now while it is inspired by Los Angeles,

11:14 Los Santos is still clearly a fictional place.

11:17 It has plenty of notable LA landmarks that even

11:19 people who have never been there would recognize,

11:21 but it isn’t worried about presenting them faithfully,

11:24 giving Rockstar more freedom with how they structure every bit of the city.

11:27 In fact, they do a lot to change up the terrain,

11:30 and it actually uses the same elevation trick as Novigrad where,

11:33 atl east in the city proper,

11:35 going up hill tends to take you north and to richer areas,

11:37 where going down hill brings you south and to lower

11:40 income parts of the city—a technique Rockstar seems

11:42 to be somewhat fond of as it can also

11:44 be seen with Saint Denis in Red Dead Redemption 2.

11:47 Regardless, the inclusion of aspects that many people see everyday

11:50 whether it be in person or in film or television,

11:53 provides a familiarity to the city that makes it more believable,

11:56 but then everything else is meant to improve the gameplay.

11:59 What I find most interesting about Los Santos though,

12:01 and this can really be said for every city in the Grand Theft Auto series,

12:05 is that certain aspects that are brought in from real life,

12:07 serve an opposite function within the game.

12:10 For example, traffic cones, and delineators,

12:13 and stop signs aren’t placed around the world

12:15 to give you something to look out for and avoid,

12:17 they are there for you to run into.

12:20 Honestly, this is even why pedestrians are around.

12:23 Grand Theft Auto is a series about ignoring inhibition,

12:26 of leaning into chaos and intrusive thoughts that cross your mind.

12:30 The things that are there in real life to get

12:33 us to pay attention and slow down and be safe,

12:35 are meant to not just be ignored in Grand Theft Auto, but to be transgressed.

12:39 It is a city that looks the same as ones in the real world,

12:42 but the way players are supposed to engage with it

12:45 is fundamentally in opposition with how they would in real life.

12:48 Honestly, I think this is part of why with GTA

12:51 and other games that take a similar approach to it,

12:53 people get annoyed that they can’t enter every building they come across.

12:57 While this obviously isn’t something most of us would do in the real world,

13:00 theoretically you have the ability to break into almost anywhere,

13:03 sso the fact that in a game that is all about theft and destruction of property,

13:07 most buildings don’t have insides you can break into, the absence is noticed.

13:12 Of course, having interiors for every single

13:14 building would be a ridiculous use of time,

13:17 and the benefits of it would not outweigh the toll it would have on the studio,

13:22 but pragmatism aside, not being able to enter any house does still have a slight

13:26 negative impact on the experience the game is trying to cultivate.

13:30 All things considered though, these hiccups are pretty few and far between.

13:35 The city and how it operates is designed to help

13:37 allow the player do what they want without many obstacles.

13:40 Roads are bigger relative to cars than they are

13:43 in the real world making it easy to swerve between them.

13:46 Despite Los Santos being based on LA,

13:48 you also never will find yourself in a traffic jam.

13:51 Curbs are low and easy to drive over, exits on the highway are frequent,

13:55 and places to hideout from the cops during a chase

13:58 where no one will rat you out are abundant.

14:00 Like even Los Santos’ demographics play into this.

14:02 There isn’t a single kid in the city—if Rockstar had included them,

14:06 in order for the game to get a rating,

14:07 they probably would have had to go the Skyrim route of making them invincible,

14:11 which would have impeded on the players

14:13 ability to be as destructive as they want,

14:15 so to not get in the way of that, they’re just not there at all.

14:19 The Grand Theft Auto series is meant to feel like a chaotic playground,

14:22 and while on the surface it resembles a real city,

14:25 the shifts it makes to real things are just enough to allow you

14:28 to engage with it in a way most people never would in their own life.

14:32 In contrast to this, in Rockstar’s follow up to GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2,

14:36 the design goal seems much more about including

14:39 things that will enhance the story of Arthur Morgan.

14:43 It is still a bit of a chaos playground,

14:46 but by and large the game wants players to experience

14:49 his life and not just use him as an avatar for destruction.

14:52 While there are choices that do influence who Arthur becomes,

14:55 there is a distinct story the game is aiming to tell,

14:58 and almost every aspect of the world plays a role in telling it,

15:02 and this is reflected beautifully with the city of Saint Denis.s.

15:06 Reaching Saint-Denis is a pivotal point of the story for Arthur.

15:09 Throughout the whole game,

15:10 the Pinkertons are closing in on the Van Der Linde gang,

15:13 pushing them into a corner, and Saint Denis is that corner.

15:17 It represents the way of life they have been rejecting this whole time.

15:21 Where Novigrad feels similar to the rest

15:23 of the world of the Witcher 3 just massively compressed,

15:25 Saint Denis feels like a whole new world all together.

15:29 The roads are all paved in stone,

15:31 trollies attached to powerlines weave through the streets,

15:34 and smoke from the factories clog the skies.

15:37 Civilization is creeping into the frontier that Arthur

15:40 and gang has rode and ruled over, and time is starting to run out.

15:44 It is designed to make you feel equal parts awe

15:47 and dread as this new way of life starts to take over,

15:50 and it also aligns thematically with the struggles Arthur

15:52 is going through during this section of the game.

15:54 What or who can he trust in in this ever changing world?

15:57 Who is he if everything he once lived by gets left behind?

16:01 What does it mean to live a good life?

16:04 Technically players can reach Saint-Denis whenever they want,

16:06 but coming by it through the natural progression of the narrative,

16:09 creates a really powerful moment of story aligning with setting.

16:12 Of course, while I do love when games use

16:14 the juxtaposition of going from an open expanse to a dense

16:17 metropolis to hammer home a theme as it also serves

16:20 to make the world as a whole feel more cohesive,

16:22 and like it exists beyond the game,

16:24 there is also something to be said about titles

16:26 that use their setting to make players feel eternally isolated.

16:29 Take, Cyberpunk 2077, it largely takes place all within Night City,

16:33 and it sort of does the opposite of Grand Theft Auto

16:36 5 in terms of not getting in the way of the player.

16:38 Where Los Santos is simple and quick to navigate,

16:41 Night City is an utter mess of roads and buildings that barely make sense.

16:45 There’s a really great video by Morphologis

16:47 where he examines the design of Night City,

16:50 and one of the major things he talks about there is how

16:52 it really feels like a product of the setting it takes place within.

16:56 Cyberpunk as genre is one where corporations and capitalism

16:59 are king and red tape and regulations are for losers.

17:03 When some industry needs a building or a road

17:06 or anything really that will help their bottom line,

17:08 it gets built regardless of its long-term efficacy.

17:10 Night City is an amalgamation of countless ventures that are barely compatible,

17:15 making the city itself a nightmare to move through efficiently.

17:18 And, as I brought up with Novigrad,

17:21 while it may create the desired effect of feeling

17:23 lost within and locked in to the city,

17:26 it also risks alienating players whenever they have to move through it,

17:29 but what’s different here is that navigation feeling so

17:31 sloppy plays into the major themes of the setting.

17:34 That of overwhelming urban expansion that hardly

17:36 cares about the people living there.

17:38 In the scheme of the greater system you barely are even recognized as a pawn,

17:43 and the city is almost suffocating in an oddly beautiful way.

17:46 Unlike Novigrad, Night City is not meant to ever be understood,

17:49 and while you may be able to orient around some major structures

17:51 and figure out the layout of a few more regularly traveled areas,

17:54 it is hard to ever break free

17:56 of the navigational tools the game offers like the mini-map.

17:59 And for those who watch me a lot,

18:00 you might assume I’d think this is a bad thing,

18:02 but I actually think it works better here than in most titles as another

18:06 major aspect of the genre and this game in particular is a reliance on tech.

18:10 It is the main way your character gets upgraded and is a part of who they are,

18:14 so needing to rely on a mini-map to get

18:17 pretty much anywhere fits in perfectly with this concept.

18:20 Despite exploration being an element of Cyberpunk 2077’s design,

18:23 it’s not what the game really centers around,

18:26 at least when compared to something like The Witcher 3.

18:28 The point of Novigrad’s scope is to make searching

18:30 for Ciri feel like looking for a needle in a haystack,

18:33 but the point of Night City’s scope is

18:35 to make living within it feel inescapable and heavy,

18:38 which I imagine is why CD Projekt Red leaned more into creating

18:41 an incredibly dense and abstruse place instead of one with obvious signposting.

18:45 The idea of a world beyond Night City almost feels impossible,

18:48 and that’s also what makes it feel so enticing.

18:52 I think the reason cities in games pique my interest in a different way than

18:56 other settings do is because of how layered they need to be to feel realistic.

19:00 There are so many moving pieces all concentrated in a relatively small space,

19:04 and that is a harder thing to fake than a village or a cave or a forest.

19:08 When looked at beyond the surface level,

19:09 almost all of them feel wrong in one way or another.

19:10 Realism in games is a pretty common talking point,

19:12 and as graphical capabilities become more

19:14 robust and mechanical systems more complex,

19:16 we get closer and closer to being able

19:19 to make games that truly simulate more of reality.

19:22 While I am sure that there could be

19:24 an incredible title where you are an inhabitant

19:25 of a simulated city—one where the actions of NPCs change the state of the world,

19:29 where the locations of things matter in order to keep the city running,

19:33 where any action you make can interrupt the process of the place you’re

19:36 in—I don’t think that this kind of dedication to realism will make games better.

19:40 It sounds good and in the right context could be good,

19:43 but for the most part, I don’t think it’d actually serve most titles.

19:47 Games are tailored experiences aimed to get players to feel specific ways,

19:52 and that means creating a reality to make them feel a certain way.

19:57 And I think that’s what players want.

20:00 They want a city that feels alive and is intuitive to move through,

20:03 they want one that enhances the core gameplay,

20:06 they want one that allows them to experiment

20:08 in ways they never could in real life,

20:10 they want one that enhances the story being told.

20:13 Video games cities are weird because if they weren’t they

20:15 wouldn’t be able to support the vision of their respective games.

20:18 Ultimately, as much as we may say we might,

20:21 I don’t think we really want realism,

20:24 at least not to its fullest extent—it’s limiting

20:27 and in the context of games often pointless;

20:30 what I think we actually want is the illusion of realism

20:36 but as recognizing that something is an illusion often breaks the illusion,

20:40 I guess let’s just say we do want realism.

20:43 And while we’re doing some pretending,

20:47 let’s pretend like this transition is good.

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