Towns in most RPGs have just like 4 or 5 buildings with a potion and some pocket change hidden inside them. The villagers would be lucky if they had a single bathroom in the whole place.
Error of Ruto
They are also designed for one player to walk through them, instead of the millions of people a normal city has.
Like, how many of those cities have a functioning public transport?
GTA and Cyberpunk are the only ones that come to mind
My city has millions of people and no functioning public transport.
What did you mean by this?
WoW had it for intercity travel. Maybe it still does, feels weird that that game is still around lol.
Racing games tho
Come visit Europe.
Mate, I live in “Europe” and my town is a hellscape.
Average person living in Ludwigshafen
Same goes for living on college campus dorms.
It’s the one time in american life that anyone gets to live in a walkable community.
Imagine no cars when you got a physical disability, and two kids who need to be taken to school in winter, I’ll just toss em on my back and fly.
And yes perfect transit and funding would fix this. When that happens I’ll show you a pig flying
Man, I’m crippled. You’ve entirely missed the point.
The concept here is the entire way a city or community is laid out and designed.
You wanna see a solution to your problem?
Look at any city that currently exists that has at least half decent public transit, or town where its reasonably safe to walk to common places you’d need to go.
There are tons of these, by the way, places that have figured out how to do this.
You’re mad that you live in a poorly designed and poorly funded exurb area.
Howabout this?
Sell your inconviently located home, at the current market rate, and move to somewhere that doesn’t have these problems.
What, is too much of your net worth tied up in your home?
Wow! How did that happen?
I wonder why your community is built in such a way that that could happen… maybe decades and decades of giving handouts to homeowners and driving up their prices and requiring everything else in reality bend over backwards to subsidize them… has maybe just completely proven to be fundamentally economically unviable, with infrastructure needing to be spread too far and thin, constantly being subsidized by the urban core areas that generate the vast majority of jobs and tax revenue?
If that doesn’t make sense…
I’m sorry.
In addition to your physical ailments…
You also have terminal car brain. Yes, it’s fatal.
Having large sidewalks, bikelanes and good public transport does not mean that you are not allowed to bring your kids to school in your car.
However, it means that your kids could walk to school or use the bike/bus in an environment that is safer and less polluted.
In pedestrian-friendly cities, children usually just walk to school. They’re called 15 minute cities because because you can get anywhere you need, including schools, in 15 minutes.
Also, because there’s fewer roads to maintain, and the majority of people walk, the streets actually get plowed and handicapped folks often have an easier time getting around than in car-centric cities.
my 15 minute car city is a 25 minute ebike city and it’s pretty great
They’re called 15 minute cities
Or just the average European city or small town
Good point, SUVs for everyone is the only truly enlightened path.
Creating an exaggerated argument to argue against, one that no one made, does not nothing but display your emotional immaturity.
How so? The person they replied to is also mocking in bad faith.
“i have a disability and your idea doesn’t work for me or people like me”
“shut up that is bad faith go back to being a doormat and never mention disability again”
now why do i see this conversation spring up everywhere people on the internet are discussing getting rid of cars
The true road to enlightenment starts when you realize that SUVs just aren’t fit to haul your kids and your groceries, and that the only logical path forward is to buy a massive lifted truck that puts a Sherman tank to shame to drive your statistical 37 miles per day in some modicum of safety.
You do know that other places in the world have disabled people and children who go to school, right?
They seem to still be alive.
They also tend to have less sprawl, more homogenous and high trust societies (relative to where most people live in the US), and a shaky history of true legally enforced disability considerations. On that latter part, there still isn’t a good equivalent to the ADA in European peer countries. Europeans will hand wave it away, but it’s too patchwork and exclusionary.
All things in this scope considered (i.e., not healthcare necessarily), I’d rather be disabled in the US than in Europe or most Asian countries because the US actually have strong legal protections both federally and at the state levels. Lack of extensive public transport outside of a couple major hubs is obviously a problem for most people (especially the disabled). But no other country comes close to enshrining protections like the US did with the ADA (and how some states extended it even more themselves).
But no other country comes close to enshrining protections like the US did with the ADA (and how some states extended it even more themselves).
we’re kidding ourselves if we pretend it’s anything more than a de jure situation.
Yeah they have CARS.
Cars continue to work even if fewer people need to drive to get where they need.
Get a grip
They’re beautiful because they’re fake.
They often have enough room for 12-50 people, yet in lore they house thousands.
I replayed Ocarina of Time recently, the entirety of Hyrule is basically the size of a small town. Someone did the math and it was something like 55 hectares or 133 acres. Like Monaco is 4 times larger. Felt so expansive when I played it for the first time 25 years ago.
preeeetty sure that’s just Bethesda games
usually there’s at least an illusion of a larger settlement than what you can see
Video game travel always has that weird feel to it, too. For instance, in the Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim, you can run from one city to another in roughly a minute. Even if we very generously assume you’re running at ~15 MPH (which would be crazy fast for any distance), that would put them about a quarter mile apart. At more realistic speeds, 1/8 or so.
There is (was) rather infamously a mod for Morrowind which removes the fog. Said fog was required to conceal the render distance limitations of the hardware of its time, but these days basically any random computer can render the entire Morrowind map in one go which reveals that in fact it’s smaller than Disney World. Morrowind has the smallest map out of any of the Elder Scrolls titles to my knowledge, and it’s surreal to see all the towns and landmarks all nestling practically shoulder to shoulder like that.
Skyrim does an excellent job of making its lands look vast, but the geography is similarly compressed. The climb from lush valleys to frozen windswept peaks is only something like the equivalent of two thousand real world feet, which wouldn’t even qualify as anything more than a foothill to the Rockies here in reality. The Throat of the World which is canonically supposed to be the tallest mountain is actually only 766.5 meters or 2514 feet tall in map scale terms, which isn’t even a third of the way to breaking the treeline in most places.
San Andreas has a similar effect when removing the fog. The map looks comically small.
I tried that in Morrowind years ago. I’m not sure if it was the same mod, or some version of the game with lots of graphics settings, but yeah.
I loved Morrowind so much. I played it so much that I took over a house and turned it into a museum for all my hoarded items and ridiculously valuable concoctions and trinkets.
Having unlimited view distance and seeing how freaking small the world really was completely blew my mind.
Along with the fog, the walking speed must have been even slower than I remember!
That’s still more than 7 times higher than the tallest point in Florida!
And then there’s Arma…
i remember playing the original DayZ and while it was fun, running for two hours only to have an individual to log in, snipe you from who knows where (and i haven’t found beans yet let alone guns) and then log out in under five minutes really took the fun out of it.
Running for an hour then getting dropped by someone you didn’t even see
I KNEW that fucking pixel moved!
Man.
Front.
Two hundred metres.
Gotta suspend some reality though. I get walking simulators are a thing, but to do a quest you would need to travel a couple full days by horse? And filling in that content too, just doesn’t work in most games.
In WoW, Eastern Kingdoms is much smaller than you’d think.
spoiler
About the size of Manhatten, New York
Grand theft auto
You’re kinda provin’ the point. I don’t go into GTA and think “yeah i’d live here”.
They do also romanicize cities a bit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a traffick jam in GTA, for example.
Smaller parking lots than building code requires
Wasn’t there also a popular city sim that nerfed the size of parking lots because they realized if they made it accurate it would be really, really ugly?
Cities Skylines. So they decided cars that run out of parking space gets stowed into a pocket dimension.
Cyberpunk
One of the most walkable cities in video game history
Uuhhm, ever played “Crossy Road”? Yea, lib owned!!!
Videogame towns feel like an amusement park facade. Very few dont require you suspend your disbelief.
Suspension of disbelief is the responsibility of the content, not the consumer. Convince me these are the rules and I’ll fall into the media.
Videogame cities are all dead and creepy… I can’t imagine what anybody finds beautiful about them.
Of course, they are this way because they are literally designed, by a tiny number of people, and with sole focus on the player. But still, no idea why anybody can think they are beautiful.
Have you played Shenmue?
I spent I think over ten hours just hanging out in Gerudo town in breath of the wild. I remember watching my “hero’s journey” thing and when I got there it was just stuck scribbling over the town for ever lol. Super chill vibes
You should check out Cyberpunk 2077
That’s… one designed around being able to travel in a car…
Not realy. Like Manhattan it has roads for cars, but it kinds sucks. Much better on foot until you get out of the city.
And both the fun and the realism suffer because of it. 2077 is a great game, but it could be even better if they cut the car stuff from inside Night City. Leave the Aldecaldos and Claire’s quest, maybe have Delamain specifically for moving around the exurbs, but make everything else more dense.
God, could you imagine a game with a cyberpunk Kowloon Walled City for a map? Maybe not the actual KWC, but something of similar scale and density could make for both a fascinating mapmaking constraint and an incredibly memorable game world, if done well.
Shenmue II did this. Not a cyberpunk game of course, but it felt big for the time despite a small area and not that many NPCs.
I would pay for that even if it weren’t a good game.
Unless you want to get out of your car. Then there’s nowhere to leave it.
Of course in the game you just leave it anywhere, but there are no dedicated parking spaces.
And you can kill all the homeless people \s
Ok but KCD2 though. Wonderful villages.
I’ve been playing Arknights: Endfield, and just got to Wuling, the second major area, and it definitely has a nice water-filled, natural utopia feeling to it. Quite often in fiction that theme ties into an area being “too good to be true”, or driven by wealthy corruption, but so far it’s just playing it straight.
Generally, yeah, I see cities as all being an ugly place with a problem the hero must solve - so they’re filled with evil creatures, or corrupt soldiers, or other forms of ruin. It’s hard to find nice places to enjoy.
Blighttown is beautiful this time of year
Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American
That explains all the beautiful driving games I guess.
Which driving games you play that let you drive into towns?
The entire need for speed series is set in towns and cities.
Nope. Some are beautiful, some are ugly, depending on artistic intent.
I too remember the “piss filter” dystopian future of 20 years ago.
Plot twist, it should have been blood and shit, cause that’s what we got.
