We talk about about 'environments' here in this blog, and it is for good reason. The world that the player inhabits is one of the most important aspects of creating an immersive and believable gameplay experience and a well realized world can be absolutely unforgettable. Great gameplay and storytelling are only two thirds of the equation, afterall; without a world to care about it can be hard to dedicate yourself to the narrative, requiring your gameplay to be undeniably top notch to ultimately save your product. (Darn it, 'Destiny', you've got me there!) However, there is one particular aspect of world-building (That would be the physical act of world-building rather than the story telling aspect) that proves difficult even for the most skilled developers, and that is the creation of cities.
It's no wonder why, either. The commonly recognized hierarchy of settlements labels the requirements of a large city as; housing between '300,000 and 1,000,000 citizens', and there isn't a game engine on earth that can render that many NPC's complete with AI packages. (Although that same hierarchy technically means that NYC is a 'Metropolis', so don't take it as gospel.) Even using the common tricks of game development it can be incredibly difficult to create a world space that appropriately simulates the magnitude of a city in a believable way. That being said, urban settings are just too tempting for storytellers to completely write them off, so these teams find clever ways to bring their worlds to life. Consequently, I look upon the act of digital city building as an artform worthy a quick look through in this collation list.
One of, if not the, best example of video game cities in the modern age is 'Los Santos' from 'Grand Theft Auto V' and 'San Andreas'. Based on the instantly recognizable LA skyline, 'Los Santos' is a loving recreation of 'The City of Angels' complete from 'Venice beach' all the way up 'Hollywood Boulevard'. Due to the sheer level of skill and love that Rockstar put into erecting this digital masterpiece, Someone could familiarize themselves with these streets enough to give a rough tour of the actual city. Emphasis on 'rough' however, as even in 'GTA V' the city of Los Santos is only about 1/3 of the size of the actual city. (They got all the landmarks in, but cut down on the number of postcodes.) Either way, this is still an incredibly impressive achievement from Rockstar and one can only imagine how they managed to pull off such a colossal city all the way back in 2011. In fact, the only place that seems set to beat it in terms of scale is Cyberpunk 2077's own version of LA, Night City. (More on that later.) On seventh generation consoles, GTA V features a 'cone of vision' based rendering system that generates cars and pedestrians in whatever way you're focused in order to create the illusion of there being more NPCs than there actually are. Of course, there is a safety buffer to this feature to ensure that you don't accidentally ram into a freshly spawned truck, but this was a clever way of fleshing out the far away world objects without slowing down the frame rate. On Eighth Generation consoles, however, Rockstar manage to coax out enough power to stick with a standard rendering distance set-up; assembling that mammoth-of-a-city one neighbourhood at a time.
In Bethesda's RPGs there are quite a few large settlements for player's to explore, however it's only in 'The Elder Scrolls' where we see them attempt to create a fully functional and manned city. Therefore, by putting 'Skyrim' in our sights, we can get a look at the unique way that they handle 'cities'. Using this criteria, I settled on Whiterun as my ideal case-study for Skyrim cities due to it's central location and familiarity with practically every player. (Even though it is actually the third largest city in the game.) Looking at Whiterun, we see something quite peculiar, namely how the 'city' itself only consists of about 30 residents despite being the 'travelling hub' of Skyrim. This comes from the way that Bethesda's game engine renders each and every NPC with such complex stats and AI packages that it simply isn't feasible to create a city consisting of thousands. (Giving the medieval setting, a settlement of thousands would constitute a 'city'.) Despite this glaring misstep, however, we still consider Whiterun a prosperous settlement due to the way that Bethesda bought that place to life. Firstly, the city itself is scaled so that the small number of residents is enough to make the place feel crowded (something that Bethesda dropped the ball with when they made Oblivion); Secondly, their daily routines often have the people meeting up in the same spot, (The central market, the Bannered Mare. etc.) creating more illusionary crowding; and Thirdly, every citizen is realized with their own personality and story. This goes a step beyond the lifeless 'NPC's of other games because it offers so much more narrative value out of every individual. In this way, a city of 30 can balloon in your mind into a functioning city because you believe in every single inhabitant there.
Looking back towards the late 90's, we have another incredibly iconic metropolitan locale in Final Fantasy 7's Midgar. At the time of release, January 1997, this was an incredible vision for everyone to behold especially given that it was the first time that Square had used the processing power of a disk-based system on their much-beloved RPG franchise. As such, we saw 3D models on a 3D world bought to life in the image of an industrial cyberpunk revolution of blinking lights and heavy, chocking exhaust fumes. Midgar was the dystopian, mechanical monolith slapped right in the centre of a narrative which I have described as: the best possible video game adaptation of 'Fern Gully'. With this one location proving to be so important to the overall themes (or rather, the themes of the first third of the game) it was imperative that the team nailed their attempts at realizing it. However, 3D polygonal tech was still new to the Square team (Final Fantasy 6 was still entirely 'sprite-based') and so they had to figure out a way of creating a city despite lacking the technical power to do so. This they pulled off with a collection of clever techniques that would make any aspiring film maker proud. The backgrounds, for one, would be largely rendered stills that were mostly either top-down shots to establish the packed-in nature of the city streets, or brief sweeping vista shots over the majesty of it all, nailing the presentation of the big and the small. The story, too, directed players through a variety of new locations that differed enough visually to establish a sense of different districts and having travelled a great distance between them. And finally that iconic retro-mechanical music that flowed out of every district did wonders to subconsciously bring players to the right mindspace to believe in a city called Midgar.
Seeing as how we've already mentioned CDPR, we should take a look at their first attempt at bringing a huge city to life in 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's: Novigrad. This was a city that was built to be the centrepiece of the second act of this game as it would be the ideal strategic point between the two warring factions and thus a veritable hotbed of interesting activities. The player would find themselves mostly visiting tiny villages in their time throughout the game, and so Novigrad is designed to be quite the system shock once you finally get there and find that the city absolutely spans the eastern waterfront as far as the eye can see. With all the power that CDPR managed to drum up to bring this particular city to life, it's no wonder that it should prove to be one of the biggest spectacles of the age. Unfortunately, Novigrad seemed to work better from afar than it did from the inside. For some reason, Novigrad never did feel particularly 'alive' in the same sense that GTA cities do, possible because of CDPR's over-reliance on uninteractible NPC's to feel up the empty space between objectives. Sure that works well enough in Los Santos, but that is because players are forever constantly aware that they can just knock out anyone on the street that they don't like and interact with the in-built crime system. In The Witcher, should you go nuts and start offing civilians, not only are you acting in a non lore-friendly way, but the game doesn't quite know how to handle it and just sends endless guards after you until you die or get bored. Novigrad serves as an example of how video game cities can be visually impressive whilst feeling ultimately empty, teaching an important lesson on balance between content and spectacle.
Heading back to Bethesda and their other popular RPG franchise, Fallout, we have a modest selection of post-apocalyptic home steads to choose from. Unfortunately, most of Bethesda's Fallout games seem to focus on 'settlements' rather than post-apocalyptic 'societies', but there are a couple of exceptions I picked out. Fallout 4's Fenway Park (or 'Diamond City') is one such locale, but I dislike Fallout 4 so I instead want to look at 3's Rivet City. This is a settlement fashioned out of a pre-war washed up air carrier that has been irradiated to hell and cut in half, so the perfect place to call home, right? Spend any amount of time in the Capital Wasteland and you'll hear about 'Rivet City' as this well defended city of traders, which is likely enough to grab any explorer's interest. Of course, this being a Bethesda game built on a much earlier framework than Skyrim, the reality isn't quite as grand as the story, but that Bethesda formula goes into making it all work. Once again, Rivet City is a 'city' of about 30-40 residents with the majority of that number going towards the security staff, but Bethesda manage to brag that off with style. This time, the centerpiece of the town is a busy market, selling the illusion of this being a major drop-off point for travellers on the road and giving you a chance to believe in the fact that most people don't stick around. Rivet City really shines with it's layout, however, which is intentionally winding and confusing to create the atmosphere of a large living space with countless decks, rooms and shops. Once again, Bethesda have a habit of making a mountain out of a molehill. (In a good way.)
Lionhead's Fable is a series that long sought to bring a distinctive English flair to the fantasy RPG genre, to arguable success. Hence the name of the region, Albion, which is an old poetic name for the British isles that is not so commonly used today. Inevitably, this meant that the team would try their hand at parodying the industrial revolution at some point, and they did exactly that in Fable 3, as the small town of Bowerstone blew up into a light steam-punky cityscape kingdom. This is the player's home for the majority of the game and the location to which they will return repeatedly throughout the course of events surrounding the campaign, so it was in best interest of the Dev team to have the Bowerstone region feel large and real for players play around in. Once again, the key to bringing Bowerstone to life was interaction. As the game engine wasn't powerful enough to render an entire city, (instead they allowed players to visit specific chunks of the city through separate play areas) Lionhead ensured that the player could mess around with ever individual citizen using the franchises patented 'touch system'. (It's not as creepy as that sounds, but is sure is as awkward) Unfortunately, the citizens themselves as mostly just wooden cutout stereotypes, but every little bit helps when it comes to believing in a world. As another added touch, the performance of the player in the main narrative has a knock-on effect to how many folk survive the final conflict, meaning that the world actually reflects upon your consequences, which always helps the immersive-ness a bit.
Let's go back to the 90's for this next entry, as Capcom decided to up the stakes from their last Resident Evil game and elevate their zombie outbreak from a sprawling mansion to the entirety of Raccoon City. This is one of those locations that is practically video game royalty, and for very good reason as it housed one of the greatest horror/action games of all time and managed to make people feel like they were living through a city-wide zombie outbreak despite the game only having the power to render 7 zombies on screen at once. (You need those precious 450 polygons for Leon and Claire, afterall.) This time Capcom made great use of perspective in order to highlight the claustrophobia of a city that they lacked the processing power to render. That meant a lot of high angled shots of alleyways and separated screens. (allowing one area to be loaded at a time.) Of course, once the 2019 remake came along there was no need for any of that subterfuge and we finally got a chance to see Raccoon City rendered in all of it's glory.
Okay, I already did a Bethesda Fallout game, but what about an Obsidian one? Objectively the best Fallout game to date, 'Fallout: New Vegas' featured a memorable post-apocalyptic society in their depiction of the titular 'New Vegas'. This was a city that stood as the crown jewel across the wasteland as it was one of the only major cities to be mostly unharmed by the missiles that ravaged the surrounding landscape. (Or at least, The Strip survived intact. Everything else was still a little banged up.) What resulted was a revival of the hedonistic materialism that everyone loved about the old Las Vegas, only ramped up to eleven with armed robot guards patrolling the whole place. Obsidian managed to make this city feel large through a mixture of Bethesda's techniques and Rockstar's. They stuck a bevy of named NPC's around the area but spruced up the space inbetween with filler folk; helping to make 'the Strip' feel like a heavily frequented location. They also made sure to take advantage of that Vegas glitz and glamour to plaster gaudy lights and advertisements all over the city, imbuing that overwhelming sense of metropolitan capitalism. All this makes New Vegas easily my favourite place in a Fallout game to visit and one of the best examples of creating a believable town.
Finally, as I promised, we come to CDPR's second attempt to create a huge cityscape, Cyberpunk 2077's Nightcity. This is a Cyber-futuristic-dystopian recreation of Los Angeles from the aftermath of just about every terrible event that a single society can undergo. We're talking wars, recessions and at least one nuclear detonation, but through it all the City survived and thrived. (depending on your definition of 'thriving'.) Of course, Cyberpunk 2077 isn't technically out yet so it's impossible for me to determine what specific techniques the team have used to realize this city, but judging from the demo alone we've seen a vast array of thematic distinctions, impressive graphical flairs and independent variety in civilian walk cycles. It seems that the name-of-the-game for CD Projekt word is diversity and, if the demo footage is any indication, they've pulled that particular task off with flying colours.
City building is one of most complex, and rewarding, task that one could ask of developers, and it is one that is particularly revealing as to the specific talents of your team. I love analyzing all the little tips and tricks that developers utilize, seeing what works and what doesn't, just as much as I enjoy believing in these digital spaces. As we steadily trudge into the next generation I can hardly imagine what sort of ingenuity this new breed of hardware will inspire out of developers and how well it'll all translate.
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