If you want EVEN MORE of my thoughts you can find them on patreon where any tier unlocks a written post mortem a few days after a video upload. www.patreon.com/AdamSrayi

First time saying that, thanks youtube algorithm

A beautiful exploration of city design. Thanks..

This channel is just so f*cking good... i love every single video you put out. Great work

Good video, great design advice. Night City is fantastically designed, imo. Likely the best execution of natural city design I've seen. Still, there's no shortage of fake doors and inaccessible structures. While not a technically a city, Talos 1 from Prey is also impeccably designed and follows the kind of design principles you outline here. Learning about how they went about designing it gives a lot of insight into why the end result is so solid. I do wonder if we'll get to a point where 1:1 replications of life like cities are common (doesn't feel like we're far off). But how much value will this actually add? An apartment building with 50 apartments might not add much over one with only a few if there's not much reason to visit the other 48.... but I'd be happy to be wrong.

I think the at the end of the day, what matters most about a video game city is that you actually get to know it. For example: My issue with Witcher 3's Toussant was that there wasn't enough quests to have you memorize the layout of the city. Even after the main quest, I got lost and struggled navigating it. I couldn't memorize any part of it. I had a similar issue with Novigrad, but many playthroughs alleviated that. Why do I not know the Cloud District of Whiterun that well? Because I don't go there very often. Why do I struggle to pinpoint where I am in Spider-man without looking at the map? Because so many of the buildings look the same at the end. Why do I have the same issue with AC Unity's Paris? Because monotomy. Why do I not fully learn the layout of Gotham in Batman Arkham Knight? Because I constantly just blitz through it with the Batmobile. It doesn't really matter how the city exactly looks, how realistic or believable or immersive it is. None of that matters if the player is never asked to get to know it. If all they do is run past 1 time and never touch that part of the map ever again. If all they do is use that one main road to do all their errands.

Another banger, thanks for your hard work!

Bro I remember coming across one of your videos a while back now and it literally just reshaping the way I look at games and video essays about games. You’re creative, unique, introspective and just fun to watch. You’ve inspired me to write essays about games too, although I don’t actually release them (maybe I should). But the weird thing is that I literally made an essay about this exact topic. It’s cool to see somebody else having such a fascination with these types of things in games. Carry on making quality content man!

I loved the video! I have one suggestion though. I think you could add a list of games featured in the description. Or even better for future videos, add a title card the first time you show footage from a specific game. That way if someone sees something they like they'll know where it comes from.

I really like your channel because you analise trople A games, that i personally very rarely play, great job!

I thought this channeled had at least 100k subs but I was surprised to find u only have 10k

Great video :) As a side effect it paraphrased how hard open world games are and how many oppotunities there are to f it up.

the solution is imho most likely going to be better and more aggressive procedural generation systems , it just feel unfeasible to recreate something like NYC in a videogame by handcrafting the internals of every building [even tho that is exactly how it was created in the real world , but ofc that took decades] ; but if you had a clever procedural system maybe it could generate interesting bldg interiors on the fly based on template models for residental/industrial/commercial/etc , then it would be a matter of hardlocking those generations like dwarf fortress or minecraft do or allow those spaces to 'degrade' after the player leaves them for a period of time or distance ; obvs u could still have handcrafted spaces as well , for intentional effects

what a great video keep it up i loved ratchet and clank as a kid bc of the cityscapes

Fantastic advice and analysis, good stuff.

Great video! You're a very high quality creator, I'm surprised you don't already have like 100k subs. There's a game from the 90's that achieves a lot of these things but generally falls flat, and a spritual successor to the game which aims to basically have all of this. The game is The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. It has huge procedural cities, every surface is climbable, you can talk to every npc, you can enter every house, and you can seek out different guilds and quests based on your character. There are also factions which will dislike or like you based on who you have worked for. It is thoroughly impressive for a game that came out in 1996, and not just in the city aspects(it also has other stuff like banking, buying ships, a world the size of great britain, etc.). It still falls short quite a bit. The cities outside of the 3 non-procedural cities are all extremely generic, being created with different combinations of the same few tiles. The cities don't make use of the amazing possibilities of having every surface be climbable, almost all npc's are pulled from the same few models, almost all npc's act the exact same, and the faction system is totally hidden from the player(meaning it's difficult to know why someone hates you). Overall it's very impressive, especially for the time, but very shallow. The spiritual successor is called The Wayward Realms and is developed by the original creators of the elder scrolls. It essentially wants to have all of what you talk about. Having every city be unique is basically impossible with having thousands of them in the game, so some things will be sacrificed. Even with this limitation, it seems like this game will have almost everything you(and I) want in a city.

I do wonder if this is a matter of 'an ideal city' or whether we need to think in terms of 'ideal cities' italo Cavino style, with elements of the city emphasised and deemphasised with intention to serve a particular end. For example in, Assassin's Creed the massive Notre Dame (compared to the mini city) makes that building impactful in a way it wouldn't be if every other building wasn't downscaled. Spider-man downsizes its map in part to aid speed of traversal because it makes Spider-man feel faster. In contrast something like flight simulator uses the size and the detail to build a sense of space and accuracy, but lacks obvious story, because it's aiming for exploration. You coudln't put all of these together to make a perfect city, but you could take your core aim and wind a city around it. I wonder if we need an ideal here, or if an ideal ties us into that logic of 'here is the one perfect way to do everything' which can kind of get in the way. I wonder if it might be easier to break these down rather into a element->use structure (you know, 'this encourages explanation', 'this makes the city readable' 'this makes the city feel lifeless and depressing [and that's what we want because it's supposed to be a commentary]' that sort of thing). With all that said though, I really like the analysis here, I think there's a really nice jump between the needs of a real city and the abstractions of gaming.

Great video man , my favourite city is Prague from Deus Ex Mankind Divided .

many many more views deserved. and most importantly a city should fit the game it is part of

Thanks for this video, great great great help to me! Thank you very much 🙏

damn! I'm still blown away by everything you put out. I really, really enjoyed this video essay. I'm wondering what you think of HZD/HFW's cities--especially Meridian. I hope that, in the third game, we can go back to Meridian and run around, especially if we can go into more buildings. some of the settlements in HFW confused me at first (cough cough Thornmarsh cough cough the Bulwark), but getting lost was much more frustrating than "getting lost," as one might in NYC. your footage of Cyberpunk makes me curious to try it out! I like the audio blend you use. the volume of the background music is perfect, and your cadence is very calming. fantastic stuff!!

That was fun to watch! Many good ideas

Really good video man, keep it up

Read dead redemption 2s city is amazing

W vid

Most city are crated for the player instead for the people of the world. That makes them dead. That worst that can happen to the city.