Looking for the Foursides, Goldenrods, whatever village or town or city you remembered from video games and that can be thoroughly explored and that are considered “big”
Kinda funny but I remember how vast Minniopolis seemed in The Urbz Sims in the City for GBA and DS and I saw a map this year that looked so tiny, amazing how big it felt at the time
The City of Paris in Assassin’s Creed Unity was something. I mean that was impressive. City was huge felt very lived in and vibrant. Unity and to a lesser degree Syndicate were the last two Assassin’s Creed games where the world felt vibrant. Partly because they did the walking tour bullshit and they killed the History part of the series. I mean I played a little bit of Valhalla and they just couldn’t give a fuck anymore.
Mechonis Field in Xenoblade chronicles and Lazulis City in The Last Story, both are for Wii and both are great games
Xenoblade chronicles X, especially back in 2014 on Wii U. But today it’s just middle sized - yet still created by hand and not procedurally generated.
Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 blew me away, its probably the most memorable location of any significant scale I’ve ever experienced in a game. I’ve experienced bigger, but forgettable, and equally memorable, but far smaller.
Paris from The Sabetour absolutely deserves a mention. It’s a big city that you mostle travel by car, but it still feels rich and detailed on foot.
Manhattan from TMNT Trouble in Mahattan on the NES.
San Francisco from Watch Dogs 2 was great
The universe in Star Flight. Which fit on a 720k floppy disk. Nothing else has really measured up to that lost in a huge place feeling since.
I imagine The Crew (2014-2024) somewhat qualifies - it’s got the entirety of the US in its map. While its servers were shut down last year, it was just relaunched by the community a couple weeks ago
City of Heroes had some large areas.
Tp me Lindblum from FFIX felt really huge as a kid and it felt like there was so much to check out which i only noticed later.
Paradise City from Burnout was pretty amazing, especially given you were supposed to navigate it at 250km/h. Lots of three-dimensionality about it too, with tunnels, overpasses, rooftops, etc.
It’s not big in an overall area sense but it’s so dense that it can feel massive. Kamurocho from the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games. Seeing it evolve over 20 years in real time and about 35 years in game time has gotten me quite attached too. Each new game I do a loop to check what has changed and see if old friends are still there.
Bonus with having so much in game time in it is that since it’s essentially just Kabukicho in Tokyo, all that in game exploring translates to the real world pretty well.
I actually went to kabujicho after i played the first 5 yakuza games (zero to 4) and it doesn’t looks exactly as in the game but yet it was weird how a place in a city i have never been to felt so familiar, it probably didn’t help that it was a rainy may afternoon but yet, some things were exactly at the same place, like the corner don quichotte at the map border
After Kabukicho I was pretty confident doing the same in Dotenbori in Osaka. Once I got south of the river I got very lost and the whole thing fell apart. It was hilarious. It probably is the same but my memory definitely wasn’t.
From a while ago I’d say GTA San Andreas, but I really want to shout out Boston from Fallout 4. It’s easily the biggest city in a game that really fills out its size with interesting places and distinct neighborhoods. There’s an amazing verticality to it as well in the central districts, and the mix of real historical buildings with new retro-futuristic ones is great as well.
I’ll always remember Night City. Over the years I’ve basically learned to navigate it without a map.
