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
Ark from Enderal
Vivec from Morrowind
maybe Washington DC from Fallout 3, depending on how you define “city”
What was the name of the city from the Tribunal expansion? That was probably roughly the size of Vivec, but less repetitive
Mournhold, capital city of Morrowind
Which was the seat of Almalexia, but the expansion also featured the Clockwork City, seat of Sotha Sil.
I don’t think either were as large or as explorable as Vivec, though, unless you count the Dwemer ruins under Mournhold as part of the city.
Novigrad from witcher 3 is pretty big,especially for a medival setting. Games like cyberpunk or GTA have huge cities but they feel smaler because you get around in cars and motorbikes. In novigrad you walk.
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.
Los Santos in GTA San Andreas. Heck, their versions of San Francisco and Las Vegas were awesome too.
Currently playing Project Zomboid and I know their Louisville Kentucky will be etched into my nightmares for decades to come, lol.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
I’ll always remember Night City. Over the years I’ve basically learned to navigate it without a map.
The Imperial City from Oblivion was big-ish but not huge. Blackreach in Skyrim was big too, but stretches the definition a bit, because it depends if you count all the dungeons as expansions of the ‘city’, what with them being underground
Holtburg in Asheron’s Call there was a Tavern there that was a great hangout spot in Dekarutide
Asheron’s Call. My first MMO experience.
There’s still private servers running. When I hopped in one a few years ago there were maybe 5 other people playing. So, still there to explore, but not much in the way of people to play with.
Mine too was in the beta and was blown away by the graphics and scale. I tried the private servers after the official ones shut down had a lifetime sub. But it was a bitch to install and patch to work with private servers on linux the last time i tried.
San Francisco from Watch Dogs 2 was great
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.
