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
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.
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.
Manhattan from TMNT Trouble in Mahattan on the NES.
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.
City of Heroes had some large areas.
San Francisco from Watch Dogs 2 was great
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The Imperial City comes to my mind too, especially if you’re a theif. It’s not big like a modern city, but there’s hardly a single door you can’t enter, and I just love how so many basements connect to the sewers, it’s like you can almost navigate the whole city underground, except you’re more likely to get lost down there!
The various mods available more than double the size, too.
The ones I actually remember in detail are the city locations from FF7: Crisis Core, Rogue Trader and Pillars of Eternity. Not sure why those three.
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.
