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
I was going to say fourside, but you beat me to it, and the emptiness of it definitely played on the feeling of largeness.
There’s also Castellia city in pokemon b&w, the people wandering and the 3d buildings made it look like a real city, alive and busy.
Idk if it counts, but in Professor Layton, when i didn’t know what to do, i would desperately walk across the locations of the city and then realise it’s quite big for there to be buses and streets.
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.
Mechonis Field in Xenoblade chronicles and Lazulis City in The Last Story, both are for Wii and both are great games
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.
City of Heroes had some large areas.
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.
I realy like Las Venturas, GTA SA and the Hong Kong map of Sleeping Doge since it feels so alive and dense.
i remember exploring potos in secret of mana either before they banished me for life just because a drink old man told me to save the town from a giant ant
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.
Manhattan from TMNT Trouble in Mahattan on the NES.
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.
Britannia from Ultima Online
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 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.
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.
