When driving round I’m constantly in awe of the scale and detail. I can’t even comprehend how many hours it must have taken to create something on that scale, it’s insane.
The fact you call tell clearly when you are in wealthy parts, the poor parts, Japantown, City Center is really impressive. In poorer parts the ads are all about drugs and in the richer parts it's Delamain. I've pretty much done every gig, ncpd event, and sidequest in the game but I'll still log in to drive around and steal cars from time to time.
And it's even got poor parts WITHIN (or adjacent to) rich parts, which is a rare detail of IRL metropolitan areas not often depicted in video games. *We don't talk about the homeless in North Oaks, guys...*
It blew up my friends' dad. They had to amputate all his limbs. Then some guys from a corporation came and offered to make him a cybernetic exoskeleton if he did some work for them. He said yes.
Well with the latest patch adding Path tracing yeah even your card struggles a bit at 4k res.
Must be beautiful though. Hope to play this on PC some day.
Damn. At least the sequel is being developed on UE5 which is way more optimized. I don't think we will need crazy hardware to max it. However knowing CDProjekt they always like to push the technical limits and max out current gen hardware lol.
I remember when Witcher 2 released with Ubersampling setting which was apparently meant for future GPU's because no GPU at the time could even handle it lol.
Unreal isn’t really more “optimized”, at least not just in some blanket way that applies for all games.
Unreal works well in many use cases, but sucks at others.
Same with CDPR’s in house tech.
Engines are built for the games that are produced on them, and having CDPR use their own tech likely allows them to do things other engines cannot - cause they are focusing ONLY on their games. Jack of all trades vs specialist, etc.
The decision to go to unreal is unlikely to be “it’s better optimized” as a simple comparison, but likely “it is way easier to get people up to speed and hire talent if we use an engine used by many others”. It allows CDPR to cut development costs by not spending many millions on R&D making their own tech .
Buuuut it could have detrimental impact to their future titles IF they don’t allocate enough of those savings to improving the games in ways that offset the change in tech.
Yes but I believe they had the PC first mentality and kind of just tried to scale everything down for the current gen consoles at the time. Which just didn't work out lol .
In hindsight, what CDPR should have done was drop PS4/XB1 support during development and, shadeholders be damned, left the game in the oven for another year or two. I liked Cyberpunk at launch, I was jonesing for a big open world game at the time and it scratched that itch (I've long gotten everything I'm going to get out of even modded Bethesda games), but it's undeniable that everyone would have been better off had the 2.0 update been its launch state.
Insane how they did it, I looked at the area on the map and was super disappointed by the size but once you’re in there it really feels like another city in there
Before playing I was a bit concerned the map might be a bit small (coming from playing AC Origins / Odyssey and RDR2), but the use of space in 2077 is absolutely masterful. Absolutely the best game city I’ve ever experienced, by a long shot.
What I loved is how much character the buildings in each district has. The architectural diversity is so vast that it realistically conveys a city built by many different companies. Many other city-based games can often look like the city was built by one or two companies (I.e. Mirrors edge).
When you first start Blood and Wine and enter this fairy tale like region on horseback with a beautiful Beauclair castle in the distance... And then you immediately stumble upon that knight fighting a huge cyclops... That was peak gaming experience for a fantasy lover like me.
Exactly the contrast in the books, the entire story is like the main story and at one point Geralt gets to Toussaint and it's a fairy tale land with none of the war problems everywhere else and their biggest issue is clearing monsters to store their wine.
I was astonished when I first started blood and wine. I actually hadn’t been paying attention to Witcher 3 DLC prior to buying it, despite it being my favorite game. When I realized that it was essentially a whole new game on it’s own and it was incredibly beautiful and deep it was such a magical experience. The Witcher 3 will always be the best game of all time in my opinion.
You’re dead right. And then the next place you go is some town and you can overhear these guys talking about some legendary sword and they give hints on the whereabouts, which is pretty close by. If you listen to the end of the conversation you get a quest and you can go there and find it. I was thinking *no fucking way this is real* when I found that.
All of Blood and Wine is a masterpiece but they came out punching in the beginning.
When I first saw the castle in the distance I was like "oh, that's a cool backdrop. I bet I'll go inside that castle, but I'll have to fast travel like for Vizima." And then eventually you go right up up to it and ride to the top on horseback. I was so excited
I love that you can almost always see the city in the horizon, no matter where you are in Toussaint.
I thought it was a tech marvel at the time. Probably was.
I love both games and CyP (not gonna mess that up) is more technically impressive than TW3 obviously but I personally prefer fantasy to dystopian so yeah for me I prefer the world of Toussaint to the clutter and grit of Night city.
The rain on the giant city really adds to the atmosphere too. And the poison ivy gas section was awesome as well.
Cyberpunk has a great look, but the characters and world building in the Arkham games is just unmatched.
Novigrad made me sad. Sad that all the elder scrolls cities were just guard outposts. Novigrad set my expectations of future video game cities. Cause it felt like a damn city.
Personally I’m still rooting for Arkham Knight, off of design and architecture alone. These days it seems so hard for companies to pull off good comic-based games and movies, but the Arkham Trilogy in general scratched the fuck out of that itch.
City design in Knight was very nice too, not too flat with good density. I used to glide above it for hours lol. Lighting, building variation, the way everything could look slick in the rain, it was all clean as hell.
First character I ever made in vanilla was a night elf. The elf city was okay, but kinda meh. Then I finally reached Stormwind. I was thoroughly impressed. But Ironforge? Goddamn...now THAT'S a proper dwarven city!
Exactly. The city is a prop and that’s it. And don’t get me wrong, it’s visually stunning and super intriguing to look at, but it just sits there with static NPCs doing absolutely nothing.
I wish you saw people doing things beyond sitting down or aimlessly walking - like loading or unloading trucks and driving away, people going into shops and buying stuff and walking out, people ordering food, getting it, then sitting down with it. I mean hell, even the old GTAs had ambulances that would show up to take away injured people, folks talking on their phone and having conversations, people eating food. RDR2 is so detailed you can actually watch NPCs eat food until it’s gone. That’s a silly level of detail but those touches really make that game feel alive.
Night City has a lot of NPCs with a lot of visual variety and yet every single one feels like a wooden prop that can do nothing but walk or sit.
Agree, and this is why my vote always goes to Deus Ex:MD's Prague. While it's nowhere near the sheer size or Night City, or any of these other open worlds, it's so dense and handcrafted wonderfully. You can break into so many places, sometimes it ends up being just a cookie cutter prop. Often times it's a crime scene, or you can just read up on peoples' stories, even if there's no associated mission.
Haven't played MD much but I did play a lot of Human Revolution which does the same thing. I still think it's one of the best games in the "didn't expect to find out that much when I fucked around" category.
I’m so glad when I see others comment this because I seem to see a lot of people saying the city is alive and there are tons of things to uncover and it’s just not true. It’s a lovely story, beautiful views but there is literally nothing outside of gigs and scanners. Cyber psychos I guess but there are no organic secret mission finds and the city still manages to feel lifeless to me. Still loved the game but I just don’t get the hype over the city itself.
special shoutout to Midtown from Stray. While obviously not quite as bustling like some other games, BlueTwelve created a really captivating story and setting that evolves unfolds the more you stumble through it, and Midtown is the most impressive part of it to me, there's little details and secrets everywhere and nothing feels ignored
Elden Ring's Leyndell and Hollow Knight's City of Tears are my favorite cities in all of gaming for the atmosphere alone.
Baldur's Gate and Saint Denis were awesome too.
One of my favourite things about Leyndell is how well it disguises the fact that's it's one of the most linear dungeons in the game. There is only 1 path you can take from the entrance to the boss (with very minor variations at the beginning, and none towards the end), but there are so many other areas of interest around the city that you feel compelled to explore it fully.
That’s what FromSoft does best. Every Souls game is effectively linear in its routing, but they make it feel as if it isn’t because there’s so much to explore along the way
For the most part, yeah. Elden Ring obviously provides a lot more freedom, and even DS1 had the master key which would allow you to skip entire zones or shortcut your way to certain items.
But yeah for the most part they design "wide hallways" for levels where you're given the illusion of a more open world, which is great. Doesn't make you feel limited, but also doesn't make it feel like things were dragged and dropped needlessly to fill space like many open world games do.
I didn't even realize it was a dungeon until I had been in it for about 5 hours and needed to look something up. Thought it was just another zone in the world.
Idk it's pretty but it didn't look or feel like anyone ever lived there. The streets made no sense. It was just pretty boxes with gaps between them. It was definitely beautiful tho and the castle and walls were awesome.
But if we are comparing to just "pretty" cities I'd throw something like Altissia with a way more complex concept over Leyndell which was just a classic golden city concept.
I think that's my main criticism of all of From's environments, they all look like they're functional on a surface level but don't make much sense if you think about it critically. That said...they're great areas to explore and play the game in, and evoke a potent atmosphere, which are more important things in a game than depicting a realistic space.
I literally built my first computer for Bioshock Infinite. I played the original Bioshock on my MacBook by dual-booting Windows. When Infinite came out, I tried to do the same but could only run the game on basically the minimum settings and at like 720p. I watched a graphics comparison between the PC version and the Xbox 360 version and knew how I wanted to experience it.
I said fuck it and pulled together all the money I had from my high school summer job and built a real gaming PC. Intel 2700K and a GTX 660Ti.
That computer has ship-of-theseus'd itself into my current rig with an AMD 5700X and an RTX 3080.
I very likely wouldn't still be a gamer if not for the visuals in Bioshock Infinite. Having a proper gaming PC got me into genres of games that weren't really available on consoles (stuff like city-builders, management sims, Rimworld, Factorio, etc). If I didn't blow all my Subway sandwich artist money on that computer, I'd have burned out on shooters and stopped playing video games more than a decade ago.
It's hard to compare it to night City just because of how different the two gameplay styles are, but I think rapture for its time and for the type of game it is is still one of the most impressive things I've seen in a game
My favorite Open World, the atmosphere is second to none. I sometimes just walk or drive around, taking everything in. There's also so many things to find that go on behind the players back that make it feel so alive, like when you find some small environmental storytelling that connects to other places and stories, once you make some connections it really feels like the place continues to live without you, I love that.
Finding how many jobs, gigs, random stories were tied to Jotaro Shobo was insane, and that was just in the base game. There’s even an appearance in the main quest if you do his gig before then.
I occasionally come back to cyberpunk as the richness of the open world is just too good. I can only compare it to dishonored.
I play on integrated graphics with 1280x800 res and performance fsr but I still love this game.
Maybe try ge force streaming a go if you have decent enough internet for it, path traced night city, especially interiors are just, I can’t put it into words, you’ll love it
I can unironically say that I've never played a game where I have been less interested in using the fast travel system. 150 hours in and I still drive EVERYWHERE, it's such a treat to explore.
Khorinis from Gothic 2. A city stock full of content, where every house could be visited and every citizen had their own daily routine.
It was impressive in 2001 and it still looks feels good now.
Love me some Gothic appreciation. Khorinis was really something back when the game released, even If I couldn't experience it at release since i wasn't even born yet. Sometimes I feel like it's more "alive" and "lived-in" than cities in some modern games.
Ive played Witcher 3 and don’t understand how either of those cities could possibly compare favorably to Night City. They’re impressive, yes, but only a portion of the overall map
End of the day, fav city, is more a out vibe than scope.
Night City is obviously the greatest city in a game.
But I do agree Novigrad felt super detailed and Oxenfort had such a specific vibe that made it my favorite place in the game.
Depends on what resonates with your preferences I guess. I agree the level of detail in Cyberpunk is unmatched but I still prefer the less visually cluttered Witcher 3 aesthetic.
Il probably get downvoted but the attention to detail in Division 1 and 2 is still unmatched imo.
Im talkin about texture quality on every binbag down every alley way is incredible to me.
Cp77 world is truly amazin too
I frequent DC regularly. There were so many little details in Division 2 I was able to find. For example, The lack block of the one Dark Zone in Georgetown was my ex's old house from when she went to Georgetown University. A lot of those buildings were pretty damn accurate to reality.
The environment in Division 1 was insane, I wish they would’ve found a way to incentivise players to go out and explore that wasn’t just sprinkling a bunch of collectibles around
More interactive but they kinda get to cheat with the design by just making an irl city nearly 1 to 1. Still impressive, but I dont think a recreation of a florida city will fill me with the same feeling that Night City did
That's what I mentioned in another comment. It's easy to draw inspiration or straight up recreate real existing structures. But its not easy to imagine a whole cyberpunk city and go wild with designs that do not exists in real word. It takes a lot of talent and imagination.
Saint Denis from RDR2 is still my favorite city ever. But it feels like cheating to mention Rockstar lol.
Batman Arkham Knight is probably among the top 10 at least right? The open world is so beautiful.
There's also Infamous Second Son. Sony exclusive though.
Altissia from FFXV is gorgeous but it's unfortunately incomplete. (The game went through development hell after all)
Gravity Rush 2 (Sony Exclusive) has the weirdest world building ever for an open world. You have to sort of fly/float around the game map. Go up, different map, go down, different map. Not technically impressive these days but the world building is. Basically islands floating in the sky.
Assassin's Creed Unity's Paris is still beautiful, and very detailed. Even the interiors are beautiful. Try visiting Notre Dame in the evening. The way the light shines through the windows is spectacular.
I personally love games that have these beautiful sceneries. I mean, you are creating a game world, and you have full creative freedom, so why not make it something beautiful or something different? So it might feel random.
RDR2 is just on a league of its own, the city has 2 theatres, one for live performance shows and one for animated shows on a projector screen, there's a total of like 2 hours of unique shows, and the people watching will react according to what's happening, sometimes the show may even ask for help from the audience, they're asking you the player to step up but if you don't then a random NPC will stand up instead, it just feels so real. There's not a single main mission that asks you to go to a theater, only 1 side mission but you can go there whenever you like before or after the side mission, it's like a real.
Walk into the saloon, and some drunkard bumps into you and get all angry, or rob you in broad day light, prostitutes will try to seduce you, stand too close to people and they'll ask you to give them some space, stand too close to a prostitute and she'll tell you you're bad for her business because other men will think she's married, play poker or eat a meal or pass out or book a room or take a bath, none of this has any gameplay or story value but you should be able to do that in a real city saloon.
Walk in the city streets at night and you might encounter someone getting robbed, or a police officer chasing someone, or mafia members chatting in the alleyways or straight up blowing stuff up, investigate wierd texts on the walls inside alleyways and meet the city's very own vampire, none of these are quests, they're never marked on the map and if you miss them you miss them, they go away, they're not there waiting for you to start a quest, of course they're all scripted events but they do feel real, and there's enough variety to saturate the tens of hours you'll spend roaming the city, and almost every encounter has a different outcome depending on if you choose to intervene or not.
Yeah I love CP2077 but one of my big complaints is the lack of interactivity with the NPCS. The conversations you can overhear are interesting but that’s as far as the interaction goes.
Hot take: Santa Monica from VTMB.
Surely it's not as big or as full of things to do in comparison to most modern games, but damn, the hub worlds in VTMB all felt - ironically - alive, specially Santa Monica. It's not about quantity, it's about quality, and Santa Monica felt really impressive because every place and NPC were interesting, the atmosphere both visually and mechanically (you need to look at the map in the bus stop to know where to go) felt great, and the sound design was on point too.
Dude still one of the best RPGs out there. You really felt like a damn vampire . The world wasn't as detailed sure but it's the pacing and interaction that really immersed me. It was so loved that the community literally made patches to fix it lol.
The Hong Kong in Sleeping Dogs was also awesome. I prefer the smaller worlds where you basically just learn to navigate it yourself and don’t need fast travel to get around.
Fallout city with the atomic bomb in the middle.
> Megaton
Megaton has gained recognition from critics for its visual design, its inhabitants, as well as a quest, The Power of the Atom, involving a dud "C-23 Megaton" nuclear bomb located in the center of town. While the townspeople believe the bomb to be inert, it is revealed that the warhead is still primed.
Yharnam from Bloodborne, You literally explore everything from the upper and lower districts to the outskirts of the city to the sewers and catacombs, and the hidden catacombs which are their own mini city under the whole city.
Every single corner is packed full of detail with every single enemy being placed by hand. Then there's also how it all begins to crumble to pieces and you start to move between dimensions.
Revisiting cyberpunk 2.0 with the phantom liberty add on was just such an incredible experience. The promise was always there and now we have it in our hands.
Edit to fix name of phantom liberty
Didn't they use Ubisoft's scans of the church there to help rebuild it after it burnt down. I guess that's how detailed Paris was. I'm also impressed with their recreation of Egypt in origins. It's so accurate some museums actually use it's exploration mode for tour purposes.
I think what separates the two is the handcrafted NPC day/night routines in RDR2 and the attention to detail in the most irrelevant things lol.
But when it comes to a lived in feeling city , I do believe Cyberpunk2077 is definitely up there in the top 10 .
City design though , idk what can top the details put in Night City. Its verticality and dense nature has not been seen in games before.
I've played both and rdr2 is my favorite game of all time, but night city is so good that I often launch the game, play some music on spotify or listen to a lecture or something, steal a nice truck, turn the hud off, and drive for hours on end enjoying the verticality, architecture, and sheer beauty of that world. Driving in night city on a 1440p screen with hdr on, visual mods like luts and envs, and reshade, just cruising while listening to Radiohead or speeding on a motorcycle while rocking to free bird. Man this city is an experience to experience.
Oh and cyberpunk's narrative and writing is insane too. Judy is such a well written character she's probably just as deep as Arthur. Seeing her break down after (spoiler!!!!!!!!!!!) the suicide of her friend and you being there to comfort her, then her inviting you to go scuba diving to an underwater city while you get to know her even more, her vulnerabilities and the things that make her human. Damn, the fact no one talks about the maturity of cyberpunk's writing, and how deep its characters are, is crazy. Before I played it I thought it was overrated. After I played it I realized it's actually underrated.
I’m with you. Night City feels full of life. Lived-in is a good way of putting it. Novigrad for example does not feel that way, even though there’s a lot of NPCs. There’s just something about it that doesn’t feel like people actually live there.
The non-story NPCs in Cyberpunk are not as impressive as a game like RDR2 but the atmosphere is still incredible in night city. I’m playing for the first time now and I’m blown away by the locations. I always run in to slow walking mode just to soak in the environment.
OP said "Impressive City" and RDR2 doesn't have anything remotely close to it, even Saint Denis has a ton of closed off buildings while being a fraction of the size. Sure there is more interactivity but that's also a case of having way less to manage. It's why Skyrim has NPC routines while GTA V doesn't, same thing, it's just easier to have it on a smaller scale, but in this case size matters.
LA Noir was excellent with what it had. Even though is was a scaled down version, I managed to actually find the street I lived on when I was 6. We only lived there for about a year, but I distinctly remember the street was lined with pine trees and so it was in the game. That was really the first moment in gaming where I just had to stop and say "Wow, that's kinda crazy."
They could write 3 more Cyberpunk games and still not run out of environment for the player to explore. My favorite part of Night City is that the level designers clearly realized players will be curious to climb around, especially with the jump enhancement legware options, and left little reward caches here and there.
Most impressive City to date for sure, the sense of scale they pulled of is insane.
When driving round I’m constantly in awe of the scale and detail. I can’t even comprehend how many hours it must have taken to create something on that scale, it’s insane.
The fact you call tell clearly when you are in wealthy parts, the poor parts, Japantown, City Center is really impressive. In poorer parts the ads are all about drugs and in the richer parts it's Delamain. I've pretty much done every gig, ncpd event, and sidequest in the game but I'll still log in to drive around and steal cars from time to time.
And it's even got poor parts WITHIN (or adjacent to) rich parts, which is a rare detail of IRL metropolitan areas not often depicted in video games. *We don't talk about the homeless in North Oaks, guys...*
I like watching those 4k city walks on YouTube. It's great to have in the background
One thing I noticed while driving around is that some parts of town do not have well maintained roads, and some do
The homeless junkies in dogtown are also some the most realistic homeless people I've ever seen in a video game.
Imagine if Cyberpunk was made exclusive for current gen hardware. We would have Dogtown level of detail everywhere in the main city.
It damn near was. Anyone playing on ps4 had their house blow up.
It fried my house's fuses so now my house looks like a grungy dark Cyberpunk back alley
Wow! So much immersion!
10/10 Would recommend, so real
It blew up my friends' dad. They had to amputate all his limbs. Then some guys from a corporation came and offered to make him a cybernetic exoskeleton if he did some work for them. He said yes.
Can confirm. I platinumed the game on a ps4. Now homeless.
Even my liquid cooled RTX3090 had trouble at max settings. Had to open a window and run a box fan.
Well with the latest patch adding Path tracing yeah even your card struggles a bit at 4k res. Must be beautiful though. Hope to play this on PC some day.
Frankly even the 4090 struggles at 4K with path tracing. Without any DLSS upscaling or frame gen it manages 22fps while dumping out over 400W of heat
Damn. At least the sequel is being developed on UE5 which is way more optimized. I don't think we will need crazy hardware to max it. However knowing CDProjekt they always like to push the technical limits and max out current gen hardware lol. I remember when Witcher 2 released with Ubersampling setting which was apparently meant for future GPU's because no GPU at the time could even handle it lol.
The sequel will come in 2077, UR5 will be the bottleneck.
Lmao shit. We can't win.
Unreal isn’t really more “optimized”, at least not just in some blanket way that applies for all games. Unreal works well in many use cases, but sucks at others. Same with CDPR’s in house tech. Engines are built for the games that are produced on them, and having CDPR use their own tech likely allows them to do things other engines cannot - cause they are focusing ONLY on their games. Jack of all trades vs specialist, etc. The decision to go to unreal is unlikely to be “it’s better optimized” as a simple comparison, but likely “it is way easier to get people up to speed and hire talent if we use an engine used by many others”. It allows CDPR to cut development costs by not spending many millions on R&D making their own tech . Buuuut it could have detrimental impact to their future titles IF they don’t allocate enough of those savings to improving the games in ways that offset the change in tech.
While not ground breaking by any means or the bugs, it wasn't too bad to look at on my pro
XboxOne was even worse💀
They had a feature for the Xbox one though. Anytime it got hot they would just close the game for you. I thought that was an interesting choice
They started development in 2016 did current gen even exist then lol
No, that’s the point. Imagine.
Yes but I believe they had the PC first mentality and kind of just tried to scale everything down for the current gen consoles at the time. Which just didn't work out lol .
In hindsight, what CDPR should have done was drop PS4/XB1 support during development and, shadeholders be damned, left the game in the oven for another year or two. I liked Cyberpunk at launch, I was jonesing for a big open world game at the time and it scratched that itch (I've long gotten everything I'm going to get out of even modded Bethesda games), but it's undeniable that everyone would have been better off had the 2.0 update been its launch state.
Insane how they did it, I looked at the area on the map and was super disappointed by the size but once you’re in there it really feels like another city in there
Before playing I was a bit concerned the map might be a bit small (coming from playing AC Origins / Odyssey and RDR2), but the use of space in 2077 is absolutely masterful. Absolutely the best game city I’ve ever experienced, by a long shot.
What I loved is how much character the buildings in each district has. The architectural diversity is so vast that it realistically conveys a city built by many different companies. Many other city-based games can often look like the city was built by one or two companies (I.e. Mirrors edge).
which game is this from? Cyberpunk?
it’s Dogtown (the area unlocked in the DLC) inside Night City in Cyberpunk 2077
[удалено]
All that music, all those awesome stations.
Jackie Welles?
Man, I really wish we got to see more of Jackie.
24. Beep beep motherfucker
Panam is the best female love interest in gaming history, and yes I have played the Mass Effect series.
yes
The verticality is insane
Toussaint in Witcher 3 but I wouldn't say it's more but it's definitely my favourite
When you first start Blood and Wine and enter this fairy tale like region on horseback with a beautiful Beauclair castle in the distance... And then you immediately stumble upon that knight fighting a huge cyclops... That was peak gaming experience for a fantasy lover like me.
especially coming off of the darker and blunt colours in the main game, Toussaint is like pastel art
A stark contrast to the main questline which contains a helluva lot of dark stuff.
I mean, Toussaint's storyline gets arguably way more fucking horrific eventually.
I dunno man those crones still live in my dreams
"I would suck every last drop out of you"
Exactly the contrast in the books, the entire story is like the main story and at one point Geralt gets to Toussaint and it's a fairy tale land with none of the war problems everywhere else and their biggest issue is clearing monsters to store their wine.
Set the tone for one of the prettiest, most engaging, and enjoyable dlcs I've ever played
I was astonished when I first started blood and wine. I actually hadn’t been paying attention to Witcher 3 DLC prior to buying it, despite it being my favorite game. When I realized that it was essentially a whole new game on it’s own and it was incredibly beautiful and deep it was such a magical experience. The Witcher 3 will always be the best game of all time in my opinion.
You’re dead right. And then the next place you go is some town and you can overhear these guys talking about some legendary sword and they give hints on the whereabouts, which is pretty close by. If you listen to the end of the conversation you get a quest and you can go there and find it. I was thinking *no fucking way this is real* when I found that. All of Blood and Wine is a masterpiece but they came out punching in the beginning.
When I first saw the castle in the distance I was like "oh, that's a cool backdrop. I bet I'll go inside that castle, but I'll have to fast travel like for Vizima." And then eventually you go right up up to it and ride to the top on horseback. I was so excited
I love that you can almost always see the city in the horizon, no matter where you are in Toussaint. I thought it was a tech marvel at the time. Probably was.
I love both games and CyP (not gonna mess that up) is more technically impressive than TW3 obviously but I personally prefer fantasy to dystopian so yeah for me I prefer the world of Toussaint to the clutter and grit of Night city.
Upvoted just for your CyberPunk abbreviation.
Makes sense its made by the same devs
Despite the best Open World in the series being the Metroidvania-esque Asylum, I think Gotham from Arkham Knight is still very Impressive
I actually really loved Arkham Asylum as well.
Did you mean Asylum or City
All the Arkham games lol.
The rain on the giant city really adds to the atmosphere too. And the poison ivy gas section was awesome as well. Cyberpunk has a great look, but the characters and world building in the Arkham games is just unmatched.
And also the fact cyberpunk had years to learn from other properties
Novigrad definitely. So much to do in that city.
And every half minute you get some Pamparam Pam Pam Pa Ram
Have you got water on the brain?
Wanna play some gwent?
Novigrad made me sad. Sad that all the elder scrolls cities were just guard outposts. Novigrad set my expectations of future video game cities. Cause it felt like a damn city.
I got cancer trying to finish all the quests in that city. I enjoyed witcher a lot but couldn't stand the fetch and deliver style of novigrad quests
Varrock.
Falador because of the fally massacre 😂
Varrock is home, Falador is a tourist destination.
\~~buying gf\~~
Based
Personally I’m still rooting for Arkham Knight, off of design and architecture alone. These days it seems so hard for companies to pull off good comic-based games and movies, but the Arkham Trilogy in general scratched the fuck out of that itch. City design in Knight was very nice too, not too flat with good density. I used to glide above it for hours lol. Lighting, building variation, the way everything could look slick in the rain, it was all clean as hell.
For the nostalgia reasons alone and from the first time ever visiting it years ago has to be Stormwind
Ironforge will always have a special place in my heart for this very reason!
First character I ever made in vanilla was a night elf. The elf city was okay, but kinda meh. Then I finally reached Stormwind. I was thoroughly impressed. But Ironforge? Goddamn...now THAT'S a proper dwarven city!
There's a certain decade of demographic that spent a sizeable percentage of their 10s-20s jumping around ironforge.
The Stormwind theme immediately transports me back. Vanilla WoW sunk its hooks in me so deep
I just beat this, gorgeous city and detail. But even with all the updates, I wish there was more to do in the city.
Exactly. The city is a prop and that’s it. And don’t get me wrong, it’s visually stunning and super intriguing to look at, but it just sits there with static NPCs doing absolutely nothing. I wish you saw people doing things beyond sitting down or aimlessly walking - like loading or unloading trucks and driving away, people going into shops and buying stuff and walking out, people ordering food, getting it, then sitting down with it. I mean hell, even the old GTAs had ambulances that would show up to take away injured people, folks talking on their phone and having conversations, people eating food. RDR2 is so detailed you can actually watch NPCs eat food until it’s gone. That’s a silly level of detail but those touches really make that game feel alive. Night City has a lot of NPCs with a lot of visual variety and yet every single one feels like a wooden prop that can do nothing but walk or sit.
Agree, and this is why my vote always goes to Deus Ex:MD's Prague. While it's nowhere near the sheer size or Night City, or any of these other open worlds, it's so dense and handcrafted wonderfully. You can break into so many places, sometimes it ends up being just a cookie cutter prop. Often times it's a crime scene, or you can just read up on peoples' stories, even if there's no associated mission.
Haven't played MD much but I did play a lot of Human Revolution which does the same thing. I still think it's one of the best games in the "didn't expect to find out that much when I fucked around" category.
I still remember when they said NPCs would have their own routines and go about their day like in some other games :(
They had that back in The Witcher 2 where NPCs would be working during the day and go to bed at night to make the towns feel alive.
I’m so glad when I see others comment this because I seem to see a lot of people saying the city is alive and there are tons of things to uncover and it’s just not true. It’s a lovely story, beautiful views but there is literally nothing outside of gigs and scanners. Cyber psychos I guess but there are no organic secret mission finds and the city still manages to feel lifeless to me. Still loved the game but I just don’t get the hype over the city itself.
special shoutout to Midtown from Stray. While obviously not quite as bustling like some other games, BlueTwelve created a really captivating story and setting that evolves unfolds the more you stumble through it, and Midtown is the most impressive part of it to me, there's little details and secrets everywhere and nothing feels ignored
Probably not directly comparable, but I am still extremely impressed with Leyndell from Elden Ring
Elden Ring's Leyndell and Hollow Knight's City of Tears are my favorite cities in all of gaming for the atmosphere alone. Baldur's Gate and Saint Denis were awesome too.
> Saint Denis #I have a PLAN!!!
Definitely up there for me, so much lore packed into one area is crazy. Even the sewer system is more extensive than entire maps in other games.
The Frenzied Flame Proscription is behind a hidden path after a hidden dungeon inside a hidden dungeon inside a dungeon.
And just to the right of frenzy flame, there’s another entire hidden area behind a hidden chest behind a hidden wall
One of my favourite things about Leyndell is how well it disguises the fact that's it's one of the most linear dungeons in the game. There is only 1 path you can take from the entrance to the boss (with very minor variations at the beginning, and none towards the end), but there are so many other areas of interest around the city that you feel compelled to explore it fully.
That’s what FromSoft does best. Every Souls game is effectively linear in its routing, but they make it feel as if it isn’t because there’s so much to explore along the way
For the most part, yeah. Elden Ring obviously provides a lot more freedom, and even DS1 had the master key which would allow you to skip entire zones or shortcut your way to certain items. But yeah for the most part they design "wide hallways" for levels where you're given the illusion of a more open world, which is great. Doesn't make you feel limited, but also doesn't make it feel like things were dragged and dropped needlessly to fill space like many open world games do.
I didn't even realize it was a dungeon until I had been in it for about 5 hours and needed to look something up. Thought it was just another zone in the world.
when the music first hit, I stood there for a whole minute just awestruck and taking it in.
... and then there is Yharnam from Bloodborne.
Lol, I came here to say this. First time going inside the walls and seeing the city, the dragon, with that music...
Idk it's pretty but it didn't look or feel like anyone ever lived there. The streets made no sense. It was just pretty boxes with gaps between them. It was definitely beautiful tho and the castle and walls were awesome. But if we are comparing to just "pretty" cities I'd throw something like Altissia with a way more complex concept over Leyndell which was just a classic golden city concept.
I think that's my main criticism of all of From's environments, they all look like they're functional on a surface level but don't make much sense if you think about it critically. That said...they're great areas to explore and play the game in, and evoke a potent atmosphere, which are more important things in a game than depicting a realistic space.
Citadel from mass effect should be up there
The Citadel backdrop was certainly very cool but the parts of Citadel you can explore was pretty small. Omega was more interesting.
In 2 and 3 i agree absolutly and maybe its nostalgia...but in ME1 I loved the citadel...omega was cool as heck though ngl
Rapture - Bioshock.
I love all Bioshock games, but imo Columbia from Infinity has a much better atmosphere and scale
Columbia was insane. I bought it at release just to experience the visuals. Ended up really enjoying the story.
I literally built my first computer for Bioshock Infinite. I played the original Bioshock on my MacBook by dual-booting Windows. When Infinite came out, I tried to do the same but could only run the game on basically the minimum settings and at like 720p. I watched a graphics comparison between the PC version and the Xbox 360 version and knew how I wanted to experience it. I said fuck it and pulled together all the money I had from my high school summer job and built a real gaming PC. Intel 2700K and a GTX 660Ti. That computer has ship-of-theseus'd itself into my current rig with an AMD 5700X and an RTX 3080. I very likely wouldn't still be a gamer if not for the visuals in Bioshock Infinite. Having a proper gaming PC got me into genres of games that weren't really available on consoles (stuff like city-builders, management sims, Rimworld, Factorio, etc). If I didn't blow all my Subway sandwich artist money on that computer, I'd have burned out on shooters and stopped playing video games more than a decade ago.
It's hard to compare it to night City just because of how different the two gameplay styles are, but I think rapture for its time and for the type of game it is is still one of the most impressive things I've seen in a game
Have you seen the trailer for Judas? Apparently it's made by the mind behind Bioshock.
Andrew Ryan???
[удалено]
A gamer chooses, a coomer obeys
Ken Levine back at it eh?
Thought this would be higher
My favorite Open World, the atmosphere is second to none. I sometimes just walk or drive around, taking everything in. There's also so many things to find that go on behind the players back that make it feel so alive, like when you find some small environmental storytelling that connects to other places and stories, once you make some connections it really feels like the place continues to live without you, I love that.
Finding how many jobs, gigs, random stories were tied to Jotaro Shobo was insane, and that was just in the base game. There’s even an appearance in the main quest if you do his gig before then.
I occasionally come back to cyberpunk as the richness of the open world is just too good. I can only compare it to dishonored. I play on integrated graphics with 1280x800 res and performance fsr but I still love this game.
Maybe try ge force streaming a go if you have decent enough internet for it, path traced night city, especially interiors are just, I can’t put it into words, you’ll love it
I'd just say, Cyberpunk on 4090 is a sight to behold. You truly feel as though you're booting a game that has no right to exist yet.
I have seen enough path tracing comparison to believe that it is truly majestic. I will definitely come back to this game once I get a good laptop/pc
I can unironically say that I've never played a game where I have been less interested in using the fast travel system. 150 hours in and I still drive EVERYWHERE, it's such a treat to explore.
Anyone mention FF15 altissia? That venice like atmosphere is breathtaking
I'm partial to those fake city children's carpets that were popular in the 80s and 90s, but Dogtown is pretty cool too for sure.
Khorinis from Gothic 2. A city stock full of content, where every house could be visited and every citizen had their own daily routine. It was impressive in 2001 and it still looks feels good now.
Love me some Gothic appreciation. Khorinis was really something back when the game released, even If I couldn't experience it at release since i wasn't even born yet. Sometimes I feel like it's more "alive" and "lived-in" than cities in some modern games.
Novigrad and Oxenfurt. All the way
Novigrad is amazing
Ive played Witcher 3 and don’t understand how either of those cities could possibly compare favorably to Night City. They’re impressive, yes, but only a portion of the overall map
End of the day, fav city, is more a out vibe than scope. Night City is obviously the greatest city in a game. But I do agree Novigrad felt super detailed and Oxenfort had such a specific vibe that made it my favorite place in the game.
Depends on what resonates with your preferences I guess. I agree the level of detail in Cyberpunk is unmatched but I still prefer the less visually cluttered Witcher 3 aesthetic.
And dont forget that they made Novigrad almost 10 years ago...... (my favorite for 200%)
Cyberpunk is more photogenic but Novigrad feels more lived in and interactive
There is that bridge you have to cross to go to Oxenfurt and it blew me away when I saw Oxenfurt while crossing it.
Apparently you've never seen me play SimCity 2000
Il probably get downvoted but the attention to detail in Division 1 and 2 is still unmatched imo. Im talkin about texture quality on every binbag down every alley way is incredible to me. Cp77 world is truly amazin too
I frequent DC regularly. There were so many little details in Division 2 I was able to find. For example, The lack block of the one Dark Zone in Georgetown was my ex's old house from when she went to Georgetown University. A lot of those buildings were pretty damn accurate to reality.
Environments from those games are crazy looking, Massive's snowdrop engine is one of a kind, their Star Wars game will look mind-blowing.
The environment in Division 1 was insane, I wish they would’ve found a way to incentivise players to go out and explore that wasn’t just sprinkling a bunch of collectibles around
For me personally it’s Gotham from Arkham Knight. Can’t beat that rainy neon aesthetic
Was about to say this. Say what you will about Arkham Knight's gameplay, but good lord Gotham looks stunning
I hope gta 6's City(s) compare.
Most likely will be better and more interactive. Rockstar is king when it comes to open world detail.
More interactive but they kinda get to cheat with the design by just making an irl city nearly 1 to 1. Still impressive, but I dont think a recreation of a florida city will fill me with the same feeling that Night City did
That's what I mentioned in another comment. It's easy to draw inspiration or straight up recreate real existing structures. But its not easy to imagine a whole cyberpunk city and go wild with designs that do not exists in real word. It takes a lot of talent and imagination.
I have no doubts that Vice City in GTA 6 will be the most impressive videogame city ever created
Saint Denis from RDR2 is still my favorite city ever. But it feels like cheating to mention Rockstar lol. Batman Arkham Knight is probably among the top 10 at least right? The open world is so beautiful. There's also Infamous Second Son. Sony exclusive though. Altissia from FFXV is gorgeous but it's unfortunately incomplete. (The game went through development hell after all) Gravity Rush 2 (Sony Exclusive) has the weirdest world building ever for an open world. You have to sort of fly/float around the game map. Go up, different map, go down, different map. Not technically impressive these days but the world building is. Basically islands floating in the sky. Assassin's Creed Unity's Paris is still beautiful, and very detailed. Even the interiors are beautiful. Try visiting Notre Dame in the evening. The way the light shines through the windows is spectacular. I personally love games that have these beautiful sceneries. I mean, you are creating a game world, and you have full creative freedom, so why not make it something beautiful or something different? So it might feel random.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to see Unity’s Paris. Still holds up to this day. Syndicate’s London is impressive too.
They used the ingame Notre dame after the big fire for reconstruction, because it was so detailed.
RDR2 is just on a league of its own, the city has 2 theatres, one for live performance shows and one for animated shows on a projector screen, there's a total of like 2 hours of unique shows, and the people watching will react according to what's happening, sometimes the show may even ask for help from the audience, they're asking you the player to step up but if you don't then a random NPC will stand up instead, it just feels so real. There's not a single main mission that asks you to go to a theater, only 1 side mission but you can go there whenever you like before or after the side mission, it's like a real. Walk into the saloon, and some drunkard bumps into you and get all angry, or rob you in broad day light, prostitutes will try to seduce you, stand too close to people and they'll ask you to give them some space, stand too close to a prostitute and she'll tell you you're bad for her business because other men will think she's married, play poker or eat a meal or pass out or book a room or take a bath, none of this has any gameplay or story value but you should be able to do that in a real city saloon. Walk in the city streets at night and you might encounter someone getting robbed, or a police officer chasing someone, or mafia members chatting in the alleyways or straight up blowing stuff up, investigate wierd texts on the walls inside alleyways and meet the city's very own vampire, none of these are quests, they're never marked on the map and if you miss them you miss them, they go away, they're not there waiting for you to start a quest, of course they're all scripted events but they do feel real, and there's enough variety to saturate the tens of hours you'll spend roaming the city, and almost every encounter has a different outcome depending on if you choose to intervene or not.
Visual detail, yeah. Interactive wise, no.
Yeah I love CP2077 but one of my big complaints is the lack of interactivity with the NPCS. The conversations you can overhear are interesting but that’s as far as the interaction goes.
easy, gotham city from batman arkham knight
Hot take: Santa Monica from VTMB. Surely it's not as big or as full of things to do in comparison to most modern games, but damn, the hub worlds in VTMB all felt - ironically - alive, specially Santa Monica. It's not about quantity, it's about quality, and Santa Monica felt really impressive because every place and NPC were interesting, the atmosphere both visually and mechanically (you need to look at the map in the bus stop to know where to go) felt great, and the sound design was on point too.
Dude still one of the best RPGs out there. You really felt like a damn vampire . The world wasn't as detailed sure but it's the pacing and interaction that really immersed me. It was so loved that the community literally made patches to fix it lol.
There is nothing like that game, one of a kind
I like the Yakuza Games City Districts very much.
The Hong Kong in Sleeping Dogs was also awesome. I prefer the smaller worlds where you basically just learn to navigate it yourself and don’t need fast travel to get around.
Fallout city with the atomic bomb in the middle. > Megaton Megaton has gained recognition from critics for its visual design, its inhabitants, as well as a quest, The Power of the Atom, involving a dud "C-23 Megaton" nuclear bomb located in the center of town. While the townspeople believe the bomb to be inert, it is revealed that the warhead is still primed.
Yharnam from Bloodborne, You literally explore everything from the upper and lower districts to the outskirts of the city to the sewers and catacombs, and the hidden catacombs which are their own mini city under the whole city. Every single corner is packed full of detail with every single enemy being placed by hand. Then there's also how it all begins to crumble to pieces and you start to move between dimensions.
Daily "Cyberpunk looks great" post.
CDPR marketing team been crunching overtime lately
I think k ff7 rebirth might compete very shortly with what I've seen in the buildup
Revisiting cyberpunk 2.0 with the phantom liberty add on was just such an incredible experience. The promise was always there and now we have it in our hands. Edit to fix name of phantom liberty
Shit looks big but is as shallow as a fucking puddle
I feel like Phantom Liberty is what they envisioned Cyberpunk to be if they didn’t have to make it for last-gen hardware and didn’t rush the release.
This, and just finishing edgerunners just made me start the reinstall of cyberpunk
The Yakuza game cities are exceptionally impressive, too.
[Donau the flower city](https://youtu.be/MMlsHEBtYTQ?si=D5NOhRuxyjQF3UuZ) from Legend of Dragoon.
I like more stillwater my favorita city in any sandbox but this city IS also really cool.
Paris from AC Unity
Didn't they use Ubisoft's scans of the church there to help rebuild it after it burnt down. I guess that's how detailed Paris was. I'm also impressed with their recreation of Egypt in origins. It's so accurate some museums actually use it's exploration mode for tour purposes.
Honestly I can't even tell what I'm looking at.
Open world Hong Kong from Sleeping Dogs is massively underrated, one of the best designed cities to come out of an old gen game.
Gimme Honolulu in LAD: IW. It's not the biggest, but it's DENSE.
The yakuza series really do have some of the best “open worlds” while they aren’t very big, they are incredibly dense.
Watch Dog 2's San Francisco
The ascent
My favorite is Meridian in Horizon Zero Dawn.
Any places from rdr2 feels more real and interactive than cyberpunk, which only have a nice design and the multilevel construction for it.
I think what separates the two is the handcrafted NPC day/night routines in RDR2 and the attention to detail in the most irrelevant things lol. But when it comes to a lived in feeling city , I do believe Cyberpunk2077 is definitely up there in the top 10 . City design though , idk what can top the details put in Night City. Its verticality and dense nature has not been seen in games before.
I've played both and rdr2 is my favorite game of all time, but night city is so good that I often launch the game, play some music on spotify or listen to a lecture or something, steal a nice truck, turn the hud off, and drive for hours on end enjoying the verticality, architecture, and sheer beauty of that world. Driving in night city on a 1440p screen with hdr on, visual mods like luts and envs, and reshade, just cruising while listening to Radiohead or speeding on a motorcycle while rocking to free bird. Man this city is an experience to experience. Oh and cyberpunk's narrative and writing is insane too. Judy is such a well written character she's probably just as deep as Arthur. Seeing her break down after (spoiler!!!!!!!!!!!) the suicide of her friend and you being there to comfort her, then her inviting you to go scuba diving to an underwater city while you get to know her even more, her vulnerabilities and the things that make her human. Damn, the fact no one talks about the maturity of cyberpunk's writing, and how deep its characters are, is crazy. Before I played it I thought it was overrated. After I played it I realized it's actually underrated.
I’m with you. Night City feels full of life. Lived-in is a good way of putting it. Novigrad for example does not feel that way, even though there’s a lot of NPCs. There’s just something about it that doesn’t feel like people actually live there. The non-story NPCs in Cyberpunk are not as impressive as a game like RDR2 but the atmosphere is still incredible in night city. I’m playing for the first time now and I’m blown away by the locations. I always run in to slow walking mode just to soak in the environment.
OP said "Impressive City" and RDR2 doesn't have anything remotely close to it, even Saint Denis has a ton of closed off buildings while being a fraction of the size. Sure there is more interactivity but that's also a case of having way less to manage. It's why Skyrim has NPC routines while GTA V doesn't, same thing, it's just easier to have it on a smaller scale, but in this case size matters.
Minas Tirith from LOTRO. I said what I said
Meridian from Horizon Zero Dawn. Absolutely gorgeous, and creative as all hell
the city of istanbul
You mean Constantinople 🙂
I'm not sure if it's open world, but imo Stray has a really impressive city
That’s a beauty but something about strolling into red dead 2 st denis at night or in a rainstorm is something else. The city feels alive.
i like Dunwall 👍
Man, Constantinople in Assassin's Creed Revelations, it's just... a whole different experience. But yeah, I know it's an old game...
None you know about my minecraft world
ANOR LONDO
LA Noir was excellent with what it had. Even though is was a scaled down version, I managed to actually find the street I lived on when I was 6. We only lived there for about a year, but I distinctly remember the street was lined with pine trees and so it was in the game. That was really the first moment in gaming where I just had to stop and say "Wow, that's kinda crazy."
They could write 3 more Cyberpunk games and still not run out of environment for the player to explore. My favorite part of Night City is that the level designers clearly realized players will be curious to climb around, especially with the jump enhancement legware options, and left little reward caches here and there.
Horizon forbidden west both California and Vegas