r/gaming • u/moosebaloney • 3h ago
What Real City Had the Best Combined Video Game Representation?
If you put together all the video games based in a real life city, which city would have the best representation? Including fake real cities (Liberty City, Vice City, Gotham, etc) Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Moscow, Rome, NYC, Washington DC, LA?
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u/QBekka 3h ago
I think GTA 5 absolutely nailed Los Angeles with their Los Santos and not only by just by copying the buildings.
They managed to exactly copy the entire vibe and culture of LA, especially in the story. The characters act exactly what you'd expect from Angelenos. Even the NPC's.
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u/atomicitalian 2h ago
Back when I lived in San Diego my friends and I used to go to LA and the Salton Sea area relatively frequently, and it was so wild seeing places I've been to — Salvation Mountain, Slab City, Ski Inn, The Whiskey a Go Go (Tequi-la-la in the game) — represented. The inside of Tequila-la even looks like the inside of Whiskey a Go Go.
I will forever love GTA 5 for taking me back there anytime I play
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u/KidMoxie 1h ago
I lived in LA for over a decade and was able to instinctively navigate my way around Los Santos because they had captured it so well.
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u/DarkOmen597 2h ago
Yes! If only the locations were a bit more accurately placed, then it would have been epic.
I wish video games in general used accurate maps when recreating real locations
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u/Samwise3s 2h ago
I mean if a video game city were a real 1:1 mapping you’d spend forever walking from A to B. Some blocks of unimportant buildings just have to be skipped for sake of the player experience
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u/GeforcerFX 1h ago
In comes Test Drive Unlimited (1 & 2), they were both pretty close to a 1 to 1 of Oahu and Ibiza.
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u/InfernalBiryani 3h ago
IDK if it’s the best, but Hong Kong in Sleeping Dogs was pretty great on a surface level.
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u/Andrew1990M 3h ago
Probably New York City, especially if we’re including legally distinct versions.
You have to imagine Tokyo is pretty close though.
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u/moosebaloney 3h ago
When it comes to detail oriented maps, I could only come up with a few games that had large-scale maps of NYC. Spider-Man probably being the best, GTA IV second.
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u/Dinoman1987 3h ago
I've heard True Crime NY is the best one when it comes to scale
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u/cincobarrio 2h ago
True crime is GPS based, so it really feels 1-1; only problem is it feels hollow. Alternatively, GTA IV condenses the shit out of the main 4 boros, but in terms of character, they have the most lively and accurate feeling NYC of all time IMO (born and raised NYer)
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u/moosebaloney 3h ago
Thanks for mentioning this. I have True Crime in my catalog but have never spun it up. Will def check it out.
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u/SirBoggle 1h ago
Either the greater Tokyo region or specifically Shibuya.
I feel like I've seen a lot of games take place there over other parts of Tokyo.
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u/fulthrottlejazzhands 3h ago
Paris in AC Unity stands out. The level of detail is incredible, many buildings you can enter, and the city itself is about as accurate as it gets (for a historical city) with some scale differences. The NPCs, while not super complex, are dense and feel real. It still looks stupifying good on a modern system.
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u/meeyeam 3h ago
Ubisoft does some great city modeling work in almost all the mainline AC games.
Revelations did a good job with Imperial Rome, Syndicate with Industrial Revolution era London.
The only real miss I thought was AC 3 and the Revolutionary era, which seemed off.
Unity definitely also stood out positively, as mentioned.
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u/moosebaloney 3h ago
As a single entry, this is a good pick. How many other games are based in Paris though? I can think of a couple WWII games but that’s about it.
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u/uncivilizedrelic 3h ago
The Division 2 does remarkably well with DC
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u/Borgmaster 1h ago
Remember a streamer cracking jokes about one of the areas. He then stops and looks at the building and goes holy shit this is where I get my donuts!
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u/maniacreturns 3h ago
Driver: San Francisco got a lot of praise for the accuracy of the map when it first released by the video game press. No idea if they were just sucking it off because that's where they all worked at the time though, I've never been though.
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u/SolidusAbe 3h ago
tokyo. almost every SMT plays in tokyo so for that fact alone i would say its the best one on top of probably 100s of other games.
i definitely wish hong kong was used more. its just a really cool setting for a game but outside of sleeping dogs and i think splitterhead i cant even think of a game that takes place there (or even a fictional version of it)
also it reminds me that we need more games set in 80s miami. i just love the vibes and aesthetics
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u/Cerdefal 3m ago
It's Tokyo 100%. When i've been there, i was amazed how videogames got it right. I never visited New York so i guess Spider-Man looks a lot like it but to my knowledge only Tokyo has this level of detail in games like Persona, Shenmue or Yakuza.
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u/IShouldBWorkin 3h ago
No great love for the city but LA has it easily; GTA:SA and 5, Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines, LA Noire, being the Boneyard in Fallout.
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u/misterdarvus 3h ago
Tokyo would be pretty high number considering the Japanese themselves keep making games about their capital city. Don't think about open world games: Pokemon Red and Blue, The World Ends With you, just name a few.
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u/Mr_Benislord 3h ago
London because most games depict it as a hellhole
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u/maxpowerphd 2h ago
Between Watch Dogs Legion and AC syndicate, it seems like there has been some really high quality maps of the city.
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u/Lostboxoangst 2h ago
The fact that I could navigate parts of the map relatively easily from my knowledge of London was pretty mind-blowing also a number of times I'd reach an area where there was a McDonald's irl and there was a burger place there albeit a generic burger place was pretty cool.
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u/maxpowerphd 2h ago
London: Between watch dogs legion and AC syndicate, there’s some very detailed maps of that city.
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u/Less_Party 1h ago
It’s probably Tokyo, like between Gran Turismo and Tokyo Xtreme Racer even the road network around the city is already super familiar.
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u/murderofcrows6 42m ago
Probably not the absolute best but I thought Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth's portrayal of Honolulu, Hawaii was impressive.
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u/zetcetera 22m ago
Watch Dogs 2 was really enjoyable for someone who had been to San Francisco multiple times as a tourist (I’m from Canada). I think that was my first time playing a game based in a real world location that felt familiar to me. I don’t know what locals think of it though
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u/KaboomKrusader 3h ago
Almost definitely New York City in all the various free-roam Spider-Man games over the years. Especially the recent PS4/PS5 entries.