I loved this question when I first saw it, and I know almost every little nook and cranny of Skate 3’s Port Carverton still. I bought that game at launch and I still find myself retreading familiar locales trying to make new lines and combos for myself. It’s well put together as a city but it’s so good in creating a city-wide skate-friendly terrain.
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Oh, Pelican Town. I love you (and most of your residents) so much.
Megaton will always hold a special place in my heart, probably because Fallout 3 was the first game I ever played to completion on a console and I just loved it so much. The one playthrough of Fallout 3 where I blew it up caused me such immediate, all-encompassing guilt that I quickly reloaded and earlier save and killed that rich fucker in his stupid tower like a good kid should.
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Majula from Dark Souls 2… it’s gorgeous, the music is amazing, and really conveys the sense of melancholy that pervades that world.
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Everyone loves to clown on Dragon Age II, but Kirkwall was legit pretty cool. It was a pretty neat concept of having almost the entire game take place in this one city, so I got to know it well. There’s a power struggle for the city, a seedy underbelly doing all sorts of ill shit, and even a de facto Qunari occupation. What a cool setting, even if repetition makes it boring after awhile.
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People talk a lot of yay about DA2, but the combat wasn’t nearly as janky and I could actually beat it, so it had that going for it that DA:O didn’t.
And Kirkwall was great, repetition aside! I feel like I knew every nook and cranny of that damn town.
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There was an open thread sort of about this a while back: What’s Your Favorite City in Games? Not exactly the same question, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there to read through.
At the moment, I have to say Possum Springs from Night in the Woods. Even though it’s pretty small, it has such a tremendous sense of place from all the different paths and buildings and passing character interactions (and I love how NITW lets you “overhear” conversations without actually being a part of them). It manages to straddle this line of feeling singular and unqiue while also evoking this archetypal image of a west Pennsylvania mining town. Definitely a big reason why that game was so evocative for me.
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Has anyone made a game set in Marielda yet?
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The second I read this, my mind immediately went to the Kingdom Hearts franchise, despite not having played a game since 2 or finished one since 1. Traverse Town and Twilight Town are, aesthetically, pretty memorable.
Also, my personal MVPs for Cool Cityscapes in Video Games has to go to Dunwall and Karnaka. Of the two, I prefer Karnaca, but that’s entirely because the quasi-Mediterranean atmosphere in that city is a lot better than Dunwall’s ‘Gross and Shitty Steampunk London’ vibe.
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I’ll second Majula from Dark Souls II and Possum Springs from Night in the Woods. Both weirdly enough strike a very similar emotional note for me: coming home from the dangerous and unknown. It’s a place you’re fond of and where you know you’re safe, but it’s still kind of sucks to be there.
The obvious recent answer is the Eva’s Hammer from Wolfenstein II. Shit’s dire and everyone has to deal with that, but also what’s for dinner and how can I decorate this steel crate I live in?
My personal deeper cut would by the City from Thief 1 and 2. The way you’re only shown very specific parts of the City while a myriad of other locations and districts are hinted at or mentioned in passing implies that the place could contain anything. The later games filled in the map a bit too much to maintain that.
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As others have said, Pelican Town immediately sprang to mind. It’s a very wholesome place where everyone seems to get along. It’s not without its problems but they’re very real problems that real small towns face. I want to live in Pelican Town.
The lore about the towns in the Elder Scrolls games always betrays their in-game appearance, they just feel too small to actually function as cities even if everyone has a house. But nevertheless, I really like the concept of Vivec. I just hate finding my way around it.
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Um, probably most of the towns in Chrono Cross? I remember wanting to live in either Termina or Arni as a kid since they all looked aesthetically pleasing and very chill.
North Point / Night Market in Sleeping Dogs doesn’t fit the criteria here since it’s based on Hong Kong, but that place felt very alive in a way I didn’t get with modern GTA games.
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the first thing i thought of was twilight town from kingdom hearts II
the way it works narratively as like, a perpetual almost-end that wont actually end (always twilight never night or day) and how that reflects roxas’ story and how its like, the end of summer for them for like, 8 days or however long the intro is, idk its a perfect place created for that section of story and the place is such an important mood-setter for the intro to that game.
there’s not much by the way of exploration bc the town is mostly empty but as a narrative device it’s one of my faves
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The best part about Kirkwall was how by the second act you definitely got really familiar with the city’s nooks and crannies down to remembering how to get to The Hanged Man from anywhere with your eyes closed. That game was so good at immersing the player in Hawke growing to live in that city and Bioware either would need to absolutely nail going back there or never even think about it.
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It’s such a peaceful place in an otherwise intense game. Sometimes I’ll just idle by the bonfire and soak in the atmosphere.
Heoi and the Kreuzbazar from Shadowrun for sure! I’m probably biased because I just replayed them, but I love the atmosphere so much. They’re both cyberpunk in such different ways, and the music and level design make me happy.
Also the campground in Psychonauts- although I guess that might not be a town, technically? And the citadel in ME1. The common thread now that I see it all laid out, is that I really like wandering around and bothering npcs to a pleasant musical backdrop.
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It’s probably just because I’m playing through it now, but I really like the Shinjuku area of Persona 5. At first I found the various platforms and exits confusing, but with time I figured it out, and I know exactly where to go when it’s raining, where to get my aijuro on Sundays, where to find Yusuke or Ann hanging out. If only Makoto were there, too.
I love popping out of the tunnels and talking to a rocking busker, listening to some drunk college kids, or being a teenage boy helping a 50-year old politician clear his name from a decades old scandal… yeah, ok, this game is weird.
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I’ll echo Alexandria and Lindblum from FFIX since they’re both welcoming cities and locations that evolve with the game’s narrative in a way that I really appreciate. I’d add the Black Mage Village from FFIX too since it might be one of the more earnest and unique locales in that game. In the FF series, I’ve also been partial to Balamb Garden in FFVIII and Besaid in FFX. The garden manages to be a beautiful school full of life and a mysterious base for a legitimately shady military organization. Besaid might be the best sleepy beach town in gaming and its theme goes a long way.
I’d also throw in Inaba from Persona 4. That is one well realized Japanese town.
Take me down to the paradise city/
Where speedy cars go fast and the crashes are pretty
Burnout Paradise, a game so fun it made me hate the song Paradise City slightly less by association.
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So my answer to the actual tweet was Paradise City from Burnout Paradise. And what it comes down to is the city was perfectly constructed for the game they were creating and it was always fun to move through and explore. What pushes me to explore a city or town more than anything else is engaging movement and clear easy navigation. Paradise was masterful in this regard.
Another town worth mentioning is Novigrad. Now, I actually dislike a lot of the city as navigating it was a terrible experience. They seemed to have perfectly captured the tiny medieval back-alley and made the assumption that medieval cities were only that. But, one of the coolest experiences I had exploring a city in a game was going up the bridge to the higher area of the town and accidentally stumbling into the church of the eternal fire. That was wonderful!
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