Never a city so real?

September 10, 2006 8:57 AM

Which video games have the most realistic depictions of real-life environments?

I've been playing Project Gotham Racing 3 and recently discovered the 'photograph' feature that lets you fly through the tracks (Las Vegas, Shinjuku, New York, and London). The verisimilitude of the tracks is unbelieveable - flying through the Shinjuku track there are real buildings, storefronts, billboards and other signs which I remember seeing on my recent visit to the area. The Las Vegas track includes final models of buildings that are under construction, or would have been under construction when the game was released (eg Caesar's Place's shopping extension).

I hope this doesn't come across as a shill for the game - I'm far more interested in the exploration component of the game than the racing element, and would love to find other games that are as, or more, detailed, to any real-life environment.

What other games have very realistic and detailed depictions of real-live environments? What are the most impressive details that have been incorporated into video games?

posted by Gortuk to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (16 answers total)

Best answer: Perhaps not exactly what you're thinking of, but I can't let Adventure go unmentioned.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:02 AM on September 10, 2006

In terms of a mass depiction of a real-life environment, "The Getaway" for Playstation 2 attempts to put a whole ton of London into a game that you can drive around GTA style. Google for pictures and video clips.. just one example.
posted by wackybrit at 9:04 AM on September 10, 2006

Actually, just noticed that's from a PS3 preview for the game, but it's already on the PS2..
posted by wackybrit at 9:04 AM on September 10, 2006

"midnight club 3" had a very well-done atlanta map (can't speak about san diego or detroit though) with plenty of recognizable locales and landmarks. if it weren't for the road layout being modified for the purposes of race design, i could suspend disbelief long enough to think that i was really there.
posted by Ziggy Zaga at 9:09 AM on September 10, 2006

I'm not sure how accurate it is as I've never been to Japan, but Shenmue got a ton of press for its attention to detail.
posted by danb at 9:12 AM on September 10, 2006

Best answer: Check out the Digital Urban blog. Posts about cities in games.
posted by teleskiving at 9:25 AM on September 10, 2006

Spider-man 2 won a lot of recognition for it's attention to NYC details.
posted by revgeorge at 10:13 AM on September 10, 2006

The Gran Turismo series has always been good at this. Many of the tracks in these games are real world tracks, and they are mapped to a high level of accuracy. For example.
posted by knave at 10:47 AM on September 10, 2006

I found The Getaway's London very disappointing. The PS3 version will no doubt be far better.
posted by riotgrrl69 at 11:13 AM on September 10, 2006

To step out of the genre you've chosen, and to interpret your question slightly differently: The entire Myst series was the flagship product for photorealistic environments. Recently, I've found that Oblivion is extremely convincing as a realistic environment (of course, you'll want to get a powerhouse video card and download some mods for extended textures).
posted by thanotopsis at 12:57 PM on September 10, 2006

Response by poster: Thanotopsis - I'm not really interested in photorealism, which almost every game of recent release strives towards, and which in itself isn't that interesting to me. Rather, I am specifically interested in how games can map real-life environments in some cases better than any non-gaming technology (eg PGR3 gives a street-level view of Tokyo which even Google Earth cannot).

I'm sure we could have a huge discussion about what games have the best graphics, but that's not where I was going with this question.
posted by Gortuk at 1:32 PM on September 10, 2006

Best answer: Rainbow Six has a Vegas version coming out that's apparently really quite good. One of the problems with doing a particular city is that people from that city will love it, but everyone else just sees it as "just another map". So for example, I'd love a game with a really good map of San Francisco, but nobody really invests in one because there's just not enough of us to entertain with it. London, New York, and Tokyo have huge populations by contrast that can sort of support this sort of loving recreation. Vegas doesn't, but is so unique, alien, and travelled to that it sort of works too.

I'd kill for GTA: Disneyland :)

To extend in a slightly different direction, large scale capture of real environments is becoming a very big deal. John Carmack, creator of Doom and Quake, went on the record years ago saying that we needed faster ways of capturing real environments. Recently, a Frank Lloyd Wright CAD layout was imported into Half Life 2; the architecture world went to large scale photorealistic renderings before production years ago. Historically, the groups who have been trying to do large scale regions via video games have been the flight simulator people. Supposedly Flight Simulator: X is pretty ridiculous. The fundamental problem the flight sim guys have is that the standard mechanism for capturing cities (laying out a texture onto a variable height surface) doesn't scale when you fly low to the ground. So everyone's always trying to figure out how to do ground structures correctly.

There was actually a really cool talk at SIGGRAPH this year, entitled Procedural Modeling of CG Architecture. Like most SIGGRAPH talks, this has a video, and I encourage you to watch it. My *suspicion* is that this approach, combined with the sort of texture data being acquired from actually going around a city and taking photos, will lead to some pretty ridiculous results.

It really is inevitable; the only question is whether it'll happen because video games want to be pretty or because the military needs better urban warfare simulation.
posted by effugas at 5:35 PM on September 10, 2006

Since the late ninties, Microsoft Flight Simulator has used actual satellite imagery and GIS data to skin the terrain of the world. Some buildings and landmarks have actually been rendered, as well. I haven't played a recent version, but I would assume the attention to reality has increased.

I always got bored since it took so long to fly anywhere. Realism!
posted by cowbellemoo at 10:43 PM on September 10, 2006

Also, though it's limited by processor, memory, and cell shading, GTA: San Andreas manages to fool me at times when the sun is setting on the urban outskirts. As close to any LA I've seen in movies.
posted by cowbellemoo at 10:45 PM on September 10, 2006

This weekend I was playing the game just released in the US, Yakuza, which is startlingly accurate in its rendition of Kabukicho. I had an odd disconnected sense of deja vu running around the same theater area I was at 5 years ago and I delighted that when you enter the Don Quijote store it even plays the same music over the speakers that it does in real life.
posted by jeditanuki at 11:24 AM on September 11, 2006

I could've sworn I made this comment months ago, but anyway: sports games, and flight-sims, are likely to have extremely accurate versions of real-life cities (or their racetracks and stadiums and golf courses, anyway). And, if you call something like Celestia (the planetarium sim) a game, there are some edutainment titles that are worth considering.
posted by box at 6:57 PM on December 21, 2006