Lunchtime Discussion: Location

In my ongoing campaign to completely ruin gaming by picking it apart one piece at a time, lets take a look at level design and location. Whether it’s the jungle’s of South America, a vast cityscape or a tiny corridor in an alien spaceship the setting is key in getting the game to feel right, after all it’s where you’re going to be fighting those ninjas/gangsters/pirates.

For me the GTA games make brilliant cities. They don’t quite have them at the living city level yet, the citizens just aren’t smart enough to earn that label, but the scope of the cities is impressive and the fact they’re clearly based on real cities allows them to get the scale right. So many games feel too big or too small compared to the size of your character and the way they move, but GTA always seems to make everything feel achievable but not too far either. The addition of trains and taxis in GTA IV was a pretty significant step towards making it feel like an actual city, and all that’s really left in my opinion is getting the pedestrians to do something that isn’t just walking through the city.

Twisting away from impressive cities for sheer variety I’d have to go with Modern Warfare 2. The game as a whole doesn’t really impress me, but the locations in the game were superbly crafted. Moving from the ice fields to the Brazilian slums and then onto the streets of American suburbs presented some brilliant contrasts, and the same kind of attention went into each location’s design and layout. I can’t even really put my finger on why I like the games locations so much, but they just seemed to draw you into the game world.

Are there any games that really stand out for you? On the other hand is there anything that does it terribly, worlds that feel inconsistent and flakey?