History Main / SpaceCompression

* ''VideoGame/TheSettlers II'' did this with the World Campaign. Your regular island are shaped like the continents. That means that you start with your headquarters in what is Latium, build a barracks in Tuscany to expand in Lombardy, then mine the Alps and place an iron smelter in Switzerland...

* A common feature in the ''Franchise/Civilization'' games, particularly with the various maps of the world or maps of a specific continent. It's quite funny to have the Romans build their capital in a square or hex large as the entire Central Italy, with citizens working a tile that is basically Northern Italy, and then place Veium or Capua mechanically a few tiles away, which correspond to... Germany or Ukraine.

* The ''Franchise/BaldursGate'' is quite full of such examples, as some big cities are represented as very tiny. The city of Baldur's Gate itself, but also Athkatla, are divided into multiple areas, but still combined together you don't get anything beyond the size of a real life village (although with walls and palaces). There are even towns represented just by a few houses (Nashkel) or even less (Imnesvale, where you only see the inn, the mayor's house, another small house... and nothing else besides a couple of private cabins beyond the river).

* Most open-world ''[[Franchise/SpiderMan Spider-Man]]'' video games tend to have a very compressed version of New York City; in general, many neighbourhoods are drastically shrunk with many buildings missing entirely (with no game to date including Washington Heights), while roads tend to be slightly expanded to accommodate Spider-Man's BuildingSwing mode of travel.
** With the exception of ''VideoGame/UltimateSpiderMan'' and ''VideoGame/MarvelsSpiderMan2'', most Spider-Man games restrict play to [[NewYorkIsOnlyManhattan just Manhattan]], sometimes with the surrounding islands e.g. Roosevelt, Liberty and Ellis Islands. [[note]]''Ultimate Spider-Man'' does allow access to Queens but deletes Roosevelt Island completely while ''Marvel's Spider-Man 2'', which features Queens ''and'' Brooklyn replaces it with the fictional prison island the Raft. [[/note]]

* In ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'', while the actual area of a game world, not counting the glitchy [[EldritchLocation "far lands"]] is over 140 million square kilometers (~50 million square miles), biomes are at most a few hundred meters across (without the "large biomes" option turned on it is often possible to see the edge of a biome when standing in the center of it). The seemingly lightning-fast powered minecarts are actually going at around 40 km/h (~25 mph). Height, too, is extremely limited, with the tallest snow-capped mountains topping out at around 100 meters above sea level despite players being able to build considerably higher, and most seas being shallow enough that you can see all the way to the bottom. Not being able to dig further than 64 meters below sea level, at least, is justified by the fact that the rock is just too hard for any tools to penetrate.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'', while the actual area of a game world, not counting the glitchy [[EldritchLocation "far lands"]] is over 140 million square kilometers (~50 million square miles), biomes are at most a few hundred meters across (in some versions, it was even possible to see the edge of a biome when standing in the center of it). The seemingly lightning-fast powered minecarts are actually going at around 40 km/h (~25 mph). Height, too, is extremely limited, with the tallest snow-capped mountains topping out at around 100 meters above sea level despite players being able to build considerably higher, and most seas being shallow enough that you can see all the way to the bottom. Not being able to dig further than 64 meters below sea level, at least, is justified by the fact that the rock is just too hard for any tools to penetrate.

* ''VideoGame/TheCrew'' and [[VideoGame/TheCrew2 its first sequel]] takes place in a shrunken mainland USA, with a player being able to drive from East Coast to West within two hours, or even one hour using the game's fastest cars. For comparison, the current record of coast-to-coast driving is a little under 29 hours. The second sequel, ''VideoGame/TheCrewMotorfest'', takes place on a condensed version of Oʻahu, which comes across as odd considering that it already appeared at near-1:1 scale in the first two ''VideoGame/TestDriveUnlimited'' games, and those games were released on much older consoles.

-->-- '''[[WebVideo/RosssGameDungeon Ross Scott]]''', on ''VideoGame/TheCrew''

* ''VideoGame/TheCrew'' and [[VideoGame/TheCrew2 its sequel]] takes place in a shrunken mainland USA, with a player being able to drive from East Coast to West within two hours, or even one hour using the game's fastest cars. For comparison, the current record of coast-to-coast driving is a little under 29 hours.

* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'''s towns and cities are remarkably close together; even taking into account all the RandomEncounters, once all the {{Broken Bridge}}s are fixed, it takes ''maybe'' an hour to circuit the Kanto region. Even the largest cities have a few dozen buildings, and maybe eight you can actually enter. ''[[VideoGame/PokemonRubyAndSapphire Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire]]'' are especially bad, making the claim that it would take a swimmer three days to lap the volcanic cone encircling Sootopolis City. Not counting random encounters, it takes the player about 15 seconds to travel that same distance.

->''Now, I have to say, I realize this is a scaled-down version of America, but it ''is'' kind of hilarious seeing UsefulNotes/{{Nashville}} reduced to a two-block podunk town that ''happens'' to have a skyscraper.''

* In-universe example in ''LightNovel/HowNotToSummonADemonLord'', where the first difference Diablo notices after being transported to a fantasy world based on a MMORPG is that a distance that would take three minutes to walk in-game now takes three hours.

* ''VideoGame/BeyondSkyrim'', a massive {{Game Mod}}ding project for ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'', intends to recreate most of the continent of Tamriel in the game's engine, and keep the added provinces to the scale of the region of Skyrim. This means that this trope will be played straight with some parts of Tamriel previously seen in older ''Elder Scrolls'' games. That said, there will be a few twists on this.

* ''VideoGame/EldenRing'' takes place in the Lands Between, which are realistically the size of a small island. Despite being half the size of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtenstein Liechtenstein]], multiple great kingdoms ruled by actual gods and demigods have had massive holy wars across the land for around two hundred years, and an unclear number of other gods and groups have taken an interest in influencing the events of the Lands Between to their own ends. The great capital city of Leyndell is realistically only the size of a little town, and the secret forge at the end of the mysterious snowy lands beyond, shrouded in myth and legend, is actually [[https://i.redd.it/6kh0bldj07791.png visible from the start of the game]] if you know where to look. Despite this, the game has been praised for how massive the game world feels, and FromSoft themselves laud it as "The largest FromSoftware game to-date", proving that it is very possible to get away with doing this without taking away from the quality of the game.

* ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' games typically do this with their maps, adjusting the size of areas up or down depending on what makes most sense for the story or gameplay; presumably, we're meant to assume that the characters are as big and taking as much time as makes sense for that relative map, but it still feels a bit odd when a Pegasus Knight can breeze over a mountain in one map but be blockaded by a small building in another. This trope is averted, however, in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGenealogyOfTheHolyWar'', where the entire continent is mapped to a consistent set of squares, with each map simply zooming in on the most relevant kingdom-sized portion. There are still some simplifications, like castles and villages all being of the same size relative to one another, and [[UnitsNotToScale the units are definitely not to scale]], but if a mountain range is meant to dominate a particular part of the country, you better ''believe'' a third of that map's area will be devoted to blue mountains.

** Ironically, the need to keep the player from traveling out of the city when the game added aircraft led to this trope going in the exact opposite direction and essentially turning Vice City and ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIV'''s Liberty City into isolated city-states and San Andreas into a Hawaii analog by surrounding them with miles of ocean and absolutely nothing in the distance. It can get a bit odd when you take your helicopter out of the fake New York City and discover that you can't even see the nearest land...

* ''VideoGame/JustCause'' and its sequels are set on fictional island archipelagos, which, whilst immense by videogame standards (''Just Cause 2'''s map is around 40 square kilometers), contain massive compression by real-world standards. For example, in ''VideoGame/JustCause2'', you can see a snow-covered mountain range, which is just above a steamy jungle, and across a small bay from an arid desert plateau.

* In ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls'', Tamriel, the continent which the bulk of the universe's story is set on is canonically about the size of Africa. The franchise started out with a realistically sized world, but has been shrinking with each installment. On a case-by-case basis:

[[folder:Four X]]
* The galaxy map in ''VideoGame/GalacticCivilizations II'' shows densely packed star systems with [[ConvenientlyClosePlanet planets only a few solar radii apart]], to the extent that a planet can look closer to one in another system than to others in its own. {{Justified|Trope}} in-game with the explanation that starship hyperdrives can travel much faster in interstellar space than within gravity wells, so the map represents travel times rather than actual distances.
[[/folder]]

* The Mojave Wasteland in ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' is even egregious. While the real-life area covered is about 10,000 square miles, the in-game world is only 8.502 square kilometers. This is most notable around Hoover Dam, which, when overlaid over the actual map, grew by several orders of magnitude.

* Cutting corners to reduce business costs. Making realistically sized worlds and realistically populated cities is AwesomeButImpractical without using randomly generated maps or {{NPC}}s to cut corners. It's also a waste of developers' resources to program a realistically sized city when less than one percent of the population is of ''any'' relevance to the player.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'', while the actual area of a game world, not counting the glitchy [[EldritchLocation "far lands"]] is over 140 million square kilometers (~50 million square miles), biomes are at most a few hundred meters across (in some versions, it was even possible to see the edge of a biome when standing in the center of it). The seemingly lightning-fast powered minecarts are actually going at around 40 km/h (~25 mph). Height, too, is extremely limited, with the tallest snow-capped mountains topping out at around 100 meters above sea level despite players being able to build considerably higher, and seas being shallow enough that you can see all the way to the bottom. Not being able to dig further than 64 meters below sea level, at least, is justified by the fact that the rock is just too hard for any tools to penetrate.