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4[[quoteright:350:[[VideoGame/EuroTruckSimulator https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/eurotruck.png]]]]
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6Bottom: London idealized for truck drivers.]]
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8->''"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."''
9-->-- '''[[WebVideo/RosssGameDungeon Ross Scott]]''', on ''VideoGame/{{The Crew|2014}}'' (2014)
10
11Sometimes a game's environment is blatantly not to scale. The usual culprits are fantasy {{RPG}}s and WideOpenSandbox games. This freakish distortion of space is becoming more common these days, as the fashion is for photorealistic detail difficult to execute uniformly in a huge world and the banishment of abstractions such as [[OverworldNotToScale world maps]]. (Note, of course, that even in games with said world maps the main game world will still be drastically scaled down.)
12
13Sometimes games scale different areas according to their interest / importance to the story, so for example a game taking place in New York and surrounding areas might have Manhattan (RealLife: 21.5km long) at 1:20 scale (Result: About 1km long), but Long Island (RealLife: 190km long) at a 1:200 scale (Result: Also about 1km long).
14
15'''Common traits:'''
16* The distance between settlements is very small, allowing one to walk from one village to another in a matter of minutes.
17* Settlements themselves are very small ([[ThrivingGhostTown but contain all necessary features]]). Even the largest cities aren't larger than a village in real life.
18* Forests and deserts aren't more than a few square kilometers large. Fields are so often so tiny that they wouldn't feed even a single person. The amount of space taken by settlements is also larger than in real life.
19* Mountains aren't really mountains. Just hills.
20* Ten yards is turned into ten feet, and ten feet is turned into five feet. For a large game, 500 yards is the equivalent of 500 miles.
21
22'''An AcceptableBreakFromReality for ''several reasons'':'''
23* Using real-world travel times in a game tends to quickly become tedious, especially if the player is walking and especially if your world takes place with [[TechnologyLevels lower levels of technology]] where cars/planes/teleporters don't exist yet. Remember that it was the nineteenth century before ''80 days'' became a plausible amount of time in which to circumnavigate the globe; walking from one side of the world map to the other would take ''years'' in a realistic scale. Heck, walking from one major city to another would take ''days'' if not ''weeks''.
24* Pick your poison: LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading so your hardware isn't put under too much strain as you move from one area to the next, or Loads And Loads of Lagging as your hardware bakes itself trying to render it all. Usually it's considered a bad thing for a game to [[TechDemoGame overload and melt most devices available on the market trying to run it]].
25* Cutting corners to reduce business costs. Making realistically sized worlds and realistically populated cities is AwesomeButImpractical without using randomly generated maps or {{Non Player Character}}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.
26* Miles upon miles of the same terrain isn't exactly the most interesting of things.
27* It could be made to look larger with fog, trees, and hills.
28
29See also UnitsNotToScale, ClownCarBase, ThrivingGhostTown, and BabyPlanet.
30
31----
32!!Examples:
33[[foldercontrol]]
34[[folder:[=4X=]]]
35* 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.
36[[/folder]]
37
38[[folder:Action Adventure]]
39* The playable area of ''VideoGame/HorizonZeroDawn'' takes in an area that covers most of Utah and western Colorado; the ''Frozen Wilds'' DLC added parts of Wyoming. The actual map is about four or five miles square, with an overall scale of a little over 100:1, and the great city of Meridian consists of a couple dozen buildings. Apart from the real-world landmarks you can find, from Lake Powell to Old Faithful, certain collectible datapoints make this explicit, referring to places that in-game are a minute’s jog apart as being a day’s journey from one another.
40* Hyrule's size fluctuates wildly over the course of the ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'' games but it never seems big enough to be the powerful kingdom it claims to be (except possibly in ''VideoGame/ZeldaIITheAdventureOfLink'', and that one still used OverworldNotToScale).
41** Also; this was part of what made the sailing so tedious in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTheWindWaker''. Rather tellingly, the world of ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaPhantomHourglass'', while using the same "boat on the water" mechanic, is much more densely packed.
42** In ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime'' and a few others, time (in terms of the day/night cycle) stands still in towns and dungeons, but passes very rapidly in the spaces between them. It can take multiple in-game days to walk to a seemingly nearby town, implying that they are really many miles apart.
43** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'' was heavily advertised as having the largest, most expansive ''Zelda'' world yet, but it still only takes about an hour of real-life time to go from one corner to the other despite loading screens describing this Hyrule as a "continent." The lack of large settlements is somewhat justified, however, by the story taking place AfterTheEnd, in which the [[StarfishRobots Guardians]] obliterated the capital and several other towns in Central Hyrule while the smaller and/or further away villages were spared.
44* Also, ''VideoGame/{{Gun}}'', in which one can travel on horseback from Kansas to Montana in ten minutes of real time and approximately a day of game time.
45* Taken to ridiculous heights in ''VideoGame/StarFoxAdventures'', where the setting is supposed to be an entire ''planet''. Let's say it's not very big...
46[[/folder]]
47
48[[folder:Action Game]]
49* ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedIVBlackFlag'': Impressively, the ocean map of the Caribbean is only roughly a tenth of the actual size of the real thing, which is understandable since ocean graphics use less memory than land. Still, it's off-putting that you're always close to land. It's understandable that the player wouldn't want painstakingly long voyages from one island to another, but the fact that you can always see land on the horizon takes away part of the illusion.
50* ''VideoGame/SolarWinds'' lets you fly from one end of the (ridiculously large) solar system to the other in about five minutes, even before you get the faster-than-light drive. It gets worse when you fly up to a planet and see that it's only slightly bigger than your one-man fighter (which is shown in the intro to only be about 20 feet/6 meters long).
51* The ''VideoGame/EscapeVelocity'' series and ''Ares'' do the same thing as ''VideoGame/SolarWinds'' you just have to smile and go with it.
52* ''VideoGame/DeadSpace'': There is no way that planet cracker ''Ishimura'' can hold its supposed crew of 1,322. For example, a monorail car only has 8 seats in it.
53* ''VideoGame/RogueSquadron'': In one level, after completing the initial objective Wedge Antilles will radio in that he's battling Imperials on "the other side of the planet". You are then given an objective marker, and after flying over a small hill which takes all of about seven seconds, you have apparently arrived on the other side of the planet.
54* The ''VideoGame/StarWarsBattlefront'' series features some of the most iconic locations from the films, but usually compressed down into a relatively small and compact battle map. For example, the Death Star map in ''VideoGame/StarWarsBattlefrontII'' depicts locations from across the gigantic, moonlet-sized space station (such as Moff Tarkin's conference room, Princess Leia's prison cell, and the superlaser control room) as all basically nextdoor to each other.
55[[/folder]]
56
57[[folder:Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games]]
58* Very evident in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'', where it takes about two hours to cross Azeroth by foot, and the villages and cities are [[ThrivingGhostTown visibly too small to host any population]] apart from shopkeepers and other interactive {{Non Player Character}}s. Goldshire, for example, consists of about 3 houses at a crossroad, one of which is an inn and the other two shops, yet it's stated in RPG supplements to have a population of 7,000.
59** Goldshire was quite large in the early in the beta, but players found it confusing and all towns were shrunk by necessity. Not much of a need for 7000 [=NPCs=] when only about 15 do anything.
60** People have used the Cartographer mod to measure the continents. Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms are each just over fifteen kilometers long, north to south.
61*** Apparently in early Alpha builds the continents were much more realistically sized, but testers and employees rapidly realized that this was ''incredibly boring''. (A good hint... back in "Vanilla", people would complain about the flight from ''Moonglade'' to ''Thunder Bluff''. Imagine how it'd be if it were realistically sized.)
62** ''Wrath of the Lich King'' throws in some in-game dialogue to the effect that Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, the two "starting" zones in Northrend, are several hundred miles apart from each other. It's nice for flavor purposes, even if it's obviously a much smaller distance than that.
63*** This would also make Northrend a ''very'' small continent, comparable in size to Tasmania.
64** The journey to Northrend from Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor is said to take about a month on a boat. In-game, you hop on the boat/zeppelin, and you're there as soon as the loading screen completes. Absolutely necessary, because very very very few players would be willing to wait a month before they could play their character again or wander around a boat for a month.
65** Travel in lore between Lordaeron/Undercity and Tarren Mill is said to take over 2 weeks on a horse. In game, it takes maybe 15 minutes walking, 7 minutes on a mount, or about 3 minutes on a flying mount or flight path.
66** ''Battle for Azeroth'' has a rather blatant example in the form of Mechagon. The island is a long-lost utopia that took an explorer a lifetime to track down. In game it is within swimming distance of Kul Tiras and fully visible; there is no way the neighboring nation renowned for their navies wouldn't know about it.
67* One of the complaints in ''Vanguard'' was that while the world wasn't as compressed, it unfortunately had a ton of blank space that wasn't used for anything, even mobs wouldn't spawn there. Generally, it's better for there to be a small but detailed world than a large but dull world.
68* The [[http://static.tibia.com/images/library/map_big.jpg world]] of ''VideoGame/{{Tibia}}'' has major towns quite close to each other, though the towns aren't the usual five building metropolises, since all the towns have lots of houses for the players to rent. Some small towns are hardly anything but player houses.
69* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'', not only does it take roughly twenty minutes to ride from one end of the continent of Quon to the other, it takes a mere eight ''[[InUniverseGameClock game]]'' hours. Mindartia is slightly smaller. Apparently even if they were designed to scale, the ''continents'' would be no bigger than, say, Maine, Ireland, or Portugal -- ''if'' [[HorseOfADifferentColor chocobos]] are comparable in speed to cars and Vana'diel has the same day length.
70* The effect is still present, albeit somewhat diminished in its successor ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV''. On chocoboback getting from the southern tip of Eorzea to the furthest north one can go takes about forty five minutes. During an early quest an [=NPC=] casually mentions that going from the western gate of Ul'dah to the outlying town of Horizon is about half a day's ride. The player can reach it in less than a minute real time, and less than an hour by the in-game clock. The loading zones between maps are implied to be just as spacious, but the player never gets to see them since they immediately zip to the neighboring area.
71** This compression is inconsistent however, especially when it comes to dungeons. For example, the Pharos Sirius dungeon is roughly the same size as the exterior of the lighthouse it takes place inside, and Haukke Manor could reasonably fit inside the overworld house that stands in for it, but Wanderer's Palace is at least twice as long as the lake where it supposedly is partially submerged.
72* As a text game, ''VideoGame/{{Achaea}}'' attempts to avert this trope using various mapping tricks, including the Wilderness (a Roguelike-ish ASCII map put in so that the developers could create distance without writing thousands of unique room descriptions, and only visible to the player a little bit at a time as he travels across) but patched-together maps made by players show that the 'continent' (which can be walked across in a game day) has significant chunks missing. The 'cities' are also very, very small by anyone's standards.
73* ''VideoGame/{{Runescape}}'' is one of the offenders. Towns take as much space as forests, yet stories of [=NPCs=] and history of the land might leave you another impression. One of the examples is how vampires in this game are unaware that the town called Burgh De Rott is not abandoned at all despite them being only 20 meters away from it.
74** This is often explained by people who are interested enough to care with Scale Theory: what takes a few minutes for a player to cross is described as taking days, but things that are not important for the player character are cut out from view, leaving a much smaller and practical world for gameplay.
75* Blatant in ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline''. There are instances of orbiting asteroids wider in diameter than they are distant from the planet's surface.
76** There are shipyards outside of Bajor that are almost as large as, and most certainly WIDER than Bajor's moon. One in particular orbits Bajor's moon at roughly half a mile out from it, if using your own ship's size as a scale is any indication.
77* Quite apparent in ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic''. Many pieces of dialogue suggest that locations are much larger, more extreme and/or further away than they are in game. In-game settlements are usually [[ThrivingGhostTown thriving ghost towns]] while major military bases have only a few dozen troops in them, at most, and are often a short walk away from an enemy base.
78** As [[https://www.deviantart.com/isriana/art/SWTOR-Slight-Exaggeration-411758917 this comic]] points out, the gap between Mannett Point and the main playable island on Ord Mantell is a particularly egregious example, as the destruction of the bridge between the two is described as a major inconvenience for the residents, with [=NPCs=] stating you'll have to swim if you want to reach the other side... while in-game crossing over means walking barely a meter in knee-deep water.
79** Less obvious on [[CityPlanet city planets]] such as Coruscant and Nar Shaddaa where you must take taxis or quick travel between otherwise isolated sections, though still played straight for the taxi rides themselves.
80* In ''VideoGame/TheLordOfTheRingsOnline'', a player can run from the Shire to Rivendell in a single in-game day (in real time, it is a dozen of minutes). It took Frodo over two weeks.
81** Perhaps the best example of the compression of Middle-earth is the distance from the Brandywine Bridge to the Bucklebury Ferry. In the books, the ferry is stated to be twenty miles south of the bridge. In the game, the bridge is clearly visible from the ferry.
82* When ''VideoGame/EverQuest'' first came out, players only had a few modes of transportation: They run, they run with the Spirit of Wolf runspeed buff on them, they run with a Bard's runspeed buff, or they hire a wizard to taxi-teleport them across the world, saving the player a half-hour boat ride to get across continents. Horses and other mounts wouldn't be introduced until the 4th expansion 3 years later. In those early days, it would take a player running at normal running speed roughly 20 minutes to cross the largest zone in the game, the Western Plains of Karana in a straight line from North Karana to Qeynos Hills. During that run, you'd be lucky if you saw any type of building or if a wolf, or a griffin, or a hill giant started chasing after you.
83* ''VideoGame/EverQuestII'' would improve on the scale of the world, claiming to make it even larger than the zones were in the first game. For the most part this is true. The relatively small Qeynos Hills in the first game is now the continent of Antonica, the same size as the Western Plains of Karana was in the first game. They learned from their predecessor though by including automatic travel stations in the overland zones to allow them relatively fast travel from point A to point B. Depending on what zone you were in, you'd still need to sprint a considerable distance to reach the next zone that you want to go to after that. At the same time though, they made sure that you were never ''too'' far away from any major identifiable landmarks.
84** Developers eventually realized that making overly large zones and cities wasn't very efficient. When they introduced the city of New Halas, players are expected to believe that this city compares in size and populous to other cities like Qeynos and Kelethin, but there are only the bare-bones necessity [=NPCs=] needed to serve all the game's functions, and you can cross the entire city in about 3 minutes on foot. Paineel and Thurgadin were later given the same treatment, being given very little of any environmental flavor, just the essential [=NPCs=].
85* ''VideoGame/WorldWarIIOnline'', more of a WW II Simulator than a MMOFPS, takes place on a half-scale map of Europe complete with destructible cities, roads, and farm fields that take forever to walk across. Needless to say, Mobile Spawn Points were implemented fairly early in the games release to make attacking key objectives quicker, as previously reinforcements would have to be driven from the Forward Base to the objective constantly.
86* The world of ''VideoGame/{{Elsword}}'' is large enough to be broken up into two continents, with multiple countries within. The map is quite large as well, [[http://elwiki.net/wiki/images/d/df/MappaElios.png as seen here.]] Unfortunately it's entirely possible to cross from the very first village on the map to the last in about five minutes, due to the linearity of the game.
87[[/folder]]
88
89[[folder:Platform Game]]
90* DK Isles seems to shrink in size between the 2D ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry'' and the 3D ''VideoGame/DonkeyKong64''. This is because it's meant to be like a 3D version of the map screens from the 2D games. That's why the jungle, which is inside the island, has an open top sky.
91* Throughout the ''Franchise/SonicTheHedgehog'' franchise, Angel Island is consistently depicted as a huge, verdant FloatingIsland in the middle of an open ocean. This is also the case in a ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure'' CGI cutscene where it [[ColonyDrop falls out of the sky]]... but during ordinary gameplay, it's a tiny island that's featureless save for the Master Emerald's shrine, and close enough to the Mystic Ruins to be connected by a simple log bridge. As well as the usual practical considerations, this also helps explain how Knuckles is actually able to travel between Angel Island and the mainland as per the demands of the plot.
92[[/folder]]
93
94[[folder:Real Time Strategy]]
95* ''VideoGame/DawnOfWar: Dark Crusade'' uses a RiskStyleMap to represent the provinces your army is taking over. Capturing a province only requires a single battle over an area that could easily fit in a modern city. Even worse in ''Soulstorm'', where there are now a few provinces per ''planet''.
96[[/folder]]
97
98[[folder:Roguelike]]
99* In ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'', any tile can hold an unlimited number of creatures of any size, with the only restriction that all but one of said creatures are lying down. This leads to the awkward existential realization that a tile is large enough to contain a dragon, but not large enough to contain two kittens without one of them crouching. This is one of many strange aspects of Dwarven Physics.
100** Multi-tile monsters are planned, as soon as the ensuing pathfinding nightmare can be worked around. Multi-tile ''trees'' have been implemented, which the Toady One notices makes the still single-tile giant monsters look sort of stupid.
101** This is all still a tiny improvement over the game's model, {{Roguelike}}s, where each tile can support only a single monster and monsters [[NPCRoadblock can't push past each other.]] This can be used to your advantage by clogging the map with [[TheGoomba trash enemies]] while plinking something dangerous from long range.
102** As of the introduction of minecarts (in version 0.34.07), tiles have been defined as being 2x2 meters in area and 3 meters tall. As stated by the author, "It wouldn't make any fewer dragons fit in the tile though".
103** As of the Steam release, dragons and other large creatures are being extended to visually cover about six tiles, even though the mechanics still only consider them to occupy one.
104* Averted in ''VideoGame/{{Incursion}}'', where huge monsters take up more than one tile and a single tile can be shared by more than one normal sized monster. This realistically prevents huge creatures like dragons from moving down human-sized corridors.
105[[/folder]]
106
107[[folder:Role-Playing Game]]
108* 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).
109** probably the most blatant example: Saradush is a major city in Tethyr and a very compressed town in Throne of Bhaal, with everything collapsed into a single map under siege that is the size of a huge mansion.
110* Happened when the ''VideoGame/{{Ultima}}'' series stopped using an overworld/town/dungeon split from ''VideoGame/UltimaVI'' onwards. The kingdom of Britannia went from spanning multiple continents to approximately the [[http://ian-albert.com/games/ultima_6_maps/u6-map-level-0-sm.jpg size of a suburb]]. (Each of those boxy shapes on the map is a single house.) By ''VideoGame/UltimaIX'', the entire world map is on the order of one square mile.
111** Even in the earlier games with the large overworld individual towns were tiny, usually consisting of four to six buildings each.
112* ''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.
113* In ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls'', Tamriel, the continent which the bulk of the universe's story is set on is canonically about the size of Europe. The franchise started out with a realistically sized world, but has been shrinking with each installment. On a case-by-case basis:
114** The first game, ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsArena Arena]]'', actually inverts this. You can visit every province in the continent of Tamriel, but you can't actually walk from one town to another without Fast Travel. You could theoretically walk from a town for months in real-time and all you will encounter is an endless stream of randomly generated wilderness, dungeons, and tiny villages that appear to share the same landmass as the town you left. And even if you did use Fast Travel, every place and NPC not associated with the main quest was rather lacking in uniqueness thanks to all of them being RandomlyGeneratedLevels.
115** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]]'' also featured part of the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell at their full size. Bethesda says that their physical size amounts to 188,000 square miles (or 487,000 in square kilometers) -- that's twice the size of Great Britain. There are ''15,000'' full-sized towns, cities, villages, and dungeons to explore, and more than 750,000 [=NPCs=] capable of interaction -- impressive for a game from 1996. However, most of the terrain is randomly generated, non-quest-related locations are [[ProceduralGeneration procedurally generated]], and traveling by foot is lengthy and tedious. In the case of cities, most houses cannot be entered even by the most skilled thieves -- the player will be told "This house contains nothing of interest."
116** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind Morrowind]]'' was the point where things changed, and to date is the game with the tiniest explorable area. Bethesda's game director and executive producer Todd Howard has said that ''Morrowind'''s physical size is 0.01% that of ''Daggerfall'' -- only 10 square miles (or 25.9 square kilometers). Stated-to-be-massive cities contain only a few dozen [=NPCs=] at most, while many of the smaller settlements have populations in the low teens. [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools However]], it traded away the massive size of ''Arena'' and ''Daggerfall'' for a far greater [[SlidingScaleOfContentDensityVsWidth content density]], with the entire world being hand-build as opposed to relying on [[ProceduralGeneration procedural]] or [[RandomlyGeneratedLevels random]] generation like the previous games. There is also an in-universe justification: you only visit a ''district'' of Morrowind called Vvardenfell, which was only recently settled by the rest of Tamriel, and most of the population was sparse and consisted of the native Ashlanders and the worshippers of the Tribunal and Great Houses.
117** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion Oblivion]]'' follows the same development philosophy as ''Morrowind'', but is somewhat larger as the explorable area is 16 square miles (41.4 square kilometers). Lore would have you believe that Cyrodiil is the heart of a continent-spanning empire; in-game, it's smaller than most of Europe's microstates. City Isle, which is about the size of Great Britain on the world map, is scarcely large enough to contain the Imperial City, which is as big as a large parking lot. In fact, the Imperial Province is small enough that with the visibility set to maximum and fog options turned off, a player can still see the Imperial City's central tower when climbing mountains near the border. The level of vertical exaggeration applied to said mountains is fairly incredible, too; the road from the Imperial City up to Bruma is almost all at a 30 degree (or more) slope. The chances of ever getting something such as a horse and cart up there don't seem good -- or wouldn't be, if the citizens ever needed to transport anything... This is partly because while ''size'' was increased compared to ''Morrowind'', so was the compression (as ''Morrowind''[='s=] Vvardenfell represented a bit less than half of a mid-size province, while ''Oblivion''[='s=] Cyrodiil represents almost all of the largest by far province).
118** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'' also continues to play this straight; Bethesda says the explorable area is comparable in size to ''Oblivion'', though ''Skyrim'' also uses winding pathways as was done in ''Morrowind'' to give a greater sense of vastness. The way the world has shrunken down stands out when comparing locations featured in ''Arena'' to ''Skyrim'', such as the town of Riverwood. In ''Arena'' it's a bustling town that contains 200 or 300 buildings, but in ''Skyrim'' it's a hamlet with seven houses.
119* ''VideoGame/BeyondSkyrim'':
120** Being massive {{Game Mod}}ding project for ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'', it 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.
121** The ''Morrowind'' project will see a smaller Vvardenfell than the one featured in ''TES III'', but in return it will not restrict the player to the island, instead allowing them to explore all of the province of Morrowind.
122** Similarily to the ''Morrowind'' project, the ''Iliac Bay'' project features a smaller version than the original ''TES II''[='s=] take on the area, but will also allow the player to visit all of the provinces of Hammerfell and High Rock.
123** The mod will actually also see an [[InvertedTrope inversion]] of it with their ''Cyrodiil'' project, as since it is scaled to Skyrim, the titular province will actually be slightly bigger than it was in ''TES IV''.
124* ''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 notable, 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.
125* The latest entries in the ''VideoGame/{{Avernum}}'' series effectively compressed the map by replacing the overland map with a continuous series of ''Geneforge''-style town-scale maps, reducing the distances between towns down to few kilometers.
126* In ''VideoGame/PaperMario'' and ''VideoGame/PaperMarioTheThousandYearDoor'', most buildings are the same size both inside and out, but by comparison to real-life buildings are ridiculously small. Possibly lampshaded in the second game, too: battles take place on a stage in front of an audience, but many bosses are so large that they can't actually fit on the stage (an early-game boss has to bend over to fit its head on the screen, which is conveniently an ideal thing to attack).
127* In ''VideoGame/DragonQuest'', like most [=RPG=]s, you [[WalkingTheEarth Walk The Earth]]. Normally, this trope can be avoided by assuming that only the important stuff is shown, not to mention world maps in Eastern [=RPG=]s are deliberately on wider scales than the towns. In [[VideoGame/DragonQuestVIII VIII]], however, the game keeps track of how far you've walked. By the end of the game, once you've walked over more or less every square inch of the planet, it tells you that you've walked maybe 500 kilometers.
128* In the first ''{{VideoGame/Wild ARMs|1}}'' game, you can walk around the entire world on the world map (yes, it's spherical) in a minute or two, though you'll need a plane and/or boat to get through the ocean areas.
129* ''VideoGame/Fallout3'' is nothing out of the ordinary for this article. It still hits home hard when you're familiar with the (real-life) areas and realizes you'd ''kill'' to have that kind of commute times (think minutes on foot versus half an hour in traffic)...
130** Compare to the first two ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' games -- the world map was realistically large (so the player traveled between places on an overworld map), though the settlements themselves weren't very big.
131*** You're only seeing a small part of most of the settlements though - for example, the entrance and downtown districts of [[VideoGame/{{Fallout}} The Hub]] are stated to be a few miles apart by one of the inhabitants, despite the fact that it takes you seconds to transition from one to the other. This is also confirmed by a lot of the settlement maps, most notably that of [[UsefulNotes/LosAngeles the Boneyard]].
132** Still, the kicker is the Vaults themselves: The typical capacity of a Vault in the canon is 1,000 dwellers. No single Vault depicted in any game is close to holding a ''tenth'' of that.
133** For your information, the Capital Wasteland is about 50 km in each dimension. That takes about 5 to 10 hours to cross. You might even be able to get this in-game... but the Fallout time is sped up by a factor of ''thirty''.
134* The Mojave Wasteland in ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' is even more 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.
135** The placement of locations in the Mojave Wasteland is more congruent with where they are in RealLife though, whereas a lot of ''Fallout 3'''s locations have been moved closer to D.C. in order to fit them in, relativity be damned. For example, compare real-world Fairfax on [[https://web.archive.org/web/20170405104243/http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c199/GoblinStands/Blogs/Blog05_Fallout3.jpg this]] map with its in-game counterpart, which is just north of "Unknown 3". [[note]]"Unknown 3" being Andale in-game.[[/note]]
136* ''VideoGame/Fallout4'' has the same levels of compression applied to the greater Boston area. Most notably, the vast majority of the approximately 6-mile leg of the Charles River between Waltham and Cambridge has been compressed into a fairly short bend, squeezing out a lot of the western suburbs, including Waltham itself, and pushing Lexington almost directly north of Cambridge.
137* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'' replaced the overmaps of earlier games with life-size 3D environments that the characters walked around in. A lot of the playable areas are contiguous though, which led to you being able to walk across a whole continent in under an hour.
138* The main town in ''VideoGame/AvalonCode'' is about twelve screens, including the graveyard, plaza, and arena, and is home to one or two dozen {{Non Player Character}}s. But cutscenes include an enormous crowd and several blocks of buildings and alleys that don't appear anywhere in ordinary gameplay.
139* This is quite common with most ''Franchise/KingdomHearts'' games - despite going around multiple ''worlds'', these worlds only seem to include maybe one town and a few outskirts areas. While some are {{Hand Wave}}d due to being only being in the areas that "count", it's hard to believe just how small they are. Heck, the outside of Paris is somehow around the same size as Notre Dame in ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts3DDreamDropDistance''.
140** ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsIII'' actually features a few aversions - while it's implied that, once again, they're not going around the ''whole'' world, the areas that is just towns are ''parts'' of larger cities. This is one of the reasons why San Fransokyo and The Caribbean are [[BestLevelEver so well received]] - you're only around ''some'' areas of the town, but they manage to be somewhat of a WideOpenSandbox.
141* ''VideoGame/{{Cyberpunk 2077}}'': Night City is a downplayed example; the city as shown could probably house the 5 million people it is canonically supposed to, thanks to the immense verticality of the setting, but the infrastructure is woefully underdimensioned and the uptown area should be somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude larger than it is.
142* ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles'': Since every continent in the series is [[TurtleIsland a living, mobile creature]], fans have spent quite a lot of time trying to calculate the exact size of each Titan. Unfortunately, extrapolating from playable area, the ''larger'' ones are smaller than Tokyo, despite having multiple biomes with fully functional ecosystems. One [[CommonKnowledge common figure passed around]] is that [[VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles1 the Bionis]] is the size of Japan (377,975 square kilometers), well over a hundred times larger than the area shown in the game. The Titans in [[VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles2 the second game]] are slightly smaller, but we also get a lot more size comparison shots that ''probably'' aren't accurate. If they were, then the Mor Ardain Titan, host to an empire with a good chance of conquering the world, would be... twelve kilometers tall. That's like if a country the size of Mount Everest could conquer the world.
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147* The ''VideoGame/{{Elite}}'' franchise has gone back and forth on this trope, either playing it straight, averting it but providing some sort of ''time'' compression mechanism, or both. And someone created a "realistic scale" mod for FanRemake ''VideoGame/{{Oolite}}'', apparently to prove a point about [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality why this trope exists]] because using it entails sitting around waiting for something to happen for literal ''hours''.
148** This feature has been carried over to pretty much the entire ''Elite''-like genre, with similar games such as ''VideoGame/{{Freelancer}}'' and ''VideoGame/NoMansSky'' having planets no more than a few hundreds of kilometers in diameter, two minutes' flight apart, and motionless relative to one another. This is usually intentional: [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality it would be rather boring to spend hours with engines at lightspeed to get from one planet to another]]. And in the case of ''No Man's Sky'', it's also because [[RuleOfCool seeing a huge planet in the sky above you looks pretty cool]].
149** ''No Man's Sky'' also replaced the usual heliocentric solar systems with ''geocentric'' solar systems -- the old school belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth, made into a videogame -- in order to reconcile having fixed planets with having a natural day-night cycle.
150** ''VideoGame/StarTrekBridgeCommander'' does the same thing, with planets that show as small circles on the area map measured in kilometers.
151* In ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing'', outdoor and indoor maps are square grids. Character interactions with, say, furniture show that each cell of an indoor map is about one meter by one meter in size. But outdoors, an "acre" is 16 cells by 16 cells. If this is intended to call up the standard acre of 4047 m^2, that means each cell is closer to four meters on a side, and the characters [[UnitsNotToScale don't shrink to fit]], nor does [[RoadRunnerPC the player's speed]].
152* The ''Battlecruiser'', ''Universal Combat'' and ''Galactic Command'' series by 3000AD totally averts this trope, and everything is to scale. A planet is literally planet-sized and it takes hours if not days to travel around it once. If anything these games lampshade why space compression is one of the AcceptableBreaksFromReality.
153* The ''VideoGame/NavalOps'' series often uses recognizable locations (say, Sicily and its immediate surroundings) on maps, but completely out of scale with everything else. A well-equipped battleship can easily cruise at 60 knots, which is ridiculously fast in naval terms, but only takes minutes instead of hours to circumnavigate Sicily.
154* Totally averted in the ''VideoGame/SilentHunterSeries'' saga, where a patrol could take weeks mainly due to the time required to arrive at your destination and to return to your base (plus extra time if you decide to wander around). Instances of this are when you have a type IX submarine and are ordered to patrol the North American coast or the seas near-equatorial or South Africa, and the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. They show quite well why time compression is a must in that kind of game.
155** Actually ''inverted'', as the game world is cylindrical instead of spheroidal, so many distances are noticeably longer than they should be. At 60N latitude (roughly Scapa Flow / Baltic Sea), one degree of longitude should be about 60km, but it is nearer 120km in-game.
156* ''VideoGame/EuroTruckSimulator'' heavily condenses Europe, with transnational journeys taking far less time than they would in RealLife and most cities reduced to a handful of trucking-related businesses and distribution centers. This is likely because, save for [[WebVideo/DesertBusForHope special cases]], not many gamers have the time or patience for a real-time European road trip.
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160* Combined with the [[UnitsNotToScale units not being to scale,]] SpaceCompression makes ''VideoGame/BattleForWesnoth'''s scale very mutable. One of the common abbreviations seen on the forum is HAPMA -- Hexes Are Possibly Miles Across -- explaining why, for instance, archers can't shoot further than a single hex. The terrain graphics are also very variable, with a stand of trees being the same in-game size as a mountain, a house, or a patch of flowers.
161* ''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 [[OverworldNotToScale 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.
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168* The cities in the 3D ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAuto'' series are comparable to miniature megalopolises: [[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIII Liberty City]] is the size of a small suburb, [[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoViceCity Vice City]] is the size of a coast town, and the entire ''state'' of [[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas San Andreas]] is not even bigger than a large city.
169** 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 Miami and discover that you can't even see the nearest land, especially after ''GTAIII''[='=]s Liberty City had a noticeably large tract of land that you weren't supposed to be able to explore by normal means attached to the north of Shoreside Vale.
170** In ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoV'' you can see the scale of compression easily by comparing it to a real-life map of Los Angeles - some of the streets line up almost exactly, except that what is a major multi-lane avenue in LA is a residential side-street in GTA. Essentially, every street downgrades a level when making the transition from real life to GTA - highways become major streets, major streets become side streets, and side streets become alleyways between buildings.
171** GTA V was probably the most egregious about space compression, since not only was the map itself clearly shrunk down, the characters still talk and act like it's larger. One mission that sees Trevor driving a semi-truck from downtown Los Santos to Paleto Bay along Route 1 has him asked how long it will take to get to their destination by Lamar, to which he replies that it will take hours, when, in-game, the whole mission shouldn't take longer than 20 minutes or so. One radio DJ mentions an area called "The Valley" which tried to secede from Los Santos, an obvious reference to the real-life San Fernando Valley... except San Fernando Valley lacks a counterpart on the map at all.
172** Interestingly averted with the small town of Ludendorff in the state of North Yankton, due to being a linear map featured in two missions, not intended for freeroam exploration. The town itself and its surroundings look more believable in size - as you're thrown into a small "cut out" portion of land rather than an open map intended to represent a large portion of a state.
173* ''VideoGame/JustCause'' and its sequels are set on fictional island archipelagos, which, whilst immense by videogame standards (''VideoGame/JustCause2'''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.
174* Planets in ''VideoGame/{{Spore}}''. You can [[spoiler:find Earth and lay a colony down on it. The only areas large enough to facilitate the room of a single colony (which, in Spore, contains roughly 10 major buildings or so), without deforming the shape of the land, are Antarctica and Asia]]. On a similar note, most planets can only have up to 3 colonies. Homeworlds start with 10. A city cannot have a population over about 175; the effective max (i.e. assuming you're putting entertainment buildings and/or factories) is about 100. So, a stellar empire on a dozen planets... won't have a population over about three or four thousand. Even [[spoiler:the Grox]], who have thousands of colonies, only have a total population in the tens of thousands or so.
175* ''VideoGame/TheSaboteur'' places [[GayParee Paris]] within 30 minutes driving distance of Le Havre and Saarbrücken, and squashes the city of Paris into a smaller-scale version. In reality, it is a 2-3 hour drive from Paris to Le Havre, and a 3-5 one to Saarbrücken.
176* ''VideoGame/{{Prototype}}'s'' mini-Manhattan where the also-scaled down Central Park is ludicrously small.
177* In ''VideoGame/{{Bully}}'', the town of Bullworth appears to be the size of a small suburb. But the entire student body of Bullworth Academy -- a campus that could easily accommodate hundreds -- consists of 61 students (plus four prefects). The boys' dorm seems to consist of literally a single floor for some forty boys; the girls' dorm feels disproportionately larger, despite there being only eleven girls at the Academy (one of whom doesn't even live there).
178* 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 less than 200 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 a little over 100 meters below sea level, at least, has the in-universe justification that the rock there is just too hard for any tools to penetrate.
179* Planets and distances in ''Videogame/KerbalSpaceProgram'' are scaled down to roughly a tenth of what their RealLife equivalents are. But considering these are still astronomical sizes, travelling between any celestial bodies still requires the time warp function to cut down on waiting and make the game playable.
180** Averted by the Real Solar System mod. All object sizes, their gravity, and the distances between them, are ''true to life''. Notably, this mod is generally considered extremely hardcore, especially if mods for more realistic rockets and life support requirements are added -- like real life, simply getting to the moon becomes a major accomplishment rather than a routine excursion. Interplanetary manned missions usually require orbital construction to accomplish -- and mind you, docking things in orbit is already considered a very high level skill.
181* ''VideoGame/KingdomComeDeliverance'' takes place in a section of the Kingdom of Bohemia circa 1403, highly accurate in historical and geographical detail save for the fact that locations have been comparatively jammed together from hundreds of kilometers to a mere 3 by 3 kilometer world space.
182* ''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 [[UsefulNotes/{{Hawaii}} 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.
183* ''VideoGame/RedDeadRedemption2'', like its ''Grand Theft Auto'' sister series, takes place in a fictionalized version of the United States (though many references are made to real life cities and states as well) along with a few excursions outside the country. Stand-ins for the Rocky Mountains, the deserts of the American southwest, the great plains, and the bayous (including Saint Denis for New Orleans) are all present and packed tightly together. In fact, you can even see the Grizzlies from Saint Denis. In game, you can leisurely ride a horse from one edge of the map to the opposite in a single in-game day (66 real-life minutes). In real life, these regions span an area over ''1300'' miles.
184* In-universe example in ''Literature/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.
185* In ''VideoGame/NoMansSky'', this is played straight regarding the distance between planets. While travel times between planets may still be up to two minutes of sitting in your cockpit at top speed, the planets are still much closer together than in real life. Averted when it comes to some mission objectives, which can sometimes be located on the opposite side of the planet from where you are. If it weren't for your spaceship, it would take days to walk/drive to them.
186* Most open-world ''Franchise/SpiderMan'' 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.
187** With the exception of ''VideoGame/UltimateSpiderMan2005'' 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]]
188** Games that reference the wider Marvel Universe will sometimes replace real landmarks with Marvel ones, e.g. in ''VideoGame/MarvelsSpiderMan'', a building for the [[ComicBook/IronFist Rand Corporation]] stands in for Trump Tower.
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