Gateless Ghetto

"Those crates are completely blocking the sidewalk."

— Manny Calavera, Grim Fandango

Making a city in a video game can be difficult. After all, it's a big place — if the creators were to allow the player to explore, they would have to map the whole city, which would require a huge amount of work and boost technical requirements.

Therefore, many games resort to dumping the player in the middle of an enclosed area that is indeed full of buildings and streets, but is walled off from the rest of the city. You cannot see anything that would be outside the area. Often it also has no visible connection to the outside area: no doors, gates, tunnels — whatever.

Sometimes, it is instead done with the help of Insurmountable Waist Height Fences, Invisible Walls, permanently Locked Doors, or with rubble, ruins, etc.

A defining feature of a Dungeon Town. Might be escaped with The Great Repair. For city-themed video game levels in general, see Metropolis Level.

On a Sliding Scale of Video Game World Size and Scale, games that use a Gateless Ghetto are usually somewhere between "symbolic representation" and "realistic scale, most of world in background".

Currently, the authors of games have Skyboxes at their disposal, which allows them to make this a little more realistic.

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Examples:

Adventure Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: Both Skopp and Noctis City can be explored to find hidden collectible items and do Sidequests, with the rest of the surrounding areas being blocked off by a 'No Trespassing' sign.
• Myst: The underground city of D'ni can be like this at times in Uru - most of your access to it is on the island of Aegura, which is logically not directly connected to the rest of the city. The original game had extremely limited access to the majority of the city, and while the accessible area was greatly expanded in the first expansion, where the city became the center of action, Rezeero and the docks are both locked off from the main area by collapsed passages and immovable barricades, respectively. The one neighborhood on the other shore that you can reach - Bevin - is similarly sealed off from the rest of the capital. The result is an accessible area that covers approximately a square mile of world space in a city dozens of miles on each side.
• The Quest for Glory series has used this a few times, most notably in III, where most of the city of Tarna is forbidden to humans. Somewhat averted in II, though, in which you can pretty much go anywhere in the labyrinthine city of Shapeir. The anonymous and uninspired nature of most of the default city streets and how easy it is to get lost, though it's done on purpose because the Feelies that came with the game included a map of the city in a form of Copy Protection.
• Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts averts this. The Hub World, Showdown Town, is the largest in the entire series (and quite large, by game standards.)
• The first segment of Grim Fandango is set in the city of El Marrow, but the only parts of the city that are actually accessible are the building where Manny works and the street and alleyway immediately outside; the rest of the street, and access to the rest of the city, is blocked off for the city's annual Día de Muertos festivities.

Driving Games

• In Vette!, only certain parts of San Francisco are accessible; the rest are blocked off by insurmountable fences, "because of the vast amounts of information needed to recreate the city". Also, since the game was released right after the 1989 earthquake, the manual lampshaded it as being due to earthquake damage.
• The Mario Kart series's traffic courses are set on public roads with no visible way in or out (there are some exceptions, but the kart gets dragged back onto the track).
• In Midnight Club 2, the cities of L.A., Paris, and Tokyo are modelled after real-life cities with the exception that there are no roads leading out of them. The surrounding visible terrain in all three cities has some further cityscape that suggests that the cities are actually somewhat bigger "in-universe" and their sprawl expands past the in-game road network, but that terrain is inaccessible. Even if the player ends up there due to a freak accident, they immediately learn that it consists of non-solid geometry that causes the car to fall into the featureless void under the city.
• In Forza Horizon 4, the region of the UK where the Festival is set has no external road access, other than a barricaded bridge north of Edinburgh.
• In the open world Need for Speed games, the worlds don't seem to have any road connections to the outside world, even in games where there are other cities/parts of the city in the background. This is notable in Need for Speed: Underground 2 and Need for Speed (2015). Even Need for Speed: Carbon has parts of the map that don't seem to be connected to the main city.
  • The trope is averted in Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) however, as there is a road that leaves out of town. Need for Speed: World also introduced the Rockport Turnpike that was seen in the background of Most Wanted, which leads to the Tri-City area of Need for Speed: Undercover.

First-Person Shooter

• Duke Nukem 3D.
  • Episodes 1 and 3, set in Los Angeles, follow this trope; the very first level ("Hollywood Holocaust"), for instance, is set around a movie theater whose both doors lead to the same walled-in street section, which has no exits or even doors to other buildings.
  • The N64 port of the game averts it slightly, as the areas "beyond the walls" (which are simply blank in the PC game) instead have entirely new streets added to them, expressly for the purpose of making the levels look a little bit less like isolated ghettos. Sure, most of these new areas can't actually be accessed. But at least you can see more city beyond the bits you're walking around in!
• Half-Life 2 uses a variant of Invisible Walls (which are actually visible forcefields) and, during the Uprising, the rubble and ruins approach. Also, in the Ravenholm level the maps are hedged in by wooden barriers presumably built to keep the zombies at bay or in one area (though some of them could probably just jump over them anyways).
  • Simply using the 'noclip' cheat reveals there are invisible walls everywhere, most of which are in places that the player shouldn't normally be able to reach anyhow. Although some could be easily reached on foot, were the invisible walls not there.
  • In Left 4 Dead, Valve uses a similar technique as the Ravenholm level. Rubble, fires, and makeshift barricades keep the action moving in one direction. Subverted in that, when the players join the Zombie team, they gain access to much more of the level. The trope becomes more apparent in the finale of the No Mercy campaign that takes place on the hospital's rooftop; the player can see the city from above and there's a mountain range surrounding the whole city, which makes the city look like it's in a deep valley with mountain barriers and no visible paths leading away from the city.
• Quake III: Arena is set in a number of so-called "arenas", which are closed off environments built for firefights to the death with explicit in-universe respawns. Even the arenas that seem to be converted from previously inhabited locations like futuristic laboratories and such don't have any locked doors or blocked passageways that would appear to lead elsewhere.
  • Some of these arenas either have ways to take a peek at what is outside the walls during some big jumps, or are explicitly floating in empty space. In either case, the structures appear to be surrounded by featureless terrain at best, and by sky or void on all sides at worst.
  • Somewhat justified since the arenas are built by the Vadrigar who possess advanced technology that allows for kidnapping worthy warriors from all over the galaxy and eternal respawning using "soul catching devices". Teleporting the said warriors into artificially constructed environments outside known space should be trivial for them.
• Deus Ex makes use of literal concrete barriers erected around parts of New York City by the US government in order to block off areas of civil unrest or disease outbreak. A newspaper the player can find and read contains an article about the Supreme Court upholding the legality of said barricades.
  • Yet despite the justification, the trope still applies. The road you saw blocked off during an earlier mission? It's the express road to your next objective, without so much as an alleyway deviating from the path.
  • The Nameless Mod justifies this with Forum City being under lockdown.
  • 2027 has Moscow under curfew, blocking off major roads.
  • Most of Deus Ex: Human Revolution's plot happens right before or during the anti-augmentation riots, so roads have been cordoned off and public transport severely limited.
• In Perfect Dark, one mission in Chicago takes up one small street and a couple of alleys. There's no way to access any other part of the city; there isn't any traffic, gates, or doors leading out of the enclosed space.
  • There are flying cars, though, so there doesn't seem to be much need for gates into the area.
  • Also, it's mentioned that the street is no longer open to ground traffic. Doesn't completely justify it though, since there isn't any pedestrian access either (you get into the area by jumping over a fence).
• The Darkness' New York isn't much better- the subway areas are lampshaded to a point by trains only running on one line between two stations (unless you try and walk up the tracks) but the streets less so.
• Multiplayer maps in the Call of Duty games are like this. Invisible walls block you from exiting the map via wide open spaces, whereas highly urban areas (like in Modern Warfare 2's "Karachi") have fences, brick walls, and railings that keep you from exiting the map space.
• The BioShock games restrict you to certain sections of the city and, to a lesser extent, certain areas within those sections. Many establishments are closed up or blocked by malfunctioning doors or rubble. Even the bathyspheres can only take you to the next level, or to levels you've already visited; this is never really explained. One of the odder aversions, however, is Ryan Amusements. Not a single section of the park is blocked off by rubble or barricades, making it plain just how small the park is and how little it contains.
• Lampshaded in Blood II: The Chosen. The incredibly snarky journal has a few things to say about Cabalco's engineers, who are apparently responsible for every single instance of absurd architecture in the game.
• Medal of Honor does this with locked doors, invisible walls, and insurmountable waist-height barriers.
• Team Fortress 2 tended to avoid this with fake doors (indicated by a lack of handles or knobs) and "behind the scenes" areas with conference rooms and large computer labs, and then Gravity Barriers in outdoor areas. However, since two of the classes (now four) could Rocket Jump, it was necessary to add invisible walls and/or ceilings anyway. In the commentary, the developers stated that it was more important to make the inaccessible areas look uninteresting enough that players don't feel like trying to get there in the first place, and then they won't mind when they're blocked from doing so by a two-foot-high guardrail.
• High Hell takes place on the top floors on skyscrapers, and there doesn't seem to be any "intended" way in or out for the staff. This is no obstacle for the protagonist, who breaks in by climbing to a balcony with a Grappling-Hook Pistol and breaks out by parachuting off the building.

MMORPGs

• City of Heroes plays with this. At first glance, most of Paragon City's neighborhoods are sealed off by the War Walls—massive concrete-and-forcefield barriers erected during the Rikti War, and still used to keep hazardous, wrecked areas of city isolated from the populated areas—from which the only way in or out is through security checkpoints guarded by the PPD SWAT (with the exception of the Sewer Networks, that is). However, most of the populated areas have tunnels between the War Walls that let traffic and pedestrians move freely between neighboring zones, and the Paragon Transit Authority has several metrorail lines that serve all of the populated areas.
• Averted in Champions Online. Millennium City is positively HUGE, with regions that include rundown warehouse districts, apartment buildings, a somewhat bohemian city center, an industrial center, and more, with what appear to be the suburbs visible and also visibly NOT simply a skybox in the distance. However, when one begins to go outside arbitrary boundaries, the screen fades to black and white. If one goes TOO far, the character simply can't go any further.
• Averted in World of Warcraft after Cataclysm. The developers re-modeled the world to take account of the decision to allow players to use flying mounts in all areas of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, though still not the areas which were bundled with the first expansion pack The Burning Crusade. This involved particularly remodeling Stormwind, which was originally a Potemkin village of sorts with the polygons representing the taller buildings flat and two-dimensional. The zones are still bordered with mountains impassable on foot; however, enterprising players did find one route from Dun Morogh to Thorium Point, so they were never total barriers.

Platformer

• Super Mario Odyssey has New Donk City, a sprawling metropolis... of about seven or eight blocks at best, surrounded by Bottomless Pits. More of the city is visible in the distance, past the pits, but the only part you're allowed to explore is a tiny group of buildings situated on top of a huge concrete block in the middle of what appears to be a harbor.
• Pizza Tower has the Pig City, which has several explorable districts (including a prison), but are only accessible between each other through cab stops.

Roguelike

• Angband, a Roguelike, starts the player off in a 'town' consisting of several businesses, the player's house and the entrance to the titular dungeon. These locations are surrounded by a gateless, unbreakable wall.

Role-Playing Games

• EarthBound:
  • Lampshaded when, in order to inhibit your progress, the police set up roadblocks, claiming that they are famous for their roadblocks and are going for a record.
  • Along similar lines, both EarthBound and EarthBound Beginnings explain, in their usual conspicuous style, how to pick out the doors which can be entered from those which cannot. EarthBound often trades entering useless houses for hearing unusual conversations behind doors.
• While this is a non-issue in 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy games, where towns and cities were composed of a dozen buildings at most, it becomes noticeable to the point of frustration in PlayStation-era games. Most egregious of all:
  • Final Fantasy VII: Midgar, a sprawling megalopolis built on two levels (ground level, and a plate built above it.) You only visit three sections of the former, and a couple of alleyways of the latter. Other games in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII would allow you to explore a bit more, but still never the whole shebang.
    • Nearly this exact scenario played out in Final Fantasy VI with the city of Vector.
  • Final Fantasy VIII: Deling City and Esthar, capital cities of opposing nations. More noticeable in Esthar because it's large enough to take up a huge chunk of the world map (the player can run across its pathways and get into random encounters later on.)
  • Final Fantasy IX: Lindblum, Treno, and Alexandria, all rather large cities with innumerable neighborhoods, alleyways, plazas, and markets. All are reduced to isolated corridors in the actual game.
  • Final Fantasy X: Zanarkand, Luca, and Bevelle. They're extremely linear corridors. Literally, in the case of Bevelle —you never actually visit the city, just the Temple's atrium.
  • Every single city in Final Fantasy XII. Even Rabanastre, the largest of them, has plenty of areas you can't visit, most notably a large central street that is only visible in the background and in cutscenes.
• Averted and justified with The World Ends with You - the entire game takes place in Shibuya, which is walled off from the rest of the world to our protagonists by supernatural power.
• In the Baldur's Gate games, the cities are divided into districts. Each has a gate or two, from which you just warp to another area. The other areas of the city are off limits.
• The Citadel in Mass Effect is described as having a population of millions and the background graphics show it to certainly be large enough, but the player can only access an isolated area containing nothing but the plot-relevant locations, a few shops and the Cool Ship's private parking space. And about ten people who will talk to you. And even fewer who will care if you start unloading bullets into them.
  • Hence why Mass Effect 2 disabled weapons-firing outside of explicit combat situations anyway. Both games have plenty of unusable doors presumably leading to other areas of the Citadel. That may not very well apply to Tuchanka or Illium (and maybe not even Omega), though.
• Fallout 3 takes place in the ruins of Washington, DC, and the surrounding wasteland of Virginia/Maryland. Since everything in the city is in ruins, the only way you are allowed to enter and move between sections is via the underground Metro tunnels. Gigantic piles of unclimbable debris and sealed buildings prevent you from doing much surface travel, at least directly. Outside of the city it's pretty much wide open though, until your Pipboy tells you that you can't go any further when you reach the map boundaries.
  • Some debris piles are unclimbable, but a few very similar looking ones actually can be climbed, which is kind of annoying: "Okay, this 45 degree slope I can scamper up just fine, but this ready-made staircase is completely impassible."
  • The various districts of Las Vegas in Fallout: New Vegas are cordoned off by makeshift junk barricades and accessed through gates (or the sewers), making these more of gated ghettoes. The only area where access is actually restricted is the Strip, where you need to be carrying at least 2000 caps to pass the security checkpoint without being shot at. (The opening cutscene of the game and various pre-release materials suggest that originally the entire city was meant to be completely intact, but it seems likely that programming limits forced this trope.) The Sierra Madre Villa from Dead Money plays this trope straight, being completely self-contained. Ditto the Big Empty, which is surrounded by a radar fence (force field).
  • It's mentioned that some parts of the Hub that can be visited in Fallout are a few miles apart, but traveling between them is instantaneous. Other settlements, like the Boneyard, seem to do this as well.
• Deconstructed in Devil Survivor — the players are trapped inside the Yamamote line (a section of Tokyo) by the JSDF, who have standing orders to shoot anyone trying to escape. Everyone trapped inside starts going crazier and crazier as time drags on with no power, very little food and water, and demons and the lunatics summoning them running around.
  • This is actually pretty common in Shin Megami Tensei games, dating back to the first one, where thanks to a coup d'etat instituting martial law and an invasion by the American army, most of Tokyo is out of bounds to you until After the End.
• Planescape: Torment made heavy use of this trope: Sigil consists of six-seven areas you can move between and explore, with the implication that most of the places between are of no particular interest to you. The total amount of Sigil accessible to The Nameless One and crew through these areas is less than a single percent of its total size and population, given its tabletop stats.
  • In addition, you're prevented from leaving the Hive into other areas until a certain plot development, because the Dabus have changed the streets around too much to allow a clear path.
• Dragon Age II only shows you a fraction of the great city of Kirkwall, despite of most of the game being set within its walls.
• Summoner 2, Munari City. You can only visit the docks, market, university and arena. Justified in that the remainder of the city is underwater.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic plays this straight with Taris. It's somewhat justified in the second game on Telos: the only inhabitable area is the Citadel Station, which pretty much consists of standalone modules, that can only be reached via shuttles, or Nar Shaddaa, which actually makes this a plot point.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind's Tribunal expansion features the mainland city of Mournhold, in which levitation is disabled (Because the city is technically in an enclosed cell), and the main gate is impassable. The only way to get from Vvardenfell to Mournhold and vice versa is via a teleport service.
• Many Tales Series games, especially Tales of Vesperia, allow you to see in the background unvisitable parts of the towns and cities.
• In Go Vacation, the City Resort is just a small piece of a much larger city. You can only walk around part of it, but some of the minigames take you outside the basic city area, and you can fly above the whole city in the Hang Glider's Free Flight mode.
• In most towns and villages in the various Monster Hunter games, you can only visit a single street or square, while you can see the rest of the town in the background but never visit it.
• Shadow Hearts: All the towns in the series are like this, consisting of one street with the only buildings accessible being the plot important ones. Larger cities like London in the first game, Paris in Covenant and New York in From the New World are divided in small subsections that are sometimes unlocked by progressing the plot.

Shoot 'em Ups

• Sensory Overload: There's only one entrance to the building and the terrorists have welded it shut.

Simulation Games

• Animal Crossing: Wild World takes place within a square Gated Ghetto, 256 meters on a side. West and east are solid walls, south is impassable water, and north is a solid wall interrupted by a small gate. But in order to pass through this gate, you must first be invited by another player with another DS and another copy of the game. City Folk's eponymous city also fits this trope. Averted in New Leaf, where your town is at the end of a giant peninsula and the sea can be seen instead of giant walls. However, your town is still blocked off in some areas.
• The Truck Simulator games do a good job of averting this. There are plenty of inaccessible roads scattered around the map that are blocked off to the player, but can be accessed by AI traffic. The holographic 'X' barriers that mark the boundaries of the drivable area can also be disabled in the options menu for extra immersion once you're used to knowing where you can and can't drive.

Sports Games

• While most street levels in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater avert this trope, most of the levels in American Wasteland (Hollywood, Downtown^note although a highway does go through the map, but it's not connected to any of the streets, Santa Monica^note same with Downtown, but unlike downtown this road is inaccessable, and East LA don't seem to have any road connection to any other part of Los Angeles. Beverly Hills is the only level to have some sort of road connection. Each level is connected through loading tunnels whether it be a mall, drain pipe, metro station, or even a parking garage, there is no way vehicles can transverse between the levels.
  • Played straight with Minneapolis ^note from Pro Skater 1, but also reappears as a classic level in American Wasteland, Streets^note also from Pro Skater 1, Chicago^note From Pro Skater 4, but originally from Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2 and Beaver Valley^note from Project 8, but only the PS3/360 version, as all of these levels appear to have no connection to the outside world whatsoever.

Survival Horror

• Silent Hill:
  • Silent Hill: The town is fairly wide open, but parts of it are blocked off by large crevasses and, later, construction sites.
  • Silent Hill 2: The town is fairly wide open, but parts of it are blocked off by large crevasses and, later, construction sites.
  • Silent Hill 4: The Building World and other otherworlds are either completely isolated from the outside, have permanently locked doors, or the exits are blocked by debris.
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories: The inaccessible areas are blocked off by massive snowbanks.

Wide Open Sandbox

• In the Grand Theft Auto series, most buildings, including public ones, are inaccessible. There also don't seem to be any roads leading into the city, blocked or not. However, there is a tunnel in Shoreside Vale in the third game that's permanently blocked by an Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence. Apparently, this is the only road into the city. The later games each have their cities built on islands in the middle of the ocean. The reason for this is that after GTA3, Rockstar decided they did not like having land that the player could not reach. So while in-game the Cities are portrayed as islands, in actuality they are meant to be connected to land. Also, on GTAIV's website, the picture of the city is much larger than the in-game city, confirming this.
• [PROTOTYPE]: The bridges in and out of the city are Border Patrolled and blocked with Invisible Walls. The game forces you back to shore if you try to go across the water; the virus allegedly has an aversion to water, the only effect of which is apparently that your character is incapable of jumping out of the water in a direction away from the designated game area.
  • Attempting to fly out in a helicopter will result in being shot down (read: spontaneously exploding) — the military takes the island's viral infection seriously: no one who goes in comes back out without proper clearance in an attempt to prevent the virus breaking quarantine.
  • Happens in the sequel as well. It's turned up to eleven in the Dead Zone area, where if you try going out that way and ignore the warnings, you get an instakilled with an airstrike.
• Done in both True Crime games when the scale of Los Angeles and Manhattan are almost identical to real life. Buildings and road blockades prevent you from leaving LA and Manhattan.
  • Neatly dodged in Sleeping Dogs (2012), which was originally intended as an entry in the True Crime series, by setting the game in Hong Kong.
    • Hong Kong Island to be specific, instead of the whole city. Doesn't explain the absence of the Kowloon Peninsula (which is very visible from the north side of the island in Real Life), as well as the three cross-harbor tunnels that connect the two sides of the Victoria Harbour.
• Yakuza only lets you enter a restricted part of Tokyo or Okinawa. The rest is sealed off by invisible walls.
• Averted in the Saints Row games. Once you're out of the first mission, you can go anywhere in the city. Played straight in that there doesn't seem to be any way to drive to or from Stilwater, however. The city has no standing bridges other than those that connect the two main islands, meaning the only way into the city is by plane or boat. Steelport in The Third is much the same. There is a single collapsed railroad bridge on one of the islands, but beyond that there is no evidence of a bridge in the distance.
• Semi-averted in Assassin's Creed-games. The Medieval cities are rendered in their full glory and you can go anywhere you want within them, but their gates remain permanently closed except for special missions.
• Batman: Arkham City seems to make it a point to provide in-universe justification for this trope, where the titular Arkham City is a large chunk of Gotham that's been completely walled off to serve as a radical, experimental prison; all of Gotham's criminals are simply dumped into the "city" and left to their own devices, provided they keep the hell away from the heavily guarded walls. Out-of-universe, this seems to be their way of finally giving players the chance to patrol the streets of Gotham itself, as opposed to Batman: Arkham Asylum which was entirely confined to the asylum.

Other

• A rare film version of this appears in Dark City. The residents are all certain that the world outside of the city, Shell Beach in particular, is real and will tell you about them if asked, but anyone attempting to actually leave will find themselves blocked one way or another. This is because, like a video game, those areas do not actually exist.
• In The Hunger Games, the arena where the Tributes compete is one of these, as Katniss finds out when avoiding combat.
• The Thirteenth Floor features this in the simulated world. Everyone inside is programmed to never choose to leave the city. One way to prove the artificial nature of the world they are living in was to pick a far away destination they would never think to actually visit and try to get there; eventually the person will come to the edge of the simulation and see how it starts to break down into crude line drawings and then just nothingness. The protagonist thinks these instructions apply to people living in the simulated world he helped create, but eventually discovers they were meant for the world he lives in, which is also a simulation (running under the same rules as the one he built).
• A parellel example from outside computer games: the designers of the map of the Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork chose to represent only the "city centre" inside the city walls. Their reasoning is that 90% of the action in the novels featuring the city takes place here, and there was no need to map the whole of New York - only "Manhattan". whilst those buying the map can see the city rolls away into suburbs in all directions, there are only cursorily dealt with or else are not even mentioned. Therefore the virtual visitor to Ankh-Morpork is confined within the gates of the city walls...

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