History Main / SlidingScaleOfVideoGameWorldSizeAndScale

* The ''Spiderman 2'' game for Gamecube, UsefulNotes/{{PS2}} and UsefulNotes/XBox recreated the entire scale of Manhattan! On the other hand, most buildings couldn't be entered, and the few that could didn't let you explore much inside.

Many video games, striving for maximum interactivity, allow players to go to any part of the world in real-time, allowing them to explore everywhere and trying to give the feeling that the world is a real, livable place. However, because the world must be scaled to be convenient for gameplay, this can result in the world feeling very small, since each individual area must be small enough for players to explore and go everywhere, and they have to be able to easily travel from place to place in real-time. This results in, for instance, towns with maybe 20 townspeople and 10 houses and 1 store, for instance, and other areas that might look like real places but only so long as you don't roam through them and see how small they really are. This can be a believability problem for story-driven games.

** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsArena Arena]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]]'' take this UpToEleven. They possess some of the largest game-worlds in gaming, with ''Daggerfall'' in particular having a playable space stated to be the size of Great Britain. Due to this size, however, virtually all content that isn't related to games' main quests is [[RandomlyGeneratedLevels Randomly]] and/or [[ProceduralGeneration Procedurally Generated]], meaning it gets repetitive rather quickly.

* Almost every inch of the planet's dry land is accessible in ''VideoGame/{{Albion}}''. Many buildings can be entered and they are all unique. On the other hand, the overall size of all settlements is incredibly small, and despite still being incredibly vast (with not too many features of interest), even the largest continent in the came can be crossed in the course of a single day on foot, and the entire world's population is barely a three digit number. This is handwaved by people stating that the planet is very small, and the almost earth-like gravity is due to the high density metal underground (also explaining why time goes by so fast), and by narration accompanying sea voyages as lasting for several weeks, implying that most of the surface is water. Still doesn't explain the small population.

* Games like ''VideoGame/MicrosoftFlightSimulator'' (playable area is the entire Earth) or ''{{VideoGame/Orbiter}}'' and ''VideoGame/KerbalSpaceProgram'' (entire Solar System). Since you can't go indoors and explore interiors as well, they technically fit this category.

* Games like ''VideoGame/MicrosoftFlightSimulator'' (playable area is the entire Earth) or ''Orbiter'' (entire Solar System). Since you can't go indoors and explore interiors as well, they technically fit this category.

* ''VideoGame/{{Yakuza}}'' series is somewhat different in its WideOpenSandbox approach than western titles in that the world itself is tiny by comparison. You can sprint to one end of the city to another in about a minute and anywhere outside of the couple city blocks you can explore can only be accessed via quick travel or story missions. The cities are dense to make up for it, and you'll be hard pressed to find truly empty spaces in each city. While there's a lot of buildings you can't enter, there's also a lot of back alleys and corners with most of them containing some hidden items, and even certain buildings have a lot to explore.

* ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsArena'' took this to an extreme. While later ones still technically do this, they dial it down a bit. ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'', for example, has a smaller, more intimate world than previous games in the series, with towns that have only a dozen or so buildings, and a walking distance between locations that takes ~10 minutes to go from one to another, making it more an example of '''real-time, small scale world'''. However, there's still a large amount of ground to cover, a great many cities, towns and outposts, and every single building can be entered. The world is very large, but definitely nowhere near to scale.

[[AC:Real-time, small scale world]]

[[AC:Visit parts of map]]

[[AC:Symbolic representation]]

[[AC:Realistic scale, most of world in background]]

[[AC:Realistic scale, locked doors everywhere]]

[[AC:Realistic scale, tons of buildings enterable]]

[[AC:Hybrid approaches]]

* Many [=RPGs=], such as ''Dragon Warrior''/''VideoGame/DragonQuest'' and even newer ones like Namco's ''TalesSeries''.

There's also making a large world but locking most of the doors or simply not allowing players to enter most of the buildings. So you travel the distance it should realistically take to go from one side of a large town to another, but because you can't enter most buildings, the company is spared the problem of having to design their interiors. Plot/gameplay-important buildings are likely to be somehow marked, or otherwise made obvious. Some games - notably, the ''SilentHill'' series - go for a somewhat different approach, in which players can explore realistically-sized buildings but most doors are locked.

* ''SilentHill'' has many realistically-sized environments that you mostly travel to entirely in real-time rather than reaching them via cutscene, and uses the "locked doors" approach.

* VideoGame/{{Minecraft}} handles this by using individual blocks to make structures and using [[ProceduralGeneration procedural generation]] to create a near-infinite world.

* ''VideoGame/TheConsumingShadow'' uses this approach. You speed across the British Isles by car, from town to town, fighting monsters, finding clues and buying drugs to keep up your SanityMeter. Actual interactive gameplay is limited to Dungeons, which are buildings or parks taken over by minions of the various EldritchAbominations in action. Between each town and dungeon, you get a first-person view of your PlayerCharacter driving their car along a highway.

* The ''Spiderman 2'' game for Gamecube, PS2 and XBox recreated the entire scale of Manhattan! On the other hand, most buildings couldn't be entered, and the few that could didn't let you explore much inside.

* The various ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAuto'' games would fall under a form of '''real-time, small scale world''' (for example you can drive across ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas San Andreas]]'' in a couple of minutes, even though it's meant to represent a whole state). However, the games also usually feature the '''locked doors everywhere''' feature, in that there's usually tons of buildings but few, if any, are actually enterable.
** Driving times ARE shortened by the fact that you're normally driving pedal-to-the-metal without a care about crashing. But even if you did drive like people do IRL, the locations are still much smaller than their real-world inspiration.

* ''{{Opoona}}'' has several absolutely massive cities, with truly enormous explorable areas. In addition to huge "business" areas, the apartment areas are also elaborately crafted in such a way that they resemble real apartments--everyone [[NobodyPoops finally has their own bathroom!]] The overworld areas even seem a bit small in comparison, though they're still quite large. And although the first few areas have to be traveled between in flight (the "parts of the map" variant), the later areas get interconnected such that it takes quite a bit of time to traverse them.

* VideoGame/AssassinsCreedIII lets you visit parts of the map, the map being the east coast of the USA. The locations are the cities of Boston and New York which are bigger than realistic scale but with locked doors everywhere. The frontier is a Real-time, small scale world version of the New England countryside. Davenport is a very small town made up of less than a dozen individuals that you all personally know, so that its map is of realistic scale with tons of buildings enterable. The mission exclusive parts like Charleston and Captain Kidds treasure locations are of realistic scale but with most of the world in the background.
* VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas is a combination of real-time small scale and realistic scale tons of locked doors. Many parts of the map are done at a realistic scale (such as the Nellis Air Force Base) but the Mojave Desert is a bit on the small side. The setting allows for plenty of justification for the relatively small communities given that its AfterTheEnd and many buildings are boarded up or collapsed.

This is a technique many modern games use. Buildings are as big as they are in real life, cities are, and so on, but you the player are limited to a specific path and you cannot explore the world outside that path, but you can certainly see it. Buildings, mountains, etc. are often in the distance, but you can't ever reach them, as they're there just to make the world feel huge. The distance you physically travel to get from place to place is also realistic within the limited scope you can visit of the world. This approach is favored by ''{{Uncharted}}'', which lets you explore limited parts of jungles, towns, caves, and so on, but has the places you can't reach visible in the background to make them feel believably large. This style tends to be used mostly in linear games, as it would be rather questionable in an open-world game.

* An approach favored by ''{{Uncharted}}''. Cities can have literally hundreds of buildings stretching into the distance, but you're unable to go near them, being limited to the ones important to gameplay.