Dying Town / Video Games

Dying Towns in Video Games.

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• In After Protocol, when morale drops too low on a planet, your colonists will say Screw This, I'm Outta Here and abandon the colony.
• Alan Wake II:
  • Alan's manuscript describes the town of Watery as slowly dying out, as the lumber mill that served as its main economic driver closed down years ago, and the fishing yields from the nearby lake are starting to decline. Coffee World has managed to stave off total collapse, but Alan states it has merely delayed the inevitable.
  • Bright Falls isn't faring much better, with businesses failing left and right and the younger townspeople desperate to leave due to Bright Falls picking up a reputation as a "haunted town" thanks to a string of mysterious disappearances in 2010. A late-game article notes that the FBC sealing off Cauldron Lake utterly destroyed their tourism industry.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura has Dernholm. In the backstory, it was the thriving capital of the nation of Cumbria, but when their king suddenly went mad with power and hatred of technology, he dragged Cumbria into a hopelessly one-sided war against the much better-equipped nation of Tarant. When the player arrives at Cumbria in the game proper, it's lost nearly all of its power and prestige, and Dernholm itself is a barely held together village whose people desperately try to survive, but have little hope of doing so due to the king's ever-escalating insanity and his sickeningly depraved Guard Captain. Depending on the player's actions, Dernholm, and Cumbria and general, can begin a slow but sure path to recovery in the epilogue.
• Rapture in BioShock the entire city has been torn apart by a civil war between Ryan and Atlas, and the only ones left are insane splicers. By the sequel the city is slowly crumbling as the sea starts overtaking it.
• In Diablo, Tristram was going through this stage during the first game, what with the demonic invasion and slowly being bled dry by a steady wave of heroes drawn to the town by said demonic invasion. Then the town completely flatlined at some point before the second game.
• Mamon in Dragon Quest IV (Aktemto in the official NES release) big time, with this mining town going from decline to virtual ghost town status over the course of the game. The apparent cause is a poison gas seeping from the nearby mines, caused by the fact that the demon king Estark was sealed underground beneath the town centuries ago - and the miners had been unwittingly unsealing his prison.
• In Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, the second game in The Longest Journey series, one discovers that the Venice district of Newport, where April Ryan (the first game's protagonist) lived has been ravaged by technological Collapse. Now, homeless people can be seen on every street, and the apartment complex where April lived is now run-down and used as a base for unscrupulous experiments. In Arcadia, the city of Marcuria has begun this process after the occupation by the Azadi, and their decision to segregate the city's considerable magic-user population and magical beings into ghettos, leaving several parts of the city abandoned.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  • Winterhold was once a grand, vibrant city that rivaled Solitude and Whiterun in sheer glamor and splendor. Then an earthquake sent 99.9% of the city (and indeed, the Hold itself) into the ocean. No one knows what exactly caused what became known as the Great Collapse, but many people, including the current Winterhold Jarl, believes that the Mage College is connected somehow. Ironically, the College itself is now the only reason anyone still cares about Winterhold. The replacement Jarl (if the Imperials win the Civil War) recognizes the reality of the situation and wants to foster good relations with the College.
  • Ivarstead. One man is reluctant to allow his daughter to go to Riften with her new paramour partly because Ivarstead will have no future if more of the younger generation leaves. The main attraction of Ivarstead is that it is the closest settlement to the mountain where the legendary Gray-beards reside.
• Etrian Odyssey: As a way of deconstructing 100% Completion, the titular town becomes this if you 100% the game (with people losing interest by Etria's main attraction, the labyrinth, not having any mysteries anymore).
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 2:
    • The Player Character's tribal village of Arroyo has become one due to a terrible drought, which is what kickstarts their quest when they're sent out to find the Garden of Eden Creation Kit.
    • The town of Modoc, a prosperous farming community, is also dying at the hands of the same drought that's killing Arroyo. You can potentially save it if you help establish an alliance with a nearby people called the Slags, which will allow Modoc to thrive.
    • If you get the best ending for Broken Hills by saving it from a human/mutant race war, it trucks along fairly well...until the uranium mine runs out. Losing its economic foundation, it quickly becomes a Dying Town, and eventually a Ghost Town.
  • Fallout 3:
    • The village of Arefu, which has all of four people left.
    • Andale has a close-knit community of seven, several of whom seem oblivious to the fact that the war happened. Given the... appetites of the locals, there's a reason why not more people move in. For long.
    • Big Town is a small refugee camp where the kids of Little Lamplight who grow too old are banished to, established in some old suburb, there is next to no food or clean water and the town is constantly beset by raiders, slavers, and super mutants.
    • The Capital Wasteland is a dying region, at the start of the game most people just survive and don't really thrive, the topsoil and water supply is lousy with radiation, the region is slowly but surely being overrun by raiders, slavers and super mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel, the only people who can make a difference, have their hands full. Naturally, this being a Fallout game, you can make things much better or doom them to extinction.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • There's Goodsprings, which never truly picked up in the first place. Some endings have the town prospering, or at least gaining a semblance of normalcy while other endings have the town being abandoned by all but the most stubborn for fear of the Legion or massacred and left to die by the Courier.
    • Boulder is one too, having been bombed to hell during the first war with the Legion. Only a bartender and some soldiers are left.
    • Primm too, having hit by bandits recently. The NCR, independent and even some Legion endings resurrect the town to some extent.
    • Novac is in serious danger of becoming this at the start of the game, as a pack of feral ghouls has overrun the old REPCONN test site, the main driving economy of the town. Depending on how the Courier resolves some quests, the town is either abandoned or remain prosperous.
  • Almost every settlement in Fallout4 not named Diamond City, Goodneighbor, or Bunker Hill is this. The player can revitalize this combination of Dying towns and Ghost towns into a thriving network of settlements, through great effort.
• Final Fantasy VII features two. The town of Corel lays dying after the coal mining industry was shut down in favor of Shinra-backed mako energy and Shinra going back on thier promise to employ the Corel miners in new positions. Even the nearby Gold Saucer Amusement Park has not provided the Corel residents with employment or spillover economic prosperity. The other is the village of Gongaga which was abandoned and left to die after their mako reactor exploded. Also inverted with Rocket Town, where a small and seemingly prosperous settlement has sprung up in only a few years around a derelict space vessel sitting unused on the launchpad.
• Final Fantasy XV finds the heroes visiting Cartanica, a once-prosperous center of industry in Niflheim. Once the area's natural resources were depleted, the Empire left the entire region to die, leaving behind derelict factories and a severely dimished population.
• Ghost Port Kolobos in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius isn't quite a Ghost Town yet despite its name, as it does have some permanent residents and a couple of shops, but large sections of the town are falling apart, and everyone makes it clear that the town currently doesn't have long before it's completely abandoned.
• Last Train Outta' Worm Town: Darwin has certainly seen better days. By the time the game proper begins, the only residents left are the Pardners, along with the Train Conductor — and the latter doesn't last long. Blame it all on the giant worms infesting the area.
• Kakariko Village is basically this in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, but because most of its inhabitants were killed.
• Mars has become this in Mass Effect. According to the in-game codex, it was once considered ripe for terraforming, but mankind essentially lost interest when the Prothean mass relay was discovered and they began to spread across the galaxy and meet other races.
• Mewgenics: It's not stated directly anywhere, but you only meet six or seven people in the dirty, trash-covered Boon County. It's gotten to the point that there are many more cats than people in the town- which is great news for the local illegal cat fighting ring.
• There is one in Mother 3, which eventually becomes a Ghost Town. It's Tazmily Village.
• Night in the Woods is set in Possum Springs, an old blue-collar mining town in the Midwest. The mine's closed up, and the jobs are gone. Nobody there's got any real future, and they all know it. A cult, which worships an eldritch god supposedly living in the mine, hopes that by appeasing their patron deity with sacrifices they can revive the town.
• No More Heroes: Santa Destroy seems to be this, or closer to the small-town version of Vice City. It is generally portrayed as a derelict, seedy place with a menial population and a notable lack of care for education, infrastructure and culture. It is heavily implied that most of the inhabitants remain there simply because they couldn't leave for one reason or another. In Desperate Struggle, the city has a miraculous recovery thanks to being renovated into a tourist hotspot funded by multiple corporations.
• No More Heroes III has Call of Battle, a region that suffered from a severe warlike conflict a long time ago, and is now a crumbled mess with very few inhabitants.
• Octopath Traveler: Orewell is said to have been a thriving mining town at some point, but by the time the events of the game take place, it's been reduced to a desolated, run-down settlement full of depressed, hopeless townsfolk.
• Octopath Traveler II: Orerush used to be the quintessential Wild West Boom Town founded following a silver rush. By the time of the events of the game, the place has fallen on hard times: a combination of the price of silver plummeting and the founder leaving a Small-Town Tyrant in charge, now Orerush is a pale, decrepit shadow of its former self full of impoverished and exploited townfolk that barely survive day to day. Fortunately, after Partitio deals with the cruel Small-Town Tyrant and his cronies in his first chapter, the town makes a miraculous recovery.
• The nameless town in the middle of a steppe from Pathologic.
• Inaba in Persona 4 has shades of this, several stores in the central shopping area are boarded up, with many of the residents blaming Junes (a megastore) for these businesses failing, and several high school NPCs comment that they're ready to jump ship and leave town once they reach college age. It's implied in the Golden Ending that Inaba will recover, and Junes starts working with and supporting the local shops instead of displacing them. Yu comes back a year later for Golden Week in the Updated Re-release and Arena and the place seems fine.
• Stalwart Village in Pillars of Eternity The White March is in decline due to the Hollowborn epidemic, ogre attacks, and spending what little money they have left on expeditions to restart the legendary White Forge in Durgan's Battery which have yielded no results and are actually provoking the ogre attacks since the ogres see the expeditions as invasions of their territory. Restarting the White Forge at the end of Part I breathes new life into the village as their newfound ability to manufacture Durgan Steel brings in a lot of money and business but puts them at even greater risk in Part II in the form of the colossal golems tasked with killing anyone who discovers the secrets of the White Forge, the Eyeless.
• Pyrite Town (and the base camp known as "The Under"), in Pokémon Colosseum was a former mining town, but with its mine dried up, it has fallen into a Wretched Hive.
• Tumbleweed in Red Dead Redemption II was formerly the hub town of its region, until the railroad was routed through the nearby town of Armadillo instead. This, alongside raids by outlaw gangs and an outbreak of cholera, results in the town being completely abandoned by the time of Red Dead Redemption four years later.
• One of the staples in the Rollercoaster Tycoon series is the "save the park" scenario, where you prevent a Dying Theme Park from going bankrupt. The most prominent is the "Renovation" scenario in the "Wacky Worlds" expansion for the second game where you save a Russian theme park. There's a specific set of scenery which is nothing but deteriorated Kremlin pieces made solely for this scenario.
  • Similarly, Zoo Tycoon features a few Dying Zoo scenarios, where you essentially rebuild neglectful zoos from the ground up. Special mention goes to the "Dinosaur Research Island'' scenario in the "Dinosaur Digs" expansion, which is presented as your typical scenario, but later on you "return" to the island in a later scene where all the dinos have escaped and you have to capture the dinos and rebuild their exhibits.
• The title town of Silent Hill is an odd inversion, since in-game dialogue from the first game suggests that Silent Hill might have been a dying town several years before the game takes place, but by the time that the series kicks in, it's a popular lakeside destination for people to go on vacation.
• Sim Series:
  • The town in MySims seems to be like this when you arrive. In fact, your arrival increases the population by 25%.
  • The early SimCity games, mainly the original and Sim City 2000 feature these as scenarios where you have to help it grow. Of course, you can also build one of these yourself in Sandbox Mode if you so desire.
• Skies of Arcadia gives us the ironically-titled "Esparanza."^note Spanish for "Hope". Built by sailors from all over the world, Esparanza was meant to be a port town or headquarters of sorts for sailors who wanted to take a crack at penetrating the seemingly-unpassable Dark Rift. Unfortunately, no one ever passed through the Rift, and everyone who came back from the trip were hollow shells of their former selves. It didn't take very long for the hope to wither...
• Pelican Town in Stardew Valley isn't quite dead, but it is clearly on its way there. It was once a mining town until the old mines were closed down, and then the parasitic Joja Corporation moved into the area and began wrecking the surrounding natural environment, driving the local Mom & Pop general store close to bankruptcy, and destroying the townsfolks' sense of community spirit. Even the old Community Center is an abandoned and rotting husk of what it once was, and the mayor is close to selling the land off to JojaMart for some desperately needed funds. By befriending the locals, helping with their myriad issues, fulfilling the requests of the local Junimos, and restoring the old Community Center, you can revitalize Pelican Town and bring it Back Fromthe Brink... or you can help Joja take over for a more Bittersweet Ending.
• Story of Seasons:
  • A lot of towns are this way in Harvest Moon. You might even have to fix the entire town up all by yourself, like in A New Beginning. Or maybe you just have to fix up this farm or something, like in GBC 3.
  • In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and its Distaff Counterpart, the protagonist is a city-goer who decides to take over their deceased father's old farm. The local town in Forget-me-not Valley is a sleepy village with less than 30 inhabitants. By the end of the game, most adults are either middle-aged or seniors while the very few kids in the town are all most likely going to leave. However, by the sequel Harvest Moon DS the town is just fine a century later. Admittedly, DS is very loosely a sequel and more-or-less only used that concept in order to excuse reusing all the characters and saying they're reincarnations/descendants.
• It is heavily implied the Slums of Stray used to be vast and sprawling, yet by the time the Cat falls down there the majority have been overrun by parasitic Zurks, with only a scant few pockets still populated by Ridiculously Human Robots.
• Suikoden V: Lordlake. Once a beautiful and popular tourist destination in Falena, it was reduced to a scorched, dust-filled hellhole after being declared a pariah city in the aftermath of the Lordlake Incident. Most the original inhabitants left, leaving only the infirm and the stubborn in the city. Fortunately, thanks to the actions of the protagonists during the Godwin war, Lordlake was revived and the population is working hard to restore the place to its former glory.
• Syberia: Almost every location Kate travels through appears to be a half-deserted town past its prime:
  • Valadilene was once world-famous for its automaton factory. Since then it seems to have fallen on hard times as the demand for Voralberg automatons decreased and many young people left the town to seek employment elsewhere. Many inhabitants fear that the death of Anna Voralberg may mean the closedown of the factory and the ultimate end of the town.
  • Despite all its grandeur, there appear to be almost no students on the campus of Barrockstadt University. Local stationmaster admits that, while he still remembers days when students would come from all around the world to study in Barrockstadt, he hasn't seen a train come to the station in a very long time.
• The town of Hellawes in Tales of Berseria ends up becoming one because of the party. Early on Velvet firebombs the entire port to steal the Van Eltia, the fire spreading out of control ends up sinking the merchant fleet that gave the town its main income, and the wreckage in the bay makes it impossible for anything but smaller ships to get through, utterly crippling its economy. A later incident ends up flooding the town with refugees and having the Abbey cast them off as no longer worth investing resources into, draining any potential the town had to recover.
• A few examples exist in the Trails Series:
  • North Ambria is a dying nation rather than just one town or city. Decades before the main plot began, a supernatural incident called the Salt Pale disaster occurred. A giant pillar of salt descended from the skies, turning anything it came into contact with into salt. This made a lot of the nation's land uninhabitable, destroyed a lot of infrastructure, and killed a third of its population. During this incident, the Grand Prince in charge of the nation fled, which enraged the citizens enough to start a coup, converting the former principality into a democracy. However, the Salt Pale eroded the soil and made it difficult to farm anything, reducing trade and crippling the economy. To make up for this, former army soldiers converted the military into a jaeger corps to bring in money and have a functioning economy.
  • Jurai is also an example, albeit much less extreme than North Ambria. Jurai used to be a port city, but a massive typhoon ended up destroying its ports and reducing trade, causing an increase in poverty. It also doesn't help that Jurai borders North Ambria, meaning it was indirectly hit by the Salt Pale disaster since Jurai lost a huge trade partner. This gets exploited by Chancellor Osborne, who manages to convince most of Jurai's leaders to let Jurai be absorbed into Erebonia with the promise of new trade. In a case of Villain Has a Point, the epilogue of Cold Steel IV reveals that some citizens of Jurai still want to remain a part of Erebonia even when rumors of reclaiming its independence pop up because of how much Jurai's economy has improved since it was annexed.
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is set in a small mining town that has been abandoned for well over a decade after a mine collapse killed off its economy.

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