Architect Compares Cyberpunk 2077 vs Starfield vs Star Citizen Cities

[Music] trying to pull off a big city in a video game is a pretty Monumental task with a ton of time resources and money required to pull it off as players are always going to expect it to be believable immersive and to support the stories and gameplay they come to expect from the game and this is something that cyberpunk 2077 Star Citizen and Starfield have all tried to do albeit with wildly different scope focus and General levels of completion hey guys morphologist here Architect by day and YouTuber by night and I wanted to take you guys on a little trip to three of my favorite game cities to compare them and see what they do best and importantly how scope can drastically affect and influence the way virtual cities realized my aim here is to highlight what makes a good Virtual City and to identify the shortcomings that they have more accurately so in a moment I'm going to compare a city from each game on what key features I see are most important like the master plan public spaces gameplay experience transportation and interior design along the way if you enjoy the video and you think I deserve it please don't forget to hit that like And subscribe button to show that you want to see more stuff like this just as I hope you won't forget to check out the generous sponsor of today's video n VPN who go a step further with their threat Protection Service it works against in terms of ads malware trackers and malicious websites nordvpn has become a main stay of my channel sponsors because I've trusted them now for years after getting sick of free vpns that didn't work for me now I can access the IP restricted websites that I need to while I'm working from abroad which is Handy for tax season all while protecting my personal information I also use the app on my iPads routinely watch shows like Strange New World season 2 which is frustratingly not available here in Taiwan so if you're in the market for a reliable VPN service and you want to support me in another way you can head on over to nordvpn.com morphologist to get a huge discount on their 2-year plan plus get an additional 4 months for free that's nordvpn.com morphologist and if it doesn't work for you you can always get your money back with their 30-day money back guarantee so first of all comparing cities from Starfield and Star Citizen to cyberp Punk's night City isn't an entirely fair comparison the scope and development of each game was very different only cyber Punk's development team was focused solely on one city alone where do the other two had to balance their focus costs and Dev time again to making sure that the other spaces in their solar system sized gameplay spaces also felt well realized the reason why I wanted to still compare them to night city is because I think that night city is an excellent Benchmark that other games can draw lessons from even if its density can't realistically be attainable for big games like Starfield and Star Citizen for comparison I've chosen new Babbage for Star Citizen since I think it would be a good counterpart to starfields Crown Jewel new Atlantis the other options in Star Citizen didn't really fit well since lille's Interiors haven't been updated since it was initially released although the exterior has recently been been updated Orson is a floating city and our Corp is a city Planet I also didn't want to choose starfields neon since its scale was a little bit too small even though it seems like it would have been a good comparison next to say KN City and lville with the explanation then out of the way I think it's time for us to get into the comparison and go first to the big scale of each of these big cities before diving down into their streets so this might come to you as a bit of a surprise if you've played cyberpunk but night city is actually quite a bit smaller than typical real world cities coming in at just 127 Square km compared to something like Chicago which has a staggering 600 square km in size this isn't something though that you're really ever going to notice playing due to just how well-designed the city is which I'll explore a little bit more later in the video well I don't have a measurement for the other two in this comparison starfields new Atlantis is very clearly a lot smaller with the largest of the three being new babage by a long shot but visual size doesn't always tell the full story of the experience which you'll find out more about when we get inside them more on that later each of them though manages to have a really realistic feel from afar with well-crafted skylines that build up from the edges realistically towards the center they also each share distinctive buildings that dominate the skyline near the city's Center which be seen from afar like arasaka tower for night City the mass building for new Atlantis and the central Microtech Tower with its distinctive Keyhole design and Microtech logo this kind of distinctive architectural style centerpiece building is really important for cities cuz most cities have that kind of centerpiece again going back to Chicago it could be the Sears Tower or John Hancock building there's a lot to actually choose from but those are the ones that primarily come to mind each City's master plan is also broken up into distinct dist districts that make up the whole from which can help inform the master plan and its realistic buildup since night City got the most amount of development time it has the most amount of detail and the most amount of districts which help inform its designs it has a total of eight major districts with 16 subdistricts districting cities is actually something that we do in the real world to break down Administration zones in the city to make more useful policies that can be leveraged and districts are typically formed around symbiotic relation ships in the local economy making a successful looking City then for a game means using this principle when planning to make it feel and look realistic this is something that KN city does especially well for example the Watson district is a primarily industrial working class District which helps inform what it should look like it features a city's Port warehouses factories and low-income housing to help Supply those areas with workers and a lot of the other districts fall the same kind of idea having their own distinct person personalities and Architectural Styles just adjacent to it for example sits the Beating Heart of the city's Commerce and trade the city center containing the major corporation headquarters of the city like the aforementioned arisaka Tower and the milch building and a number of others this rich and believable tapestry of interwoven City functions then creates a believable layout for the city sprawl with each district again having its own distinct personality and architectural style while simultaneously feeling like they each belong to the same city environment and era the amount of work here is absolutely staggering and it saddens me that we're never going to see another District expanded due to them moving on to cyberpunk 2 and away from the red engine one other thing I want to point out before moving on is that it has a road network based on a typical grid system that interchanges between more organic shapes but this is all very intentional and something I want to go into a little bit later when I talk about sight lines but generally speaking it looks and feels pretty realistic but how does new Atlantis f Fair well it also follows a design principle of creating districts which include its own residential commercial trade transportation and Loan income districts unfortunately the size of the city doesn't give the districts much room to breathe leading to the design having some issues that we'll get into later one distinctive difference though from night city is that its master plan is heavily influenced by its lack of a road system focusing instead on being a solely walkable city with a single transit system so instead of Roads the city is connected by plazas and a transit system you might have heard then of the term a walkable City it's a contemporary goal of urban planners especially those in US cities which are more acutely suffering from congestion and transportation issues than their Eastern or Western counterparts due to an overreliance on cars this has become a source of economic strain where housing is spread out and expensive with long and inconvenient commutes this in itself could actually fill its own video but to give you the tldr many post-war Master plans centered around cars instead of public transit or foot traffic and this resulted in spaces that are at best unfriendly to pedestrians and at worst downright dangerous a city in the distant future probably would have worked out a lot of The Kinks that we have yet to understand with the way CI should be planned and so I think having a mostly walkable City seems like it would make sense but uh who knows maybe in the future we have teleporters and we don't need anything scale though isn't an issue for Star citizens new babage as I mentioned before it's easily the largest of these three in this comparison the designers here took a lot of time crafting districts to make up the whole of the city creating nodes that branch in an organic feeling manner as if they were built up over time like a real City however despite its size the accessible districts are minuscule in comparison there's just a single Residential Building Hospital common area and a Spaceport that can be accessed in detail to be fair to Star Citizen though it's still in development with most of their Studios resources having gone gone to a single player campaign of which new Babbage plays no part still that scale does give a sense of realism to the space and immersion when you're approaching in a spaceship the size of the space board even feels appropriate for the size of the city which would certainly need the infrastructure to support the large population that certainly inhabits it like new Atlantis it largely has no roads though and this is due in part to the fact that the environment is extremely hostile this isn't after all Earth and so much of the space is kind of a mix between interior and semi exterior spaces that are all interconnected with a transit system that commuters use to get to the various services that the city has to offer on that subject then let's take a closer look at these cities beginning with n city the city's interior from its streets to public plazas are breathtakingly well done for a video game there are a plethora of different scale spaces featuring a a variety of believable activities from Commerce to cafes to even illegal transactions happening in back alleys depending on which district you're in it's clear to me that the designers used real world precedents as examples for example the Kabuki District seems like it took a lot of inspiration from the cun wal City in Korea which has been since demolished for quite some time now and the workingclass fael slums in Brazil some of my favorite locations I'd like to point out include corpo Plaza with its icon IC monolithic Osaka Tower among other headquarters and its circular Plaza at the center of the city also Kabuki which I already talked about which offers great views to other parts of the city even though it's on the lower end of the pecking order in the city going back to the road Network though of KN City one of the things that the master plan does particularly well is reducing sight lines in certain areas to create enclosures in districts to give you a better sense of the area and make it feel like the city is bigger than it is roads then often twist at the end allowing architecture to obstruct views and create controlled Illusions and this enables you to go from insane verticality to run down suburbs in just a few kilomet and it can feel like those spaces are many more kilometers apart than they are in reality in this way night city does this great thing of making it feel like the city is bigger than it actually is comparing that to new Atlantis though there are some problems it has a limited number number of public spaces due to the size of it but they're equally as excellent just fewer in number they provide a number of different scale social spaces as well as good public areas for circulation that can help people get to where they need to go and it has a lot of good water features and trees to help shade and cool the area but really that scale issue is constantly coming and biting the designers in the butt a bit here the smaller size of the city doesn't give designers a lot of room to use environmental design to separate the areas or districts of the city to give them more distinct flavor and character so no matter where you are it all kind of feels rather Sy even though they tried to make certain buildings feel more distinct and that's really unfortunate and it certainly doesn't help that a city has tall buildings and so it's much harder to hide them from afar that means that you can see the buildings in other districts as if they're in the same district that you're in like in a real City and this really stops you from being able to make things feel distinct I see that they tried to use the mass Central Spire building to separate the districts but it just doesn't really work because it's the same building scene from two different angles and so the two different spaces can feel kind of syy sculpturally though the spaces are still beautiful and the designers here did a really good job with the size of the city that they were limited to certainly there must have been some kind of engine limitation here involved however and this maybe is just something that I noticed since I regularly deal with scale in my job it does feel that some of the buildings are a bit smaller than they should be the gal Bank building for example would be far too narrowed to have practical office spaces inside of them the effect is that new Atlantis feels a bit like a movie set or something like visiting Disney's Backlot or even Main Street they're expertly created yes to give this illusion of scale but when you view them from suboptimal angles like the ones you're not supposed to and inspect them more closely the illusion falls apart this is starting to sound a bit like I'm not a fan of new Atlantis and certainly it's the weakest of the bunch but I don't want to say that it's bad it's actually got a lot of good going for it one thing I particularly like is how well it composes sight lines from certain positions like the space stock when you arrive looking up at the city and how in some places like the main plaza it well presentes a lot of the buildings that surround it afar it even manages to look fantastic from a lot of angles the illusion of scale then is really well done despite the fact that these buildings are probably smaller than they should be and you don't really notice it so much unless you look very closely it also makes the city quite easy to navigate what about new babage though well although the occupiable spaces are few in number they do still provide a good assortment of different scale locations for social interactions one strange bit about the city though is that it's mostly interior spaces unlike the other two examples as I mentioned earlier this is due to the harsh cold environment of Microtech so the line between interior and exterior design should be a bit blurred that means that there's not so much to talk about when it comes to Interior spaces for this city as everything is already in interior space that the players can occupy this Focus then on interior spaces creates some problems for the onf foot experience the scale of Star Citizen new Babbage is unquestionably the largest of the bunch it's epic it's incredible but crucially it can only really be experienced from a limited number of sight lines the result is that when you walk around in the com or the space board it can often times feel that you're just in a small room and not in a big city until you're presented with that brief epic moment through a window that's well framed but what about getting to and from these different locations well now let's take a look at the navigation in these cities as I mentioned previously n city has roads and so it's the only one of the bunch in which that you'll regularly use vehicles for inner city transport aside from that though all three examples have their own rail system as as well as their own Spaceport I'm not going to talk about that but I just thought that was an interesting point with the 2.1 update cyberpunk added the Metro system which is now physically usable as an alternative to fast traveling through a transition that goes from inside to outside and back with a loading screen so it's not maybe as immersive as some of us were hoping additionally there isn't very much freedom of movement when you get on board the Metro well its addition is welcome then to enhance immersion it can sometimes take you on of it at times when you have those loading screens cutting between for those moments though when you just want to kick back and check out the window view it can be absolutely epic given how well-designed the city is the same though can't be said for Starfield well starfields Metro can be used technically speaking it's more of a fast travel system with an animation that falls far short of keeping you immersed the issue is exacerbated even further by a strange game design choice that allows you to fast travel from the menu to different locations around the city which is to be honest just far more convenient so unless you really want to do it to feel immersed which isn't really immersive in the first place most people don't use it it feels as though they were aiming for something a bit more seamless at one point but perhaps couldn't pull it off because of the engine or something the result is lackluster as you may have guessed but that definitely is not the case for Star citizens new babage new babage has its own hyperloop which by and far is the best of the bunch in terms of an immersive experience there are no loading screens here you just step right onto the train and it takes you to your next stop with no trickery in between the glass canopy also gives you fantastic and epic views as you zoom across the adjacent frozen lake or as you wind through the building's massive districts personally I think it's by and far the best of the bunch the same though can't be said for new bag's gameplay but we're going to get into that in a moment what I love about these three examples is that they all represent a different approach to achieving the same thing for cyberpunk all of CD project Red's resources were poured into lovingly crafting night City it is after all the only location you can visit in the game aside from some very small oneoff locations for special missions the density then of the gamep play is going to be very impressive but there're always being something to do or see CD project red has had a long internal design goal for all their games to properly space out gameplay so that there's never a time where you feel like you're going too long of a distance before something happens constantly keeping the player engaged and anticipating the next encounter this can also help play a role in how space and scale is perceived small pauses can help create anticipation and appreciation for the environment to give a sense of Journey for the player there's also a good deal of interior spaces to discover from Mission locations to player homes to interesting points of interest however it would never be practical to make every every building have an interior so I don't think that's a realistic expectation the developers then did a good job of spreading out interior spaces to make it never feel like the city is just all facade even though the majority of it actually is this is a challenge then for any developer making a virtual City Starfield and Star Citizen both didn't have this luxury though of focusing on just a single City because their space games with planets and star systems to concern themselves with the result is that of course that they're much less dense and complex in their experience than night City despite a similar starting point though Starfield and Star Citizen both took very different approaches Starfield for example took the approach of crafting a highly detailed smaller scale City where a Star Citizen poured its efforts into making a massive City with less onf foot detail once again the big caveat to this is that Star Citizen isn't done yet but I'm still going to need to point it out here and where it's falling short currently so that it can be improved new Atlantis then in terms of gameplay is similar to night City in that they did a good job of giving a good density of gameplay with space in between a breathe the scale though once again can be a bit detrimental so sometimes the spaces in between can feel nonexistent this can create a sense of the city being smaller sometimes than it actually is interior spaces also suffer from this in some cases while there are a handful of large scale spaces some of them feel strange in scale when compared to the facade they're visual connections with the exterior also non-existent for whatever reason which I suspect once again is related to limitations with the engine the spaces though aren't terribly designed and the well location in the underbelly is pretty nicely put together and plays a nice kind of foil to the shiny exterior of the upper levels now though we arrive at what you Star Citizen players knew was coming all along or maybe already typed out in the comments section before I even got to this point in the video New babage Falls far Far Behind These two in terms of gameplay and services the truth is that there's very little to do within the cities of Star Citizen at the moment a consequence of their focus on their single player campaign Squadron 42 which just got to feature complete status last year which means they're focusing their resources back on Star Citizen thankfully this is in fact something that all of the cities and Star Citizen desperately need to improve on it's not entirely fair then to make this comparison but it's still worth pointing out in my mind for thoroughness still there are Loc to visit such as unique shops that provide a number of different purchasable items and even what was supposed to be a mission Giver at the bar which hopefully they'll be able to do this year now that they're refocusing again on Star Citizen as a side note you might also be wondering what gives if you watched my new babage video where I talked about how much I love the city well I'm still impressed by it but this is a comparison video which means I'm looking at the good and the bad and unfortunately it just doesn't live up to some of the other examples right now because of what I suspect are the limited resources they've been able to put into it so far so what are the Lessons Learned I think that despite the very low density of gameplay I still prefer the approach of Star Citizen over Starfield I respect what Starfield tried to do with Bringing Down the scale to something manageable but I still think that they could have made it feel a lot bigger and maybe done a bit more facade if Starfield had gone with that approach having a large scale city with a lot of facade like I said with the same amount of gameplay that they currently have just more spread out it would have given new Atlantis a much more realistic feel if Star Citizen can learn anything from this then is that it's not really important to do the entire city as detailed as possible the only important thing is that it feels big by spreading out those things and making sure that there's always something to do along the way trying to actually Match Night City though is really unrealistic and impractical given time and budget constraints so I don't think I ever expect to see that from games like this another thing it could do better is take advantage of sight lines and leverage architecture to create some good framing for establishing really epic moments to embellish the hard work of the environmental designers something that I think any good city in any good game should include if you're wondering then which of the three I think is best well the answer should have been obvious from the beginning the game that focused only on one city cyberpunk is in my view the very best city night city is the best city that doesn't make the other too bad though again limited scope can only produce limited scale but what do you think what's your favorite part and why this was a really big subject matter to cover so I'm sure you have your own thoughts about parts that I wasn't able to discuss so please share them below and maybe I can respond to them and see what you think about those parts that you like best let me know down below otherwise hope to see you in the next one

Channel: Morphologis

Views: 218,157

Keywords: cyberpunk 2077, star citizen, starfield, Best videogame city, Video game cities comparison, cyberpunk 2077 phantom liberty, cyberpunk 2077 gameplay, cyberpunk 2077 2.0, starfield review, starfield gameplay, starfield news, starfield update, starfield bethesda, star citizen game, star citizen 3.22, star citizen gameplay, star citizen 4.0, star citizen update, Architecture, urban planning, architect reviews

Id: sbOFw1NgUj4

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024