It feels very off.įor this kind of interaction with the general population to be entertaining it requires a completely different tone. This would be fine, except that your principle methods of interacting with these citizens, in your role as their self-appointed guardian, is to hack into their personal information, rob their bank accounts or kill them with near total impunity. Watch_Dogs aimed for a fairly naturalistic tone, painting the city as being full of interesting yet familiar, believable characters. Consider 2014’s Watch_Dogs, a game about a vigilante hacker set in Chicago. And from a game design perspective, everything else is a footnote.įurther problems relate to how a game and its characters treat the city and its people – and it is here that scope exists for a game to become horribly unstuck. San Francisco is the best city in the world for car chases because it’s got those ludicrously cool hills. This is perhaps the best example of a game nailing down what makes a city work as a location for the type of play the game is offering. Which meant driving wasn’t fun, so neither was the game.īy contrast, the more recent Driver: San Francisco is a game that involves, unsurprisingly, driving in San Francisco. The game captured the absurd traffic congestion and frustrating road layout of the city surprisingly well. As a setting for a crime game you can’t really fault London – but you wouldn’t want to drive there. The problem The Getaway had, as a GTA style game, was the driving. (That said, the GTA series did dip into London in 1995’s top-down GTA: London, a dip that has fuelled rumours ever since that the series may one day return). One example of this is the 2002 game The Getaway, which in spite of its age is perhaps the closest anybody has come to a modern Grand Theft Auto game set in London. The first set of problems in basing a game in a real world city stem from geography. Almost without exception, the best cities in videogames are fictional. From London and Paris to New York and Hong Kong, these metropolises stand as some of the most significant cultural touchstones for people all over the world.Īnd yet attempts to put these great edifices into a videogame can often be disappointing.
Great cities are more distinct to a global audience even than the countries they are situated in. You get all that sense of place, all that rich history to draw on and every city has its own character, its unique blend of people, politics and culture. Taking a real city and putting it in a videogame sounds like a great idea.
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