Sometimes, multiple creators spontaneously stumble onto very similar topics; this is definitely the case for me and "The Cursed Judge," who just released a video on empty worlds that features many of the same touchpoints as this essay. It's honestly a really interesting look at how two different people can take the same information and run in different directions with it. I recommend checking it out! ua-cam.com/video/PEocLl_dl5g/v-deo.html
I've played videogames since the 80's and one of the key things for a 'big world' was always things like "you can go inside all the buildings". Nothing breaks immersion like a painted-on door.
This was the saddest part about Cyberpunk to me. Yeah the city is big and nice, and the ratio of visitable to prop buildings is far from the worst... But there are still so many prop buildings that just sit there like cardboard boxes. These are the situations where mostly auto-generated but slightly hand curated spaces can make all the difference.
That's why I prefer smaller maps now. In Yakuza, Dishonored, Arkham City, you can go from end to end in a few minutes but the map feels really alive. I'd rather have a small map packed with content than a gigantic map filled with nothingness.
man, I was really hoping you might quote or reference Hitchhiker's Guide at some point, because this bit has lived in my head since I first read the book and is absolutely relevant: "It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself."
If you walk across a 5 meters long room, but you take half the step of the one before, you would in the end reach the other side of the room, but you will also have to walk for infinity. Maybe I butchered it, learned it from a Phd in abstract mathematics. It has been stuck with me for so many years now.
@@Softlol I think that's one of Zeno's paradoxes. One time I took acid and experienced Alice In Wonderland Syndrome, where I couldn't tell how big or small anything was. Things kept flipping back and forth between appearing really huge and then really small. That was quite anxiety-producing. Really drills into your mind how relative everything is though
There was a guy on Penn and Teller Fool Us that did a magic trick where he would spring down cards and seemingly pick out the chosen card from the spring itself. There's a lot of ways to do the illusion, but the method which was used was the most bizarre and impressive trick of all. He simply did it. He practiced it so well for 18 years that he could basically pick out exactly whatever card he wanted in a split second from a rapidly falling card spring. This video somehow reminds me of that. There's a certain realness to it
The scale of the facility in Portal 2 has always stuck with me. Every time you feel like you're approaching the surface, that maybe you're seeing some natural light peek through, you always inevitably come across some monolithic constructs towering overhead. Love it.
Yes, absolutely. Ever since I first played the game, the implied colossal scale of the Aperture Science facility filled me with wonder. Just how much are we not seeing? What secrets does Aperture have that are not known to GLaDOS or the player?
@SteamBirds It helps to achieve a sense of comedy as well, seeing how Aperture, rather than renovate their old test areas, basically built on top of them, creating an impossibly deep facility of old junk. It's constant expansion, to the point of ridiculousness but never really meaninglessness. There's an implied end point, where GLaDOS' influence doesn't reach, where Cave didn't build into. It's the matter of finding it
I'm not sure if it's accurate to describe it like this but it feels very lovecraft it's design. Describing the building itself with anything under super massive feels like a insult. But I call it love craft because it is a super massive building that appears so wide and giant that even with light creeping in it can barely be lit. With larger than life rail systems that move anything and everything around and seem to have beams that go down to the remote possibility of a rumored floor that the darkness hid long ago. When I first started Portal 2 and saw the hotel room being rammed out only to notice that even in the good light it was simply a impossibility large machine holding alot of things in the air with no sight of ground I knew it was amazing. Also I still wonder how humans could even build something as big as that mega project of a building even with the army of robot engineers.
When I learned the world outside of your submarine in Iron Lung was a real, rendered world and not just invisible with randomly selected photos when you use your camera, the game became scary again. It was scary the first playthrough and then became scary again on a second playthrough after learning that everything outside really is there.
@@NanoMan737400it's honestly easier to develop with a real space than to arbitrarily decide abstracted coordinates to receive specific pictures while keeping it consistent Old games only ever did the latter due to constraints.
@@PretzelSage Yeah great point, and to add to this when you play Counter-Strike, you're just a camera moving around with a gun floating. You can't actually get shot and killed.
The first game I remember being amazed by it's scale was Shadow of the Colossus. And not necessarily because it felt so big. But because the plains, mountains, architecture and colossi themselves made me feel so small.
One thing that help make SOTC feel awesome, in my opinion, is the emptiness. It feels like things USED to be in the lands, but now it’s just empty… gives good down time to consider your actions with the colossi as well
SotC did scale better than any game I've ever seen. It really felt like you were exploring this long lost world that had been abandoned for thousands of years. Better yet, it felt as though the land itself wasn't even designed for someone your size, as if you were walking through some alien landscape created by beings unknown. Absolutely incredible stuff, from the architecture, land mass, the enemy designs, it's all brilliant. The only game that gave me a similar feeling of awe and scale was Elden Ring, with it's interconnected world design, it's insane verticality and massive draw distances. If you took the enemies out of Elden Ring it wouldn't be far off SotC in look and feel.
For me it was the second I got close to the first boss. Sure, there's a cutscene at the start with trees between you and the boss for scale, you already see he's big but when you gain control again, and get close to him and get his attention, and starts walking towards you before he smashes his maze to the ground, only then you know how big he really is.
I remember as a kid finishing the tutorial of Oblivion and looking out. It was my first ever open world rpg. I was legitimately shocked and excited for the first time when my brother said "See that mountain? You can go there."
my first rpg was alien logic on dos that was memorable, i played oblivion and many other like lagoon. But alien logic even today is still a special game no one will ever beat in utter adventure weirdness. honestly skyrim got a lot of its character idea's from Alien logic, the lizard and cat people, etc are almost identical. However skyrim doesn't have the aliens nor the total whacked out story that game had. plus it had digger pet breeding, you could breed aliens for quality and have them dig for stuff. to hunting 2d dungeons and a world map interface, it was the first game with a world map interface that final fantasy started using. Alien Logic changed gaming forever, highly recommend the game and a bag of shrooms. Might as well play commander blood too while you got your bag of shrooms LMAO... It will be unforgettable i promise, most whacked out experience ever right there. eat shrooms and go on a time traveling adventure back to the big bang meeting aliens and all kinds of weirdness... no idea what the dolphin deal ever was about but it sure made space travel dream like. i am not liable for a bad trip either, ingest and take the adventure at your own risk.
Jacob Geller videos are so good because you get philosophical conversations of how games use their physical space and how it relates to how you feel inside it, but also phrases like, "and the driving kinda feels like butt." Absolutely top tier shit especially for me. Great job as always
I've always liked the moment early in The Beginner's Guide where narrator-Davey makes the walls transparent at the end of a game and you see a vast unaccessable labyrinth outside the "game." There's this great feeling of wonder and that there must be something bigger outside of the presented game. It's also fun because a) it's clear that narrator-Davey experienced this same wonder, and b) in restrospect it's clear that he's currently weaponizing that emotion to make his actions and worldview more understandable.
The Beginner's Guide is a complete triumph in general. Years back I was one of those Lets Play doofuses and I immediately realized the game was too significant to do an LP of. It has to be experienced first hand.
The first time i experienced true, massive scale was in my early 20s when i was working a gig at a convention center and walked through several of their biggest spaces. These are the spaces that usually hold entire conventions in a single "room"; individual stages hosting panels, huge groups of 15-20 booths, places to buy and eat food, etc. The kinds of spaces that are usually partitioned off into smaller, more individual spaces that still feel massive. It took me about 10 minutes to walk from one end of the room to the other, walking at a fast pace. When I hit the middle of the room it felt like I was in an ocean, and the first thought in my head was "If I had a heart attack or some kind of medical emergency, the closest people to me wouldn't even see me fall over. I'd just lay here and they wouldn't even be able to hear me scream, and they might not even find me for who knows how long." We've all felt that before when we're outside in a big park or a giant clearing, but to be walking through a carpeted, air conditioned, walled in, purpose-built structure that's so *empty* is something i'll remember the rest of my life. I felt completely isolated in a building full of hundreds of people.
I wonder if there is a difference in the minds of people which live in a very baren landscape, like mongolia or argentinia. Are they afraid of endless space? Do they see the little details in the landscape, that makes one place different from another? How are they remembering paths, distances, locations? Would really love to know that.
The Boeing plant in Everett WA is similar. Even full of people, machines, offices, other buildings, and partially built airplanes the space itself dwarfs all of that and still feels impossibly massive. A building so big that it makes a dozen jumbo jets inside look small is an insane sentence to even think about. It's so big it has its own weather. I'd probably have a panic attack if the place was empty like your convention center.
@@-sturmfalke- countryside argentinian here! i despise human contact so i love seeing just green on every horizon. but it does get harsh for surviving. you end up learning to fix everything all alone, even yourself (with medicine)
Reminds me of the scene from "1408" where the main character is climbing the outside of the skyscraper to get from one room to the one next to his, but then the camera suddenly zooms out with that scary sound, showing the skyscraper impossibly has only one window - the one from the room he just left. The sheer scale of the building and the impossibility of the image was terrifying
@@MentalParadox there's a somewhat tall building next to the Alexanderplatz square in Berlin and the side facing the square has no windows. except one. one of the residents complained they didn't have a nice view on the square so they added one in for them. the building, maybe ten stories or so, has no windows(on one side) except for one.
I’ve always been curious how deep, vertically, the SH2 stairs puts you. When I first played it, knowing exactly where I was relative to the rest of the map was comforting. That staircase began ripping me apart from an understanding of my surroundings. Surely that was intentional, but it felt personal; as if the creative team knew exactly what comforted me, and decided to tear that away.
@jasonhildebrand1574 Not so much a plot spoiler as a commentary on Silent Hills design philosophy as a Horror game: It's a horror game focused on psychological horror.
8:33 The reason why I loved Portal 2 so much was because of this. One second you are in a small test chamber, next moment you are in this underground giga-structure, where you can see so extremely far into the unknown. It really created a sense of wonder for me as a child, wanting to break free and explore this place.
That’s interesting because, for me, it was the opposite. I didn’t feel wonder so much as an overwhelming sense of anxiety. I’ve always been… maybe _scared_ isn’t the right word. Disconcerted? Yeah, disconcerted by the out-of-bounds areas of a game. I have to close my eyes or even straight up step away if I glitch through the floor because that infinite space just fills me with dread, and it’s the same with the wide open spaces in Portal 2.
The most impactfull empty space of Portal 2 for me was just before we enter modern Aperture Science again, but after the elevator. That gigantic space in all directions except up and down, the huge foundation with enormous springs holding the weight of the entire facility just felt so... real? Like it could exist in some real forgotten maintenance tunnels, neither ancient nor new enough to be noteworthy, yet very much necessary for everything to exist...
What I liked most about the spaces in portal 2 was the way they made the space feel ominous and spooky and mysterious, but never *too* alienating or lonely. It was the perfect level of familiar and unfamiliar, often both being elements of the same space. You can understand the purpose of a space from the first look within the test chamber, and know what every element does. How they interact with eachother and how to take advantage of the space, that's the puzzle, and the reason this space is presented to you. Contrast this with the space outside the chambers - they do NOT feel finite. You cannot access every part of this space. You enter these spaces with the same mindset that got you out of the chamber --- that's a portal wall, that's a cube, that's a turret, I need to decipher and use the environment to get from point A to point B. But this space is NOT meant for you. It's not meant to be traversed. And every unfamiliar part begs to be explained, and can be, thru extensive daydreaming that runs parallel to the rest of your navigation. Signs, pre-recorded messages, waiting rooms, offices -- the game gives you just enough to think about and chew on to not feel alone in such a lonely space.
I always remember the first time I went up to the top of the mountain in Skyrim, where the greybeards live. It felt like a "big" journey somehow. Even though that map isn't the biggest, and the climb doesn't take all that long, it truly felt like a long trek.
If you don't know where the path up is, and you instead just try and approach from a random angle madly hopping up the semi sheer cliffs, it can take quite a while...
same, i remeber looking at the different cities on the map and planning out how i was going to survive the journey up to solitude, I know you can just pay a wagon but i refused to on the first play through.
I think that's because Skyrim has hidden quests. You don't know what you'll discover on the next nook and cranny. Unlike games like Far Cry, if there's no map marker on the mountain, that means there's nothing there and it's not worth the time to go there. Games with this design can have huge maps but feel really small because you can just ignore huge parts of it. Skyrim and Fallout feels big because I check every inch of the map.
@@One.Zero.One101I had the opposite feeling when playing the modern fallout games and skyrim. The fact that every square inch had something in them makes them deel artificially dense and ruins the sense if scale. Maybe its because ive grown up in places where there are large stretches of nothing. It doesnt help that they repeat the same formula so often: random hidden entrance with enemies that ends with a miniboss and a treasure for example.
This reminds me of a small indie game I used to play. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name anymore, but what made it so special is that after using console commands to enable flying and teleportation, if you went high enough, you could touch the sun. It was real. No skybox, no picture, but an actual, glowing orb hanging in the sky miles about any geometry you should be able to touch. It was really cool.
Reminds me of a JSR inspired indie game called Zenith where you eventually have to build enough momentum to launch yourself into space and onto the moon. No loading screen, just one long jump til you land on the moon that's been above you the entire game
This is why Jak and Daxter felt like such a game-changer when it first game out; the loading screens are hidden so as to deliver what feels like a seamlessly integrated and massive world to explore. And at the very end, you can even look back from the mountaintop and see the other levels in the distance, your entire massive journey stretched out before you in a single, glorious view.
Its wild when you switch to debug mode and discover that those far off elements are actually in the position of those levels. The geometry is faked with imposter low poly versions, but the size is not.
i experienced that with Soul reaver (1999), where the levels are streamed in as you run through corridors and it just made the (objectively medium sized) world feel so huuuuge
Your point about Babbdi is something I've always found interesting. A lot of times, video game environments feel like they only exist for the player. And obviously, they DO only exist for the player, but I'm more intrigued by video game environments that feel like they were designed as a place first and a video game second.
I think immersive sims do a good job at emulating that feeling, since the player has to think about how to pass them, rather than the levels being structured around the player's level
Rainworld is a game that exists and is basically this, every entity in the area you are in is always being rendered and doing their own things, and the entire map design is based around making everything traversable but not clear in its pathing
This is also why the "Chosen One" trope for the player character feels so played out and claustrophobic. It's Truman Show-esque to walk around and feel that all the NPCs are there to gawk at you instead of getting to experience the world around you on it's own terms. Speaking of immersive sims, Thief is a great example. You're a thief, not a throne heir. You're trying to pay rent, not save the world. Oddly enough, that makes the world feel *bigger*.
Not necessarily about space but I've felt this way about Dwarf Fortress before. There's a strange quality where the NPCs you meet seem much more real than video game NPCs usually do, because if they say "my daughter was slain by a dragon" they aren't reading a script - that literally happened at some point in the world's history.
IMO, Dwarf Fortress is an example of how big does not always feel big. Such limited graphics and so much limited to plain text results in me not really feeling much about it all. The history may be expansive and actually reflect what happened in the world but most of it just feels generic and nothing more than name swaps to me. I also just do not find the gameplay fun or interesting and there have been notorious programming errors that lead to nonsensical, immersion breaking, results. I want to have more respect for it but there is a siginificant disconnect between the praise i hear for it and the experience i have with it. My impression is hampered further by the fact it has been in development for over 15 years and as such i should not expect any major changes soon or ever. I am not complaining, just being honest about what i really think of it. It just feels too archaic even if impressive.
@@pkfiremain710 Fair point, perhaps what i wrote was unfair. My issues with the game are not things that i would expect to change in any update, although possible.
@@elio7610Not too long ago it got a paid version with graphics which significantly increased it's popularity SO it's possible that they could put the money into improving immersion which leads to more money which leads to more immersion and you get rapid improvement well beyond what could be predicted. I'm not saying this will happen just a possibility.
Funny that you mention Elite: Dangerous. If were talking 'emotional reaction to big' that was the game that did it for me. You're absolutely right that often times, things are just too big to register. I absolutely agree on No Man's Sky. What made Elite different for me was a combination of things. Let me tell you a story: I'd finally gotten my Cobra MkIII. A good little workhorse that can do whatever you ask of it. And me? I was going to *explore*. I named her *Curiosity* and spent an hour fitting her out. And then, I was ready to set out. My goal was Colonia. And I would explore hundreds of systems on my way out. So off I went. The first twenty jumps were quiet. All I ran into were planets already tagged with 'first discovered by:' So I kept going. And then... Poof, my first unexplored system. I was an awe inspiring feeling to know that I was the first person to ever enter that system, despite it just being a game. And so was the next one. And the next one. I continued on for hundreds than thousands of jumps. Each one into a system that no one had ever visited before. Two things struck me as I made that journey. One, and the thing that still sticks with me today, is what we're talking about. The sense of scale. It's one thing to hear there are 100 Billion stars in our galaxy. It's another to *experience* it. Star after star after star, as you visit but a handful of them. And what truly made it impactful for me? It's real. It's all there, twinkling in the night sky. I may have been traveling virtual representations of them, but many of those stars really are out there. And that leads onto the second thing that has stuck with me. The sense of loneliness. Much of the time, I was playing late at night, the world seemingly dead and quiet. And out there, so far from inhabited space, I felt so alone. At the height of my journey, I would have been thousands of light years away from the nearest player. It was just me, my ship, and the endless stars. To this day, I'm happy I did it. It was an experience like no other, and truly helped me comprehend the vastness of our universe. And with it, that boundless wonder and curiosity of a child I thought I'd grown out of. To be curious is one of my favorite feelings.
I agree that Elite is one of those games that truly feels big because it is big. In a way, it's making an otherwise enormous world feel positively tiny in comparison to what it really is, it's just that the real version is truly incomprehensibly vast. Just sticking to the occupied systems will give you that sense of enormity, and then you zoom out and find that that bubble of space is _tiny_ in comparison to the whole galaxy. No matter that the stars are (mostly) carbon copies of each other, no matter that the planets aren't really all that different from one another, it still feels huge in a way that No Man's Sky fails to encapsulate. Maybe it's because in Elite, all the spaces in between are modeled. You don't jump directly into planetary orbit, you pop in less than a light-second from the system's largest star, and you have to cover all the remaining distance the slow way. No loading screens, just an incomprehensibly high speed over a distance that you _know,_ given enough time, that you could cover at sub-light speed. There is no place for the illusion to break down (unless you try to fly to another system in supercruise) because _it's all there._ The stars, the planets, the asteroids -- all of it, right there for you to run into if you're not paying attention. I'd compare it to flying IRL. Flying has made the world both larger and smaller than it was in the days of our ancestors. Smaller, in that we can actually get from one end to the other in our lifetime; but so much larger, in that we can get to enough of it to truly comprehend its incomprehensible size.
I'm a combat CMDR. Fly 100% FA Off, optimize my ships for combat, have a particular style of gameplay that I like to stick to. But as I'm without a setup that can accommodate that sort of play right now, I've decided to do an expedition on my integrated graphics laptop, and... Wow. 8000Ly out from Sol and my trigger finger is itchy as hell. I get my kicks using the FSS and DSS, but it sure increases the amount of time between jumps... Already, I'm losing focus, wanting to get back to the Bubble. But I'm determined to press on. I'm getting a similar feeling I had when I walked the length of a marathon. It was a challenge I set up for myself, to walk from my house, hike a mountain, and walk back. 26.5 miles in 14 hours. I'm a walker - I do not drive at all, so I'm used to walking for hours at a time - But this hike really took it out of me. It wasn't just physically taxing, but spiritually taxing too, to force myself not to call a taxi even as I felt I could walk anymore. But it was definitely worth it by the end. I've got this Elite expedition down for ~35000 Ly round trip. It's difficult for me to imagine longer trips, like to Sag A*, and a possibly months-long trek through The Abyss to Beagle Point seems overwhelming to even think about attempting. I get that this game is procedurally generated, and the distances aren't exactly curated or authored (a point I would argue somewhat, as real-life observations of celestial composition have been programmed extensively into the amazing Stellar Forge generator). But what I will say is that the distances *relative to your human scale and your (in)ability to cross them* are authored, leading to a moment-to-moment feeling of isolation and smallness. Interestingly, it's the one game I play where actually getting up and doing something else is done *as part* of gameplay, with distances between in-system objects being what they can be. Elite: Dangerous is *vast*, unapologetically - And its vastness does provoke an emotional register as we begin to realize the full grandeur of 400 billion star systems.
I had a very similar experience to you and the one thing I realised was there is something very relaxing about being far away from anything else in the game. I set of on my first real exploration trip with the intention to return to rhetorical civilised part of the galaxy, but never came home. I’m now about 4 years into that same trip, done the beagle point thing, done loops of the galaxy, with 30 odd thousand previously unexplored systems to my name. I only visit the dssa stations when I need to repair something. It’s a wonderful experience.
I genuinely fucking love these videos. They feel so powerful, artistically, philosophically. It makes me feel at peace, while also hooking my interest and refusing to let go until the very end. They feel less like essays and more like fully fledged stories.
This is why I love Jacob's work. I've listened to countless other video essays, even on the same topics/games, and none strike me down to my very core compared to his. I genuinely admire his craft, and how it's made me question many aspects of life in ways that have genuinely enlightened me.
I don't always understand what he means, and get confused at times. That's okay though, because that's not always the case AND the videos are soothing to watch in general for my tiny monkey brain. It's a win either way!
I had plans to play Final Fantasy after getting home from work this morning, but made the mistake of clicking in this video... I can't just not finish the video, the hooks were in firmly😭
i did philosophy for undergrad and then went into law, stumbling upon this video gave me such a bittersweet feeling - i miss philosophy so fricking much, the abstract theorising, the deep questioning, the meaningfulness of art as a boundary breaking medium! i wish i could go back to writing essays about this stuff lol
The most effective part of the Silent Hill Historical Society stairs is how, at some point during your descent, you become so disoriented that it suddenly appears that you're going upstairs rather than down. This and the first time you get to the all-consuming blackness of the third floor of the Woodhaven apartments are the scariest moments in the game for me.
I recently played through the game for the first time and at that point I was seriously debating if the game glitched or if It's a puzzle that I am doing wrong
I was wondering if Shadow of the Colossus would get an honourable mention in this. It may still do some fakery, but having to traverse long distances across a strange forbidden land by horse was magical.
I think it absolutely qualifies. The map is way larger and way freer to explore than it needs to be for the given gameplay. Its obvious the devs very strongly valued the atmospheric significance of giving players such a map.
I think it feels so much bigger than it is because there’s so little in it, it’s an empty world with only 16 collosi in it, it’s surreal and it feels endless
Fuel is a game, although unremarkable in many ways, that still amazes me. It has been years since I last played this game, but I still think about it. The ability to traverse as far as eyes can see, with the geography actually making sense as it changes, and that feeling of being lost and lonely in a world where you actually felt tiny, it was something no other game made me feel. This game did not try to make you feel important and big. I used to roam around rather than play for progression. The maps where quite beautiful for the time. Thank you for making this video. I'll definitely go back to this game someday. PS - Far Cry 2 is another such game. The feeling of loneliness in a big world is inescapable in the game.
After reading about 'biggest map' sizes for games I did find a download for Fuel and it's still installed - I just don't play it much. It IS dated as far as racing games go.
Noita takes this to the extreme - there’s a whole Terraria-esque world outside the “normal” game area, complete with unique biomes, whole factions of enemies, bosses, spells, mechanics, collectibles, and quests that you’d never know about if you just kept to the main track. And outside the bigger world is a pair of “impenetrable” walls made of cursed rock that damages you if you get too close. Outside those walls are the brothers and sisters of the main world, with subtly different layouts, and covered in copies of previous bosses and cursed versions of collectibles.
Didn't expect to see a comment about Noita. There are so many reviews on steam saying the map is "limited" or "repetitive" which is sorta true for the main game but with the parallel universes? It's just huge. Too bad the game has an ungodly difficulty level that makes completion hard enough let alone exploration.
My mind was completely blown when I found out about it. I really love the idea that there are multiple universes in the, it really brings back that sense of wonderlust I used to have as a kid playing videogames, that there is something beyond that bounds of a game's world. Too bad it's next to impossible for most players to even attempt 😅
oh, you're right!!! Noita is a _fantastic_ example of the concepts talked about in this video!! It's kind of a shame he _didn't_ take a look at it, actually, it's really perfect for this.
8:10 funnily enough, I find airliners show a real world example of this kind of distinction taking off in an airliner gives you a feeling of height for a whole 10 seconds before oyu are so high up that the world below you feels like a map or background image but flying low i na small aircraft or a helicopter you can continuously see enouhg detail that every moment feels like a place and a situation that you are actually in and hanging above in a way that humans usually don't
I've had something related the first time I took a flight to another country to study. I walk into the plane, sit, wait 2,5 hours, and when I leave, I'm in a completely different place on Earth. The air I breathed in and the rain that fell was the same as home, so it only clicked how much distance I covered when I imagined a map, where I was and where I were then. Surreal that, first time it happens
I've actually never experienced that abstraction you're describing, to me while on an airplane everything looks like a tiny little diorama except that when you keep zooming in there's no abstraction there keeps being detail because, of course, it's real it's the real cities with real trees and real cars driving around real roads
You are also a giant in a bugs world filled with trillions of bugs, many deep underground doing buggy things living a bugs life. You don't see them and maybe that's for the best. Maybe there are intergalactic space faring aliens who don't even notice us because we're just space bugs in a stupidly big universe.
8:20 in Halo 3, when you watch a real scale UNSC frigate enter orbit, and rapidly grow to be bigger than the entire gameplay map, as it lands for but a fleeting moment to drop off tanks and reinforcements, before just flying off again. Absolutely iconic moment.
The Halo series in general is so good with this kind of stuff. Tip of the Spear in Reach has a similar moment when you clear the first AA gun and multiple frigates fly in, blowing up the phantom coming to drop more troops near you before firing into the battle going on out of bounds, where all of the vehicles in the fight are real. Come to think of it, every single Halo game has at least one jawdropping moment where you realize that some massive object isn't actually background dressing, but a tangible thing that you will interact with.
the whole thing with the game having no invisible walls really reminds me of manifold garden, where you can clip from the starting area directly into the final hallway, and the game doesn't stop you. In fact, I would bet good money that the developers know about it, because placing them that close together _must_ have been intentional
I had this terrifying dream when I was younger of an outline of a circle rolling down an endless line. I had it a lot and I still think of it constantly, decades on.
I had these thought experiments where i would imagine divers coming across every day objects but the objects would be so so so large and under water making it impossible to see all of them at once
I love the way the stalker series of games fully simulates every single monster and npc at all times, even at the completely far opposite end of the game world where the player is. When you stumble across some massacre, it wasn't just spawned in, those encounters happened
This also makes me think of the Wild-era Zelda games. They feel so huge when you realise that the big, varied playground you've been exploring is a snippet of the true map size. Albeit it's made smaller through things like fast travel and such, but when you head out into the wild (pun intended) you just... wander, it's so dense there's always something to do, some weird npc, a great view from a mountain, or even an entire hidden village if you're dedicated enough. You can enter pretty much every house and it's honestly amazing to explore for the first time. You only realise that the world isn't actually that huge in game terms after you've explored more of it than any casual player would.
I didn’t watch trailers for totk. I avoided all promotional material I could. When I saw my first chasm… and jumped into it, and eventually realizing that, yes, that entire area down there is effectively doubling the map size? I’ll never forget it.
I imagine going through the open world in The Crew 2 feels similar to walking through one of those Minecraft maps that recreate the entire planet on a fractional scale.
I don't like cars or car culture, but I play The Crew 2 religiously since it became free on PS+. It is just relaxing good vibes to DRIVE, and they got the scaling and pacing of the world down perfect so that the changes don't feel so quick that they're jarring but are rapid enough that you don't get bored with one landscape. I'm apprehensive for the next one because it's much more geographically restricted (it's set on Oahu) and I'm worried the change in scale will affect the illusion.
The Game Dungeon episode of The Crew made me really wanna try it, it's like the developers were passionate about making an open-world driving game, and some marketing exec tried to put a flashy coat of paint over it so people wouldn't think its just a Giant Driving Simulator, something that is far more desired than yet another racing game.
Reading the title of the video I immediately thought of Outer Wilds. Physically taking off in that ship for the first time felt amazing. I expected the transition between earth and space to be a cutscene as it is in so many other space exploration games. But there isn’t one; no kind of barrier to make the planets feel separate from space. And you need to learn to manually take off and land. The realization that the entire game was being constantly simulated, and I could travel anywhere in the solar system without a loading screen was mind blowing.
Yaknow on that note I actually wonder whether that's the same with Echoes of the Eye, the DLC that on one layer is ABOUT all the trickery and faking of developing a game world. Like obviously entering and exiting the world is loading but are the inter-section boats loading or merely an actual tunnel? Is the underworld beneath areas actually always underneath all three or are you teleported during the elevator? I just think there might be something there of interest in the same way as the big hall in Dark Souls where the game itself fakes far less than it says it does.
@@TheRealPentigan Im pretty sure there are no secret loading screens in outer wilds. There might be rendering limits tho, meaning that some things might not be rendered at all times, only if you come close or look at it. But that is normal for most games.
@@jurremioch316There are secret loading screens but only in the sense that the game doesn't account for things too far away in real time. Loading screens were used to compensate for both lower memory and poor data streaming speeds/caches. Also the fact that constantly reading from a CD would wear both it and the the drive out, fast. It's why there aren't really any loading screens in cartridge based games unless the area doesn't fit in a few chunks of memory. Cartridges use flash storage, so they can load as fast as the memory/cache will allow. Like SSDs.
Reminds me of how there are some magic tricks that aren't fake at all. Like eating glass. The only "trick" to it is knowing how to not horrifically injure yourself doing it. There is no illusion to glass-eating. The glass does actually end up in your stomach at the end.
Outerwilds was like this to me. Despite the solar system actually being relatively small I remember kinda sitting in awe on the moon like “Yeah, I can go anywhere, each planet I can land on and see every corner it has to offer” It’s one of the few games that I think truly captures the feeling of exploration and discovery
What’s cool about this game is that technically, the world is moving around YOU and not the other way around. Just another genius way that game devs have achieved incredible feats
May i suggest a game that is very different from outer wilds but feels very similar. Rain world is a 2d survival platformer that is infuriatingly hard. Just like outer wilds it rewards exploration and discovery. There's a video on youtube that compares the two games and how similar they are if you're intrested
I found the out of bounds view of the SH2 stairway a lot more affecting than the normal PoV - There's something unsettling about how James keeps getting smaller as we pull backwards, and how the darkness above him keeps getting bigger and bigger. You've used the phrase 'swallowed up' to describe going underground several times in your videos, but that shot was the first time I've ever felt it so viscerally.
same, the fact that James just keeps getting smaller and smaller, getting away from the camera, and yet only one ending of the staircase can be visible, it just makes me more scared than walking down the stairs in game
I think reasons like this are why the Half Life series is so popular. You feel as if you are actually covering meaningful distance over a meaningful space, all with a meaningful objective. (Although there are loading screens)
Which is actually pretty funny for a developer that loves to conjure up fake catwalks that don't really go anywhere or serve a realistic purpose. They're just there to build atmosphere.
Dark Souls, opening your first shortcut and realising what has taken you 5 hours to get to links directly back to the beginning, really makes that game feel BIG
I find myself wandering in games a lot, and usually without any specific reason or goal. Sometimes just having a well thought-out open space to explore is enough to make a game worth playing!
Funnily enough, the DS port of _Super Mario 64_ ruins the staircase illusion by giving you a map that tracks Mario's exact position and orientation in real-time on the bottom screen, and thus shows you teleporting back down the staircase as you attempt to climb it. Though seeing how they achieved that effect made me appreciate it even more as a kid.
Stuff like that reminds me of when people say they don't want to know how a magic trick is done, when I've always found how the tick is constructed to be far more interesting than the results on their own. After all, you know it's fake, so refusing to learn more is just being satisfied with ignorance. When you actually do learn how it's done, you gain so much more useful knowledge. The staircase is a good example. It isn't actually infinite, but as a kid you are satisfied with the question of whether or not it is. As you get older, however, you'll become more curious, and eventually want the answer to that question. A lot of people unfortunately never bother to ask for the real answer.
@@spencersdh1 I don't mind learning how the trick is done after it's already had its impact, but I want the full experience first if possible. I enjoy just letting the experience have its intended pull first. Part of enjoying learning about the creation process and charting out a game's production history and the people behind it for me is being able to think back to my first impression and the effect the game had on *me* at the time.
@@themindfulmoron3790 Oh of course. I love learning about the technical aspects of games, but it definitely has more impact if I have a personal pre-established connection.
@@spencersdh1 Ignorance can be bliss. We live in a world where much of the technology could be equated to magic. Most people likely have little to no understanding of it either and have no desire to find out lest it make them uncomfortable. Much of human history functioned on fantasy and lies to keep society functional under similar beliefs. Something we thought was consigned to the past, but many are now reverting to living in a fantasy, as our daily lives become more separated from reality more than ever.
I had a dream once where I was playing a game where you start near the top of the tower and have to work your way to the top. However I broke out of bounds and found every single floor below where you start is fully modelled (was also completely underwater) and then beyond that once I made it out of there the whole town around this building was also model and it's an idea that's endlessly fascinated me just the pointlessly huge world despite the game only taking place in a fraction of this space
This is like when you learn that they actually built Hobbitton for Lord of the Rings or that the Ten Commandments movie was actually shot in the Sinaí. It's still fake, the sets, the costumes, the illusion of moviemaking, but the fact that what you see in the screen is "real" gives a special kind of chill down my spine.
This made me remember playing Portal 2 as a kid, suddenly getting pushed out of the rat maze of the traditional levels and into the old Aperture levels and feeling so lost and scared of the vastness.
With naissance and the stairs, I got mixed up halfway through and couldn't tell what direction I was heading. Or even if I was ascending or descending. It was a very memorable moment. Also one of the "biggest" feeling games I've ever played is the first Xenoblade Chronicles game. Eryth Sea in particular feels so impossibly massive
Totally, XC1 feels personally a lot more massive than XC2, with the entire world being two absurdly massive creatures directly connected to each other, and being able to walk between very nearly each and every area.
The game has a LOT of issues but when it comes to just being able to seamlessly travel around and explore star citizen really nails that feeling with it's seamless nature. (when it chooses to work)
I just wanted to tell you that you are one of a very small number of artists who i get thoroughly excited every time you put out a new piece. Thank you so much for all the effort put into your video's. From the choice of topic, to your clear diction and artistic expression. You genuinely make my life better
As an Asset 3D artist and an Environmental Artist videos like this always renew my faith in players. I know that after building something that can take up to months sometimes, will be appreciated by someone. Big love
Half Iife 2 felt HUGE to me, incredible. While no where near huge in terms of numbers, the fact that you traversed everywhere on foot (or when it was a vehicle it felt long enough) with no cutscenes and no teleports except for 1 where it made sense, it was such an adventure
Same. I was so impressed by the map, I googled it after I finished the game. And I found that it makes total sense. Even though I know it consists of multiple different maps, they all connect together like a puzzle to form a complete world. Also, the "hazardous waters" chapter, where you have a boat, is the biggest one, but city parts, where you go on foot, have a lot of verticallity, brilliant disigne
What I've always loved about Halflife 2, and subsequently Half-life Alyx. The spaces you explore don't just feel like maps, but places that were lived in, and logically coherent. Even small details such as how the water levels have lowered due to the Combine harvesting the Earth's water. All this makes the game feel even more eerie and dystopian, such as how the citadel looms over everything like the eye of Sauron.
@@Art_official_intelligenc3 I mean, what's to say this isn't actual philosophy? Sure, it isn't questioning the meaning of life, or asking about the nature of consciousness, but it still counts, I think.
@@realtechhacksI agree but I’d go even further, is this really NOT questioning the meaning of life or the concept of consciousness? I’d argue exploring and examining art in all it’s forms IS a part of asking those questions. Video games in just one of our newest forms of art.
One thing you forgot about NaissanceE's stairs is "no guard rails". You have to manage to walk straight in pitch darkness or risk falling and having to do it all again. This added a lot to the experience.
Oh God, the descent into the deepest part of the ocean you can access in Soma is a moment that sticks with me years upon years later. If I recall, it's just conversation the whole way down... but you feel the descent. Lower and lower into the horrors that lie beneath, because you damn well know there lies horrors you dare no dwell on. Then the game has the audacity to actually make you walk the pitch black ocean floor, in those fathomless depths. It's chilling.
I personally really love the ash lake from dark souls. I had assumed that the dark gloomy gray area from the intro was something primordial, so when I jumped down a hole in a tree in a giant gloomy chasm I assumed I'd never assumed I would be in a gigantic lake of ash with petrified trunks all around me, without a horizon. It was magical. The area itself is mundane, the area before it even my least favorite part of the game, but the ash lake is just so awe inspiring.. Nothing to do with faking the space, just also something huge that I enjoyed
@@joshmartin2744 one of my favorites in all of gaming. Stepping out of the great hollow into ash lake for the first time is just otherworldly in a way no other game has ever managed to capture.
helps that it's one of only two places in the game where music plays outside of a boss, and the music is just the most awe-inspiring shit on the soundtrack.
The name is also so wonderfully cheeky and mysterious. "Lake" almost implies that it's no big deal in this magical world. It's notably *not* called something like "The Infinite Sea".
Every video that you make gives me chills. You're so eloquent about what you want to say yet you're still so personal. Your videos are certainly the ones I look forward to the most
I've always wanted a racing game that takes place in a space colony like the ones in Gundam. Essencially a massive rotating cylinder. It's so cool to see the terrain and city just curve up to both your left and right and meet upside-down above you. Give us that!
I had that feeling of 'enormous environments' while playing Portal 2. The game has perfectly fooled me, as I thought that each of those test chambers you could see in the distance were actual places, where the most weird things could be happening (or not). That feeling even grew stronger when I realized there were actually hidden places in Portal, where the player could simply miss, and the game would still go on. Of course now, after a lot of exploring Aperture Science out of bounds, I know that mostly of what you can see in the distance is just an illusion to make you feel small. But if I fell for it, I must say it's very well done. Still would like to see a game where you could actually get to anywhere you see tho!
Lots of large open world games do that. I haven't played every game in the Just Cause series, but the ones I did took place in huge remote islands, so anything visible was somewhere you could go. The sea abstracts away anything that would exist outside of the map. Using the sea to abstract away the limits of the map and create a world where you can go everywhere you can see is pretty common, whenever the setting allows it.
Something incredible about Dark Souls 1 is that the citiy below the Anor Londo buildings you cross and the town under Firelink Shrine are all completley modeled and realistically scaled, of course they're low resolution and have less detail, but they're still fully modeled and, with mods, fully explorable.
Really interesting video. I think this is maybe why sometimes playing Minecraft feels a bit... empty, to me? There's just no end. You can walk forever and find nothing but the same, and so you lack destination or sense of progression. When there are constraints it lets you play and think more creatively about how and what you want to do with the space and the things in it, I think. I really enjoy travelling by horse in LOZ Breath of the Wild (which has a really big map) because even though I can instantly teleport places, I really enjoy the feeling of travelling a world that's all there (pretty much) and watch the scenery change around me. It's fun that I can climb a mountain or jump from a tower, pick a point in the distance and just *go* there. Also NaissancE has been on my to-play list for a while so I'll definitely have to check it out now.
More than a few moments where the level design just floors you. Like I commented above, the first time I enter the foundations never fails to fill me with a sense of wonder
Few games truly gave that sense of scale like Control did. It all technically takes place in one building, yet some spaces are so unfathomably huge they made me nervous.
@@spiderjerusalem8505 No idea what you're talking about, the combat was so fun, not to mention just flying around and exploring the massive spaces once you're able to do so.
Shadow of the Colossus, specifically the original is the best example of scale and distance in a game I think. No other game made me feel so intimidated just by the world. Also the scale of the flying colossus in the desert is literally jaw dropping. Play it if you haven’t it’s one of the best games ever.
The footage of NaissanceE reminds me a lot of 'BLAME!', the endless treck up through an abandoned cityscape with breaches into the bottom of the next layer. It impressed me how much the manga managed to impose that feeling of a hideously inhuman space
I have a distinct memory of playing Majoras Mask as a kid and seeing the Ben drowned creepy pasta and trying to explore these random fake spaces that never existed. That felt large. Those spaces were so cool because they didn’t make sense. It was the feeling I got from House Of Leaves just far sooner. Things feel large when you can just barely understand them. I don’t know why I commented this this video just reminded me of that feeling.
I don't know what is so special about Jacob Geller's videos, but they always find a way to express the little nuggets of fascination I find hidden in the corners of my brain. I needed a way to relax and get sucked into another world for half an hour. Thank you sir!
It was Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital that made me think about these things. How can a planet that looks so small feel like I'm in so deep once I start exploring. Also that trick planet, I won't elaborate but it's cool and is like an advancement on the Mario 64 stairs. The way that the DLC uses dark mess and illusion to hide its space is also equally fascinating.
Your writing is absolutely astounding! And you present it with calm enthusiasm... It's a treat to listen to your topics! Thanks for all your hard work you put into these amazing videos!
Thank you for including the music list! It's so frustrating when a creator uses some theme that I remember but can't name and the tune isn't anyway mentioned! As an aside, one aspect of Star Citizen (despite its many flaws) is that the solar system feels big to me in a similar way because you can't fast travel (the quantum jump is not instant and actually can take a while) and so in a Eurotruck simulator-esque way, you plan out your routes, fuel stops, etc... as you zip around the system from mission to mission. The "in-between" places are either empty space (in space) or procedural (on planets) but the complexity is sufficient it feels far more real to me than say Daggerfall's map. Seeing the planets physically and slowly move as you jump makes them feel like real locations. Kerbal Space Program feels big to me for similar reasons even though by necessity you need to speed up time to handle maneuvers which take hours, days or weeks to accomplish.
agreed i would have seen SC here too, even if most building in cities are there for show without interior, ship have no fake space, planet are fully explorable ( beside some part of cities due to no physicalized and lore reason, after all who would let a spaceship with bomb fly close to some cities part / industrie :)
in starsector you don't think much of the extremely big distances one travels between planets but similarly you're fast fowarding month long trips constantly
Babbdi has some insane secrets as well! I just played it recently and it was extremely fun, yet eerie, like a city far removed from the rest of the world, yet strangely familiar, with empty structures and strange objects, as well as some environmental puzzles to solve, it was a pretty interesting game, and i just wanted more of it!
For me, One of the most memorable moments of this type was in the game EVERHOOD, a psychedelic rhythm game reminiscent of Undertale. During the games own genocide route, the green wizard's underground lair has an extra hallway that seems to stretch on forever- covered head to toe in tally marks. He had written signs to remind his addled memory not to go down it, that it goes on so far its pointless to even go down it anymore. I went down the hallway, seemingly it just was looping with screen transitions, BUT the signs were indicators otherwise to me. I kept holding the right arrow key, sprinting down an endless hallway of tally marks counting days, weeks, years, decades, or even centuries for all I knew. The game is about eternity and what that really means to live through, so my inclination was toward a century per tally. Eventually I got tired, and turning back gave me a prompt that it would teleport me all the way back if I did so and asked me if I was sure. I frantically clicked no, desperate not to lose progress in this fools errand. Eventually the hallways become littered with rubble, denying me the ability to hold forward mindlessly-but i was getting close i could feel it. What I saw when I reached the end i keep close to my heart, but I will say it was an ending strong enough to prevent my desire to see my slaughter completed...
As someone who is far more obsessed with video game soundtracks than I should, I find it really interesting that throughout the video you return to the music of The Last Clockwinder, a game that feels very small in comparison by trapping you in the same room throughout the game (understandable, given it's VR nature), but can still feel big in other ways by how the room is endlessly swapped out and replaced by new floors
I've been in deep space scanning planets in Elite Dangerous for 2 years. The game feels massive when you've been exploring the galaxy for that long. Others have been out in the black for far longer than I.
I *really* appreciate this style of commentary, especially when it attacks the philosophical and existential elements that you manage to bring from the games, to us. I thoroughly enjoyed this video, and I am happy to see that your excellent presentation extends into other videos as well. Awesome video, I know I'm a little bit late, and you will never read this, but here I could write something existentialistic about why I'm writing it anyway. lol.
Between this video and "Fear of Depths," I'm convinced you would love Aaron A. Reed's novel "Subcuteanean." It's about a pair of roommates who find an endlessly branching, architecturally surreal basement beneath their house ... and every copy of the novel is different.
Clearly I need to start actually reading the newsletters I get from the library. I can't believe I missed out on the opportunity to see your live talk in person. I didn't even know you were located in this area. I hope there will be more opportunities like this in the future!
The second you've started describing NaissanceE, BLAME! appeared in my mind. The ginormous structure, including vast spaces, cities, unexplainable mechanisms, having a diameter of Jupiter's orbit. The style of it is beyond awesome.
In his original video about NaissanceE, he mentioned Blame, I played NaissanceE and I loved it. He opened me up to so many new games and sometimes books.
I'm so happy someone finally put into words what makes FUEL unforgettable for me despite being such a completely mid tier racing game. Starting at the coast and driving uphill from the ocean for 10-15 real life minutes until you come to the top of a ridge and see the wide open plains laid out before you. It captures scale and openness in a very real way I can't remember from any other game.
Elite Dangerous hits like this for me, despite being on the same category as NMS. What's special about Elite I think is that while the playable area is practically infinite, its bounds are not. Travelling to the furthest point in the galaxy, or travelling above the galactic plane and seeing it all below you, are incredible experiences. Plus there's the thrill of being the first to find something cool. While being the first to discover something has little gameplay benefit, many explorers are proud of their name tag being on an interesting place.
they all maybe small nuggets in the endless realm BUT they did it because they all have the drive thoes of the explores club has. the desire to OUT OF LIQUID SPITE im shure for some to make a mark no matter how small
Outer Wilds did it for me. I like Elite Dangerous, and I re-centered my channel around NMS. But Outer Wilds never fast-warps you anywhere, there are no instances. Elite Dangerous gives you the *feeling* that you could fly infinitely in one direction, but in reality only the current solar system is & will ever be loaded until you make a hyperspace jump. In Outer Wilds, there _is_ only one solar system, but it's all genuine, all happening with or without you, all of its secrets playing out whether you know their nature or not. There's just one big scary world out there, and it's just you and your small wooden spaceship.
@@Rocksteady72a Outer Wilds for me is kind of the opposite. Despite being a whole solar system, it's so dense and full of content that it doesn't feel "big". And it literally isn't considering the size of the planets. Not saying this as a criticism of the game by the way, it's my favourite videogame ever. I love that content density, where it feels like there's something worth discovering every time you see something eye-catching.
The Silent Hill Historical Society is one of the greatest game levels of all time. Just completely unnerving and creepy and i do love the finale where you just...emerge just on the other side of the building you entered. The breaking of space to unnerve the player is just a stroke of genius. At least, in my opinion.
I think the game that doesn’t “fake the space” in the most memorable way is actually The Longing. Because the game takes place in 400 days of real time and your character moves painfully slowly throughout its labyrinthine caverns, it really feels like a massive space where every action counts. It challenges any notion of game completionism while having such a satisfying and memorable experience.
Portal 2 is definitely my favorite “bigness”. When Wheatley started destroying everything, and the endless void everything fell into, it struck me. The miles and miles of just… stuff. The thousands of years of accumulation. All falling because of one tiny robot. It made me cry a little, how all of that unknowable knowledge and materials was crashing and burning and breaking, partially because of my actions.
That’s a good example Valve had a good grasp of making spaces. They did it in the Citadel too. So much more expansive and emotional than open world/procedural. And Control. The first Mirrors Edge is good too. Catalyst just feels empty.
@@Freshbott2Control is such a good example. The whole concept of The Oldest House and the Thresholds it connects to is really good world building. The Ashtray Maze especially was incredibly fun.
@@HiiroRocker101 I don’t remember the Ashtray Maze. Is it in one of the expansions? I played the whole way through the main game without realising you could float upwards HAHA. I was half making dinner or something when I got that power and skipped through it. I stacked random objects on each other to get up high the whole way through. Cause I didn’t improve my stuff enough, I’m stuck on the first expansion at the Jukebox thing.
As someone who found NaissanceE from watching your original video and cannot stop thinking about the staircase, it's so good to finally hear someone talk about it. I still remember hunched foreword inches in front of my monitor so I could just barely tell the stairs from the abyss and to not fall while the song Au rythme de se pas (my favourite in the game) rose upwards in its intricacy as I did up the stairs. When I first played through that section - after falling a few times - it became an intense, insanely long physically strenuous section with almost no light at all to guide me, all coming just after the psychologically intense Deeper into madness section of the game. I was just holding forward and correcting myself by moving left and right for minutes straight. At last coming to the impossible yet almost calming desert in Going down, a place that shouldn't be at the end of something. Now the song reminds me of that staircase, and I remember it as a trepidatious step into an unknown, and a profoundly memorable accent out of the dark.
I watched the cursed judge video when it came out and i commented there that the first witcher game also holds relevance to this idea, and i guess it's pertinent here too - lots of old games, fallout new vegas too, where it feels like games are allowed to be partially empty and that fills them out more. it creates an enthralling atmosphere
I'm glad you mentioned New Vegas, because I experienced this phenomenon (or a related one) in an unintentional way in that very game, by exploring it's out-of-bounds areas. There's this one section near the southeast corner of the map that stretches on and on as tall rolling hills, seemingly going for a few miles (though really perhaps only being one in actuality) before suddenly dropping down a steep cliff to the lowest map elevation. It was largely devoid of detail, but the fact that this area you were never intended to enter at all _had_ detail, I found both enchanting and mystifying.
Which is why Elden Rings world also feels so vast, yet is interesting and not "empty". While there is a lot to discover, it also has it´s stretches of emptyness. When it comes to large maps, in a way, sometimes not adding something actually adds to it.
@@theexchipmunk I wonder if this has any intersection with the use of "negative space" in mediums like comics and painting, where the "nothing" brings more attention to the focal aspects and ironically makes the panel/piece feel more alive or interesting than if it were a busier thing. For games, this could manifest in the idea that not every open world game needs endless waypoints and markers and repetitious activities - ironically vast stretches of nothing might make the world within seem more "real" than those with endless things to do everywhere.
@@the_real_Kurt_Yarish yeah geller has also done a great video on red dead and that feeling of unintentional emptiness with the whole rdr1 map being in the south-west corner (and how aristotle roufanis creates the feeling of isolation in his work)
ive always appreciated games that can successfully make me forget about the illusions. somehow the first halo always had me feeling like if i just keep going, i could go all the way around the inside of that ring. maybe it was easier to fool me when i was a kid, but i still love that feeling of wonder i get when i look out across a games landscape and think "i wonder whats out there".
I've alway asked myself as a kid what's was beyond the boundaries and death barriers, every halo level from combat evolved, and countless other games one notable one being quake 4.
Test Drive unlimited made me feel like that. The entire island of Oahu on the PS2! And, when you visit a car showroom, you can see the traffic and the outside world complete with birds and waving trees beyond the windows, from the cockpit of the car you're looking at. The geography limits the number of roads to a single thread in a few areas, but it's mind-blowing for the PS2 to let you do that.
NaissanceE is one of my all time faves and the reason I started watching this channel, as no one else seemed to talk about it. Still one of the best games ever. While not nearly as beloved, I’ve always had a soft spot for Vane, and I thought of one of its first levels watching this, where you start as a bird in a massive desert without much of a clue as to where to go. I love when a game feels directionless in a natural way, yet still manages to move me along the path built by some manner of artistic magic.
I think a game you might well find to be of grand inspiration for a video essay is The Utility Room. It might have fit in with this episode but has a whole unique experience going on that I struggle to find words to describe it. A masterpiece of spacial grandness, the feeling of being cosmically small at the edges of the universe.
I really enjoyed this. You get into applied phenomenology without making it too academic. I love that feeling of bigness and haven't heard anyone talk about it in this way. Surprised you didn't mention Desert Bus though!
Great video! I’ve heard that Goldeneye was designed in the way you describe: designers made the world-often based on areas from the movie-and then they designed the missions in them. It resulted in lots of weird empty rooms and odd pacing, but I think gave the game a really unique feel.
I really loved this approach. I think it added a good dose of realism. If I see a locked door in a modern game I ignore it, in GoldenEye I'd wonder what's behind it. It also did so well on the other extreme, prioritizing the fun of shooting stuff to the extent they made furniture explode when hit. I'd take this mechanic every day over not being able to trash a chair or table with a machine gun like in almost all other games.
2:00 when he mentions “it’s the size of… Connecticut. Or Puerto Rico.” But the point is that it’s still huge due to how you travel, I agree in a weird way - for D&D, you can get so much adventure out of such a tiny area, and yet people often make world scale maps and explore multiverses. The thought of scale is maddening.
Dishonored is so jam packed with content and information, you never realize how small the maps really are until you’ve spent an hour doing everything in a level and then spend two minutes making your way back to the start of the map to end the level.
Sometimes, multiple creators spontaneously stumble onto very similar topics; this is definitely the case for me and "The Cursed Judge," who just released a video on empty worlds that features many of the same touchpoints as this essay. It's honestly a really interesting look at how two different people can take the same information and run in different directions with it. I recommend checking it out! ua-cam.com/video/PEocLl_dl5g/v-deo.html
Holy shit! Two cakes!!
Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
thank you mr geller
Any chance you’ll be doing a talk in Durham again?? I’d absolutely love to attend in person. Very much enjoyed it on Nebula!
Also, sometmes, multiple creators spontaneously use the same thumbnail guy 👀
I've played videogames since the 80's and one of the key things for a 'big world' was always things like "you can go inside all the buildings". Nothing breaks immersion like a painted-on door.
sims 4 players are very familiar with this concept due to "rabbit holes" and debug prop buildings
Especially in isometric topdown RPGs like Fallout
I just wish a game that i can do this, do you have any recomendations?
This was the saddest part about Cyberpunk to me. Yeah the city is big and nice, and the ratio of visitable to prop buildings is far from the worst...
But there are still so many prop buildings that just sit there like cardboard boxes.
These are the situations where mostly auto-generated but slightly hand curated spaces can make all the difference.
That's why I prefer smaller maps now. In Yakuza, Dishonored, Arkham City, you can go from end to end in a few minutes but the map feels really alive. I'd rather have a small map packed with content than a gigantic map filled with nothingness.
man, I was really hoping you might quote or reference Hitchhiker's Guide at some point, because this bit has lived in my head since I first read the book and is absolutely relevant:
"It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself."
Jacob quotes that at another video, actually, can't remember what video now. Probably "The Shape of Infinity".
He’s mentioned a similar quote in The Horror of Universal Paperclips and Space Engine.
I really gotta rewatch those ones!
Fireeee
omg hi
this reminds me of freaking myself out as a kid by realising that even the smallest of distances feel enormous if you move slowly enough.
This is a surprisingly wholesome thought lmaooo
Or when you realize that spaces you were in as a kid that seemed so big are so much smaller than you originally thought.
If you walk across a 5 meters long room, but you take half the step of the one before, you would in the end reach the other side of the room, but you will also have to walk for infinity.
Maybe I butchered it, learned it from a Phd in abstract mathematics. It has been stuck with me for so many years now.
Freaking yourself feels so gOod 😩
@@Softlol I think that's one of Zeno's paradoxes.
One time I took acid and experienced Alice In Wonderland Syndrome, where I couldn't tell how big or small anything was. Things kept flipping back and forth between appearing really huge and then really small. That was quite anxiety-producing.
Really drills into your mind how relative everything is though
There was a guy on Penn and Teller Fool Us that did a magic trick where he would spring down cards and seemingly pick out the chosen card from the spring itself. There's a lot of ways to do the illusion, but the method which was used was the most bizarre and impressive trick of all. He simply did it. He practiced it so well for 18 years that he could basically pick out exactly whatever card he wanted in a split second from a rapidly falling card spring. This video somehow reminds me of that. There's a certain realness to it
Kostya Kimlat, season 5
@@demonzabrak You answered my question before I even asked!
"the trick, Potter, is not minding that it hurts" :D
I think he fooled you with this explanation
just wanna say, bc of your comment, i went and watched that episode. truly impressive
The scale of the facility in Portal 2 has always stuck with me. Every time you feel like you're approaching the surface, that maybe you're seeing some natural light peek through, you always inevitably come across some monolithic constructs towering overhead. Love it.
I am surprised he didn't even mention the fall there. AFAIK, that's also all real.
Yes, absolutely. Ever since I first played the game, the implied colossal scale of the Aperture Science facility filled me with wonder. Just how much are we not seeing? What secrets does Aperture have that are not known to GLaDOS or the player?
@SteamBirds It helps to achieve a sense of comedy as well, seeing how Aperture, rather than renovate their old test areas, basically built on top of them, creating an impossibly deep facility of old junk. It's constant expansion, to the point of ridiculousness but never really meaninglessness. There's an implied end point, where GLaDOS' influence doesn't reach, where Cave didn't build into. It's the matter of finding it
I was thinking of this game too!
I'm not sure if it's accurate to describe it like this but it feels very lovecraft it's design. Describing the building itself with anything under super massive feels like a insult. But I call it love craft because it is a super massive building that appears so wide and giant that even with light creeping in it can barely be lit. With larger than life rail systems that move anything and everything around and seem to have beams that go down to the remote possibility of a rumored floor that the darkness hid long ago. When I first started Portal 2 and saw the hotel room being rammed out only to notice that even in the good light it was simply a impossibility large machine holding alot of things in the air with no sight of ground I knew it was amazing. Also I still wonder how humans could even build something as big as that mega project of a building even with the army of robot engineers.
When I learned the world outside of your submarine in Iron Lung was a real, rendered world and not just invisible with randomly selected photos when you use your camera, the game became scary again. It was scary the first playthrough and then became scary again on a second playthrough after learning that everything outside really is there.
To make it less scary again, its only the camera of your sub moving through the map. You sit safely in your box outside of it all.
Oh that's really nice, I also thought it was just "oh you are here, get this photo"
@@NanoMan737400it's honestly easier to develop with a real space than to arbitrarily decide abstracted coordinates to receive specific pictures while keeping it consistent
Old games only ever did the latter due to constraints.
@@PretzelSage this is kinda true about every video game too
@@PretzelSage Yeah great point, and to add to this when you play Counter-Strike, you're just a camera moving around with a gun floating. You can't actually get shot and killed.
The first game I remember being amazed by it's scale was Shadow of the Colossus. And not necessarily because it felt so big. But because the plains, mountains, architecture and colossi themselves made me feel so small.
I still feel that way about that game.
@@DrDingsGaster SOTC is still one of my favorite games I've probably played through it over a dozen times, and I cant agree more
One thing that help make SOTC feel awesome, in my opinion, is the emptiness. It feels like things USED to be in the lands, but now it’s just empty… gives good down time to consider your actions with the colossi as well
SotC did scale better than any game I've ever seen. It really felt like you were exploring this long lost world that had been abandoned for thousands of years. Better yet, it felt as though the land itself wasn't even designed for someone your size, as if you were walking through some alien landscape created by beings unknown. Absolutely incredible stuff, from the architecture, land mass, the enemy designs, it's all brilliant.
The only game that gave me a similar feeling of awe and scale was Elden Ring, with it's interconnected world design, it's insane verticality and massive draw distances. If you took the enemies out of Elden Ring it wouldn't be far off SotC in look and feel.
For me it was the second I got close to the first boss. Sure, there's a cutscene at the start with trees between you and the boss for scale, you already see he's big but when you gain control again, and get close to him and get his attention, and starts walking towards you before he smashes his maze to the ground, only then you know how big he really is.
I remember as a kid finishing the tutorial of Oblivion and looking out. It was my first ever open world rpg. I was legitimately shocked and excited for the first time when my brother said "See that mountain? You can go there."
Was your brother Todd Howard?
Hey, if it just works, then it just works.
He is indeed
man I wish I had amnesia to relieve such moments
my first rpg was alien logic on dos that was memorable, i played oblivion and many other like lagoon. But alien logic even today is still a special game no one will ever beat in utter adventure weirdness. honestly skyrim got a lot of its character idea's from Alien logic, the lizard and cat people, etc are almost identical. However skyrim doesn't have the aliens nor the total whacked out story that game had. plus it had digger pet breeding, you could breed aliens for quality and have them dig for stuff. to hunting 2d dungeons and a world map interface, it was the first game with a world map interface that final fantasy started using. Alien Logic changed gaming forever, highly recommend the game and a bag of shrooms. Might as well play commander blood too while you got your bag of shrooms LMAO... It will be unforgettable i promise, most whacked out experience ever right there. eat shrooms and go on a time traveling adventure back to the big bang meeting aliens and all kinds of weirdness... no idea what the dolphin deal ever was about but it sure made space travel dream like. i am not liable for a bad trip either, ingest and take the adventure at your own risk.
Jacob Geller videos are so good because you get philosophical conversations of how games use their physical space and how it relates to how you feel inside it, but also phrases like, "and the driving kinda feels like butt." Absolutely top tier shit especially for me. Great job as always
Shit like that just become extra funny when it's said by sophisticated people. Accented cinema is another one of my favourites
I've always liked the moment early in The Beginner's Guide where narrator-Davey makes the walls transparent at the end of a game and you see a vast unaccessable labyrinth outside the "game." There's this great feeling of wonder and that there must be something bigger outside of the presented game. It's also fun because a) it's clear that narrator-Davey experienced this same wonder, and b) in restrospect it's clear that he's currently weaponizing that emotion to make his actions and worldview more understandable.
Adore that moment
The Beginner's Guide is a complete triumph in general. Years back I was one of those Lets Play doofuses and I immediately realized the game was too significant to do an LP of. It has to be experienced first hand.
@@HonkeyKongLive I also watched a Let's Play of TBG for about 15 minutes before deciding that I wanted to experience it firsthand instead!
The beginners guide is just absolutely beautiful, I felt genuinely betrayed at the “stop putting lampposts in my games” moment
This comment is many times older than the video upload! That is the true terror!
(I assume it's patreon)
The first time i experienced true, massive scale was in my early 20s when i was working a gig at a convention center and walked through several of their biggest spaces. These are the spaces that usually hold entire conventions in a single "room"; individual stages hosting panels, huge groups of 15-20 booths, places to buy and eat food, etc. The kinds of spaces that are usually partitioned off into smaller, more individual spaces that still feel massive.
It took me about 10 minutes to walk from one end of the room to the other, walking at a fast pace. When I hit the middle of the room it felt like I was in an ocean, and the first thought in my head was "If I had a heart attack or some kind of medical emergency, the closest people to me wouldn't even see me fall over. I'd just lay here and they wouldn't even be able to hear me scream, and they might not even find me for who knows how long."
We've all felt that before when we're outside in a big park or a giant clearing, but to be walking through a carpeted, air conditioned, walled in, purpose-built structure that's so *empty* is something i'll remember the rest of my life. I felt completely isolated in a building full of hundreds of people.
I wonder if there is a difference in the minds of people which live in a very baren landscape, like mongolia or argentinia. Are they afraid of endless space? Do they see the little details in the landscape, that makes one place different from another? How are they remembering paths, distances, locations? Would really love to know that.
This is why people are fascinated by the idea of the backrooms
The Boeing plant in Everett WA is similar. Even full of people, machines, offices, other buildings, and partially built airplanes the space itself dwarfs all of that and still feels impossibly massive. A building so big that it makes a dozen jumbo jets inside look small is an insane sentence to even think about. It's so big it has its own weather. I'd probably have a panic attack if the place was empty like your convention center.
Always avoid the human crush.
@@-sturmfalke- countryside argentinian here! i despise human contact so i love seeing just green on every horizon. but it does get harsh for surviving. you end up learning to fix everything all alone, even yourself (with medicine)
man, that stair scene is even more freaky when viewed from out of bounds
Reminds me of the scene from "1408" where the main character is climbing the outside of the skyscraper to get from one room to the one next to his, but then the camera suddenly zooms out with that scary sound, showing the skyscraper impossibly has only one window - the one from the room he just left. The sheer scale of the building and the impossibility of the image was terrifying
could you send the link for that clip@@MentalParadox
@@Empwuznalua-cam.com/video/JSeN5pu4MZY/v-deo.htmlfeature=shared at 1:37 i think
@@MentalParadox there's a somewhat tall building next to the Alexanderplatz square in Berlin and the side facing the square has no windows. except one.
one of the residents complained they didn't have a nice view on the square so they added one in for them.
the building, maybe ten stories or so, has no windows(on one side) except for one.
I’ve always been curious how deep, vertically, the SH2 stairs puts you. When I first played it, knowing exactly where I was relative to the rest of the map was comforting. That staircase began ripping me apart from an understanding of my surroundings. Surely that was intentional, but it felt personal; as if the creative team knew exactly what comforted me, and decided to tear that away.
And that's because what you found comfort in was something a lot of people also took comfort in, and they knew that.
@@Cthululululu damn, i might have to play that game. but is this revelation considered a plot spoiler when taken in this context ?
@jasonhildebrand1574 Not so much a plot spoiler as a commentary on Silent Hills design philosophy as a Horror game: It's a horror game focused on psychological horror.
8:33 The reason why I loved Portal 2 so much was because of this. One second you are in a small test chamber, next moment you are in this underground giga-structure, where you can see so extremely far into the unknown. It really created a sense of wonder for me as a child, wanting to break free and explore this place.
That’s interesting because, for me, it was the opposite. I didn’t feel wonder so much as an overwhelming sense of anxiety. I’ve always been… maybe _scared_ isn’t the right word. Disconcerted? Yeah, disconcerted by the out-of-bounds areas of a game. I have to close my eyes or even straight up step away if I glitch through the floor because that infinite space just fills me with dread, and it’s the same with the wide open spaces in Portal 2.
The most impactfull empty space of Portal 2 for me was just before we enter modern Aperture Science again, but after the elevator. That gigantic space in all directions except up and down, the huge foundation with enormous springs holding the weight of the entire facility just felt so... real? Like it could exist in some real forgotten maintenance tunnels, neither ancient nor new enough to be noteworthy, yet very much necessary for everything to exist...
And then You almostly get lost on the moon...
Same!!
What I liked most about the spaces in portal 2 was the way they made the space feel ominous and spooky and mysterious, but never *too* alienating or lonely. It was the perfect level of familiar and unfamiliar, often both being elements of the same space.
You can understand the purpose of a space from the first look within the test chamber, and know what every element does. How they interact with eachother and how to take advantage of the space, that's the puzzle, and the reason this space is presented to you.
Contrast this with the space outside the chambers - they do NOT feel finite. You cannot access every part of this space. You enter these spaces with the same mindset that got you out of the chamber --- that's a portal wall, that's a cube, that's a turret, I need to decipher and use the environment to get from point A to point B. But this space is NOT meant for you. It's not meant to be traversed. And every unfamiliar part begs to be explained, and can be, thru extensive daydreaming that runs parallel to the rest of your navigation. Signs, pre-recorded messages, waiting rooms, offices -- the game gives you just enough to think about and chew on to not feel alone in such a lonely space.
I always remember the first time I went up to the top of the mountain in Skyrim, where the greybeards live. It felt like a "big" journey somehow. Even though that map isn't the biggest, and the climb doesn't take all that long, it truly felt like a long trek.
If you don't know where the path up is, and you instead just try and approach from a random angle madly hopping up the semi sheer cliffs, it can take quite a while...
same, i remeber looking at the different cities on the map and planning out how i was going to survive the journey up to solitude, I know you can just pay a wagon but i refused to on the first play through.
I think that's because Skyrim has hidden quests. You don't know what you'll discover on the next nook and cranny. Unlike games like Far Cry, if there's no map marker on the mountain, that means there's nothing there and it's not worth the time to go there. Games with this design can have huge maps but feel really small because you can just ignore huge parts of it. Skyrim and Fallout feels big because I check every inch of the map.
@@One.Zero.One101I had the opposite feeling when playing the modern fallout games and skyrim. The fact that every square inch had something in them makes them deel artificially dense and ruins the sense if scale. Maybe its because ive grown up in places where there are large stretches of nothing. It doesnt help that they repeat the same formula so often: random hidden entrance with enemies that ends with a miniboss and a treasure for example.
@@Sharrakor6 first time I tried it it took me about 3 hours. bc I wasn't gonna walk that distance and decided to take "a short cut".
This reminds me of a small indie game I used to play. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name anymore, but what made it so special is that after using console commands to enable flying and teleportation, if you went high enough, you could touch the sun. It was real. No skybox, no picture, but an actual, glowing orb hanging in the sky miles about any geometry you should be able to touch. It was really cool.
Huh
Describe the game so we can find out which it was
Reminds me of a JSR inspired indie game called Zenith where you eventually have to build enough momentum to launch yourself into space and onto the moon. No loading screen, just one long jump til you land on the moon that's been above you the entire game
@@ellagage1256Just looked into the game and it's actually called Zineth and is made by arcanekids. Leaving this here if anyone wanted to play it.
@@ellagage1256 Zineth* but yes it was mindblowing when it came out
This is why Jak and Daxter felt like such a game-changer when it first game out; the loading screens are hidden so as to deliver what feels like a seamlessly integrated and massive world to explore. And at the very end, you can even look back from the mountaintop and see the other levels in the distance, your entire massive journey stretched out before you in a single, glorious view.
Yessss ❤❤
Being able to see the balloons floating over the swamp or Lurker Island from the top of the jungle temple blew my mind as a kid.
Its wild when you switch to debug mode and discover that those far off elements are actually in the position of those levels. The geometry is faked with imposter low poly versions, but the size is not.
i experienced that with Soul reaver (1999), where the levels are streamed in as you run through corridors
and it just made the (objectively medium sized) world feel so huuuuge
Candleman does this as part of the story and it generations emotions.
Your point about Babbdi is something I've always found interesting. A lot of times, video game environments feel like they only exist for the player. And obviously, they DO only exist for the player, but I'm more intrigued by video game environments that feel like they were designed as a place first and a video game second.
I think immersive sims do a good job at emulating that feeling, since the player has to think about how to pass them, rather than the levels being structured around the player's level
Rainworld is a game that exists and is basically this, every entity in the area you are in is always being rendered and doing their own things, and the entire map design is based around making everything traversable but not clear in its pathing
@@LeMargot Great example
i love how "the beginner's guide" plays with this idea
This is also why the "Chosen One" trope for the player character feels so played out and claustrophobic. It's Truman Show-esque to walk around and feel that all the NPCs are there to gawk at you instead of getting to experience the world around you on it's own terms. Speaking of immersive sims, Thief is a great example. You're a thief, not a throne heir. You're trying to pay rent, not save the world. Oddly enough, that makes the world feel *bigger*.
Not necessarily about space but I've felt this way about Dwarf Fortress before. There's a strange quality where the NPCs you meet seem much more real than video game NPCs usually do, because if they say "my daughter was slain by a dragon" they aren't reading a script - that literally happened at some point in the world's history.
"Vegeta suplexed my son"
Mods are great lol
IMO, Dwarf Fortress is an example of how big does not always feel big. Such limited graphics and so much limited to plain text results in me not really feeling much about it all. The history may be expansive and actually reflect what happened in the world but most of it just feels generic and nothing more than name swaps to me. I also just do not find the gameplay fun or interesting and there have been notorious programming errors that lead to nonsensical, immersion breaking, results. I want to have more respect for it but there is a siginificant disconnect between the praise i hear for it and the experience i have with it. My impression is hampered further by the fact it has been in development for over 15 years and as such i should not expect any major changes soon or ever. I am not complaining, just being honest about what i really think of it. It just feels too archaic even if impressive.
@@elio7610 You upset me by being incorrect. Every single Dwarf Fortress update HAS brought major changes.
@@pkfiremain710 Fair point, perhaps what i wrote was unfair. My issues with the game are not things that i would expect to change in any update, although possible.
@@elio7610Not too long ago it got a paid version with graphics which significantly increased it's popularity SO it's possible that they could put the money into improving immersion which leads to more money which leads to more immersion and you get rapid improvement well beyond what could be predicted. I'm not saying this will happen just a possibility.
Funny that you mention Elite: Dangerous. If were talking 'emotional reaction to big' that was the game that did it for me. You're absolutely right that often times, things are just too big to register. I absolutely agree on No Man's Sky. What made Elite different for me was a combination of things. Let me tell you a story:
I'd finally gotten my Cobra MkIII. A good little workhorse that can do whatever you ask of it. And me? I was going to *explore*. I named her *Curiosity* and spent an hour fitting her out. And then, I was ready to set out. My goal was Colonia. And I would explore hundreds of systems on my way out. So off I went. The first twenty jumps were quiet. All I ran into were planets already tagged with 'first discovered by:' So I kept going. And then... Poof, my first unexplored system. I was an awe inspiring feeling to know that I was the first person to ever enter that system, despite it just being a game. And so was the next one. And the next one. I continued on for hundreds than thousands of jumps. Each one into a system that no one had ever visited before.
Two things struck me as I made that journey. One, and the thing that still sticks with me today, is what we're talking about. The sense of scale. It's one thing to hear there are 100 Billion stars in our galaxy. It's another to *experience* it. Star after star after star, as you visit but a handful of them. And what truly made it impactful for me? It's real. It's all there, twinkling in the night sky. I may have been traveling virtual representations of them, but many of those stars really are out there.
And that leads onto the second thing that has stuck with me. The sense of loneliness. Much of the time, I was playing late at night, the world seemingly dead and quiet. And out there, so far from inhabited space, I felt so alone. At the height of my journey, I would have been thousands of light years away from the nearest player. It was just me, my ship, and the endless stars.
To this day, I'm happy I did it. It was an experience like no other, and truly helped me comprehend the vastness of our universe. And with it, that boundless wonder and curiosity of a child I thought I'd grown out of. To be curious is one of my favorite feelings.
I agree that Elite is one of those games that truly feels big because it is big. In a way, it's making an otherwise enormous world feel positively tiny in comparison to what it really is, it's just that the real version is truly incomprehensibly vast. Just sticking to the occupied systems will give you that sense of enormity, and then you zoom out and find that that bubble of space is _tiny_ in comparison to the whole galaxy. No matter that the stars are (mostly) carbon copies of each other, no matter that the planets aren't really all that different from one another, it still feels huge in a way that No Man's Sky fails to encapsulate.
Maybe it's because in Elite, all the spaces in between are modeled. You don't jump directly into planetary orbit, you pop in less than a light-second from the system's largest star, and you have to cover all the remaining distance the slow way. No loading screens, just an incomprehensibly high speed over a distance that you _know,_ given enough time, that you could cover at sub-light speed. There is no place for the illusion to break down (unless you try to fly to another system in supercruise) because _it's all there._ The stars, the planets, the asteroids -- all of it, right there for you to run into if you're not paying attention.
I'd compare it to flying IRL. Flying has made the world both larger and smaller than it was in the days of our ancestors. Smaller, in that we can actually get from one end to the other in our lifetime; but so much larger, in that we can get to enough of it to truly comprehend its incomprehensible size.
I'm a combat CMDR. Fly 100% FA Off, optimize my ships for combat, have a particular style of gameplay that I like to stick to. But as I'm without a setup that can accommodate that sort of play right now, I've decided to do an expedition on my integrated graphics laptop, and... Wow. 8000Ly out from Sol and my trigger finger is itchy as hell. I get my kicks using the FSS and DSS, but it sure increases the amount of time between jumps... Already, I'm losing focus, wanting to get back to the Bubble. But I'm determined to press on.
I'm getting a similar feeling I had when I walked the length of a marathon. It was a challenge I set up for myself, to walk from my house, hike a mountain, and walk back. 26.5 miles in 14 hours. I'm a walker - I do not drive at all, so I'm used to walking for hours at a time - But this hike really took it out of me. It wasn't just physically taxing, but spiritually taxing too, to force myself not to call a taxi even as I felt I could walk anymore. But it was definitely worth it by the end.
I've got this Elite expedition down for ~35000 Ly round trip. It's difficult for me to imagine longer trips, like to Sag A*, and a possibly months-long trek through The Abyss to Beagle Point seems overwhelming to even think about attempting.
I get that this game is procedurally generated, and the distances aren't exactly curated or authored (a point I would argue somewhat, as real-life observations of celestial composition have been programmed extensively into the amazing Stellar Forge generator). But what I will say is that the distances *relative to your human scale and your (in)ability to cross them* are authored, leading to a moment-to-moment feeling of isolation and smallness. Interestingly, it's the one game I play where actually getting up and doing something else is done *as part* of gameplay, with distances between in-system objects being what they can be.
Elite: Dangerous is *vast*, unapologetically - And its vastness does provoke an emotional register as we begin to realize the full grandeur of 400 billion star systems.
I had a very similar experience to you and the one thing I realised was there is something very relaxing about being far away from anything else in the game. I set of on my first real exploration trip with the intention to return to rhetorical civilised part of the galaxy, but never came home. I’m now about 4 years into that same trip, done the beagle point thing, done loops of the galaxy, with 30 odd thousand previously unexplored systems to my name. I only visit the dssa stations when I need to repair something.
It’s a wonderful experience.
I genuinely fucking love these videos. They feel so powerful, artistically, philosophically. It makes me feel at peace, while also hooking my interest and refusing to let go until the very end. They feel less like essays and more like fully fledged stories.
essays should be art too, but very few writers approach it this way, which is a shame
This is why I love Jacob's work. I've listened to countless other video essays, even on the same topics/games, and none strike me down to my very core compared to his. I genuinely admire his craft, and how it's made me question many aspects of life in ways that have genuinely enlightened me.
I don't always understand what he means, and get confused at times. That's okay though, because that's not always the case AND the videos are soothing to watch in general for my tiny monkey brain. It's a win either way!
I had plans to play Final Fantasy after getting home from work this morning, but made the mistake of clicking in this video... I can't just not finish the video, the hooks were in firmly😭
i did philosophy for undergrad and then went into law, stumbling upon this video gave me such a bittersweet feeling - i miss philosophy so fricking much, the abstract theorising, the deep questioning, the meaningfulness of art as a boundary breaking medium! i wish i could go back to writing essays about this stuff lol
The most effective part of the Silent Hill Historical Society stairs is how, at some point during your descent, you become so disoriented that it suddenly appears that you're going upstairs rather than down. This and the first time you get to the all-consuming blackness of the third floor of the Woodhaven apartments are the scariest moments in the game for me.
I recently played through the game for the first time and at that point I was seriously debating if the game glitched or if It's a puzzle that I am doing wrong
Exactly the same thing happens to me in NaissanceE
this happens to me in Minecraft if the staircases/mineshafts are long enough lol
The historical society / prison / labyrinth all combines into the scariest part of SH2 for me, starting with that ridiculous staircase.
@@mycroft3322 good game
I was wondering if Shadow of the Colossus would get an honourable mention in this. It may still do some fakery, but having to traverse long distances across a strange forbidden land by horse was magical.
Even more so because there are so many details and secrets in design that hold no relevance to the objective whatsoever
I think it absolutely qualifies. The map is way larger and way freer to explore than it needs to be for the given gameplay. Its obvious the devs very strongly valued the atmospheric significance of giving players such a map.
Ohh yeah I remember playing this game like 3 times, that desert with the huge bridge. Mwa, chefs kiss
Part of me wants to replay it without the visual guide and just see if I can fumble my way to colossi…most of me know i don’t have that time
I think it feels so much bigger than it is because there’s so little in it, it’s an empty world with only 16 collosi in it, it’s surreal and it feels endless
Fuel is a game, although unremarkable in many ways, that still amazes me. It has been years since I last played this game, but I still think about it. The ability to traverse as far as eyes can see, with the geography actually making sense as it changes, and that feeling of being lost and lonely in a world where you actually felt tiny, it was something no other game made me feel. This game did not try to make you feel important and big. I used to roam around rather than play for progression. The maps where quite beautiful for the time.
Thank you for making this video. I'll definitely go back to this game someday.
PS - Far Cry 2 is another such game. The feeling of loneliness in a big world is inescapable in the game.
After reading about 'biggest map' sizes for games I did find a download for Fuel and it's still installed - I just don't play it much. It IS dated as far as racing games go.
sure is a shame the Fuel isn't on steam any more
Noita takes this to the extreme - there’s a whole Terraria-esque world outside the “normal” game area, complete with unique biomes, whole factions of enemies, bosses, spells, mechanics, collectibles, and quests that you’d never know about if you just kept to the main track. And outside the bigger world is a pair of “impenetrable” walls made of cursed rock that damages you if you get too close. Outside those walls are the brothers and sisters of the main world, with subtly different layouts, and covered in copies of previous bosses and cursed versions of collectibles.
There's infinite worlds, until the game breaks right!
Noita manages to feel huge even though it has instant teleportation, it's an impressive achievement
Didn't expect to see a comment about Noita.
There are so many reviews on steam saying the map is "limited" or "repetitive" which is sorta true for the main game but with the parallel universes? It's just huge.
Too bad the game has an ungodly difficulty level that makes completion hard enough let alone exploration.
My mind was completely blown when I found out about it.
I really love the idea that there are multiple universes in the, it really brings back that sense of wonderlust I used to have as a kid playing videogames, that there is something beyond that bounds of a game's world.
Too bad it's next to impossible for most players to even attempt 😅
oh, you're right!!! Noita is a _fantastic_ example of the concepts talked about in this video!! It's kind of a shame he _didn't_ take a look at it, actually, it's really perfect for this.
8:10
funnily enough, I find airliners show a real world example of this kind of distinction
taking off in an airliner gives you a feeling of height for a whole 10 seconds before oyu are so high up that the world below you feels like a map or background image
but flying low i na small aircraft or a helicopter you can continuously see enouhg detail that every moment feels like a place and a situation that you are actually in and hanging above in a way that humans usually don't
I've had something related the first time I took a flight to another country to study. I walk into the plane, sit, wait 2,5 hours, and when I leave, I'm in a completely different place on Earth. The air I breathed in and the rain that fell was the same as home, so it only clicked how much distance I covered when I imagined a map, where I was and where I were then. Surreal that, first time it happens
I've actually never experienced that abstraction you're describing, to me while on an airplane everything looks like a tiny little diorama except that when you keep zooming in there's no abstraction there keeps being detail because, of course, it's real it's the real cities with real trees and real cars driving around real roads
You are also a giant in a bugs world filled with trillions of bugs, many deep underground doing buggy things living a bugs life. You don't see them and maybe that's for the best. Maybe there are intergalactic space faring aliens who don't even notice us because we're just space bugs in a stupidly big universe.
8:20 in Halo 3, when you watch a real scale UNSC frigate enter orbit, and rapidly grow to be bigger than the entire gameplay map, as it lands for but a fleeting moment to drop off tanks and reinforcements, before just flying off again. Absolutely iconic moment.
That might just be my favorite moment in the whole series.
@@B_Skizzle it's certainly a breathtaking highlight of any playthrough.
The Halo series in general is so good with this kind of stuff. Tip of the Spear in Reach has a similar moment when you clear the first AA gun and multiple frigates fly in, blowing up the phantom coming to drop more troops near you before firing into the battle going on out of bounds, where all of the vehicles in the fight are real.
Come to think of it, every single Halo game has at least one jawdropping moment where you realize that some massive object isn't actually background dressing, but a tangible thing that you will interact with.
Is there a video somewhere of that happening? Would love to see it.
@@mememationsyt3556 You should be able to find it by looking up gameplay of the mission "The Ark."
you make me love games I've never played and experiences I've never had.
Oh hey it's the Magic man. Glad to see that you on another channel with quality just as good as yours
A true Obscure Sorrows moment
the whole thing with the game having no invisible walls really reminds me of manifold garden, where you can clip from the starting area directly into the final hallway, and the game doesn't stop you. In fact, I would bet good money that the developers know about it, because placing them that close together _must_ have been intentional
I had this terrifying dream when I was younger of an outline of a circle rolling down an endless line. I had it a lot and I still think of it constantly, decades on.
Wow. How powerful dreams can be.
I had a dream like this but I was a piece of dust flying in a straight line through space endlessly it also stuck with me into adulthood
I had these thought experiments where i would imagine divers coming across every day objects but the objects would be so so so large and under water making it impossible to see all of them at once
I had basically the same except it was a boulder in a valley never ending
I had that but it was a huge boulder rolling loudly down a hill. Strange, and somewhat archetypal stuff. Quite curious
I love the way the stalker series of games fully simulates every single monster and npc at all times, even at the completely far opposite end of the game world where the player is. When you stumble across some massacre, it wasn't just spawned in, those encounters happened
STALKER is a magical piece of Ukrainian voodoo magic. It always manages to screw with my head and i love it
This also makes me think of the Wild-era Zelda games. They feel so huge when you realise that the big, varied playground you've been exploring is a snippet of the true map size. Albeit it's made smaller through things like fast travel and such, but when you head out into the wild (pun intended) you just... wander, it's so dense there's always something to do, some weird npc, a great view from a mountain, or even an entire hidden village if you're dedicated enough. You can enter pretty much every house and it's honestly amazing to explore for the first time. You only realise that the world isn't actually that huge in game terms after you've explored more of it than any casual player would.
What are wild era Zelda games? Like are you talking breath of the wild, idk why that’s tripping me up so bad.
@@monhi64 Yeah I'm talking about BOTW and TOTK!
Ironically I've felt the sense the video is talking about in the tiny Majoras mask, whereas botw just felt hollow to me.
I didn’t watch trailers for totk. I avoided all promotional material I could.
When I saw my first chasm… and jumped into it, and eventually realizing that, yes, that entire area down there is effectively doubling the map size? I’ll never forget it.
That ending quote "The trick might be that there is no trick at all" hit me with the same impact as the revelation in The Prestige.
I imagine going through the open world in The Crew 2 feels similar to walking through one of those Minecraft maps that recreate the entire planet on a fractional scale.
I don't like cars or car culture, but I play The Crew 2 religiously since it became free on PS+. It is just relaxing good vibes to DRIVE, and they got the scaling and pacing of the world down perfect so that the changes don't feel so quick that they're jarring but are rapid enough that you don't get bored with one landscape. I'm apprehensive for the next one because it's much more geographically restricted (it's set on Oahu) and I'm worried the change in scale will affect the illusion.
The Game Dungeon episode of The Crew made me really wanna try it, it's like the developers were passionate about making an open-world driving game, and some marketing exec tried to put a flashy coat of paint over it so people wouldn't think its just a Giant Driving Simulator, something that is far more desired than yet another racing game.
Reading the title of the video I immediately thought of Outer Wilds. Physically taking off in that ship for the first time felt amazing. I expected the transition between earth and space to be a cutscene as it is in so many other space exploration games. But there isn’t one; no kind of barrier to make the planets feel separate from space. And you need to learn to manually take off and land. The realization that the entire game was being constantly simulated, and I could travel anywhere in the solar system without a loading screen was mind blowing.
I know right, I can't believe he didn't mention it!
Exactly. I was thinking about Outer Wilds all the time watching the video.
Yaknow on that note I actually wonder whether that's the same with Echoes of the Eye, the DLC that on one layer is ABOUT all the trickery and faking of developing a game world. Like obviously entering and exiting the world is loading but are the inter-section boats loading or merely an actual tunnel? Is the underworld beneath areas actually always underneath all three or are you teleported during the elevator? I just think there might be something there of interest in the same way as the big hall in Dark Souls where the game itself fakes far less than it says it does.
@@TheRealPentigan Im pretty sure there are no secret loading screens in outer wilds. There might be rendering limits tho, meaning that some things might not be rendered at all times, only if you come close or look at it. But that is normal for most games.
@@jurremioch316There are secret loading screens but only in the sense that the game doesn't account for things too far away in real time. Loading screens were used to compensate for both lower memory and poor data streaming speeds/caches. Also the fact that constantly reading from a CD would wear both it and the the drive out, fast.
It's why there aren't really any loading screens in cartridge based games unless the area doesn't fit in a few chunks of memory. Cartridges use flash storage, so they can load as fast as the memory/cache will allow. Like SSDs.
Reminds me of how there are some magic tricks that aren't fake at all. Like eating glass. The only "trick" to it is knowing how to not horrifically injure yourself doing it. There is no illusion to glass-eating. The glass does actually end up in your stomach at the end.
What the fuck man
Outerwilds was like this to me. Despite the solar system actually being relatively small I remember kinda sitting in awe on the moon like “Yeah, I can go anywhere, each planet I can land on and see every corner it has to offer”
It’s one of the few games that I think truly captures the feeling of exploration and discovery
That was one of my favorite aspects of the game. It felt like nothing was off limits
What’s cool about this game is that technically, the world is moving around YOU and not the other way around. Just another genius way that game devs have achieved incredible feats
Man that's such a historic game in general.
May i suggest a game that is very different from outer wilds but feels very similar.
Rain world is a 2d survival platformer that is infuriatingly hard. Just like outer wilds it rewards exploration and discovery.
There's a video on youtube that compares the two games and how similar they are if you're intrested
And yet... the stars are closed to you. Just too far away to get to. The infinite universe, just too big to touch. Just too big to save.
I found the out of bounds view of the SH2 stairway a lot more affecting than the normal PoV - There's something unsettling about how James keeps getting smaller as we pull backwards, and how the darkness above him keeps getting bigger and bigger. You've used the phrase 'swallowed up' to describe going underground several times in your videos, but that shot was the first time I've ever felt it so viscerally.
same, the fact that James just keeps getting smaller and smaller, getting away from the camera, and yet only one ending of the staircase can be visible, it just makes me more scared than walking down the stairs in game
I think reasons like this are why the Half Life series is so popular. You feel as if you are actually covering meaningful distance over a meaningful space, all with a meaningful objective. (Although there are loading screens)
That's one of the great things about HL though, the fact that they're not loading *screens* but just momentary pauses in a seemingly unbroken space.
HL does such a great job of its trick that when I remember it, I still only ever think of it as totally seamless.
LOADING GRAPHIC NODE
Me : oh thank god, I survived that level...
@@habibainunsyifaf6463 Pedantic Source nerd chiming in: "Node graph out of date: Rebuilding"
Which is actually pretty funny for a developer that loves to conjure up fake catwalks that don't really go anywhere or serve a realistic purpose. They're just there to build atmosphere.
Dark Souls, opening your first shortcut and realising what has taken you 5 hours to get to links directly back to the beginning, really makes that game feel BIG
I find myself wandering in games a lot, and usually without any specific reason or goal. Sometimes just having a well thought-out open space to explore is enough to make a game worth playing!
Funnily enough, the DS port of _Super Mario 64_ ruins the staircase illusion by giving you a map that tracks Mario's exact position and orientation in real-time on the bottom screen, and thus shows you teleporting back down the staircase as you attempt to climb it. Though seeing how they achieved that effect made me appreciate it even more as a kid.
Stuff like that reminds me of when people say they don't want to know how a magic trick is done, when I've always found how the tick is constructed to be far more interesting than the results on their own. After all, you know it's fake, so refusing to learn more is just being satisfied with ignorance. When you actually do learn how it's done, you gain so much more useful knowledge.
The staircase is a good example. It isn't actually infinite, but as a kid you are satisfied with the question of whether or not it is. As you get older, however, you'll become more curious, and eventually want the answer to that question. A lot of people unfortunately never bother to ask for the real answer.
@@spencersdh1 I don't mind learning how the trick is done after it's already had its impact, but I want the full experience first if possible. I enjoy just letting the experience have its intended pull first. Part of enjoying learning about the creation process and charting out a game's production history and the people behind it for me is being able to think back to my first impression and the effect the game had on *me* at the time.
@@themindfulmoron3790 Oh of course. I love learning about the technical aspects of games, but it definitely has more impact if I have a personal pre-established connection.
@@spencersdh1 Ignorance can be bliss. We live in a world where much of the technology could be equated to magic. Most people likely have little to no understanding of it either and have no desire to find out lest it make them uncomfortable. Much of human history functioned on fantasy and lies to keep society functional under similar beliefs. Something we thought was consigned to the past, but many are now reverting to living in a fantasy, as our daily lives become more separated from reality more than ever.
I had a dream once where I was playing a game where you start near the top of the tower and have to work your way to the top. However I broke out of bounds and found every single floor below where you start is fully modelled (was also completely underwater) and then beyond that once I made it out of there the whole town around this building was also model and it's an idea that's endlessly fascinated me just the pointlessly huge world despite the game only taking place in a fraction of this space
i love this so much, that’s such a cool dream
This is what playing The Coin Game is like
This is like when you learn that they actually built Hobbitton for Lord of the Rings or that the Ten Commandments movie was actually shot in the Sinaí. It's still fake, the sets, the costumes, the illusion of moviemaking, but the fact that what you see in the screen is "real" gives a special kind of chill down my spine.
going out of bounds always scared me as a kid. something about the endless void just an accident away still gives me the heebie jeebies
This made me remember playing Portal 2 as a kid, suddenly getting pushed out of the rat maze of the traditional levels and into the old Aperture levels and feeling so lost and scared of the vastness.
It was a terrifying feeling, really
With naissance and the stairs, I got mixed up halfway through and couldn't tell what direction I was heading. Or even if I was ascending or descending. It was a very memorable moment.
Also one of the "biggest" feeling games I've ever played is the first Xenoblade Chronicles game. Eryth Sea in particular feels so impossibly massive
hard agree with xenoblade. i think all of the games have made me feel that way. I was fully expecting it with 3 and was still impressed.
was about to comment the same about naissancee
Totally, XC1 feels personally a lot more massive than XC2, with the entire world being two absurdly massive creatures directly connected to each other, and being able to walk between very nearly each and every area.
The other impressive thing is how much is actually not just background but rendered in the distance. Boundary break has a great video on it
The game has a LOT of issues but when it comes to just being able to seamlessly travel around and explore star citizen really nails that feeling with it's seamless nature. (when it chooses to work)
The far away animation of James walking down those stairs is so god damn cool. Also thanks for releasing this in time for the weekend, legend ❤️
it freaks me out so much
"But I will always love stepping outside the bounds and marvelling at how the trick might be that that's simply no trick at all." Beautifully said.
I just wanted to tell you that you are one of a very small number of artists who i get thoroughly excited every time you put out a new piece.
Thank you so much for all the effort put into your video's.
From the choice of topic, to your clear diction and artistic expression.
You genuinely make my life better
As an Asset 3D artist and an Environmental Artist videos like this always renew my faith in players. I know that after building something that can take up to months sometimes, will be appreciated by someone. Big love
Half Iife 2 felt HUGE to me, incredible. While no where near huge in terms of numbers, the fact that you traversed everywhere on foot (or when it was a vehicle it felt long enough) with no cutscenes and no teleports except for 1 where it made sense, it was such an adventure
i know , i was waiting for him to say citadel
Same. I was so impressed by the map, I googled it after I finished the game.
And I found that it makes total sense. Even though I know it consists of multiple different maps, they all connect together like a puzzle to form a complete world.
Also, the "hazardous waters" chapter, where you have a boat, is the biggest one, but city parts, where you go on foot, have a lot of verticallity, brilliant disigne
What I've always loved about Halflife 2, and subsequently Half-life Alyx. The spaces you explore don't just feel like maps, but places that were lived in, and logically coherent. Even small details such as how the water levels have lowered due to the Combine harvesting the Earth's water. All this makes the game feel even more eerie and dystopian, such as how the citadel looms over everything like the eye of Sauron.
Video game philosophy is quickly becoming one of my favourite UA-cam subgenres.
Digital humanities, you can study this kinda stuff.
If that’s true look into actual philosophy… your brain will explode
@@Art_official_intelligenc3 I mean, what's to say this isn't actual philosophy? Sure, it isn't questioning the meaning of life, or asking about the nature of consciousness, but it still counts, I think.
@@realtechhacksI agree but I’d go even further, is this really NOT questioning the meaning of life or the concept of consciousness? I’d argue exploring and examining art in all it’s forms IS a part of asking those questions. Video games in just one of our newest forms of art.
@@Cilibi That's a fair point.
One thing you forgot about NaissanceE's stairs is "no guard rails". You have to manage to walk straight in pitch darkness or risk falling and having to do it all again. This added a lot to the experience.
This video just reminds me of how in the Resident Evil 2 remake, Mr. X is actually walking around the map even when you can't see him.
Oh God, the descent into the deepest part of the ocean you can access in Soma is a moment that sticks with me years upon years later. If I recall, it's just conversation the whole way down... but you feel the descent. Lower and lower into the horrors that lie beneath, because you damn well know there lies horrors you dare no dwell on. Then the game has the audacity to actually make you walk the pitch black ocean floor, in those fathomless depths. It's chilling.
I personally really love the ash lake from dark souls. I had assumed that the dark gloomy gray area from the intro was something primordial, so when I jumped down a hole in a tree in a giant gloomy chasm I assumed I'd never assumed I would be in a gigantic lake of ash with petrified trunks all around me, without a horizon. It was magical. The area itself is mundane, the area before it even my least favorite part of the game, but the ash lake is just so awe inspiring..
Nothing to do with faking the space, just also something huge that I enjoyed
100% this. Encountering Ash Lake for the first time was one of my favorite experiences in Dark Souls.
and the music that plays along...
@@joshmartin2744 one of my favorites in all of gaming. Stepping out of the great hollow into ash lake for the first time is just otherworldly in a way no other game has ever managed to capture.
helps that it's one of only two places in the game where music plays outside of a boss, and the music is just the most awe-inspiring shit on the soundtrack.
The name is also so wonderfully cheeky and mysterious. "Lake" almost implies that it's no big deal in this magical world. It's notably *not* called something like "The Infinite Sea".
Every video that you make gives me chills. You're so eloquent about what you want to say yet you're still so personal. Your videos are certainly the ones I look forward to the most
I've always wanted a racing game that takes place in a space colony like the ones in Gundam. Essencially a massive rotating cylinder. It's so cool to see the terrain and city just curve up to both your left and right and meet upside-down above you. Give us that!
O'NEIL CYLINDER RACING GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@yapflipthegrunt4687 Was watching this video again and I was just like "Oh hey, it's me!" (on a different account)
Came for the video games, stayed for the existential crisis.
Same here.
The Jacob Geller experience
@Jacob Geller you should adopt this
I also came
This quote reminds me of the nier games and drake grad you come for the game and stay for the suffering it brings uppon you
I had that feeling of 'enormous environments' while playing Portal 2. The game has perfectly fooled me, as I thought that each of those test chambers you could see in the distance were actual places, where the most weird things could be happening (or not). That feeling even grew stronger when I realized there were actually hidden places in Portal, where the player could simply miss, and the game would still go on. Of course now, after a lot of exploring Aperture Science out of bounds, I know that mostly of what you can see in the distance is just an illusion to make you feel small. But if I fell for it, I must say it's very well done. Still would like to see a game where you could actually get to anywhere you see tho!
Lots of large open world games do that. I haven't played every game in the Just Cause series, but the ones I did took place in huge remote islands, so anything visible was somewhere you could go. The sea abstracts away anything that would exist outside of the map.
Using the sea to abstract away the limits of the map and create a world where you can go everywhere you can see is pretty common, whenever the setting allows it.
Something incredible about Dark Souls 1 is that the citiy below the Anor Londo buildings you cross and the town under Firelink Shrine are all completley modeled and realistically scaled, of course they're low resolution and have less detail, but they're still fully modeled and, with mods, fully explorable.
Really interesting video. I think this is maybe why sometimes playing Minecraft feels a bit... empty, to me? There's just no end. You can walk forever and find nothing but the same, and so you lack destination or sense of progression. When there are constraints it lets you play and think more creatively about how and what you want to do with the space and the things in it, I think.
I really enjoy travelling by horse in LOZ Breath of the Wild (which has a really big map) because even though I can instantly teleport places, I really enjoy the feeling of travelling a world that's all there (pretty much) and watch the scenery change around me. It's fun that I can climb a mountain or jump from a tower, pick a point in the distance and just *go* there.
Also NaissancE has been on my to-play list for a while so I'll definitely have to check it out now.
I am a bit surpirsed that you did not mention Control. Its infinite spaces are so beautiful. Brutalist but still beautiful.
More than a few moments where the level design just floors you. Like I commented above, the first time I enter the foundations never fails to fill me with a sense of wonder
Few games truly gave that sense of scale like Control did. It all technically takes place in one building, yet some spaces are so unfathomably huge they made me nervous.
Makes me kinda sad since I dropped Control 5 hours in due to stale gameplay, but oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Might have to give that another go then. I also dropped it because of gameplay.
@@spiderjerusalem8505 No idea what you're talking about, the combat was so fun, not to mention just flying around and exploring the massive spaces once you're able to do so.
Shadow of the Colossus, specifically the original is the best example of scale and distance in a game I think. No other game made me feel so intimidated just by the world. Also the scale of the flying colossus in the desert is literally jaw dropping. Play it if you haven’t it’s one of the best games ever.
The footage of NaissanceE reminds me a lot of 'BLAME!', the endless treck up through an abandoned cityscape with breaches into the bottom of the next layer. It impressed me how much the manga managed to impose that feeling of a hideously inhuman space
Yessss. This was exactly what I was thinking.
I have a distinct memory of playing Majoras Mask as a kid and seeing the Ben drowned creepy pasta and trying to explore these random fake spaces that never existed. That felt large. Those spaces were so cool because they didn’t make sense. It was the feeling I got from House Of Leaves just far sooner. Things feel large when you can just barely understand them. I don’t know why I commented this this video just reminded me of that feeling.
I don't know what is so special about Jacob Geller's videos, but they always find a way to express the little nuggets of fascination I find hidden in the corners of my brain. I needed a way to relax and get sucked into another world for half an hour. Thank you sir!
It was Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital that made me think about these things. How can a planet that looks so small feel like I'm in so deep once I start exploring. Also that trick planet, I won't elaborate but it's cool and is like an advancement on the Mario 64 stairs. The way that the DLC uses dark mess and illusion to hide its space is also equally fascinating.
Outer Wilds is such a masterpiece, I absolutely love how it handles space, scales and physics in general.
Your writing is absolutely astounding! And you present it with calm enthusiasm... It's a treat to listen to your topics! Thanks for all your hard work you put into these amazing videos!
House of Leaves is a book that really puts spaces into perspective it’s an incredible read. This video reminded me of that book
😍
Thank you for including the music list! It's so frustrating when a creator uses some theme that I remember but can't name and the tune isn't anyway mentioned! As an aside, one aspect of Star Citizen (despite its many flaws) is that the solar system feels big to me in a similar way because you can't fast travel (the quantum jump is not instant and actually can take a while) and so in a Eurotruck simulator-esque way, you plan out your routes, fuel stops, etc... as you zip around the system from mission to mission. The "in-between" places are either empty space (in space) or procedural (on planets) but the complexity is sufficient it feels far more real to me than say Daggerfall's map. Seeing the planets physically and slowly move as you jump makes them feel like real locations. Kerbal Space Program feels big to me for similar reasons even though by necessity you need to speed up time to handle maneuvers which take hours, days or weeks to accomplish.
agreed i would have seen SC here too, even if most building in cities are there for show without interior, ship have no fake space, planet are fully explorable ( beside some part of cities due to no physicalized and lore reason, after all who would let a spaceship with bomb fly close to some cities part / industrie :)
in starsector you don't think much of the extremely big distances one travels between planets but similarly you're fast fowarding month long trips constantly
Babbdi has some insane secrets as well! I just played it recently and it was extremely fun, yet eerie, like a city far removed from the rest of the world, yet strangely familiar, with empty structures and strange objects, as well as some environmental puzzles to solve, it was a pretty interesting game, and i just wanted more of it!
A game based on Kowloon Walled City would be cool.
For me, One of the most memorable moments of this type was in the game EVERHOOD, a psychedelic rhythm game reminiscent of Undertale.
During the games own genocide route, the green wizard's underground lair has an extra hallway that seems to stretch on forever- covered head to toe in tally marks. He had written signs to remind his addled memory not to go down it, that it goes on so far its pointless to even go down it anymore.
I went down the hallway, seemingly it just was looping with screen transitions, BUT the signs were indicators otherwise to me. I kept holding the right arrow key, sprinting down an endless hallway of tally marks counting days, weeks, years, decades, or even centuries for all I knew. The game is about eternity and what that really means to live through, so my inclination was toward a century per tally. Eventually I got tired, and turning back gave me a prompt that it would teleport me all the way back if I did so and asked me if I was sure. I frantically clicked no, desperate not to lose progress in this fools errand. Eventually the hallways become littered with rubble, denying me the ability to hold forward mindlessly-but i was getting close i could feel it. What I saw when I reached the end i keep close to my heart, but I will say it was an ending strong enough to prevent my desire to see my slaughter completed...
As someone who is far more obsessed with video game soundtracks than I should, I find it really interesting that throughout the video you return to the music of The Last Clockwinder, a game that feels very small in comparison by trapping you in the same room throughout the game (understandable, given it's VR nature), but can still feel big in other ways by how the room is endlessly swapped out and replaced by new floors
This looks like a video where you'll make me play some obscure game where nothing really happens but it's really moving for absolutely absurd reasons.
Well? Have you played Babbdi yet?
lol that was me when he talked about How Fish Is Made
@@eclipserepeater2466 gonna try it on my next off time next week
I've been in deep space scanning planets in Elite Dangerous for 2 years. The game feels massive when you've been exploring the galaxy for that long. Others have been out in the black for far longer than I.
I *really* appreciate this style of commentary, especially when it attacks the philosophical and existential elements that you manage to bring from the games, to us. I thoroughly enjoyed this video, and I am happy to see that your excellent presentation extends into other videos as well. Awesome video, I know I'm a little bit late, and you will never read this, but here I could write something existentialistic about why I'm writing it anyway. lol.
Between this video and "Fear of Depths," I'm convinced you would love Aaron A. Reed's novel "Subcuteanean." It's about a pair of roommates who find an endlessly branching, architecturally surreal basement beneath their house ... and every copy of the novel is different.
Excuse me? Every copy is different?
Yes! He wrote an elaborate algorithm to generate new variants whenever someone orders a copy.
Clearly I need to start actually reading the newsletters I get from the library. I can't believe I missed out on the opportunity to see your live talk in person. I didn't even know you were located in this area. I hope there will be more opportunities like this in the future!
The second you've started describing NaissanceE, BLAME! appeared in my mind. The ginormous structure, including vast spaces, cities, unexplainable mechanisms, having a diameter of Jupiter's orbit. The style of it is beyond awesome.
In his original video about NaissanceE, he mentioned Blame, I played NaissanceE and I loved it. He opened me up to so many new games and sometimes books.
I wasn't the only one! BLAME! is truly a unique experience. From the way faces are drawn to the way the mechanical hells are illustrated.
My exact thoughts
i feel like everytime an unexpected game pioneered some crazy tech or industry touchstone, it's always some kind of random driving game lol
I'm so happy someone finally put into words what makes FUEL unforgettable for me despite being such a completely mid tier racing game. Starting at the coast and driving uphill from the ocean for 10-15 real life minutes until you come to the top of a ridge and see the wide open plains laid out before you. It captures scale and openness in a very real way I can't remember from any other game.
Elite Dangerous hits like this for me, despite being on the same category as NMS. What's special about Elite I think is that while the playable area is practically infinite, its bounds are not. Travelling to the furthest point in the galaxy, or travelling above the galactic plane and seeing it all below you, are incredible experiences. Plus there's the thrill of being the first to find something cool. While being the first to discover something has little gameplay benefit, many explorers are proud of their name tag being on an interesting place.
they all maybe small nuggets in the endless realm BUT they did it because they all have the drive thoes of the explores club has. the desire to OUT OF LIQUID SPITE im shure for some to make a mark no matter how small
Outer Wilds did it for me. I like Elite Dangerous, and I re-centered my channel around NMS. But Outer Wilds never fast-warps you anywhere, there are no instances. Elite Dangerous gives you the *feeling* that you could fly infinitely in one direction, but in reality only the current solar system is & will ever be loaded until you make a hyperspace jump. In Outer Wilds, there _is_ only one solar system, but it's all genuine, all happening with or without you, all of its secrets playing out whether you know their nature or not. There's just one big scary world out there, and it's just you and your small wooden spaceship.
@@Rocksteady72a Outer Wilds for me is kind of the opposite. Despite being a whole solar system, it's so dense and full of content that it doesn't feel "big". And it literally isn't considering the size of the planets.
Not saying this as a criticism of the game by the way, it's my favourite videogame ever. I love that content density, where it feels like there's something worth discovering every time you see something eye-catching.
The Silent Hill Historical Society is one of the greatest game levels of all time. Just completely unnerving and creepy and i do love the finale where you just...emerge just on the other side of the building you entered. The breaking of space to unnerve the player is just a stroke of genius. At least, in my opinion.
I think the game that doesn’t “fake the space” in the most memorable way is actually The Longing. Because the game takes place in 400 days of real time and your character moves painfully slowly throughout its labyrinthine caverns, it really feels like a massive space where every action counts. It challenges any notion of game completionism while having such a satisfying and memorable experience.
Portal 2 is definitely my favorite “bigness”. When Wheatley started destroying everything, and the endless void everything fell into, it struck me. The miles and miles of just… stuff. The thousands of years of accumulation. All falling because of one tiny robot. It made me cry a little, how all of that unknowable knowledge and materials was crashing and burning and breaking, partially because of my actions.
That’s a good example Valve had a good grasp of making spaces. They did it in the Citadel too. So much more expansive and emotional than open world/procedural.
And Control. The first Mirrors Edge is good too. Catalyst just feels empty.
For me it was waking up at the bottom of the salt mine and grasping for the first time just how massive Aperture Science must be.
@@Freshbott2Control is such a good example. The whole concept of The Oldest House and the Thresholds it connects to is really good world building. The Ashtray Maze especially was incredibly fun.
@@HiiroRocker101 I don’t remember the Ashtray Maze. Is it in one of the expansions? I played the whole way through the main game without realising you could float upwards HAHA. I was half making dinner or something when I got that power and skipped through it. I stacked random objects on each other to get up high the whole way through. Cause I didn’t improve my stuff enough, I’m stuck on the first expansion at the Jukebox thing.
As someone who found NaissanceE from watching your original video and cannot stop thinking about the staircase, it's so good to finally hear someone talk about it. I still remember hunched foreword inches in front of my monitor so I could just barely tell the stairs from the abyss and to not fall while the song Au rythme de se pas (my favourite in the game) rose upwards in its intricacy as I did up the stairs. When I first played through that section - after falling a few times - it became an intense, insanely long physically strenuous section with almost no light at all to guide me, all coming just after the psychologically intense Deeper into madness section of the game. I was just holding forward and correcting myself by moving left and right for minutes straight. At last coming to the impossible yet almost calming desert in Going down, a place that shouldn't be at the end of something. Now the song reminds me of that staircase, and I remember it as a trepidatious step into an unknown, and a profoundly memorable accent out of the dark.
i made the mistake of looking back, i completely lost myself on that staircase and had no idea if i was progressing, ascending, or descending
Fun fact: in Mario 64 DS, you can actually see Mario teleport on the map in the endless staircase
Yeah the touch screen map made it painfully obvious
One game that make me feel so small in a huge world that's not fake is star citizen. I can just fly around a planet for hours and explore it all.
I watched the cursed judge video when it came out and i commented there that the first witcher game also holds relevance to this idea, and i guess it's pertinent here too - lots of old games, fallout new vegas too, where it feels like games are allowed to be partially empty and that fills them out more. it creates an enthralling atmosphere
I'm glad you mentioned New Vegas, because I experienced this phenomenon (or a related one) in an unintentional way in that very game, by exploring it's out-of-bounds areas. There's this one section near the southeast corner of the map that stretches on and on as tall rolling hills, seemingly going for a few miles (though really perhaps only being one in actuality) before suddenly dropping down a steep cliff to the lowest map elevation. It was largely devoid of detail, but the fact that this area you were never intended to enter at all _had_ detail, I found both enchanting and mystifying.
Which is why Elden Rings world also feels so vast, yet is interesting and not "empty". While there is a lot to discover, it also has it´s stretches of emptyness. When it comes to large maps, in a way, sometimes not adding something actually adds to it.
@@theexchipmunk I wonder if this has any intersection with the use of "negative space" in mediums like comics and painting, where the "nothing" brings more attention to the focal aspects and ironically makes the panel/piece feel more alive or interesting than if it were a busier thing. For games, this could manifest in the idea that not every open world game needs endless waypoints and markers and repetitious activities - ironically vast stretches of nothing might make the world within seem more "real" than those with endless things to do everywhere.
@@dialga1788 negative space is exactly what came to mind when writing my first comment!
@@the_real_Kurt_Yarish yeah geller has also done a great video on red dead and that feeling of unintentional emptiness with the whole rdr1 map being in the south-west corner (and how aristotle roufanis creates the feeling of isolation in his work)
ive always appreciated games that can successfully make me forget about the illusions. somehow the first halo always had me feeling like if i just keep going, i could go all the way around the inside of that ring. maybe it was easier to fool me when i was a kid, but i still love that feeling of wonder i get when i look out across a games landscape and think "i wonder whats out there".
I've alway asked myself as a kid what's was beyond the boundaries and death barriers, every halo level from combat evolved, and countless other games one notable one being quake 4.
Test Drive unlimited made me feel like that. The entire island of Oahu on the PS2! And, when you visit a car showroom, you can see the traffic and the outside world complete with birds and waving trees beyond the windows, from the cockpit of the car you're looking at. The geography limits the number of roads to a single thread in a few areas, but it's mind-blowing for the PS2 to let you do that.
Absolutely. I just left a longer comment about it already, but a few moments in Halo 2's Quarantine Zone communicated this sense to me too.
NaissanceE is one of my all time faves and the reason I started watching this channel, as no one else seemed to talk about it. Still one of the best games ever.
While not nearly as beloved, I’ve always had a soft spot for Vane, and I thought of one of its first levels watching this, where you start as a bird in a massive desert without much of a clue as to where to go.
I love when a game feels directionless in a natural way, yet still manages to move me along the path built by some manner of artistic magic.
NaissanceE enviornment is based almost exclusively on manga "BLAME!"
I think a game you might well find to be of grand inspiration for a video essay is The Utility Room. It might have fit in with this episode but has a whole unique experience going on that I struggle to find words to describe it. A masterpiece of spacial grandness, the feeling of being cosmically small at the edges of the universe.
I really enjoyed this. You get into applied phenomenology without making it too academic. I love that feeling of bigness and haven't heard anyone talk about it in this way. Surprised you didn't mention Desert Bus though!
Great video! I’ve heard that Goldeneye was designed in the way you describe: designers made the world-often based on areas from the movie-and then they designed the missions in them. It resulted in lots of weird empty rooms and odd pacing, but I think gave the game a really unique feel.
I really loved this approach. I think it added a good dose of realism. If I see a locked door in a modern game I ignore it, in GoldenEye I'd wonder what's behind it.
It also did so well on the other extreme, prioritizing the fun of shooting stuff to the extent they made furniture explode when hit. I'd take this mechanic every day over not being able to trash a chair or table with a machine gun like in almost all other games.
2:00 when he mentions “it’s the size of… Connecticut. Or Puerto Rico.” But the point is that it’s still huge due to how you travel, I agree in a weird way - for D&D, you can get so much adventure out of such a tiny area, and yet people often make world scale maps and explore multiverses. The thought of scale is maddening.
Dishonored is so jam packed with content and information, you never realize how small the maps really are until you’ve spent an hour doing everything in a level and then spend two minutes making your way back to the start of the map to end the level.