1- Be your most comfortable self this fall with MeUndies Get 20% off your first order, plus free shipping, at MeUndies.com/anyaustin 2- I love this video. I really do. Have a great day.
The "I wanted to show you this because I thought it was cool" mentality really is the bedrock of what I think UA-cam SHOULD be and started as. You love to see it.
@@Dr_mafario I'd click it in a jiffy. "Did you know... Did you.. .Did you know that jiffy.. Did you know.. Did you know that jiffy is a measure of time?" -Nick
You noted the plane!!! :D I intentionally put them in there, mainly because I'm a plane nerd (so I request FX to make sure the lights were correct) but really it adds subtle realism and atmosphere super easily. Making it feel more grounded and authentic. Audio did a great job with adding the distant plane sound too. Also, I took note of the normal flight paths aligned to that location this level was based on, so they fly similar to them. Just an extra tidbit for ya. 1:1 scale was a huge deal for us and we wanted to portray it well. We did more tricks to help make the level feel claustrophobic, which all adds to the intimacy and authenticity the level provides. I really enjoyed the video -- Love the fact you looked around at all of the detail, nicely done!
Really awesome stuff, thanks for going the extra mile to make video games special! I haven't played a cod campaign since the original modern warfare trilogy (which I really loved!), but seeing the level of detail in this vid makes me wanna try this one out!
omg even the path!! crazy! I love when stuff has so many details in it, and even though most of it will not be noticed actively, I really think it adds so much to the overall vibe
Another thing I’d add is, as someone from the part of London this level is set in, it literally looks EXACTLY like this. The terraced houses, the cobblestone paths, alleys, etc. is almost picturesque in how similar it looks like Camden. Even the interiors of the house and how the rooms are all placed with the large staircase going all the way up is how most of these multi-level townhouses are designed inside.
I always under estimate how many bricks are in a wall. Then there’s usually 2 layers. It’s funny to see how far guesses off are through since I never do construction and never see more than like 5 loose bricks laying around for context
I find the way you view games to be really romantic. Not in the love and relationship sense, but in the classical artistic movement sense. It’s really touching, in a way that’s hard to describe. Just seeing your appreciation and joy of airplane lights is just oddly moving to me.
I think he puts into words fleeting thoughts we all have while gaming. Who hasn't stopped to soak in the atmosphere from time to time. He found a way to cover games and gane design in a unique way.
@@badcornflakes6374 It's pretty basic artistic analysis but the gaming community is strangely resistant towards letting those views into their space. not criticizing his work at all, I think it's great, it just only seems unusual because so many gamers don't seem to partake in serious critical analysis of other mediums, or if they do they do it in a very limited capacity, so someone like this seems unusual because it is for the video game space even though it's normal in other mediums.
Classical artistic movement sense is a good comparison. He really is just taking the same approach that art critics of other mediums do towards gamers, but a lot of gamers really hate that shit and fight against it. the early 2010s had a few publications like Killscreen that were trying to bring this sort of serious artistic analysis to video games but they were widely shunned by capital G gamers and other gamergate types.
Just wanted to add my read of that sky as someone whose occasionally done amateur night sky photography. I recognise those star shapes as a medium length exposure (think single digit seconds) where the tripod was accidently bumped halfway through. The initial bright circle is the star for most of the exposure, then there's a line to another dimmer circle. The connecting line is the travel of the star during the camera movement and the dimmer circle is the position of the star for the rest of the exposure. I'm not sure it explains why this photo is in the game but thought it was interesting context. Someone's photo they didn't care to retake.
oh cool! that makes perfect sense! if someone on the dev team took the photo, it makes sense that they'd be using a longer than normal exposure. having a little more light in your 2D assets is always helpful, because it's easier to play with the values that way. and they might be in a place where the stars aren't that bright to boot. they probably had more than one shot I'd guess though. so in the long run it was maybe an accidental pick. some lighting artist going through the batches of sky shots, picked one with good color, but didn't notice the smudged stars maybe. if it was intentional though, that's a fun choice to make.
I still think it's tragic that "Press F to Pay Respects" became the meme, instead of the xbox's prompt which was "Press X to Pay Respects". 'X' rhymes and rolls off the tongue so much better than 'F'
7:13 I think there IS a point to the airplanes though. CoD IS first and foremost a war game. But those passenger airplanes are saying, very very subtly “you are not in a war zone.” Everything points to the domestic nature of the scene and that added touch just makes it all the more immersive. And I guess, maybe, makes you feel like you’re intruding upon peace, or that maybe just over the other wall on the other side are the neighbors living their lives unaware of what’s about to happen in this house.
Yep - as a Brit, I adored those levels. This one I replayed so many times and pondered over the reality of doing a job like that, in a street just like home. Picadilly was cool, too, but there's just enough "Call of Duty" in it to make it less immersive. But Clean House, man, I've stood in streets just like that, I've stayed in houses just like that house. It felt very very close to home, and that just makes it super engaging
My takeaways from this video: 1. Infinity Ward needs to do something other than a Call of Duty game. 2. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the true ultimate power in the universe.
@@thechugg4372West and Zampella are design masterminds. To so regularly be behind some of gaming’s best shooters is incredible. MOH AA, COD1,2,4 and 6, Titanfall games… incredible!
@@thechugg4372 Besides the Star Wars Jedi games, Respawn is only really interested in Apex. They’ve more or less killed the Titanfall franchise unless they actually come out and shock us all with a TF3 announcement. But I’m more so referring to the current IW team creating a new IP that isn’t just another fps
Imagine if they got Infinity Ward to do a gritty realistic campaign shooter like Spec Ops The Line. I feel like the discussion of the plot in that game makes people forget about the insane atmosphere and worldbuilding, and how they created such an apocalyptic-feeling warzone within a modern environment like Dubai. I would LOVE to see a return that type of setting.
It’s legit wild these studios are locked to call of duty and will be for years. You almost wonder with stacked yearly releases in rotation COD would benefit from literally being given to dozens of devs, they can all cycle between their interpretation of a game and theme. Probably have some misses, but some unique experiences and would be the only franchise that is so damn popular that it could survive multiple different variations and versions and interpretations of a “COD” game. Shame money won’t let it happen, could really be a cool thing and free the 3 rotating devs up to do something new too
i think the mission is so uncanny because the house seems so peaceful and something you’re used to seeing clean and orderly but you’re following a group of soldiers with night vision which completely contrasts from anything you’ve seen before. the best way i can describe it is like walking on carpet with shoes on, it just doesn’t feel right
Real size spaces in video games feel weird because of the incredibly small FoV making it feel claustrophobic. The human eye has an average overall fov of 120 degrees, with different levels of blurry where only the pinpoint area where you are "looking at" is actually in total focus (if you don't have vision ailments). In game, however, you typically play at 60-90 degrees FoV, which makes everything zoomed in closer, and not only that, you have the whole screen in clear focus so you as the player can manually look around for details. This difference makes it feel uncanny because it feels like you're walking around with a short range binocular, but if you try to scale up the FoV it will instead feel like you're using a fish-eye lens. The human vision is just inherently different compared to the camera-style vision they use in FPS games.
I'm not entirely satisfied with this explanation. Real life actually feels more zoomed in than video games do. We have more peripheral vision, but we experience it differently. We don't see the distortion you see at the screen edges at, say, 90 degrees FOV or higher in video games. If you compare a flat-screen game with its VR version, the VR image will look more zoomed in, with details appearing larger. I think the main reason video games don't have real-size spaces is for maneuverability, we don't have issues with real-size spaces in video footage so I don't see why video games would be different.
You pretty much summed up exactly how I feel and why I always crank my FOV up to 100° if given the option. I don't like feeling like I'm piloting a character through the screen of a cell phone. I want to have my bearings. I want to know where I am.
All the bins are empty, but the dumpster outside is brimming with bags. Clearly, it was "bin night" as we call it in the UK, and it is due to be collected the next morning.
@teflonhammer3465 I don't think that at all. I just wanted to clarify that we call it "bin night". Garbage collection day doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it?
On the topic of the scale of video game environments often being too large: The movement speed in most games is also really fast compared to normal human walking/running speed. This is probably why building interiors in particular are so oversized, because otherwise they would be both harder to navigate, and make it really obvious just how fast you are moving. I once made a counter-strike map with a realistically scaled house, and it was hilarious just how quickly you moved from one end to the other.
This is something that's was way more exaggerated in early shooters like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D that had people running at like, 40-60 mph or something insane. As environments have gotten more realistic so has the speed of our characters it seems. Even now high realism type shooters like Rainbow Six will have reasonable move speed but something more stylized like the new Doom or something sport significantly faster movement. I think it's interesting how that goes together. It would feel weird to have a super speedy character in a realistic environment. I bet it would also feel bizarre to have a realistic move speed in a scifi environment.
Game scale is also relevant for third-person sequences, and it's exaggerated even more in some racing games. Turns out in real streets you can't necessarily duck behind a wall for cover from gunfire, but if that little wall was 30% bigger, you could; and you can't weave through traffic at a gajillion miles per hour. But if there's 60+% of a lane between two adjacent cars, you can squeeze through comfortably, but close enough to make you feel like Steve McQueen.
@@cptnraptorYup, I feel racing games are not added onto this topic enough. Because the more realistic a racing game city is, the more it negatively affects gameplay. Something like Most Wanted 2005 had absolutely gigantic roads, it's almost comical when you stop to look at it. On top of that the sidewalks don't make much sense either, you can tell they're there to functionally act like red and white striped areas in a professional track. And don't get me started on how the map makes less sense the more you stare, and I thought the lack of pedestrians was uncanny.
I lived in Hawaii and for awhile I lived in these old basically slave cottages that had been refurbished into modern houses. They were pretty small, just a large square separated into four identically-sized rooms. So this meant the bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom were all the same size. The bathroom was, comparatively, gigantic, and it reminds me a lot of the bathroom you point out in the older CoD games. I lived in a Call of Duty house. It was, essentially, an asset flip.
Just from first guesses, a game with realistically proportioned doorways may be half-life 2. Its been talked to death, but source engine and half-life 2 devs really have a STRANGE way of constructing their buildings and level designs
Ever since i did some environment design on a work project that involved bookshelves, i cannot stop noticing how many video game bookshelves have been filled up by total psychopaths. They're always totally disorganized, books strewn all over the place in bizarre positions or with the spine facing inward so you cant even see what book it is, and ten copies of the same book on one shelf.
But have you also tried to design interesting bookshelves with like only 5 book models to choose from, and not have it look like its really is just 5 books?
til I'm a psychopath, I always shelf my books with spines facing inward so no one can see what books I have, and packing them tight, horizontal and mostly double layered like in a box, because I don't have enough shelf space.
@@UndeadKIRA Oh for sure, it's almost never worth putting in tons of effort into such small details that will only get noticed by the type of people that watch videos about unemployment rates in skyrim, lol :P
@@UndeadKIRA I have and it's a nightmare. You really need to break up the repetition so turning some books the other way or upside down is a necessity. You basically need to create a mess that's realistic enough to be done by someone accidentally but you do it intentionally. And yeah, at some point you do say "fuck it" and start copying groups of books if not the whole shelves.
I never realized video game doors are so…huge! I’d love a video talking about other video game houses and how ridiculous or realistic they look. One of my favorite video game doors is the Safe Room door from L4D. It’s just iconic
I like to imagine they didn't stack the place with beds because maybe they planned to have a couple guys on each floor that are awake as, like, lookouts or something.
The craziest little detail for me at 15:40 is the fact that they got rid of the bike lane. In the 1990s, that area definitely did not have bike lanes like it does now. That's such a cool little detail.
11:39 If I had to guess: Object and wire was placed by one dev, another dev (or maybe same dev) comes back around and deletes the object while rearranging objects on the table to better suit the room, forgetting or not noticing there was a wire connected to said deleted object. I could see them using some sort of in-engine "make wire" tool to connect the plug to any object and use splines so they can control how the wire wraps around objects. It could also be that the wire doesn't render in the editor.
I figured there was probably a model of like a damaged wall or something with a piece of wire sticking out of it. It's not like the wire itself was individually modeled and its placement could be controlled
There’s a mission in MW2 (original) where you’re going through an entire neighborhood then a bunch of restaurants and stuff, and my favorite part of the entire level is just combing through the houses and looking at all the little details, I LOVE little details in COD games
Was amazed this was mentioned neither in the video or earlier comments. Clean House shouldn't stand out as much as it does coz as usual with good things in CoD, it was pioneered in MW2
Yes! I loved that! I don't think I've seen nearly as good a depiction of American suburban sprawl vibes in a shooting game before or since. The idea of a Russian tank tearing through your local Burger King is far more evocative than a scene of the White House under attack.
As a long time fan from the eggbusters days, it makes me so happy to see this channel become so successful. And you didn't do it by 'selling out', you did it by finding a niche that fits your personality and skills better than eggbusters ever did. Makes me so proud. Have you been able quit that job you used to complain about yet?
10:26 The garbage cans being empty could actually make sende. I havent played the game so I dont know much of the backstory, but if there is a terrorist cell hiding, trying to keep a low profile, they could resolve to other ways to dispose their garbage, like burn it in a fire pit or something, so they dont leave any clues a possible investigator could find, like scrabbled notes left on a paper, wandering in a garbage bin, only to be find by law enforcement that is stacking them out or something.
After watching a bulk of Austin’s videos, I am beginning to imagine his ideal or near perfect game: An open world physics sandbox that has the map size of an American state. The map is an atmospheric liminal space devoid of people, and you simply explore it and uncover its secrets. Entire apartment blocks, shopping centers, and subway stations all open and available to explore. All devoid of life with a natural 24 hour day and night cycle. If you find a bike you can pick it up and ride it. If you find cars, and the proper keys, you can turn on the vehicle, drive it, crash it, and watch the gas tank go empty. Although the graphic fidelity of the game is limited, the mood and atmosphere of the game would be uncannily life like, allowing the player to soak in the moment and truly enjoy the world around them. Aside from finding unique and entertaining parts of the map that are “secrets” there is no win-state, and the only progression in the game itself is finding items and vehicles that allow you to traverse the environment in easier or unique ways. I would love to see this “explorative sandbox” game. A chill, subdued and almost relaxing experience of a night walk or a morning jog personified into a game.
need sounds of traffic and activity in the distance but when you go there still nothing and no one, would love a game like this, needs a lot human touches like bakeries having detailed real recipes and unique paintings and art of all sorts and music, not overworld music mind you but say you enter a musicians house and while they arent there music just comes from where the would be playing and you can only hear it there it isnt reused, also really good water physics and in depth control of your movements so even without br you can really exist in the world, play with the water in a fountain and watch how it splashes and moves and the light refracts, and devs often have little old games they made so on peoples pcs in the game they could gather up their old little made by just them games and put them on the pcs and you can play them, and you can change a lightbulb and it’ll actually change how the light looks with dif kinds of bulbs, which you can find at the hardware store of course, there will also be trains running as if people were there and you can ride them around and look out the window and just watch the world go by, and when it rains the audio of supposed people and activity that isnt there changes to match and okay so i dont want a state, i want a couple of small cities that look like a city but if you stop to think about it they're not that big with lots of specific details and one is costal and you can just hang out at the beach and watch incredibly realistic physics simulated waves crash and listen to the sounds and play with sea weed that washes up and build sand castles, also you can touch grass in game cuz thats basically what this is lol the desire to touch grass but in a way you cant irl, alone and undisturbed able to take your time and just stare at a snail as it goes by
@@thegheymerz6353 Thinking about this with your comment in mind, I agree to an extent. I was thinking more of a “Cataclysm, Dark Days Ahead” but in the first person with a similarly overly complex and innovative crafting system, and with no monsters.
So fun fact about the very accurate Washington dc, from google maps you can actually use a program to download the 3D models google generates. These are pretty rough models, but what it does allow is for you to get a true-to-scale low res version of the buildings. And from there you can easily use them as reference in your 3D modelling program to accurately recreate them. This is almost 100% what they did as getting a drone to scan the buildings or modelling from images alone would be a lot more difficult.
The videogame scale thing is actually also really weird and on a case-by-case basis. It's very obvious in VR ports like Skyrim VR, where cups and fruits will be absurdly large, but chairs are perfectly normal in size because they need to be that for characters to sit on them like normal people. It's a bizarrely mismatched world where everything feels like it's completely normal or suddenly cartoonishly big like a comedic prop and when playing the game on just a monitor, you don't notice how people drink out of gigantic cups while eating mega-apples with normal sized bread next to them from normal sized plates.
The weird scaling is intentional for the most part, the lack of immersion made by a typical screen distorts the perception of proportion in a lot of things, makes things overly tiny or giant in relation to each other in all sorts of fun ways even if they are just fine. Hitman's whole world is comically oversized to account for that, which becomes pretty fascinating to explore if you play the vr port.
I think part of it is to hide the fact that in a lot of video games, characters don't really hold objects. They're just kind of attached to the hand with the fingers fused together and stiffly curled around an object without actually touching it. It's too time consuming to properly animate intricate details like that when there's other more important things to focus on and larger objects make it look less noticeable.
@@TeamTeddy666wild journey I’ve been here for about two years and saw most of it. I also proudly hold the title of the patreon subscriber to send a video idea so absurd he raised the price to request a video from $10 to like $200 the same day
@@TeamTeddy666 To be honest, I miss his old stuff. Don't get me wrong, this stuff is great, and I'm glad he's blowing up. But I much prefer "off-the-cuff" Austin to this character. Now he's the "boring but quirky" guy, instead of whatever words you'd use to describe his older presentation style. Eggbusters and VGWham are peak. I really wish he'd do some more of that, in addition to this kind of stuff. Video essays are nice, but so was the other 10+ years of vids I subbed for.
This video brings back vivid memories from when I was in 2nd grade playing MW2 on my dad's Xbox 360. I used to really enjoy just starting an empty lobby and looking at all of the little details on each map, really trying to find every possible little area and sound effect that plays in specific areas. The problem was being completely alone in those maps made them feel like horror games instead, and I was always paranoid about some sort of entity existing in the game that wished me harm. It's strange because I've only ever felt that with MW2, other games didn't scare me the same way. It got to the point that sometimes I would have to quit my exploration early because I was convinced something was after me in the game lol.
On the topic of the scale of homes, and since you are from New Orleans, I wanted to tell you about a Doll house I almost rented back in 2019. I believe it was over on State street (coulda been Nashville), south of St. Charles. There was this large mansion, and behind it, a smaller "guest house" house on the property. I was looking to rent, and I found it on Zillow. The owner spoke normally of the house. She never mentioned the size. Rent was roughly $1400. You can see the house from the street, its at the back of the driveway. Anyway, upon entering the thing, I noticed how cramped everything was. The ceilings were low, and everything inside was painted green. It was the most bizarre place ive ever seen. Then later I read a story about how back in the day, the ultra rich would build entire houses for their kids. At any rate, I felt like a giant inside. Im a 6ft tall man btw. The kitchen counter was tiny and low. It was like being in a dream, it was so bizarre. I also remember the stairwell being cramped af. I didnt have time to stay long, but i noped out of there quickly. I remember, it was multiple stories, maybe 3, but even so it felt like I was inside of a shoebox. And it was dank and dark in there with the walls being a grass green color. P.S. im too good for editing on youtube. Thought you might gain inspiration by this house, should you ever encounter it.
For the train being empty scenario, as someone who visits London a lot, a tube train in the middle of the night is most definitely possible to be completely empty, depending on the location and day of the week
Ex-soldier here! Under some night vision, the lack of depth perception can cause things like stars to blur/appear double, we have to adjust our nvgs to different light levels, this is with usually dual feed nvgs not the gpvngs (with 4 tubes) that the characters are using (I have no experience with these) if the second level with stars has no night vision it would explain why theres no blur in that sky. I imagine the devs had to decide to focus on the skybox under nods OR under naked eye.
Maybe, but in this case the blur is clearly caused by the camera moving during exposure. It's far more likely that someone took the picture(s) and didn't notice, or they decided that not enough players would notice.
They use photogrammetry for the environments. So they take high quality photos to generate the 3D models. That’s why the buildings in the trailer are real buildings. They might make some aesthetic alterations but overall the buildings will be real scans
For all the details that the level gets right, the thing that annoys me is that the cable that you found, that doesn't connect to anything, has the wrong plug and socket for the UK.
Fun fact. Tom Clancys Rainbow Six Siege suffers from having unrealistic proportions on every single aspect ratio you can play on. UNLESS. You set your aspect ratio to 21:9 WITH Wide screen letterboxing turned on. Then all of a sudden the game looks like you are playing it in VR with realistic doorway and room sizes. The wildest thing I've ever found in a game I enjoy. Edit: 1 thanks for the likes i guess? I always comment and forget. 2 Yall are wild. Love you. But you're wild. I do enjoy the game but yes I hate it too like everyone. Prevalent hackers in at least 1 in 5 games along with new mechanics and balancing of maps. It is ridiculous compared to what it used to be. It's a sad mockery, one could even say a vicious mockery to those who love Tom Clancy.
Part of me has to wonder if a big factor in the "video game" scale goes back to the influence of Halo and games with a similar background - where these earlier 3D games had egregiously tall environments because they were originally designed to be played from a different perspective. With Halo, specifically, environments are so tall because it was meant to be a top-down RTS game. There was never thought of a ceiling or what would be up, so walls and such were extended upwards to show boundaries. Similar effects exist in games originally meant for third-person play, since once again the camera is higher than the player's head looking at least slightly down at all times. So in theory, game and environment designers end up building out the world to scale - but they scale it for the perspective of the higher, further away camera rather than the model of the individual. This then bleeds into FPS design and ends up a staple accidentally.
In Halo games in general you are master chief and really big. The chief would have to duck and hunch awkwardly to navigate one of our houses. And within Halo he's kinda midsized. The environment's also have to be navigable for Elites and hunters. I don't know exactly what the design process is but I imagine levels are designed and then enemies are placed. They wouldn't want players to easily be able to cheese big hunters by getting them stuck in choke points so it's better to make areas huge. Also later when dealing with the flood you have the same issue that narrow choke points would make it hard to get surrounded and trivialize fighting a very scary enemy. The open spaces let them rush and leap around comfortably.
I think this makes sense. There were games that had cameras that interacted with collision too, so they'd have to duck under door frames or trail behind you to go through a window. Making those ingresses larger would probably make for more seamless camera follows and smoother gameplay.
@@steelerfaninperu as Yahtzee once said, the third person camera is like the working class, if you can't control it, it will try and kill you. Smooth camera is a high priority in third person games, dying because of the camera perspective being weird is so frustrating and feels like "not my fault" death which makes people want to quit playing. Doors too big doesn't do that.
your channel has seriously got me to look at 95% of the games i play differently, i now catch myself aimlessly wandering around looking at small details that dont matter way more often than i used to, and i love it so dearly
This video really holds the vibe of someone who found something that genuinely interests them and wanted to share every detail of it and we're just nodding along because it is, in fact, very cool.
9:39 That’s a shop door and most stores like old ones that sell trinkets now have that big aesthetic door that brings your eye to it. When I played rdr2 I remember doors being basically being a couple inches taller than Arthur
There used to be a rumour in Hollywood that they would make the door frames in old Western sets smaller than usual in order to make the leading man look bigger by comparison when he walked through them
@@matthewhassett870I think we can safely say that absolutely happened but whether it was 10% or 80% is the big question. Much funnier to imagine they gave everyone comically large doors to exaggerate the illusion lol
Call of Duty really is an incredible spectacle of what it looks like when thousands of talented people create and construct a beautiful virtual world and then use it for the most brainbaby slop for dummies thank you austin for making it feel like all this effort was for something meaningful somehow
okay, well, that's your opinion I guess. I'm a graduate and I really loved MW2019, both as a game and as a storytelling exercise and vehicle for uncomfortable ideas. But sure, maybe I'm a big dummie and it's all just fascist noise, and these thousands of talented artists and writers are just mashing their peripherals like monkeys to make this stuff.
Another great video. Keep it up. I wouldn't have given this game a second glance without your video. I still won't, but I gave it a first glance through your video and you showed me some cool stuff.
Interestingly, due to the way Minecraft works, doorways are the bare minimum size, as are beds. However, most builders overcompensate and make things probably 30-50% larger than they would be IRL due to being able to only work in increments of one block easily. I'd love to hear you talk about this, curious if you've ever thought about it.
A lot of tactical shooters, due to trying to present a realistic scenario, do scale very well. Ready or Not and Ground Branch have very pretty maps in different ways. Ground Branch has a level that takes place on a super believable and high fidelity representation of an Oil Rig, complete with multiple Loading bays, Offices, Utility rooms, Maintenance catwalks, and Dorms for the workers with fire-exit lines that glow in the dark if you shoot out the lights. Ready or Not's level design in particular is incredibly believable (if you ignore that all doors swing both ways for some reason) in that there are like 20 levels and every single one feels lived in and eerily empty. So many locations feel like you shouldn't be there... Like you could see someone going about their day normally in that very spot, just an hour prior to you getting there.
Another one that does it really really well, to the point that I kinda want him to check out too is Escape From Tarkov. The maps are full of immersive details like Scavs dragging in barrels into abandoned houses to keep warm, or the corpses and bullet holes, casing and other droplets of blood actually allowing you to trace and map out the entire gunfight that occurred like a detective, and so much more! It really is the best example of Enviromental Storytelling I've ever seen in any media, and I don't say that lightly
"Ready or Not's level design in particular is incredibly believable (if you ignore that all doors swing both ways for some reason)" I honestly think that the doors open both ways so you don't break your legs trying to kick them in from the wrong side, altho it'd be funny if they remove that one just to see how many people will break their ingame legs until they realize.
This was my assumption as well, sleeping in shifts is common in a lot of scenarios, and a bunch of paranoid terrorists would absolutely have some people awake and on watch at all times so shared beds makes 100% sense to me. In fact, I feel like the number of beds found works out pretty much perfectly for the number of people, given that you don't want to have everyone needing to be on equally spaced 8-hour sleep shifts (thus having exactly 5 people asleep at one time) so you would need space for maybe 10-12 to sleep at once, and when less people are sleeping it just means some folks can either skip sharing a double bed, or avoid using the mattress-on-floor setups.
Amateur astronomer here, the streaking of the stars is simply someone taking a picture and moving the camera on accident during the brightness adjustment typically used in night mode images. When you use a night mode on a camera, you must remain still as it collects as much light as possible. If you dont, light streaks are super easy and ruin your pretty space picture instantly. Believe me, my shaky ass knows. ;-;
One thing I think contributes to the uncanniness of this whole mission is this overwhelming sense that you are encroaching upon this space and you are, by all means, not welcome there. You, as the player character, feel so big because of the devs' dedication to realistically proportion the house and this makes you feel like an invader. There is very intentional contrast between the black, bulky army uniforms, and the clean, sleek interior of the kitchen. Immediately, alarm bells are going off in your head that this is not a Place you are meant to be. There are a lot of invasions in this series, yet somehow the one that actually feels most tangible takes place in the most domestic, mundane setting you can imagine. Fascinating stuff!
i think its worth thinking about that people feel this way cuz what does it say about what people are used to seeing? what would be the “right place” for a soldier? wherever theres any kind of building theres homes lives and everyday people, but military propaganda makes us see non western architecture and think a soldier wouldn’t look out of place
Its precisely because its familiar, its an invasion of YOUR sanctum, rather than someplace already ruined, or mentally squared away as "Abode of The Other" like all the middle east home invasions
In terms of realistically proportioned doorways, the first one that came to mind is Minecraft. But as expected, doors in that game always feel sorta cramped to me.
minecraft doorways are about the right height and 25-ish% wider than real doorways. however the player model is about 33% wider at the shoulders than a real human
Valheim has quite small doors, but also offers the option to build a double-sized gate door meant for the outer perimeter of your base. I always use those gates for my house instead. It just feels right you know. Like a breath of fresh air.
from a young age i was always blown away at the attention to detail in cod games. back when they did kowloon walled city, my brain caught on fire being able to actually walk through it
I absolutely love your videos, brother. They’re vibey af. Anything that makes you stop and think, or “smell the roses” so to speak, I’m all about. I’d like to see you check out some of the maps in Hitman: World of Assassination (the newest Hitman series). Chongqing has some chill vibey energy to it that you might like.
Thank you for this video. I really enjoy this level of attention being paid to something like a CoD mission (and your commitment to reviewing such interesting details), and I truly felt validated by the venn diagram you created (as someone who inhabits the same region). It reminded me of playing Call of Duty: Black Ops during high school, and how I became obsessed with the setting of one of the missions. The 'Numbers' mission was set in Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, and while playing it I found the atmosphere of a tightly enclosed urban space seemingly endlessly 'stacked' on top of itself to be so beautiful and intriguing. I replayed the mission countless times to explore the (extremely) linear environment, and even today I can visualize so many scenes and settings around the level. In particular, I loved the audio engineering of the level which often meant you heard voices, music, and other daily life sounds in the background (often muffled by doors and through walls) as you pass through the level. It just gave this 'lived-in' feeling that isn't often found in CoD environments. My interest in Kowloon City led high-school age me to doing extensive research on the history of the city, how it was built, how it functioned, and what daily life was like for residents. It was surprising how limited material there was on the subject at the time, and I had to use inter-library loan to borrow the few english books about the city I could find from a university on the other side of the country. It was so fun to learn more about a place that captured my imagination in a video game and to try to understand what it was really like as a place in our world. While I havent played the mission (or CoD) in years, so much of what you talked about in this video reminded me of how I felt while playing 'Numbers' and it was really nice to remember all of the details that drew me to the level and down the research rabbit hole that followed. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and I'd love to see more content like this in future.
I’m a firm believer that there should be a video game world museum or archive, there is so much work that goes into to these environments that deserve some form of preservation.
Building an oversized house (or, more realistically, an oversized room or two in an old warehouse) has been a lifelong dream of mine, id love to see you do it
I honestly think that there may be people willing to even pay for that (either to live in it if its not too big or as an artwork), so you got not that bad of an idea on that, not sure if it'd actually be profitable to do (if you'd do it as a business idea instead of just for yourself) tho
@@Unknown_Genius I could see it working as a tourist trap style attraction, a big house built near an american interstate. my dream house was at a 6x scale, but even 1.5x or more likely 2x would be good for wandering through and a gift shop
Funny thing about scale is if you take any old game or even modern ones and make it run in VR stereo you suddenly notice things like say a pencil, a bottle or a coffee mug that looks fine on a monitor are actually comically large and its not an error of VR scale setting, if you consider characters to be the point of reference in vr and they look just fine everything they are supposed to be using in the environment is huuuuuge
11:04 I used to watch a youtube RPG Gamer (Keith Ballard) and he would always play the game of looking at bookcases and seeing how long until the devs repeated books. Another thing he brought up was double door hinges, where the door can go both ways which doors don't do. Another thing was Beds in video games, normally beds aren't made and the characters sleep ontop of them XD Another thing was mirrors, if they did actual reflections And Lastly he studied Geology so he would always keep a tab on Bassalt Collums, since they are weird rock formations and Games usually used those to show alien/fantasy stuff. The only game I'm pretty sure they had this was "Call of the sea"
@@anon6706dcs is the name of a combat flight sim WT is war thunder GHPC is Gunner HEAT PC which in its own right is a tank term for targeting but also the name of a PC game about tanks
I actually know the answer to the question at 09:46, being a game developer has finally paid off! It's because of a handful of factors, chief among them field of view. Your real life FoV is about 180 degrees around your head, PLUS a bit of inferred vision in your periphery. IRL, you can see around (and even a bit behind) yourself very well. In a video game, your full possible field of view is usually between 65 degrees and 90 degrees, which is as you might have guessed, a LOT less than 180 degrees. This is in part because you only ever play video games looking through a small window into the eyes of the character you're playing as, that window being your display, which in real life represents a fraction of your 180 degree field of view. If you set the FOV in the game to 180 degrees, everything looks massively distorted (which is a relative term), because the full extrapolated FOV of that segment in your real life view is closer to 1800 degrees (which, you know, is too many degrees). Now, the reason everything is scaled so big in video games is because we as developers need to account for the fact that you can't actually comfortably see the space that you're in. Try to imagine this or even test it if you'd like. Restrict your real life FOV down to as close to 65 degrees as you can get (just guess, it doesn't really matter) and then try to walk around your own home where you spend most of your time. You'll notice it's very difficult to identify space and feel comfortable because everything is so close together, or you need to rotate quite a bit to see something you could normally see from this position already, and that's because of your tightened FOV. Everything will look quite small and far away, and it might make you a bit dizzy. So we scale everything up in video games, give you space, let you look around even though things are further away than they normally would be, and in turn the player feels more comfortable because they have more space. Interestingly, if you had a display that wrapped around 180 degrees of your real life vision (we'll get to VR), video game scale would look bad and unsettling, which is a common problem for users of ultrawide displays like myself. This is also a major consideration in VR development, as we now have to ignore years of industry standard and start making things normally sized again because the FOV is much closer to the realistic 180 degrees we have, which is the opposite of what we've been doing for years. If you played a VR game with a 90 degree FOV you'd be vomiting in seconds. In the specific case of Call of Duty, there's also the consideration of controller movement, though to a lesser extent. Most players on a controller can't rotate in place comfortably, so giving them a bigger space to perform a circular rotation motion just makes things easier for them. Holy shit. It's actually the Bureau.
over time I feel like your videos have gotten more and more meta and philosophical in their critical analysis of games and I'm honestly here for it. you have a great ability to delve deeper into the tough, difficult to completely grasp or explain, artistic experience of a lot of games you've made videos on. and you do it in a way that may not completely explain the technical details of it, but does an excellent job of what it's like to actually experience. I really enjoy the way you convey the moments in games that exist between the action, especially in open world games. In my experience these are some of the most immersive moments in games, where you are no longer just experiencing the story through your character, but instead, the story takes a backseat to you freely exploring and experiencing the moment it's taking place in. It's an artistic experience that is unique to video games that your videos do an excellent job of capturing.
i just can't believe how good this channel is. i have been watching for years and years (since like 2015 or smth i want to say?) and it just keeps getting better. I love watching the channel grow.
Man, I just love this man. He could make a video about the types of sand in EA games and I’d gobble it up. He could make a video about clouds or sunshine and I’d watch it. I love this channel.
and mmo buildings are 17277374717284774% larger, personally i like a bit oversized the way screens are creates a claustrophobic feeling when realistic scaling is involved but mmo scale always bugs me it just looks big bloated and silly
The little spiel about the valid criticism of the game, whilst also being in our little corner rn admiring things like this. I really adore your channel and your content man
Thank you for being a chill guy who looks really closely at locations in video games. As a fellow chill guy who looks really closely at locations in video games, I'd like to recommend that you take a close look at the Mizoil Gas Station in the opening section of Resident Evil 2 Remake. It's SWIMMING in the details of a Japanese development team trying to re-create an authentic American Mid-West Gas Station from the late 1990s. (Honestly the whole game is full of interesting spaces like that, but the Gas Station in particular is a place I've lost over an hour of my life marvelling at.) Please continue making good videos.
Oh I love that gas station. I saw an interview with the developers where they said they had to completely remodel that area from scratch because they didn't realise how much bigger American gas stations are compared to Japanese ones. I'm not American either so I can't speak to the authenticity of the final one but I still love it, it's so atmospheric and effective as a starting area for the game
omg the planes!! i absolutely love the way you go through to touch on all of the fine details and little bits that add up to make the beautiful bigger picture of a game. i've never played any call of duty games, but this made me really appreciate the vibes/energy of and hard work that went into creating this game and this mission in particular. i love these sort of "deep dive into the details" videos that you make, i could(and do!) watch them for hours!
1- Be your most comfortable self this fall with MeUndies Get 20% off your first order, plus free shipping, at MeUndies.com/anyaustin
2- I love this video. I really do. Have a great day.
it's been 28 years... maybe i should buy underwear.
That’s crazy, I also love this video.
@@danhectic5629 No. Go one year more.
have you played dragon age: origins?
I really loved this video too, thank you Austin.
The "I wanted to show you this because I thought it was cool" mentality really is the bedrock of what I think UA-cam SHOULD be and started as. You love to see it.
I miss the old youtube of this flavour.
Me at the zoo by jawed is literally just this.
What do you mean youtube isn't about spending millions on stupid explosions and overedited dopamine brain rot with overly saturated uncanny thumbnails
Thats your takeaway? Im halfway thru the video and still dont see the point of it. This guy is just making statements
That bureau of labor statistics appearance is an unexpected legendary coincidence
My jaw literally hit the floor when I saw it, 10/10 cameo
I am too new on Austin's channel to get it. I need to do a deep dive into his unemployment videos.
@@bahamutbbob you're in for a treat
@@bahamutbbob im genuinely excited for you. also im expecting an update when that deep dive concludes :)
amazing deep cut reference for the developers to put in, so glad any_austin is being referenced in modern games
door video would go hard i think
If I saw that in my recommended, Id click it so fast you have no idea.
I have watched like 20 videos already about doors in videogames. What's one more? (it's hell yeah!)
So fucking hard I need to know the scales in games
@@Dr_mafario I'd click it in a jiffy.
"Did you know... Did you.. .Did you know that jiffy.. Did you know.. Did you know that jiffy is a measure of time?" -Nick
@@cornyFisher7 Just wait till you notice the scale in old 2000's MMO's. Double height doorways? Nah, try 20x scale.
You noted the plane!!! :D
I intentionally put them in there, mainly because I'm a plane nerd (so I request FX to make sure the lights were correct) but really it adds subtle realism and atmosphere super easily. Making it feel more grounded and authentic. Audio did a great job with adding the distant plane sound too.
Also, I took note of the normal flight paths aligned to that location this level was based on, so they fly similar to them. Just an extra tidbit for ya.
1:1 scale was a huge deal for us and we wanted to portray it well. We did more tricks to help make the level feel claustrophobic, which all adds to the intimacy and authenticity the level provides.
I really enjoyed the video -- Love the fact you looked around at all of the detail, nicely done!
Really awesome stuff, thanks for going the extra mile to make video games special!
I haven't played a cod campaign since the original modern warfare trilogy (which I really loved!), but seeing the level of detail in this vid makes me wanna try this one out!
omg even the path!! crazy! I love when stuff has so many details in it, and even though most of it will not be noticed actively, I really think it adds so much to the overall vibe
I wonder if he's realized he has a dev response in the comments lol
You did a stellar job :)
That is so freaking cool. You are the type of designer we need. Your doing gods work sir. 🫡
Another thing I’d add is, as someone from the part of London this level is set in, it literally looks EXACTLY like this. The terraced houses, the cobblestone paths, alleys, etc. is almost picturesque in how similar it looks like Camden.
Even the interiors of the house and how the rooms are all placed with the large staircase going all the way up is how most of these multi-level townhouses are designed inside.
Went to London, and specifically Camden last weekend. Looks pretty similar I'd say.
Could watch this man count how many bricks are in a brick house
Literally. ‘Counting all the blocks in Minecraft’ next hot video
I always under estimate how many bricks are in a wall. Then there’s usually 2 layers. It’s funny to see how far guesses off are through since I never do construction and never see more than like 5 loose bricks laying around for context
Let's goooo
"not one brick. not two bricks. not three bricks. not fou
As a painter, i wish he would narrate the paint drying as i waited for next coat...
I find the way you view games to be really romantic. Not in the love and relationship sense, but in the classical artistic movement sense. It’s really touching, in a way that’s hard to describe. Just seeing your appreciation and joy of airplane lights is just oddly moving to me.
This! I couldn't find the words for his vibe, Austin just really enjoys these worlds and sees the beauty in em!
It's a very ADHD ADD big Tism way of looking things that I appreciate. Rise of the divergents
I think he puts into words fleeting thoughts we all have while gaming. Who hasn't stopped to soak in the atmosphere from time to time. He found a way to cover games and gane design in a unique way.
@@badcornflakes6374 It's pretty basic artistic analysis but the gaming community is strangely resistant towards letting those views into their space. not criticizing his work at all, I think it's great, it just only seems unusual because so many gamers don't seem to partake in serious critical analysis of other mediums, or if they do they do it in a very limited capacity, so someone like this seems unusual because it is for the video game space even though it's normal in other mediums.
Classical artistic movement sense is a good comparison. He really is just taking the same approach that art critics of other mediums do towards gamers, but a lot of gamers really hate that shit and fight against it. the early 2010s had a few publications like Killscreen that were trying to bring this sort of serious artistic analysis to video games but they were widely shunned by capital G gamers and other gamergate types.
Just wanted to add my read of that sky as someone whose occasionally done amateur night sky photography. I recognise those star shapes as a medium length exposure (think single digit seconds) where the tripod was accidently bumped halfway through.
The initial bright circle is the star for most of the exposure, then there's a line to another dimmer circle. The connecting line is the travel of the star during the camera movement and the dimmer circle is the position of the star for the rest of the exposure.
I'm not sure it explains why this photo is in the game but thought it was interesting context. Someone's photo they didn't care to retake.
Most skyboxes that you see in games are real photos, so it's most likely a case of someone using a botched skybox and calling it good enough.
They probably thought no one would look at it for to long loll
oh cool! that makes perfect sense! if someone on the dev team took the photo, it makes sense that they'd be using a longer than normal exposure. having a little more light in your 2D assets is always helpful, because it's easier to play with the values that way. and they might be in a place where the stars aren't that bright to boot. they probably had more than one shot I'd guess though. so in the long run it was maybe an accidental pick. some lighting artist going through the batches of sky shots, picked one with good color, but didn't notice the smudged stars maybe. if it was intentional though, that's a fun choice to make.
@@XPthis Not only that, but nigh photography does require a decent bit of exposure time to not look grainy
@@caseymarie625 but then someone else thought they would look at it for long, so they placed two airplanes on the sky
"First mission to impact the zeitgeist in a decade"
What about that mission where you pay respects?
Good point actually
I still think it's tragic that "Press F to Pay Respects" became the meme, instead of the xbox's prompt which was "Press X to Pay Respects". 'X' rhymes and rolls off the tongue so much better than 'F'
@@any_austinit's only 2 months short of a decade at least 😂
@@themonotonist That's because we press X to doubt, thanks to LA Noire.
@@themonotonistNo? X is to doubt.
This is why only some people can make memes, some of you just don't understand it
7:13 I think there IS a point to the airplanes though. CoD IS first and foremost a war game. But those passenger airplanes are saying, very very subtly “you are not in a war zone.” Everything points to the domestic nature of the scene and that added touch just makes it all the more immersive. And I guess, maybe, makes you feel like you’re intruding upon peace, or that maybe just over the other wall on the other side are the neighbors living their lives unaware of what’s about to happen in this house.
Yep - as a Brit, I adored those levels. This one I replayed so many times and pondered over the reality of doing a job like that, in a street just like home. Picadilly was cool, too, but there's just enough "Call of Duty" in it to make it less immersive. But Clean House, man, I've stood in streets just like that, I've stayed in houses just like that house. It felt very very close to home, and that just makes it super engaging
My takeaways from this video:
1. Infinity Ward needs to do something other than a Call of Duty game.
2. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the true ultimate power in the universe.
I mean the original infinity ward team did Titanfall so....
@@thechugg4372West and Zampella are design masterminds. To so regularly be behind some of gaming’s best shooters is incredible. MOH AA, COD1,2,4 and 6, Titanfall games… incredible!
@@thechugg4372 Besides the Star Wars Jedi games, Respawn is only really interested in Apex. They’ve more or less killed the Titanfall franchise unless they actually come out and shock us all with a TF3 announcement. But I’m more so referring to the current IW team creating a new IP that isn’t just another fps
Imagine if they got Infinity Ward to do a gritty realistic campaign shooter like Spec Ops The Line.
I feel like the discussion of the plot in that game makes people forget about the insane atmosphere and worldbuilding, and how they created such an apocalyptic-feeling warzone within a modern environment like Dubai. I would LOVE to see a return that type of setting.
It’s legit wild these studios are locked to call of duty and will be for years. You almost wonder with stacked yearly releases in rotation COD would benefit from literally being given to dozens of devs, they can all cycle between their interpretation of a game and theme. Probably have some misses, but some unique experiences and would be the only franchise that is so damn popular that it could survive multiple different variations and versions and interpretations of a “COD” game. Shame money won’t let it happen, could really be a cool thing and free the 3 rotating devs up to do something new too
Counting up to 9 and then revealing there were 52 economics books was a master stroke
That scene moved me
That’s just basic macro economics
Agreed
9 count with the 52 reveal was absolutely chef’s kiss material
No he just thinks 52 comes after 9. Which it does. Right? Right??
Comedic genius
i think the mission is so uncanny because the house seems so peaceful and something you’re used to seeing clean and orderly but you’re following a group of soldiers with night vision which completely contrasts from anything you’ve seen before. the best way i can describe it is like walking on carpet with shoes on, it just doesn’t feel right
It feels like a real house not a video game house. Not just the scale but the colors and cleanliness
Also because it looks a lot like the house I grew up in and lived for 21 years
@@freekmulder3662^not enough ppl talking about this
Austin: "walking on carpet with shoes on" is so viscerally evocative I love it
True.
Real size spaces in video games feel weird because of the incredibly small FoV making it feel claustrophobic. The human eye has an average overall fov of 120 degrees, with different levels of blurry where only the pinpoint area where you are "looking at" is actually in total focus (if you don't have vision ailments). In game, however, you typically play at 60-90 degrees FoV, which makes everything zoomed in closer, and not only that, you have the whole screen in clear focus so you as the player can manually look around for details. This difference makes it feel uncanny because it feels like you're walking around with a short range binocular, but if you try to scale up the FoV it will instead feel like you're using a fish-eye lens. The human vision is just inherently different compared to the camera-style vision they use in FPS games.
this was a really insightful comment and it deserves more love.
I'm not entirely satisfied with this explanation. Real life actually feels more zoomed in than video games do. We have more peripheral vision, but we experience it differently. We don't see the distortion you see at the screen edges at, say, 90 degrees FOV or higher in video games.
If you compare a flat-screen game with its VR version, the VR image will look more zoomed in, with details appearing larger.
I think the main reason video games don't have real-size spaces is for maneuverability, we don't have issues with real-size spaces in video footage so I don't see why video games would be different.
You pretty much summed up exactly how I feel and why I always crank my FOV up to 100° if given the option. I don't like feeling like I'm piloting a character through the screen of a cell phone. I want to have my bearings. I want to know where I am.
@@subject_nThe brain compensates for and counteracts the fisheye effect irl.
My FOV is about 200
All the bins are empty, but the dumpster outside is brimming with bags. Clearly, it was "bin night" as we call it in the UK, and it is due to be collected the next morning.
Terroists even pay respect to bin day.
homie thinks the UK is the only place that has a set garbage collection day
@teflonhammer3465 I don't think that at all. I just wanted to clarify that we call it "bin night". Garbage collection day doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it?
On the topic of the scale of video game environments often being too large: The movement speed in most games is also really fast compared to normal human walking/running speed. This is probably why building interiors in particular are so oversized, because otherwise they would be both harder to navigate, and make it really obvious just how fast you are moving.
I once made a counter-strike map with a realistically scaled house, and it was hilarious just how quickly you moved from one end to the other.
one reason why rainbow six siege felt so good to me, slooow movement and everything happens usually inside
This is something that's was way more exaggerated in early shooters like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D that had people running at like, 40-60 mph or something insane. As environments have gotten more realistic so has the speed of our characters it seems.
Even now high realism type shooters like Rainbow Six will have reasonable move speed but something more stylized like the new Doom or something sport significantly faster movement.
I think it's interesting how that goes together. It would feel weird to have a super speedy character in a realistic environment. I bet it would also feel bizarre to have a realistic move speed in a scifi environment.
Game scale is also relevant for third-person sequences, and it's exaggerated even more in some racing games. Turns out in real streets you can't necessarily duck behind a wall for cover from gunfire, but if that little wall was 30% bigger, you could; and you can't weave through traffic at a gajillion miles per hour. But if there's 60+% of a lane between two adjacent cars, you can squeeze through comfortably, but close enough to make you feel like Steve McQueen.
@@cptnraptorYup, I feel racing games are not added onto this topic enough.
Because the more realistic a racing game city is, the more it negatively affects gameplay. Something like Most Wanted 2005 had absolutely gigantic roads, it's almost comical when you stop to look at it. On top of that the sidewalks don't make much sense either, you can tell they're there to functionally act like red and white striped areas in a professional track.
And don't get me started on how the map makes less sense the more you stare, and I thought the lack of pedestrians was uncanny.
@@gibleyman would be weird to have peds in a racing game
I lived in Hawaii and for awhile I lived in these old basically slave cottages that had been refurbished into modern houses. They were pretty small, just a large square separated into four identically-sized rooms. So this meant the bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom were all the same size.
The bathroom was, comparatively, gigantic, and it reminds me a lot of the bathroom you point out in the older CoD games. I lived in a Call of Duty house. It was, essentially, an asset flip.
"I'm proud to present to you the employment summary for Majora's Mask's Clock Town." "What the heck was that?"
The gorons are having another turf war with the dekus dw
Game on gamer
That freeze frame at 15:30 freaked me out because I've been there in person, and it matched my memory perfectly
Just from first guesses, a game with realistically proportioned doorways may be half-life 2. Its been talked to death, but source engine and half-life 2 devs really have a STRANGE way of constructing their buildings and level designs
Ever since i did some environment design on a work project that involved bookshelves, i cannot stop noticing how many video game bookshelves have been filled up by total psychopaths. They're always totally disorganized, books strewn all over the place in bizarre positions or with the spine facing inward so you cant even see what book it is, and ten copies of the same book on one shelf.
But have you also tried to design interesting bookshelves with like only 5 book models to choose from, and not have it look like its really is just 5 books?
til I'm a psychopath, I always shelf my books with spines facing inward so no one can see what books I have, and packing them tight, horizontal and mostly double layered like in a box, because I don't have enough shelf space.
@@UndeadKIRA Oh for sure, it's almost never worth putting in tons of effort into such small details that will only get noticed by the type of people that watch videos about unemployment rates in skyrim, lol :P
@@halberdli431 That does sound like a good way to maximize shelf space if you need it. Why don't you want people to see what books you have though?
@@UndeadKIRA I have and it's a nightmare. You really need to break up the repetition so turning some books the other way or upside down is a necessity. You basically need to create a mess that's realistic enough to be done by someone accidentally but you do it intentionally. And yeah, at some point you do say "fuck it" and start copying groups of books if not the whole shelves.
Austin, I know you're not a coward.
To that end, RELEASE THE FULL CUT of this video with "not 10" through "not 51".
Hell yes
I would become a Patreon member for this
Release the "joke not gone too far, but exactly right"-cut! DO IT
But that's what makes hilarious, going up to 9 for no reason only to say 52
He should go all the way to 50 then skip 51.
"Not 48, not 49, not 50 but 52!"
I never realized video game doors are so…huge! I’d love a video talking about other video game houses and how ridiculous or realistic they look.
One of my favorite video game doors is the Safe Room door from L4D. It’s just iconic
Day 1 of waiting for an IRL video covering "Unremarkable and odd places in The Bureau of Labor Statistics"
1:02 COD4 - Black Ops 1 is a run that will never be be matched.
BO2 and MW2019 get honorable mention
Bro Bo2 gets on the list man cmon
Wasn't expecting a shout out in an Any Austin video, of all places.
Massive fan of your work dude, I really appreciate the support!
Make more video game videos!!!!
(Do whatever you want)
@@any_austin Well now I gotta!
So good to this channel doing well. Keep it up, @any_austin
You've heard of "unremarkable and odd" now get ready for "remarkably very realistic"
I was NOT prepared for the Bureau of Statistics to show up holy moly
i want him to make a video examining the building now but i feel like studying a building in dc closely would not go over well
I like to imagine they didn't stack the place with beds because maybe they planned to have a couple guys on each floor that are awake as, like, lookouts or something.
The craziest little detail for me at 15:40 is the fact that they got rid of the bike lane. In the 1990s, that area definitely did not have bike lanes like it does now. That's such a cool little detail.
ok but the reveal of the building at the end actually made me gasp out loud. Any Austin lore going crazy rn
11:39 If I had to guess: Object and wire was placed by one dev, another dev (or maybe same dev) comes back around and deletes the object while rearranging objects on the table to better suit the room, forgetting or not noticing there was a wire connected to said deleted object. I could see them using some sort of in-engine "make wire" tool to connect the plug to any object and use splines so they can control how the wire wraps around objects. It could also be that the wire doesn't render in the editor.
I figured there was probably a model of like a damaged wall or something with a piece of wire sticking out of it. It's not like the wire itself was individually modeled and its placement could be controlled
as someone that's done 3d modeling, my professional opinion is that they didn't want to model some annoying little machine that connects to the wire
i can only imagine how excited austin was to discover that the building was the bureau of labor statistics
he probably went “ah , would you look at that” which in any austin speak in an extreme expression of excitement
It shooketh me
The ability of this guy to talk for so long without actually saying anything but still make it seem interesting is amazing lmao
Literally cheered for the Bureau of Labor Statistics appearance. Austin, the universe SEES you.
The bureau dropping at the end felt like the twist at the end of a film 😂
There’s a mission in MW2 (original) where you’re going through an entire neighborhood then a bunch of restaurants and stuff, and my favorite part of the entire level is just combing through the houses and looking at all the little details, I LOVE little details in COD games
Fuck I forgot about that. I should’ve had a section about it!
@@any_austin I could spend hours in each parody restaurant the developers conjured
Was amazed this was mentioned neither in the video or earlier comments. Clean House shouldn't stand out as much as it does coz as usual with good things in CoD, it was pioneered in MW2
Another person in the tiny Venn diagram overlap!
Yes! I loved that! I don't think I've seen nearly as good a depiction of American suburban sprawl vibes in a shooting game before or since. The idea of a Russian tank tearing through your local Burger King is far more evocative than a scene of the White House under attack.
false advertising, by the end of the mission the House is everything but Clean.
My first draft of this video was literally “How Clean Is Call of Duty’s Clean House?” going around nitpicking the dirty diaper hamper
@@any_austinsome of us like the smell of feces
Cleaned up the terrorist, and the baby's diaper
@@samholdsworth420 BROTHEEEEER
The trash cans are clean tho
As a long time fan from the eggbusters days, it makes me so happy to see this channel become so successful. And you didn't do it by 'selling out', you did it by finding a niche that fits your personality and skills better than eggbusters ever did. Makes me so proud. Have you been able quit that job you used to complain about yet?
10:26 The garbage cans being empty could actually make sende. I havent played the game so I dont know much of the backstory, but if there is a terrorist cell hiding, trying to keep a low profile, they could resolve to other ways to dispose their garbage, like burn it in a fire pit or something, so they dont leave any clues a possible investigator could find, like scrabbled notes left on a paper, wandering in a garbage bin, only to be find by law enforcement that is stacking them out or something.
"I just wanted to show you all this weird stuff I found cause I thought it was cool."
Love this line, and love this channel.
the way you said "I love that!" about the airplanes felt so genuine lmao and I agreed wholeheartedly
13:30 should've said the overlap was "two people, me and you". I would've clapped and cheered and said my name.
Hey! I also like obvious army propaganda!
Constructive criticism:
"It's three people, me, you and Hideo Kojima"
Would've been on a similar level of viewer interaction as "You're breathtaking!"
After watching a bulk of Austin’s videos, I am beginning to imagine his ideal or near perfect game:
An open world physics sandbox that has the map size of an American state. The map is an atmospheric liminal space devoid of people, and you simply explore it and uncover its secrets.
Entire apartment blocks, shopping centers, and subway stations all open and available to explore. All devoid of life with a natural 24 hour day and night cycle.
If you find a bike you can pick it up and ride it. If you find cars, and the proper keys, you can turn on the vehicle, drive it, crash it, and watch the gas tank go empty.
Although the graphic fidelity of the game is limited, the mood and atmosphere of the game would be uncannily life like, allowing the player to soak in the moment and truly enjoy the world around them.
Aside from finding unique and entertaining parts of the map that are “secrets” there is no win-state, and the only progression in the game itself is finding items and vehicles that allow you to traverse the environment in easier or unique ways.
I would love to see this “explorative sandbox” game. A chill, subdued and almost relaxing experience of a night walk or a morning jog personified into a game.
need sounds of traffic and activity in the distance but when you go there still nothing and no one, would love a game like this, needs a lot human touches like bakeries having detailed real recipes and unique paintings and art of all sorts and music, not overworld music mind you but say you enter a musicians house and while they arent there music just comes from where the would be playing and you can only hear it there it isnt reused, also really good water physics and in depth control of your movements so even without br you can really exist in the world, play with the water in a fountain and watch how it splashes and moves and the light refracts, and devs often have little old games they made so on peoples pcs in the game they could gather up their old little made by just them games and put them on the pcs and you can play them, and you can change a lightbulb and it’ll actually change how the light looks with dif kinds of bulbs, which you can find at the hardware store of course, there will also be trains running as if people were there and you can ride them around and look out the window and just watch the world go by, and when it rains the audio of supposed people and activity that isnt there changes to match and okay so i dont want a state, i want a couple of small cities that look like a city but if you stop to think about it they're not that big with lots of specific details and one is costal and you can just hang out at the beach and watch incredibly realistic physics simulated waves crash and listen to the sounds and play with sea weed that washes up and build sand castles,
also you can touch grass in game cuz thats basically what this is lol the desire to touch grass but in a way you cant irl, alone and undisturbed able to take your time and just stare at a snail as it goes by
That kind of sounds like project zomboid if you turned off the zombies.
@@thegheymerz6353 It is kinda chill tbh.
@@thegheymerz6353 Thinking about this with your comment in mind, I agree to an extent. I was thinking more of a “Cataclysm, Dark Days Ahead” but in the first person with a similarly overly complex and innovative crafting system, and with no monsters.
The coin game but there are lil robots
Youre yhe only human though
So fun fact about the very accurate Washington dc, from google maps you can actually use a program to download the 3D models google generates. These are pretty rough models, but what it does allow is for you to get a true-to-scale low res version of the buildings. And from there you can easily use them as reference in your 3D modelling program to accurately recreate them. This is almost 100% what they did as getting a drone to scan the buildings or modelling from images alone would be a lot more difficult.
The videogame scale thing is actually also really weird and on a case-by-case basis. It's very obvious in VR ports like Skyrim VR, where cups and fruits will be absurdly large, but chairs are perfectly normal in size because they need to be that for characters to sit on them like normal people. It's a bizarrely mismatched world where everything feels like it's completely normal or suddenly cartoonishly big like a comedic prop and when playing the game on just a monitor, you don't notice how people drink out of gigantic cups while eating mega-apples with normal sized bread next to them from normal sized plates.
The weird scaling is intentional for the most part, the lack of immersion made by a typical screen distorts the perception of proportion in a lot of things, makes things overly tiny or giant in relation to each other in all sorts of fun ways even if they are just fine. Hitman's whole world is comically oversized to account for that, which becomes pretty fascinating to explore if you play the vr port.
I think part of it is to hide the fact that in a lot of video games, characters don't really hold objects. They're just kind of attached to the hand with the fingers fused together and stiffly curled around an object without actually touching it. It's too time consuming to properly animate intricate details like that when there's other more important things to focus on and larger objects make it look less noticeable.
13:19 "I just wanted to show you all this weird stuff I found because I thought it was cool." This is why we love you Austin
How do you keep getting funnier? Getting better? More eloquent? More creative? You sir Austin, are a master of the arts ✨
(familiarity enhances the humour but yeah)
i've been watching since 2013 and i had no idea he was blowing up right now, just came back recently. this is great wtf
@@TeamTeddy666wild journey I’ve been here for about two years and saw most of it. I also proudly hold the title of the patreon subscriber to send a video idea so absurd he raised the price to request a video from $10 to like $200 the same day
@@TeamTeddy666 To be honest, I miss his old stuff. Don't get me wrong, this stuff is great, and I'm glad he's blowing up. But I much prefer "off-the-cuff" Austin to this character. Now he's the "boring but quirky" guy, instead of whatever words you'd use to describe his older presentation style.
Eggbusters and VGWham are peak. I really wish he'd do some more of that, in addition to this kind of stuff. Video essays are nice, but so was the other 10+ years of vids I subbed for.
I lost it at the lore accurate Bureau of Labor Statistics. Art imitates life imitates art imitates life imitates…
This video brings back vivid memories from when I was in 2nd grade playing MW2 on my dad's Xbox 360. I used to really enjoy just starting an empty lobby and looking at all of the little details on each map, really trying to find every possible little area and sound effect that plays in specific areas. The problem was being completely alone in those maps made them feel like horror games instead, and I was always paranoid about some sort of entity existing in the game that wished me harm. It's strange because I've only ever felt that with MW2, other games didn't scare me the same way. It got to the point that sometimes I would have to quit my exploration early because I was convinced something was after me in the game lol.
On the topic of the scale of homes, and since you are from New Orleans, I wanted to tell you about a Doll house I almost rented back in 2019.
I believe it was over on State street (coulda been Nashville), south of St. Charles. There was this large mansion, and behind it, a smaller "guest house" house on the property. I was looking to rent, and I found it on Zillow. The owner spoke normally of the house. She never mentioned the size. Rent was roughly $1400. You can see the house from the street, its at the back of the driveway.
Anyway, upon entering the thing, I noticed how cramped everything was. The ceilings were low, and everything inside was painted green. It was the most bizarre place ive ever seen. Then later I read a story about how back in the day, the ultra rich would build entire houses for their kids. At any rate, I felt like a giant inside. Im a 6ft tall man btw. The kitchen counter was tiny and low. It was like being in a dream, it was so bizarre. I also remember the stairwell being cramped af. I didnt have time to stay long, but i noped out of there quickly. I remember, it was multiple stories, maybe 3, but even so it felt like I was inside of a shoebox. And it was dank and dark in there with the walls being a grass green color.
P.S. im too good for editing on youtube. Thought you might gain inspiration by this house, should you ever encounter it.
Oh shoot I think I know exactly where you're talking about
Whoa
For the train being empty scenario, as someone who visits London a lot, a tube train in the middle of the night is most definitely possible to be completely empty, depending on the location and day of the week
Gotta feel for the drivers of those late runners, has to be creepy af knowing there's no one aboard.
Hell, it could after the tube closes too. Train returning to the depot or someone doing a testing or training run.
Ex-soldier here! Under some night vision, the lack of depth perception can cause things like stars to blur/appear double, we have to adjust our nvgs to different light levels, this is with usually dual feed nvgs not the gpvngs (with 4 tubes) that the characters are using (I have no experience with these) if the second level with stars has no night vision it would explain why theres no blur in that sky. I imagine the devs had to decide to focus on the skybox under nods OR under naked eye.
I believe this is still a thing with GPNVGs.
So I was thinking the same thing but even with in my experience the light enhancement allows you to see more stars
interesting
Maybe, but in this case the blur is clearly caused by the camera moving during exposure. It's far more likely that someone took the picture(s) and didn't notice, or they decided that not enough players would notice.
The lack of depth perception was so weird. Never really got used to it. Thanks for the flashback
They use photogrammetry for the environments. So they take high quality photos to generate the 3D models. That’s why the buildings in the trailer are real buildings. They might make some aesthetic alterations but overall the buildings will be real scans
For all the details that the level gets right, the thing that annoys me is that the cable that you found, that doesn't connect to anything, has the wrong plug and socket for the UK.
Fun fact. Tom Clancys Rainbow Six Siege suffers from having unrealistic proportions on every single aspect ratio you can play on. UNLESS. You set your aspect ratio to 21:9 WITH Wide screen letterboxing turned on. Then all of a sudden the game looks like you are playing it in VR with realistic doorway and room sizes. The wildest thing I've ever found in a game I enjoy. Edit: 1 thanks for the likes i guess? I always comment and forget. 2 Yall are wild. Love you. But you're wild. I do enjoy the game but yes I hate it too like everyone. Prevalent hackers in at least 1 in 5 games along with new mechanics and balancing of maps. It is ridiculous compared to what it used to be. It's a sad mockery, one could even say a vicious mockery to those who love Tom Clancy.
... So it's specifically made to be realistic if you have an ultra wide screen monitor?!
The wildest thing about this comment is the fact that someone said they enjoy rainbow 6 siege
@@Permafrost1 I enjoy it also. It's a good game. I didn't know that was controversial
@@geono4349its a buggy piece of crap that the devs refuse to actually address. its unbearable to play compared to year 3
@@tamtam.59bit of an exaggeration
Part of me has to wonder if a big factor in the "video game" scale goes back to the influence of Halo and games with a similar background - where these earlier 3D games had egregiously tall environments because they were originally designed to be played from a different perspective.
With Halo, specifically, environments are so tall because it was meant to be a top-down RTS game. There was never thought of a ceiling or what would be up, so walls and such were extended upwards to show boundaries. Similar effects exist in games originally meant for third-person play, since once again the camera is higher than the player's head looking at least slightly down at all times.
So in theory, game and environment designers end up building out the world to scale - but they scale it for the perspective of the higher, further away camera rather than the model of the individual. This then bleeds into FPS design and ends up a staple accidentally.
I was just playing Halo CE a minute ago wondering why everything in the game was so fucking HUGE
In Halo games in general you are master chief and really big. The chief would have to duck and hunch awkwardly to navigate one of our houses. And within Halo he's kinda midsized. The environment's also have to be navigable for Elites and hunters. I don't know exactly what the design process is but I imagine levels are designed and then enemies are placed. They wouldn't want players to easily be able to cheese big hunters by getting them stuck in choke points so it's better to make areas huge.
Also later when dealing with the flood you have the same issue that narrow choke points would make it hard to get surrounded and trivialize fighting a very scary enemy. The open spaces let them rush and leap around comfortably.
I think this makes sense. There were games that had cameras that interacted with collision too, so they'd have to duck under door frames or trail behind you to go through a window. Making those ingresses larger would probably make for more seamless camera follows and smoother gameplay.
@@steelerfaninperu as Yahtzee once said, the third person camera is like the working class, if you can't control it, it will try and kill you.
Smooth camera is a high priority in third person games, dying because of the camera perspective being weird is so frustrating and feels like "not my fault" death which makes people want to quit playing.
Doors too big doesn't do that.
@@AmazingMrMe123 I had forgotten about that Yahtzee line and it floored me here
your channel has seriously got me to look at 95% of the games i play differently, i now catch myself aimlessly wandering around looking at small details that dont matter way more often than i used to, and i love it so dearly
This video really holds the vibe of someone who found something that genuinely interests them and wanted to share every detail of it and we're just nodding along because it is, in fact, very cool.
9:39 That’s a shop door and most stores like old ones that sell trinkets now have that big aesthetic door that brings your eye to it. When I played rdr2 I remember doors being basically being a couple inches taller than Arthur
There used to be a rumour in Hollywood that they would make the door frames in old Western sets smaller than usual in order to make the leading man look bigger by comparison when he walked through them
The doors also do just look like that in the old parts of New Orleans, most of the French doors are a good 2 feet taller than normal doors.
@@matthewhassett870I think we can safely say that absolutely happened but whether it was 10% or 80% is the big question. Much funnier to imagine they gave everyone comically large doors to exaggerate the illusion lol
Call of Duty really is an incredible spectacle of what it looks like when thousands of talented people create and construct a beautiful virtual world and then use it for the most brainbaby slop for dummies
thank you austin for making it feel like all this effort was for something meaningful somehow
okay, well, that's your opinion I guess. I'm a graduate and I really loved MW2019, both as a game and as a storytelling exercise and vehicle for uncomfortable ideas. But sure, maybe I'm a big dummie and it's all just fascist noise, and these thousands of talented artists and writers are just mashing their peripherals like monkeys to make this stuff.
Another great video. Keep it up.
I wouldn't have given this game a second glance without your video. I still won't, but I gave it a first glance through your video and you showed me some cool stuff.
Reasonable
Interestingly, due to the way Minecraft works, doorways are the bare minimum size, as are beds. However, most builders overcompensate and make things probably 30-50% larger than they would be IRL due to being able to only work in increments of one block easily. I'd love to hear you talk about this, curious if you've ever thought about it.
The reveal of the lore accurate of labour statistics was the best dopamine hit i've had all year.
A lot of tactical shooters, due to trying to present a realistic scenario, do scale very well.
Ready or Not and Ground Branch have very pretty maps in different ways.
Ground Branch has a level that takes place on a super believable and high fidelity representation of an Oil Rig, complete with multiple Loading bays, Offices, Utility rooms, Maintenance catwalks, and Dorms for the workers with fire-exit lines that glow in the dark if you shoot out the lights.
Ready or Not's level design in particular is incredibly believable (if you ignore that all doors swing both ways for some reason) in that there are like 20 levels and every single one feels lived in and eerily empty. So many locations feel like you shouldn't be there... Like you could see someone going about their day normally in that very spot, just an hour prior to you getting there.
thats more of a recent thing, older tactical shooters didn't scale that well
Another one that does it really really well, to the point that I kinda want him to check out too is Escape From Tarkov. The maps are full of immersive details like Scavs dragging in barrels into abandoned houses to keep warm, or the corpses and bullet holes, casing and other droplets of blood actually allowing you to trace and map out the entire gunfight that occurred like a detective, and so much more!
It really is the best example of Enviromental Storytelling I've ever seen in any media, and I don't say that lightly
"Ready or Not's level design in particular is incredibly believable (if you ignore that all doors swing both ways for some reason)"
I honestly think that the doors open both ways so you don't break your legs trying to kick them in from the wrong side, altho it'd be funny if they remove that one just to see how many people will break their ingame legs until they realize.
the thing with the beds seems fine because surely they would not all sleep at the same time
Getting into a bed that's warm from someone else just sleeping in it tho? 😱
@@ACuriousTanuki sounds good if you are a military person / terrorista
What if some of them are gay
This was my assumption as well, sleeping in shifts is common in a lot of scenarios, and a bunch of paranoid terrorists would absolutely have some people awake and on watch at all times so shared beds makes 100% sense to me. In fact, I feel like the number of beds found works out pretty much perfectly for the number of people, given that you don't want to have everyone needing to be on equally spaced 8-hour sleep shifts (thus having exactly 5 people asleep at one time) so you would need space for maybe 10-12 to sleep at once, and when less people are sleeping it just means some folks can either skip sharing a double bed, or avoid using the mattress-on-floor setups.
@@ACuriousTanuki don't Google Schlafgänger if this is a concept you don't like
Congrats on all the attention you are getting lately. Underrated channel
Soon to be overrated
Amateur astronomer here, the streaking of the stars is simply someone taking a picture and moving the camera on accident during the brightness adjustment typically used in night mode images. When you use a night mode on a camera, you must remain still as it collects as much light as possible. If you dont, light streaks are super easy and ruin your pretty space picture instantly. Believe me, my shaky ass knows. ;-;
15:47
Actually mindblown. What a crazy cameo from a Call of Duty game of all places 😂
Glad you’re still doing videos on atmosphere of places in games.
One thing I think contributes to the uncanniness of this whole mission is this overwhelming sense that you are encroaching upon this space and you are, by all means, not welcome there. You, as the player character, feel so big because of the devs' dedication to realistically proportion the house and this makes you feel like an invader. There is very intentional contrast between the black, bulky army uniforms, and the clean, sleek interior of the kitchen. Immediately, alarm bells are going off in your head that this is not a Place you are meant to be. There are a lot of invasions in this series, yet somehow the one that actually feels most tangible takes place in the most domestic, mundane setting you can imagine. Fascinating stuff!
i think its worth thinking about that people feel this way cuz what does it say about what people are used to seeing? what would be the “right place” for a soldier? wherever theres any kind of building theres homes lives and everyday people, but military propaganda makes us see non western architecture and think a soldier wouldn’t look out of place
Its precisely because its familiar, its an invasion of YOUR sanctum, rather than someplace already ruined, or mentally squared away as "Abode of The Other" like all the middle east home invasions
Im so fucking glad this got recommended to me. Absolute golden content and comedic timing
Looking forward to the 30% larger than normal house video
13:03 Incredibly based take
In terms of realistically proportioned doorways, the first one that came to mind is Minecraft. But as expected, doors in that game always feel sorta cramped to me.
minecraft doorways are about the right height and 25-ish% wider than real doorways. however the player model is about 33% wider at the shoulders than a real human
Valheim has quite small doors, but also offers the option to build a double-sized gate door meant for the outer perimeter of your base. I always use those gates for my house instead. It just feels right you know. Like a breath of fresh air.
from a young age i was always blown away at the attention to detail in cod games. back when they did kowloon walled city, my brain caught on fire being able to actually walk through it
I absolutely love your videos, brother. They’re vibey af. Anything that makes you stop and think, or “smell the roses” so to speak, I’m all about.
I’d like to see you check out some of the maps in Hitman: World of Assassination (the newest Hitman series). Chongqing has some chill vibey energy to it that you might like.
Thank you for this video. I really enjoy this level of attention being paid to something like a CoD mission (and your commitment to reviewing such interesting details), and I truly felt validated by the venn diagram you created (as someone who inhabits the same region).
It reminded me of playing Call of Duty: Black Ops during high school, and how I became obsessed with the setting of one of the missions. The 'Numbers' mission was set in Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, and while playing it I found the atmosphere of a tightly enclosed urban space seemingly endlessly 'stacked' on top of itself to be so beautiful and intriguing. I replayed the mission countless times to explore the (extremely) linear environment, and even today I can visualize so many scenes and settings around the level. In particular, I loved the audio engineering of the level which often meant you heard voices, music, and other daily life sounds in the background (often muffled by doors and through walls) as you pass through the level. It just gave this 'lived-in' feeling that isn't often found in CoD environments. My interest in Kowloon City led high-school age me to doing extensive research on the history of the city, how it was built, how it functioned, and what daily life was like for residents. It was surprising how limited material there was on the subject at the time, and I had to use inter-library loan to borrow the few english books about the city I could find from a university on the other side of the country. It was so fun to learn more about a place that captured my imagination in a video game and to try to understand what it was really like as a place in our world.
While I havent played the mission (or CoD) in years, so much of what you talked about in this video reminded me of how I felt while playing 'Numbers' and it was really nice to remember all of the details that drew me to the level and down the research rabbit hole that followed. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and I'd love to see more content like this in future.
I’m a firm believer that there should be a video game world museum or archive, there is so much work that goes into to these environments that deserve some form of preservation.
internet historian video game museums, this is my kind of archeology
Building an oversized house (or, more realistically, an oversized room or two in an old warehouse) has been a lifelong dream of mine, id love to see you do it
Remarkable and odd dream. Hope you see it to reality someday
@@PretzelSage thank you for your gift of hope, Pretzel Sage. It means the world to me
I honestly think that there may be people willing to even pay for that (either to live in it if its not too big or as an artwork), so you got not that bad of an idea on that, not sure if it'd actually be profitable to do (if you'd do it as a business idea instead of just for yourself) tho
@@Unknown_Genius I could see it working as a tourist trap style attraction, a big house built near an american interstate. my dream house was at a 6x scale, but even 1.5x or more likely 2x would be good for wandering through and a gift shop
Funny thing about scale is if you take any old game or even modern ones and make it run in VR stereo you suddenly notice things like say a pencil, a bottle or a coffee mug that looks fine on a monitor are actually comically large and its not an error of VR scale setting, if you consider characters to be the point of reference in vr and they look just fine everything they are supposed to be using in the environment is huuuuuge
06:38 Oh hi Mark 👀
video starts at 00:00 for those wondering
Sage advice
Always on the lookout for these time saving comments ty!
Thanks
huge time saver, ty 🙏
thanks mate I was already wondering when the video would start
The bureau of labor statisics. the bureau of labor statistics is real!!!
There’s no UA-camr that speaks to my soul quite like you do. I thought I was alone when it came to thinking of weird shit like this
11:04 I used to watch a youtube RPG Gamer (Keith Ballard) and he would always play the game of looking at bookcases and seeing how long until the devs repeated books.
Another thing he brought up was double door hinges, where the door can go both ways which doors don't do.
Another thing was Beds in video games, normally beds aren't made and the characters sleep ontop of them XD
Another thing was mirrors, if they did actual reflections
And Lastly he studied Geology so he would always keep a tab on Bassalt Collums, since they are weird rock formations and Games usually used those to show alien/fantasy stuff. The only game I'm pretty sure they had this was "Call of the sea"
13:33 youve clearly never met anyone who plays DCS, WT, GHPC etc etc
Bro what do those abbreviations stand for?
@@anon6706dcs is the name of a combat flight sim WT is war thunder GHPC is Gunner HEAT PC which in its own right is a tank term for targeting but also the name of a PC game about tanks
I actually know the answer to the question at 09:46, being a game developer has finally paid off!
It's because of a handful of factors, chief among them field of view. Your real life FoV is about 180 degrees around your head, PLUS a bit of inferred vision in your periphery. IRL, you can see around (and even a bit behind) yourself very well.
In a video game, your full possible field of view is usually between 65 degrees and 90 degrees, which is as you might have guessed, a LOT less than 180 degrees. This is in part because you only ever play video games looking through a small window into the eyes of the character you're playing as, that window being your display, which in real life represents a fraction of your 180 degree field of view. If you set the FOV in the game to 180 degrees, everything looks massively distorted (which is a relative term), because the full extrapolated FOV of that segment in your real life view is closer to 1800 degrees (which, you know, is too many degrees).
Now, the reason everything is scaled so big in video games is because we as developers need to account for the fact that you can't actually comfortably see the space that you're in. Try to imagine this or even test it if you'd like. Restrict your real life FOV down to as close to 65 degrees as you can get (just guess, it doesn't really matter) and then try to walk around your own home where you spend most of your time. You'll notice it's very difficult to identify space and feel comfortable because everything is so close together, or you need to rotate quite a bit to see something you could normally see from this position already, and that's because of your tightened FOV. Everything will look quite small and far away, and it might make you a bit dizzy.
So we scale everything up in video games, give you space, let you look around even though things are further away than they normally would be, and in turn the player feels more comfortable because they have more space. Interestingly, if you had a display that wrapped around 180 degrees of your real life vision (we'll get to VR), video game scale would look bad and unsettling, which is a common problem for users of ultrawide displays like myself.
This is also a major consideration in VR development, as we now have to ignore years of industry standard and start making things normally sized again because the FOV is much closer to the realistic 180 degrees we have, which is the opposite of what we've been doing for years. If you played a VR game with a 90 degree FOV you'd be vomiting in seconds.
In the specific case of Call of Duty, there's also the consideration of controller movement, though to a lesser extent. Most players on a controller can't rotate in place comfortably, so giving them a bigger space to perform a circular rotation motion just makes things easier for them.
Holy shit. It's actually the Bureau.
I really would love to see videos on 1:1 scale environments in games now.
Like the door thing / spatial accuracy he talked about? I am actually craving the same thing.
over time I feel like your videos have gotten more and more meta and philosophical in their critical analysis of games and I'm honestly here for it. you have a great ability to delve deeper into the tough, difficult to completely grasp or explain, artistic experience of a lot of games you've made videos on. and you do it in a way that may not completely explain the technical details of it, but does an excellent job of what it's like to actually experience. I really enjoy the way you convey the moments in games that exist between the action, especially in open world games. In my experience these are some of the most immersive moments in games, where you are no longer just experiencing the story through your character, but instead, the story takes a backseat to you freely exploring and experiencing the moment it's taking place in. It's an artistic experience that is unique to video games that your videos do an excellent job of capturing.
I also just realized your most recent videos have been blowing up, I hope that continues! Keep it up :)
i just can't believe how good this channel is. i have been watching for years and years (since like 2015 or smth i want to say?) and it just keeps getting better. I love watching the channel grow.
Man, I just love this man. He could make a video about the types of sand in EA games and I’d gobble it up. He could make a video about clouds or sunshine and I’d watch it. I love this channel.
Videogame houses are 30% larger?? well that's going to haunt my future
and mmo buildings are 17277374717284774% larger, personally i like a bit oversized the way screens are creates a claustrophobic feeling when realistic scaling is involved but mmo scale always bugs me it just looks big bloated and silly
The little spiel about the valid criticism of the game, whilst also being in our little corner rn admiring things like this. I really adore your channel and your content man
Thank you for being a chill guy who looks really closely at locations in video games. As a fellow chill guy who looks really closely at locations in video games, I'd like to recommend that you take a close look at the Mizoil Gas Station in the opening section of Resident Evil 2 Remake. It's SWIMMING in the details of a Japanese development team trying to re-create an authentic American Mid-West Gas Station from the late 1990s. (Honestly the whole game is full of interesting spaces like that, but the Gas Station in particular is a place I've lost over an hour of my life marvelling at.)
Please continue making good videos.
Oh I love that gas station. I saw an interview with the developers where they said they had to completely remodel that area from scratch because they didn't realise how much bigger American gas stations are compared to Japanese ones. I'm not American either so I can't speak to the authenticity of the final one but I still love it, it's so atmospheric and effective as a starting area for the game
omg the planes!! i absolutely love the way you go through to touch on all of the fine details and little bits that add up to make the beautiful bigger picture of a game. i've never played any call of duty games, but this made me really appreciate the vibes/energy of and hard work that went into creating this game and this mission in particular. i love these sort of "deep dive into the details" videos that you make, i could(and do!) watch them for hours!
There needs to be more videos appreciating small little details like this because this is how we bring the "soul" back into gaming.
The door you gave as an example in Red Dead Redemption makes sense to be big in realism, it's a fancy door to a bank, not a home doorway
These stars are just astigmatism simulator
I guess Gaz canonically has periodic astigmatism.