- [Narrator] It's pretty cool to explore amazing fantasy
or science fiction worlds in video games, right?
Playing through games set on brand new worlds
is always great to escape into,
but honestly nothing beats playing a game
based on a place you know.
There's just something really cool about playing
through an area you recognize,
especially if it's been changed a little bit
to fit the new world of the game.
Hey guys, Arcade Cloud here,
and today we're counting down our list to
the top 10 video game locations based on real life.
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Number 10. Crysis 2 New York.
Crysis 2 was a pretty big deal when it was released
back in 2011.
It was the second installment of the Crysis series
and was the first game to use CryEngine 3
and be released on consoles.
The game took place in 2033
in a completely destroyed version of New York City
that has been evacuated due to an alien infestation.
The city fell into ruin when the U.S. military began
engaging the alien invaders, named the Ceph.
The city had seen a lot of fighting.
First of all, there was the initial war against the Ceph.
When that didn't work, the military actually began
to flood the city as a last ditch attempt
to destroy the Ceph.
That didn't work either but it did leave
the lower half of the city incredibly damaged.
The military in the game were even planning to launch
a nuke at the city if everything failed
but luckily that was aborted at the last minute
thanks to the events of the game.
It's pretty crazy to see New York so destroyed,
especially when New York is considered to be
one of the toughest and hardest cities in America.
Walking through the streets of a New York that has
been ravaged by the military
and an alien threat is pretty surreal.
Number nine. Stalker in Chernobyl.
April 26th of 1986 is a date seared in the memories
of everyone who lives in and around the Ukraine.
A massive meltdown in the nuclear power station, Chernobyl,
led to the nearby area being saturated by radiation
and to the government shutting the area off
from the local civilians.
It is in this area that Stalker is set.
In the game you wander the area around Chernobyl,
an area known as the zone in the game.
But this exclusion zone is not like the one we know
in the real world.
In Stalker a second explosion occurred,
and somehow that really messed up
the area around the power plant,
creating strange murderous spacial anomalies
and radioactive storms that look really pretty, apparently.
Well, pretty for giant radioactive storms over the corpse
of an abandoned nuclear power plant anyway.
Number eight. Infamous Second Son, set in Seattle.
In Infamous Second Son you take the role of Delsin Rowe
as he battles the department of unified protection
across the fictional Seattle.
The game takes place seven years after
the first infamous game in which most of
these super-powered conduits were killed by Cole MacGrath.
In this game the DUP are attempting to capture
the world's remaining super-powered people,
calling them all bio-terrorists.
When crafting their fictional Seattle,
the hometown of the studio who made the game,
they wanted to do it justice.
The end result is a beautiful recreation
that any resident of the city would be proud of,
me included.
From the crocodile to the sonic boom record shop,
to the huge space needle,
the city is recreated almost perfectly
with a few creative twists added in for good measure.
The dev team even added in smaller more unique aspects
of the city like Lincoln's tow truck,
which is a tow truck that literally looks like a foot,
and the elephant car wash.
It's not often that you see so much effort
and attention to detail for a location in a video game,
but Second Son pulled it off with ease.
Number seven. Tomb Raider 3, set in London.
While everyone might be getting excited over
the new Tomb Raider games and the new movie,
it's important to remember that the original
Tomb Raider series was pretty awesome too.
The game took place in a lot of different locations
but the one we'll be focusing on is the old city of London.
While in London, Lara Croft is searching for
the eye of Isis which was in possession of
an evil woman called Sophia Leigh.
Over the course of the level
we learn that Sophia is cooperation had performed
sick experiments on the people of London
all to try to achieve the goal of eternal youth.
Considering the game was released back in 1998,
the game has pretty good graphics for that era.
And I'm sure that those who lived
in the city of London were surprised to see their hometown
rendered in such levels of detail,
which would have been pretty rare at the time.
Number six. The Last of Us, set in Salt Lake City,
Pittsburgh, Boston and others.
The Last of Us did something really interesting
when it comes to the environments we play in.
It took the normal everyday sights of Salt Lake City,
and transformed it from what we know into a decaying,
post-apocalyptic world overflowing with nature
and of course fungus infested zombies.
For such an epic story,
an epic setting is basically required
and The Last of Us gives it's players all of that and more.
While we start the game in a completely normal town
albeit with a few more explosions and a lot more running
than you would expect from everyday life,
what you are quickly confronted with
is a world where humans just aren't able to take care
of the massive cities that they've constructed.
The city is covered in foliage and animals roam free.
Despite how pretty everything looks,
it's important to note that if humans did all die off,
then the level of nature probably
wouldn't get so high in reality as compared to the game
Salt Lake City is of course located in a desert,
and even small lawns need
to be gardened incredibly carefully.
The level of vegetation in the game just would
never get that high without human help.
Oh, and the real Salt Lake City doesn't have
public highway tunnels either.
Number five. Sleeping Dogs, set in Hong Kong.
In my opinion, Sleeping Dogs is a criminally underrated
action adventure game that you can play on both
last gen and current gen consoles.
It's set in modern day Hong Kong
and follows the undercover cop, Wei Shen
who attempts to infiltrate the Sun On Yee Triad.
The game is open world and reviews have drawn
a lot of similarities to the Grand Theft Auto series.
The only difference is this game takes place in
a completely different country.
The development team behind the game did a huge amount
of research into the city
and eventually visited it themselves.
In development diaries of the game,
they talked about how they saw the massive skyscrapers
right next to tiny little temples.
They wanted to bring that complex,
chaotic layered city to the game,
and then designed all of the gameplay mechanics around it.
In the game the main character can parkour across
four zones of the city.
The area is split up into four distinct areas.
North point, which takes it's inspiration from Mong Kok
and Kowloon central which is a high-end neighborhood
filled with modern buildings and skyscrapers.
Then there's Kennedy Town and the Aberdeen port.
While the game isn't modeled geographically after
the real world Hong Kong,
it's clear to see that a lot of effort
and time went in to creating the feel of the chaotic city.
Number four. Watch Dogs, set in Chicago.
Watch Dogs is another game that people like to compare
to Grand Theft Auto
but the game takes place in the windy city of Chicago.
The world of Watch Dogs is admittedly smaller than
the real world city of Chicago
and the developers were forced to cherry pick
some of the most obvious and recognizable landmarks.
While you'll be able to recognize the iconic Chicago skyline
there's a few notable omissions from the game version.
In the real world Chicago is a massive 600 kilometers large,
and the Ubisoft staff knew that such a big city
would be a challenge to fit into a game,
let alone make it fun to play in.
But that doesn't mean you won't recognize anything
from the game in real life.
If after playing a whole lot of Watch Dogs
you end up going to Chicago,
you'll probably end up feeling like you
know exactly where you are.
The game also has the city hot spots challenge
where you go over 100 different location from
the real world that are in the game
and then it tells you a whole bunch of history
and information.
It's not a one to one replica,
but it's a pretty impressive attempt.
Number three. Fallout 3, from Washington, D.C.
Have you ever wanted to see what Washington, D.C.
would look like after being hit by a nuclear bomb?
Not in the real world of course,
that would be pretty horrific, but in a video game.
Well if you've ever wanted to see that
particularly morbid wish come true,
you'll be able to fulfill it in Fallout 3.
It's equal parts eerie and cool to see recognizable
landmarks like the White House absolutely decimated
and reduced to piles of radioactive rubble.
You can walk straight up to things
such as the Lincoln Memorial
and see it in a new light, completely destroyed.
It's pretty spooky to walk through the charred streets
of the city of American politics
and see it reduced to such a state.
It's pretty upsetting.
With half of the iconic dome of
the capital building missing,
it's easy to imagine how much destruction
a real life nuclear war might do,
which is quite impressive for a video game to manage.
Number two. The Yakuza series, set in Tokyo.
The Yakuza series has always been known for
its high attention to detail.
And to be honest,
the game's depiction of the Kabukichō District
in Tokyo is seriously impressive.
Fair warning I suck at pronouncing any of these words.
The games are set in a fictionalized version
of the district known as Kamurocho
and the game feels almost identical to reality.
The small streets laden with signs and small shops
look almost identical between the video game and real life.
The city has been recreated in painstaking detail
to the point that when you're playing the game
it starts to feel less like you're walking through
a virtual world and more like you're walking through
the real one instead.
One seriously notable example is the Nakamichi street
which closely resembles the real Kabuki central road.
Both keep pretty much identical design elements
and the Toho building has been recreated
as a Kamaro theater in Yakuza six.
Like I said, this game series is no stranger
to the small details
and it must have taken forever to get
everything looking right in this game.
Number one. GTA five, set in Los Angeles.
Grand Theft Auto five is one of the most popular games
of this console generation
and considering it actually first released on
the last generation of consoles, that's pretty impressive.
Los Santos is a caricature of Los Angeles
but like all of the best caricatures it shares some
pretty obvious similarities with it's inspiration.
Rockstar put a lot of work into making a lot of
the settings in the game match up perfectly
with their real life counterparts.
Some of the most iconic recreations are
the Big Creek Bridge,
which in real life is the Bixby Bridge.
There's also the Los Santos observatory
which is the Griffith observatory in real life.
Then of course you have the most obvious Vinewood
and Hollywood signs overlooking both Los Santos
and Los Angeles in all of their glory.
And there you have it, out list of the top 10 video
game locations based off of real life.
Do you agree? Did we miss something?
Let us know in the comments down below
and don't forget to subscribe for more great videos
from Arcade Cloud on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Take care, and game on.