Urban Planning in Games

In this GDC 2024 session, examine all the basic steps of city creation, why urban planning is important for game environments, and how it can be useful for creating readable and distinguished urban space.
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[@Schekelstein]

Very interesting talk. Nightcity was a masterpiece of architecture. The way they played with building sizes and the spaces between those megastructures where you have this claustrophobic spaces in which you feel swallowed by the city, but still can glance trough the layers of streets and bridges between buildings above and beside you and still have an idea where you are.

[@Schekelstein]

@ I don’t see your point sry. I don’t have to go to one of the mentioned city’s to find dead corners, i can find the in RL just around the corner ;). And no, i don’t have to read a book about architecture to appreciate it. But i see that it upsets you, so let me elaborate. What I meant by masterpiece was that the architecture managed to convey a very specific feeling for the world in which you find yourself. Back alleys in the shadow of high-tech skyscrapers and giant highways that make you feel as if two cities were built on top of each other, one devouring and draining the other. I think game architecture should allow itself not to exist for its own sake, but rather to function as a vehicle for an overarching world design. And Nightcity does this in a way that I've never experienced in any other game.

[@oldcowbb]

​@Schekelstein i can assure you he is american, he only knows the grid system

[@Rhythmier]

​@oldcowbb people can be different, and it's the Internet. Idiots can at least try to sound smart without getting known IRL ya?

[@tengerzander7921]

Very cool video, city design knowledge transfered into game city design and that knowledge is been respected.

[@PlebNC]

Ah, so this is person responsible for me enjoying walking around Night City instead of fast travelling everywhere.

[@Saint_Gerund]

Same here. I just took my time and traveled almost everywhere by feet once I realized that it’s such fun not just to chase between the quests. Kudos to CDPR for putting so much effort into urban and suburban areas - they are all unique and well designed overall just to hang around. Truly good design.

[@daniilnoun8262]

if she joined cdpr in 2022-2021 as she says, she is definitely not the one responsible for that LOL

[@KaiHydra]

Exactly what I needed!

[@curioussoul5151]

Thank you so much! I learned a lot with your presentation

[@ideallyyours]

45:07 pretty sure that's Erwin Heyms

[@jnantes0]

second!

[@daniilnoun8262]

No disrespect to the presenter, but why is she presenting this for 2077 when she joined the company in 2022? At most she would have worked on Phantom Liberty, which is a tiny part of the city, and even then I am not sure since they probably had some idea for the planning in 2021 already.

[@iFukuyama]

It felt like she was answering a different question for every question. Her reaction to the last question was especially weird.

[@clessili]

Not really? if you didn't follow the release of the game, the metro was famously kind of absent, and only metro stations where visible, so it could be assumed that their planning and development was skipped, or not implemented entirely because of constraints, or as an after-thought. The question was a bit tongue-in-cheek.

[@huiAPPOAJ]

they spent so much time building the city they forgot to make a good game

[@giampaolomannucci8281]

your opinion is not shared by the majority of players, according to its success

[@huiAPPOAJ]

@@giampaolomannucci8281 tells a lot about the intelligence of CP2077 players

[@danielkjm]

Cool, shame the game was terrible, all that verticality, only to fall into buildings, Invisible walls and no mission exploring that.

[@teevee23]

So, the whole game was terrible because you were limited from entering most buildings?

[@danielkjm]

@teevee23 Verticality is how a game can explore its height to make interesting missions or ways to complete it, like in Disonored. Were whole areas can be skipped, find treasure and even find alternative ways to complete the objective.

[@iFukuyama]

@@danielkjm "like in Disonored. Were whole areas can be skipped" That's a pretty poor pitch.

[@hadriscus]

@@iFukuyama no... that's excellent design. He means any given environment is not just a corridor for the player to follow, there are several different pathways and you can take one while completing disregarding the others. Makes it feel more like a real place, and allows replayability

[@iFukuyama]

@@hadriscus What percentage of players do you reckon played through the game multiple times, and then also did not follow the same biases the second time? Creating whole areas that players don't even know about is not aspirational. It might situationally be an acceptable side-effect of other value-adds.