Video Game Geography: Difference between revisions

For all of these the technical justification is about the same: a spherical world is somewhat difficult to implement and display properly, especially on the computers and game consoles of yesteryear. Rarely are these ever a real [[Flat World]], [[Ringworld Planet]] or other exotic [[World Shapes]] - they do exist in games but they're not the reason for this trope.

Related to [[World Shapes]]. Compare [[Patchwork Map]]. Contrast [[You Fail Geography Forever]]. Has elements in common with [[Space Compression]] and [[Units Not to Scale]].

* The SNES game ''[[Terranigma]]'', contains not one, but two world maps - [[Hollow World|underworld Earth]] (although there is no way for you to cross all the way around in any direction, as you cannot cross the lava seas), and overworld Earth - both of which are toroidal. In the overworld, which is supposed to be '''Earth''', go north from Greenland and you'll end up in the Antarctic.

* ''[[Tail Concerto]]'' uses the "there's more to the world but you can't go there" method ([[Justified Trope|Justified]] by claiming navigation systems go haywire when you reach the edge of Prairie and it's just too dangerous to continue, but somehow Waffle and friends manage to make [[Continuity Cameo|Continuity Cameos]] in ''[[Solatorobo]]''). [http://www.cc2.co.jp/mamoru/bronx/img/bronx.jpg This map] shows Prairie (''[[Tail Concerto]]'') relative to Nipon (from the ''Mamoru-kun'' games), but leaves out future installments like Shepherd (''[[Solatorobo]]'') and whatever land ''[[Strelka Stories]]'' will be based in.

* In ''Tribes 2'', the levels go on ''forever'', but once you pass the mission boundaries, it's just looped copies of the main mission area, making it sort of a toroid.

** I heard that they were mapped onto a gigantic globe that seemed infinite because it was too big to go around in a match time-limit, even in a Shrike.

* The ''[[Civilization]]'' series.

** ''[[Civilization]]: Call to Power'', in which the world forms were referred to as flat, cylinder and donut shapes.

** The world of ''[[Civilization]] Revolution'' follows the cylinder definition, and yes, that means fighters and bombers are unable to cross the icy ends.

* Azeroth in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' is apparently flat, judging from the fact the sun rises and sets at the same time all around the world. It's also [[Space Compression|very small]] (somebody calculated that the surface area of Kalimdor is a few hundred square miles).

** Azeroth, in this example, would be a Type 2 flat world -- do you ''really'' want to spend three days on the boat to Northrend?

* ''[[Ultima Online]]'' standard torus world map.

* The Blue Sphere special stages in the ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' series also take place on checkered donuts, though this ''could'' be chalked up to ring symbolism. If you're feeling incredibly charitable.

* ''[[Tetrisphere]]'', of all things, really should have been called Tetristorus.

* ''Populous: The Beginning'', is toroidal although it's drawn to ''look'' spherical.

* In the ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' series at least from ''[[Final Fantasy I|I]]'' to ''[[Final Fantasy IX|IX]]'', if you fly off the east/west side of the map, you show up on the west/east side of the map. Good and logical for a spherical world, yes? However, if you flew past the north/south border, you would end up at the south/north border... thus leading us to realize that all Final Fantasy worlds in fact, behave as toroids like the picture above.

** Taken to an extreme in ''[[Final Fantasy XII]]: Revenant Wings'', in which an essentially flat [[Floating Continent]] works by the same mechanic.

* The titular setting of ''[[Might and Magic]] III: Isles of Terra'' had a toroidal map. I, II, IV and V all had flat and rectangular worlds, but that was because they were [[Flat World|Flat Worlds]] (in IV and V's case, opposite sides of the ''same'' world).

* ''[[Asteroids]]''? More like ''As-toroids''!

* ''[[Star Control]] 2'' had the various planet surfaces that you explore as cylinders (despite seeing the planet floating there as a sphere in 3 different modes of the game, and being able to orbit and '''run into''' them during [[2-D Space|Ship-to-Ship combat]]).

** It gets worse. The space in which combat takes place is ''also'' toroidal.

* [[Fury 3]] maps are donut-shaped, apparently, despite them supposedly taking place over a small portion of a spherical planet's surface.

* Justified and/or Lampshaded in ''[[Creatures]]'', where the "planet" is actually stated as being cylindrical. [[Fridge Logic|...With very odd gravitational properties]]. (And there's no cylinder world trope, but this also fits in [[Bizarre World Shapes]].)

* Completely averted in Jeff Weeks' [http://www.geometrygames.org/HyperbolicGames/index.html Hyperbolic Games]. You can play a simply maze game or pool on the surface of a sphere (or torus, or even on something insanely exotic called a "hyperbolic surface").

* [[Peasant's Quest|Peasantry]] appears to be cylindrical. Going up the northern border will take you to the southern one, while passing the southern border takes you up north. East an west are blocked by an [[Insurmountable Waist High Fence]], and a giant cliff. The former can be broken on one point by scaring a horse. This reveals a hidden area with a character you need to talk to. The later has a passage leading to [[Big Bad|Trogdor]].

* Averted in ''The Getaway'' series, the makers prided themselves that you could navigate your way through the game using a [[Real Life]] A-Z.

** Played straight however in ''Black Monday'' on the tube train putting Knightsbrige as the next station on from Holborn on the Piccadilly Line.

* ''[[Myst]] 4: Revelation'' has Haven, which prominently features a rocky seacoast, a jungle, a swamp, and a savanna all within '''yards''' of each other.

* ''The Tomb of Sammun-Mak'', episode 302 in the Telltale [[The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police|Sam and Max games]], has the duo's [[Generation Xerox]] ancestors, Sammeth and Maximus, taking the Disorient Express ''train'' from New York to Egypt. Don't ask how that works. It's fitting, though; their descendants can ''drive'' to just about any destination they want, including Europe and ''the moon''.

* The arcade game ''Harley Davidson: L.A. Riders'' includes Lincoln Fabrics, a relatively obscure local landmark, but doesn't put it on Lincoln Blvd. which gave the store its name. Why bother?

* ''[[Soldier of Fortune]]'''s last mission involves invading a German castle, under which the enemy has a submarine dock. Except that the Castle is the mountains, in a part of Germany that is far from the ocean.

* Averted by ''[[The Conduit]],'' which features very accurate (in video game terms) depictions of various Washington D.C. landmarks and neighborhoods. Even the Metro subway system's signage and stations are [http://www.examiner.com/x-14946-DC-Video-Game-Trailers-Examiner~y2009m6d30-Invasion-on-the-Blue-Line duplicated with remarkable fidelity.]

* In the expansion for the first [[Call of Duty]] game, a part of the game takes part in the Netherlands. Particularly in a mountainous area. Good luck finding mountains in the Netherlands, the closest available can be found a couple of hundred kilometers away, far outside the country.

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' also fits this, as the world is effectively compressed down, making all zones much smaller than they would be in "reality", which also leads to borders between zones being very clear (most notably in cases when there's two zones with very different terrain). An example of this can be seen when looking at any of Warcrafts comic or manga series. Traveling around in game will take a few minutes at most, but in the stories going from one place to another can take days.

* Averted in ''[[Penn & Teller]]'s Smoke and Mirrors'''s mini-game "Desert Bus", where the player makes a trip from Tuscon, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada by bus. Maximum speed: 45 kph. Pausing: none. Total trip time: Approximately [[Bladder of Steel|8 hours]].

* Later installments in ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]'' have explorable areas that are only 6-16 square miles. Compared to earlier installments with more realistically sized land masses (the landmass in ''Daggerfall'' is twice the size of Britain). This is largely the result of the switch between the randomly-generated content of the first two installments and the hand-crafted content of the later two. The time and expense of the latter method (which is the customary method in computer games) necessitated a vast decrease in the actual size of the game world. Using computers to procedurally assemble landscapes and settlements from basic building blocks allowed for the game world in the first two installments to have a 1:1 scale (and for the dungeons to be vast complexes) but had the drawbacks of making them seem generic and repetitive.

** ''[[Morrowind]]'' is actually something of an interesting case, thanks to recent technological developments. Because the world was hand-crafted rather than randomly generated, it still seemed just as large to players as the (in reality) much-larger Daggerfall. However, the ability to remove the persistent in-game fog in order to increaese visibility to realistic levels brings with it the uncomfortable realization that all of Vvardenfell's major settlements are about 100 feet apart.

* The later ''[[Ultima]]'' games also did this--the earlier games had a world map and separate cities, but the later ones had a single map where everything was laid out, which meant that a city only had a dozen or so buildings in it and the world was only a few miles around.

* The first ''[[Commandos]]'' game presented a rather strange image of 1940s Norway. Civilian housing was depicted as either half-timbered (rare in real life, and confined to older buildings in the capital and nearby areas) or curiously medieval-looking. One mission centered around sabotaging a railroad gun located in the lapp village of Masi, with a large ruined stone manor nearby. The real Masi is located far from any past or present railroads, and any building found in that area would be wooden.

** In ''Commandos 2'', South American piranha can be found in Burma and Thailand, and penguins (southern animals) frolick around a German destroyer in the North Sea. The manual mentions these discrepancies, and others; they are merely included to make levels more interesting.

** In the sequel, during the {{spoiler|Carnivale}} mission, Ezio can remain in disguise in a hostile city for a single night - but can still ride or take ferries to any location and back again and no time will have passed. Again, [[A Wizard Did It|The Animus Did It]] - the rest of the game are just earlier memories, especially as other parts of {{spoiler|Venice}} don't have {{spoiler|Carnivale decorations}}. If one revisits the area after finishing the sequence, the {{spoiler|decorations}} are still there.

* ''[[Metal Wolf Chaos]]'' has the hero defending the Statue of Liberty from a tank, which is rolling down a loooong suspension bridge that apparently leads right to the landmark. Perhaps the developers thought the tank would have looked lame if it took the ferry, which is the only real-life way to get to Liberty Island. Not to mention that, judging by the direction the Statue is facing, the other end of said bridge must be somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

* ''[[Ratchet and Clank]]'' has a lot of unique geometries, including the outside of a tiny moon similar to ''[[The Little Prince]]'', the inside of a sphere, and the outside of a '''cube''' with the gravity on the faces.

* All of the ''[[Grand Theft Auto]]'' games have had some form of this. The first 2-D games had you restricted to a completely self-contained city with no way out. ''GTA III'' had Liberty City walled in by ocean and mountains. Vice City, San Andreas, and the ''GTA IV'' Liberty City are all surrounded by ocean with no land in sight. Trying to go too far out makes you hit an invisible wall. However, the canon treats them as your usual coastal cities (e.g. one of Johnny Klebitz's patches states that he went to Los Santos on a motorbike). This is even noticeable in-game for ''GTA IV'', as the hills to the west of Alderney cut off rather abruptly into the ocean.

* ''[[Red Dead Redemption]]'' does this but does it better than the GTA games. The game world is almost entirely landlocked and there is land stretching out as far as the eye can see, you just can't access all of it thanks to canyon walls, mountains, rivers and lakes. Its actually been discovered that you can glitch your way beyond the game's barrier and that there is plenty of fully detailed space outside of the boundary.

** ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'' follows the same methods to box the player in. There are also a few blocked off roads to nowhere and collapsed caves that appear on the map but don't serve any importance, likely to be used in upcoming DLC content.

* Spoofed in ''[[RPG World]]'', where the universe has a tendency to make things that go over any edge reappear on the other edge, for instance, on the world map. Diane demonstrates this with punching another character by throwing her fist across the panel border.

* In ''[[Adventurers!]]'' (where RPG clichés have precedence over realism), a scientist makes the alarming discovery that [http://adventurers.keenspot.com/d/0345.html it is impossible for the world to be round].