Places In Video Games That Make You Feel Temporary

Click here: sponsr.is/bootdev_daryltalksgames and use my code DARYLTALKSGAMES to get 25% off your first payment for boot.dev/! That’s 25% your first month or your first year, depending on the subscription you choose. What Megastructure did I miss? What is your favorite example? Let me know below!

bro i was like "eh its just architecture can't be that interesting" and now 36 minutes later im contemplating my existence and inevitable death

This may sound weird but I’m not afraid of dark futures like that depicted in Blame!, because I have faith in birds, and rats, and bugs. If the world became only cities a lot of animals would go extinct, but not all of them. Do you know that in very urban areas there is a type of squirrel that has evolved to have black fur, so that people driving cars can more easily see it and it doesn’t get run over as much. Life finds a way, because surviving is the definition of what life does. Even in giant megastructures life would find a way that humans could never have planned for.

The undercity of Coruscant is terrifying. Typically in Star Wars, the further away you get from Coruscant, the more uncivilized and crime-ridden the galaxy gets. Yet on Coruscant itself, the further down you go, the closer you get to the actual surface and humanity's original home, you see the same thing. What on the surface is a beautiful, luxurious city, is a metal hell of anarchy and filth. Many residents of the lower levels never see the sky, and long for a day they can ride up the elevator just once and experience the sun on their face. The very lowest levels are all but forgotten, and nobody knows if anything even lives down there. There could be entire nations down there, in the darkness, completely unknown to the galactic government above.

The best part of Blame! is the moment when the main character wanders into a huge open space, and an annotation on the page says that it's the room Jupiter was used to be in. As in, the planet. The City of Blame! is so much worse than just being a mere uninspired planetary-scale building, it's an entire solar system filled up to the brim with endless corridors, rooms and utility closets, build with no sense, rhyth, function or even purpose, because the humans are long gone and the building robots just continue at random.

I’m a civil engineer, so seeing infrastructure in games that actually looks structurally sound, constructable (soneone could actually build it), and appears functional is very cool to me. Anyone can draw up a massive structure, but when you see aspects of actual civil design (trusses, load bearing columns, soil anchors, erosion control, etc) it really adds to it.

Rainworld to me is the definitive superstructure game, the ecosystem that flourished in the desolate machinery makes everything seem so enormous, while playing the game you learn that every little crevice and pipe is the home of a dozen or so creatures, so when you see the scale of the world with thousands of components not only does it make these structures seem endless, but it also makes you feel like a simple rodent, crawling at random gods.

I love the world of Stray because it's a (moderately sized) megastructure, its former inhabitants are long gone and it's somewhat derelict. But also robots are now living there and have built a home in that place.

Humans have built megastructures before, we just don't recognize them as such. Think of road network infrastructure that spans continents or sprawling internet cables which connect the planet. We even create megastructures unintentionally, the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch for example, which is twice the size of Texas; or Earth Orbital Debris Field, which envelops the planet and contains 10,000 tons of man-made detritus. Most megastructures are built out of a very specific humanitarian need, or as a consequence of those needs.

This is maybe not quite a megastructure, but the massive, sprawling structure of Aperture Laboratories in Portal 2 always got me. Falling all the way down to what felt like the centre of the earth, seeunf the massive caverns filled with gigantic metal spheres, each one given exact measurements, everything felt so real and so horrific. The main imagery that sticks with me to this fay is the last thing you do before you make it into "Wheatley Laboratories", you have opened the gate, ascended up an elevator and theres just one staircase leading you up to the next area. All that surrounds you is spring scaffolds, each is at least 20 metres wide and 10 metres tall, and they all hold up a metal plate. And those scaffolds don't end in any direction. You know this is just one area of the undefinable modern Aperture Labs, but there is STILL no end. Then you walk up the ladder and that scale is once again hidden by walls, doors, and elevators.

Armored Core 6's Rubicon is fascinating on every level.

Hi Daryl, small correction, gravity doesn't get "a little lazy" above 100km of altitude, around the ISS, the gravity is actually around 90% the one on the surface. The difference is that because the ISS is moving very fast it remains in free fall and therefore you don't experience gravity as you and the station are falling at the same speed in the same direction. Both are linked.

I feel like the sheer scale of the BLAME! mega-structure isn't properly conveyed in this. At one point he gets on an elevator and the computer on-board tells him he will arrive at his destination in 33 DAYS, he encounters a room that is revealed to be the size of Jupiter, I don't recall is its actually stated but it's implied that the structure has fully enveloped the solar system and is perpetually being built further and further out by automatons with nobody left to give them orders. In fact the entire premise of BLAME! is Killy (the MC) searching for someone still carrying the net terminal gene so the robots can be brought back under human control, though it is unclear whether such a person even exists for Killy to find

I think a great way to get perspective on these megastructures is taking a close look at skycrapers. I remember visiting London back in 2014 and standing right in front of one of the skyscrapers and looking up. On pictures they always look so... normal I guess, but standing there, knowing how big I am and how high this tower goes just feels so unreal. I'd also like to mention a favorite example of a megastructure in gaming for me, though I guess it's not that big compared to many of the examples in the video, it just stuck with me since I've known about it since I was a kid: The Haven City Palace in Jak 2. You wander around the city, completing mission on foot or on a vehicle, for quite a while, often with a view of the massive palace, until you get to actually climb one of the support cables in a later mission. You ride the elevator and once you are up and walking on that massive cable, you take a peek at the city below. The slums, the harbor, the bazaar and the gardens suddenly seem so tiny, you can barely recognize the layout from that high up. Even the massive wall of the city, which was always blocking the view of the outside, suddenly becomes small. You are even able to see past it slightly. I loved it and still do, that mission has a special place in my heart for sure. Anyways, great video. The effort really shows and I also really hope it gets a lot of traction, lord knows you've earned it!

The existential question that confounds all philosophers for ages to come. “Does it have an Arby’s”?

The free indie game Naissancee also has this feel I think. The entire game (heavily inspired by Blame!) Is basically you walking through different levels of a massive megastructure/city and it captures that feeling of being a minute speck in the middle of eternity

my favourite tidbit from Blame! is there's a giant empty chamber that's where Jupiter used to be before the builders harvested it for resources until it was gone. This isn't a plot point, this is just a thing that happens. It's not even explicitly stated iirc.

Hey Daryl! Thanks for mentioning my Megastructure book, I really appreciate it!

I love how this video is about megastructures and the vastness of us as humans, but the most touching/meaningful moments in the video for me were the small human moments like the "what is land" quote or the summary of Ghost Story

05:49 Doggy was like "what the fuck dude?" 😂