City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
Modern city builders lack visual soul because their environments are excessively flat, clean, and sanitized compared to real urban spaces.
summary is enough The piece offers a straightforward aesthetic critique, but the comment thread provides a much better technical breakdown of rendering budgets and performance trade-offs.
summary
The author argues that contemporary city-building games fail to capture the organic texture and imperfection of real urban environments, resulting in sterile, overly sanitized worlds. Modern titles look aggressively flat and square, completely omitting everyday grit like stairs, trash, graffiti, and varied housing conditions. While manual detailing can fix this, it defeats the purpose of procedural simulation and demands unreasonable micro-management. Commenters point out that rendering every individual imperfection creates severe performance penalties, forcing developers to make hard compromises within finite GPU budgets.
key points
- Modern city builders feature unnaturally clean, square surfaces that lack the organic variation and wear-and-tear of real-world neighborhoods.
- Relying on manual mods or decals to inject character defeats the joy of watching procedural generation unfold.
- Commenters note that rendering detailed grime, dynamic geometry, and individual assets introduces heavy GPU performance costs, explaining why developers default to pristine simplicity.
who should read it
Game designers and simulation enthusiasts interested in urban aesthetics and procedural world-building.
discussion mixed
consensus
Commenters largely agree that while the author's aesthetic critique is valid, achieving that level of visual detail is heavily constrained by strict real-time rendering budgets and performance limits.
pushback
Some commenters push back on the premise entirely, arguing they prefer clean, orderly, and idealized virtual cities over messy, unmaintained real-world urban decay.
I recall working on a sports game where they hired a new art director who had previously worked in Hollywood on visual effects for movies. One of my coworkers had a meeting where the new art director requested that the player's uniforms have cloth simulation in the dynamic cut scenes.
It was then necessary to explain the difference between pre-rendered scenes and real-time rendering budgets.
It often isn't a question about whether or not something can be done. In pre-rendered scenes, or screenshots, the budget is very different than in game. At whatever target frame-rate you choose, there …
It details the real-world engineering trade-offs between artistic ideals and actual real-time rendering performance budgets.
Generated by an LLM from the article and thread. Check the sources before relying on it.