What video game has the best map design of the United States and its locations?

43 comments

1. Microsoft Flight Simulator?

   There was an old Xbox game from 2002ish that had a realistic(ish) map of Los Angeles. But most videogame maps are works of art than works of reality.

   GTA (and even RDR) maps are inspired by real cities and locations but they couldn’t be considered representations of real cities.

2. While I do love Spider-Man 1 and 2, I love the winter theme of the Miles Morales spin off. It also just feels very much more like a lived in New York, whereas the first Insomniac Spidey game felt more like a Spidey playground version of NYC.

3. The *entire* United States? Probably some pre-built map in a Civilization game.

4. The Crew (the first one) has an awesome depiction of a scaled down USA. It was a lot of fun driving to different landmarks.

5. Hands down politwings 64.

6. Super Mario 3

7. Fallout New Vegas is actually not a bad representation of that area. You can visit a lot of the areas outside of Las Vegas IRL and they’re all roughly in the same places they are in the game.

8. American Truck Simulator is getting to the point where half the US is modeled and is pretty accurate for its scale. When driving around Utah in the game, even simple landmarks like hotels and restaurants are where they should be.

9. I like Red Dead Redemption II—it’s a fictionalized version of the regions between the Appalachians and the Rockies. It’s dramatically scaled down of course (a single town with a made up name will stand in for an entire region) and things can get pretty exaggerated, but it captures the shifts in culture/geography/climate extremely well.

10. I don’t know about the entire United States but Watch Dogs 2 had a pretty good depiction of San Francisco. I even used it to roughly plan a trip I was taking there lmao. When I went I realized everyone saying it was accurate was right.

11. HOI4

12. Pilot Wings – ‘Little States’ map

13. LA Noire does a great job with 1947 Los Angeles. [They put a great deal of work into it](https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-05/using-extreme-aerial-photography-1920s-rockstar-rebuilt-1940s-los-angeles-la-noire/), visiting UCLA’s archives to research street names and such. Obviously scale wasn’t 1:1 across the whole map, but that’s for practical reasons.

    I’ve heard The Division 2 absolutely nails Washington DC but I haven’t played it.

14. Fallout 3 and 4 are pretty good of DC and Boston, and GTA V in some places if you live in LA you could literally navigate

15. Fallout 3, NV, and 4 by all accounts are pretty accurate, as far as post apocalyptictia goes.

    The GTA series isn’t 1:1 for American cities, but 4 and 5 really got the *feel* of NYC and LA for sure.

16. Not exactly a country wide example, but when making Far Cry 5, Ubisoft did use real life locations in Montana to model their fictional Hope County after.

17. Hard to say, but I think that Phantom Forces has some good maps based in the United States where it accurately depicts some of how the maps would be like.

    The Dunes map is based on Las Vegas if a Sandstorm hit the place.

    There is another game titled Homefront The Revolution and it shows Pennsylvania and actually doesn’t look too bad for the in game map.

18. The Crew and The Crew 2 are both pretty impressive

19. Fallout 3 does a really good job of getting DC locations/landmarks right. Especially the metro system.

    Likely due to the makers being located right down the road.

20. I have never been to NY but I was amazed with Spiderman. It’s beautiful, I’d put it #2 in-between RDR2 as #1 and Starfield as #3 for landscape beauty.

    And as far as I can tell its pretty close to the real thing. Obviously not to scale, so things are missing, and incorporating story-world.

21. Grand Theft Auto series does a decent job at fictionalized NY and LA. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen Miami/Vice City and I think San Fancisco/San Andreas.

    WatchDogs does a good job with Chicago and San Francisco, IMO, as does The Division with NY and DC.

    Red Dead Redemption series is good at the beautiful natural landscape of the American West.

    Arkham series is honorable mention as it does a good job at bringing a fictional American city to life.

    Paradox games do OK with large-scale map geography, but I have my complaints. Vicky 2 and 3, EU4, HOI4.

    Shoutout to LA Noire.

    Not sure how well the Mafia series does at location accuracy, but I like the look of things. I think NY and New Orleans are represented by that series.

    I didn’t count flight or truck simulators.

22. No ones mentioned Division 2 yet. Amazing design of DC. And D1 plus the D2 WONY expansion are great, too.

23. Watchdogs and Watchdogs 2 did a good job representing Chicago and San Francisco, respectively.

24. The Crew 2 does a good job but the map is shrunk down to a MUCH smaller scale but it’s still enjoyable. For scale the drive from Miami to New York is about 15 miles.

25. Far Cry 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 look like Montana

26. There’s only one valid answer here…. The 1986 hit “Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?”

27. Nuketown. COD: Black Ops.

28. This is absolutely not it but I always loved PilotWings 64’s ‘Little States’ 😄

29. You only see the remnants of the US but I like what Horizon Zero Dawn did. Slow reveals of real life locations but in an apocalyptic future

30. Pilotwings 64.

31. Fuckin Fallout 3 has some of the most accurate architecture and layout I’ve ever seen on Washington DC. I visited there as a teen and was literally able to get around from memorizing the metros in the game.

32. Not the entire USA but The Division 2 nearly perfectly recreated the city of Washington DC in an open world map. To the degree that many gamers who actually live in DC said they could find their buildings in the game and identify exactly where their apartments would be. Albeit the game did somewhat wreck the place since lore-wise DC was attacked by a bioweapon

33. Assassins Creed 3 captured Colonial Boston and New York pretty well. They were shrunken down quite a bit, and NYC is *very* different 250 years later, but the street layout was basically right.

    Prototype had a pretty faithful, if scaled down, rendition of Manhattan. Crisis 2 also did, at least on the early maps before everything got all torn up.

34. Red dead redemption two I believe it has one of the best visual scenery of what it is the west in the US

35. ATS, any flight simulator like xplane and msfs and the crew…they follow the shape…when it comes to us looking places I would say rockstar games, but the map of course isn’t so similar.

36. What about The Division? Was that accurate NYC?

37. Gotta give a shoutout to Pilotwings 64 for actually having an entire (though greatly scaled down) continental US map you could fly over in 1996.

    They put Mario’s face on Mount Rushmore!

38. MSFS 2020

39. I just spent the weekend in Washington DC and it was crazy, but I had a really intuitive sense of where everything was. Then I realized it was because I spent so much time playing The Division 2. Practically a 1:1 map (with extra explosives and ammo.)

40. The division 2 does a good job of New York and DC.

41. The Division 2’s street map is pretty much one for one to actual Washington DC, though given its post-apocalyptic sci-fi lite setting it doesn’t do a whole lot to capture what it’s like to actually be downtown.

42. MSFS 2020.

43. Microsoft Flight Simulator? Or is that cheating?