Games that properly handle inside/outside scale

So I've been playing Halo 4. One of the interesting things about Halo (3 and later) is that they've got large intricate moving things (Scarabs, Liches, Mammoth) that can be boarded and moved around in and jumped out at anytime. I think that leads to some fun gameplay, plus it's a lot of work to get right, and I admire that.

Then, however, Halo turns around and completely borks the scale of everything else. Last level in Halo 1, where the Pillar of Autumn grew by 10x, the first level of Halo 4, where the Frigate grew tremendously, the Covenant ships that change size from game to game -- or wait, I mean, have an EXACTLY IDENTICAL variant that's a tenth the size.

Gameplay trumps, of course. It's just a really egregious scale mismatch though, but still I can't think of any that do it any better with huge size variations. Are there any?

I pretty much hated Neverwinter Nights 2 (I think it was 2) because in the town areas you would walk up to these buildings that were tiny on the outside map and then had these sprawling floor plans inside. That is honestly the only thing I remember from that game and it still makes me mad to this day.

So um yeah. What you said.

Unreal is the best example I can think of. Primarily the Sunspire.

The original Tribes had vast levels which occasionally featured enormous floating fortresses that you could enter and run around in, looking for objectives.

I suspect one of the problems you run into is that scaling things properly would make the game really, really boring. Take NWN2 (or Baldur's Gate, or any of those games): if you scale the exteriors appropriately, you are going to spend a lot more time just wandering around town. I already found that pretty tedious in NWN2; expanding the part of the game where I'm walking from point A to point B by a factor of two or three would not make for a better game.

The Elder Scrolls games have generally been good about consistent scale, the indoor/outdoor transitions being more of a performance/technical limits thing. Well, except maybe the dungeons in Daggerfall, which seemed to be off in their own non-Euclidian space...

I think the lesser importance of level design in a game like Skyrim and other RPGs make it easier though.

Plus, I'm willing to bet that the Skyrim dungeon dimensions would pop out into the real world or intersect in places, but I never thought about that until now because of the explicit transition.

Battlefield 2142 did a good job of this - between the tanks, and aircraft, jump pods and then those massive flying fortresses with the interiors that you would fight through...

I think most of modern setting FPS handles scale well.

Dark Souls. But I guess that was too obvious? Anyway, in both scale and quality of level design, both Souls games are unparalleled in terms of how buildings don't "cheat" and the gameplay component of the experience feels very integrated and organic. Dark Souls is more impressive because it does so within an internally consistent world that is deeply interconnected (and a lot more exterior is involved), but in many ways Demons' was the prototype. That Demons' is often regarded as having better levels in some cases suggests that such consistency might come at a price, but frankly it's really just the big empty levels that leave you wanting more. Relative to most games, it feels like an alien but increasingly familiar world as opposed to a series of impressive facades. As you realize who the statues represent and how different features of the landscape come into the story, it becomes a vibrant, lived-in experience.

This is the interconnected world itself and this 3d visualization gives you an idea of how it all holds together (both links from the DS lore thread).

I've always wondered what would (will?) happen if you had a computer with an insane amount of RAM (24 petabytes*) and could load all of the maps from one of the 'Half-Life' games, or from 'Bioshock', as though they were one contiguous map. Would you end up with level geometry that sometimes doubles back on itself, where two or more rooms occupy the same space? Or would the entire structure more or less make sense, spatially?

* number extracted from my bum

There are images from where people have done exactly this with Half-Life. As I recall, nothing overlapped, but it doesn't exactly look like a real building.

Weirdly these were the first two examples I thought of, as well. Both games also came out in 1998.

Unreal was one of the first first person shooters to tease the player with distant vistas that you actually ended up being able to travel through, while keeping the scale intact. The castle that you see in the flythrough at the start of the game is an actual level you enter and explore. The massive bases in Tribes maps like Scarabrae and Broadsides gave the game a then-unique combination of CQC and open warfare.

Jedi Knight from 1997 also did a good job of presenting massive levels that were consistent in scale relative to the player. It was probably the first FPS I played to make me feel vertigo.

Planetside 2 seemed properly scaled. It kind of had to.

How can you tease the awesome without linking to it, you cruel bastard?

Nar Shadda! I loved that level for exactly that reason. And you've reminded me of one of my favourite levels in any game, ever: the prison level in 'Dark Forces'. Given that the game is now eighteen(!) years old, I doubt I'd find this level as impressive as I did way back then, but I remember getting to the end of it and being absolutely blown away by how sprawling it was, how well-designed, the scale and the fact that every single square centimetre felt as though it was built for a purpose.

Here's one for http://www.unleashthedog.net/uploads/HL2_overview.jpg]HL2[/url] is it. Warning: huge image. It's not the whole game either, there's definitely some stuff missing.

If it's a third person game, I can't really blame them for taking liberties with indoor scale. You've gotta have somewhere to put the camera. There's an interesting article about Max Payne where they said they were going for a 150%-200% scaling over the real world for this.

World of WarCraft did it with airships. In Deepholm, a disabled Alliance airship floats aimlessly near the "ceiling". When the main quest chain leads you there, you find a complete multi-level mini-dungeon that's still part of the open world.

In Lego: Lord of the Rings, in some levels you have to engage and climb up oliphaunts to fight and disable their beastmasters.

Shadow of the Colossus has you boarding and climbing massive stone creatures who thunder across the landscape as you hunt for their weak points. The sense of scale is awesomely intimidating.

We worry a lot about it in the assassin's creed games, even if we do limit your ability to go inside and outside too often. It comes from the fact that we often base level designs off architectural floor plans.

Company of Heroes is the only RTS game I can think of where the people/vehicles/buildings are scaled realistically.

Space sims also vary quite a bit. I seem to remember that Freespace and the X-Wing games did a good job of making capital ships appropriately large and imposing.

X-Wing was really good at that. I remember doing laps around friendly cap ships just to take in the scale of them.

Wing Commander, by contrast, wasn't so hot with that. I remember the Tiger's Claw (at least in the first game) being not that much bigger than my Raptor.

The original X-wing games, did not, actually. The star destroyers were tiny. The later versions put them closer to their actual sizes.

Heh, not to mention the hilarious spherical collision they used for Wing Commander. If you got anywhere even slightly close to a capital ship, you collide with it. That's what was beautiful about the X-wings, as you could fly right in between the Star Destroyers shield towers, if you wanted.

Unfortunately their firepower was pathetic.