By Tom Hawking
Publication Date: 2026-03-05 18:52:00
Game worlds can feel mighty big, but even the most sprawling open worlds are surprisingly small when compared to the real world. This makes sense, of course—no one wants to spend multiple actual days traveling on horseback from Valen to Novigrad, or hours stuck in traffic trying to get from one side of San Andreas to the other. The whole art of open-world games is making them feel big while also keeping their scale manageable.
This tension between realism and practicality really comes into full relief in games based on real-world locations. The Fallout games are a prime example—as evidenced by the work of YouTube artist Ganshirt Art, which recreates some of Fallout’s iconic in-game locations in a real-world context. He started with the great green jewel of Fallout 4’s Commonwealth, Diamond City, which—for anyone who’s not played the game—is the game’s biggest “city”, located within Boston’s Fenway Park. His latest piece is more ambitious: it…
