Places In Video Games That Make You Feel Temporary
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- Опубликовано: 25 июн 2024
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I might have discovered a new obsession… Space Elevators, Dyson Spheres, Hanging Cities, there are so many larger than life megastructures in games and other media that have captivated me recently. But among all of that wonder… There is something haunting and dreadful about them. A truth hidden in their concept that chills me to my bones. Let’s talk about it.
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Toward the Heavens (0:00)
Boot.dev could be your future! (3:28)
The Lost Beauty of Building (5:05)
Attempts at Realism (9:12)
A Place to Call Home (15:41)
The Cost (25:00)
Acceptance and Hope (32:24)
You've been a lovely audience, xoxo (35:11)
▶Games Shown
Stellar Blade (2024)
Mass Effect (2007)
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (2018)
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (2019)
Dead Space 2 (2011)
Satisfactory (2019)
Destiny 2 (2017)
Dyson Sphere Program (2021)
Knights of the Old Republic II (2004)
Final Fantasy XIII (2009)
NieR:Automata (2017)
Final Fantasy XIV (always lmao)
Citizen Sleeper (2022)
BioShock Infinite (2013)
Sonic Colors (2010)
Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020)
Halo 3: ODST (2009)
▶Movies/TV/Anime Shown
Niel Blevins’ Megastructures Encyclopedia: www.neilblevins.com/books/mega...
Star Wars Episode V The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Star Wars Episode VI Return of the Jedi (1983)
Castle in the Sky (1986)
Alien: Isolation (2014)
Deliver us the Moon (2018)
Interstellar (2014)
Foundation (2021)
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin (2015)
Cowboy Bebop (1998)
Gunbuster (1988)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)
RocketMan (1997)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Mardock Scramble: The First Compression (2010)
Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)
Don't Look Up (2021)
Up (2009)
Blame! (2003)
A Ghost Story (2017)
▶Media/Clips/Considerations:
• Orbital Megastructures
▶Music Sources (in Order):
Stellar Blade OST - Flooded Commercial Sector
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye OST - A Dream of Home
YU-NO (PC-98) OST - 1-20 - Activation (Crisis)
Dyson Sphere Program OST - Phlogistic
Stellaris OST - Infinite Being
Stellaris OST - In Search of Life
eightiesheadachetape - what we did in the desert
/ eightiesheadachetape
spoti.fi/3LNoh7z
apple.co/39B6zXj
Mewmore - Kalos Power Plant (Pokémon X & Y Remix)
13 Sentinels : Aegis Rim OST - Just Because
There Came an Echo OST - Sass Effect
Track: Dark Cyber Tech (No Copyright Music) by MokkaMusic / Spectrum
• Dark Cyber Tech (No Co...
Music provided by "MokkaMusic" channel and inaudio.org
13 Sentinels Aegis Rim OST - Ennui Vibes
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. OST - MoozE S.A.D.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 OST - A Faint Hope
Stellar Blade OST - Passenger Lift
Stellaris OST - Dark Minds
Sid Acharya - Falling Through The Hourglass (Slowed + Reverb)
• Sid Acharya - Falling ...
Tenno - Overgrown
Dyson Sphere Program OST - Realm
Super Mario Galaxy OST - Family
▶Research Sources
The Kármán Line: Where space begins
www.astronomy.com/space-explo...
Space Debris 101
aerospace.org/article/space-d....
Interview: Knights of Sidonia Mangaka Tsutomu Nihei
www.animenewsnetwork.com/inte...
Lessons from the Japanese Miracle: Building the Foundations for a New Growth Paradigm
www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a0...
The Japanese Economic Miracle
econreview.studentorg.berkele...
Tokyo Tower of Babel: World’s Tallest Building Ever Planned
malevus.com/tokyo-tower-of-ba...
Clouds Architecture Office
cloudsao.com
ONE OF A KIND: THE KOWLOON WALLED CITY THROUGH THE EYES OF PHOTOGRAPHER GREG GIRARD
zolimacitymag.com/one-of-a-ki... 
Игры
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What Megastructure did I miss? What is your favorite example? Let me know below!
"Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon" and "NaissanceE" have some of my favorite recent examples of existential, near-megalophobic architecture.
The megastructure that really resonates with me the most are the towering supercomputers of rain world. These giant computaional cities are at the epicenter of the game's story, and exploring them as a small, insignificant being really hammers home the wonder of something much, much bigger than you. But the thing they do best is show you how it feels when structures like these decay. The death of these opressing, overempowering gods makes up the crux of this game's fantastic story, ESPECIALLY in the DLC. Exploring these great structures at the different times in their lives and seeing their gradual decay and death is something that will mark me for the rest of my life, and really makes this game such a joy to play.
NaissanceE is a game (free on steam) in which you get to explore a megastructure. It's particularly relevant to this video since it is quite overtly inspired by Blame!
Bleak Faith's Omnistructure was the first thing I thought about, when reading the video-title. it was heavily inspired by "Blame!". one of the weirdest and most fascinating structures / game-world in a video-game.
Starsector hypershunts, space rangers 2 terron, rainworld obviously, things one builds in Oxygen Not Included (!!), Portal 2 Aperture Science complexes
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
I am a studying architect and it also got me feeling that way.
For real. I was not ready for this level of oof while eating my microwave burritos.
it is natural dying my friend, once you accept that, everything become clear like water
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.
That's a hell of a point! My mind shudders to imagine what Ecumenopolis rats would look like knowing how big New York rats are lmao
If humans can survive the monstrosities of _Blame!,_ then 100% them cockroaches can as well. Which is good news, because insects are great sources of protein.
You might like Rain World then. Very much a 'nature moves on' type of game.
I think we hope that "Nature finds a way" to comfort ourselves into the belief that we aren't the true villians. Maybe cockroaches will survive our scourge, but I wonder if we ought to be acting as if perhaps they won't. Maybe our behavior here will leave Earth a sterile rock.
I appreciate the hope, though
Where did you get this black squirrel thing from?
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.
Its like us living in the luxury on the west while everything we consume is made by slaves in China. Its not science fiction, its both our future and our present, also our past.
Can humanity ever be free from having to work, we create machines to do our work, then we are free, but we're still slaving away the machines, something has to do the work.
This is why I want a game set in Coruscant. There are so many levels in Coruscant. They call it a ecumenopolis where its a metropolis expanded to a whole city. There was one game, Star Wars 1313. But it never materialized. That in my opinion is the dream game.
I always thought it would be incredible to play a game where you're an unknown bounty hunter scavenging the ruins of a later-day, post-films, post-most of (if not all) of our known Star Wars media. very few people are living in the city as something went wrong/is wrong on the planet, causing it to become more and more unlivable -- whole fragments of the planet are going dark and the remaining population thinks its an ecological crisis causing parts of the city-planet to blink out of contact, but its actually because fragments of the planet itself are cracking and sinking into the planet's core. and yet, nobody knows about the cult existing in the planet's guts... until the player starts literally digging deeper (note I at first had written "until the player goes down" -- not optimal) into the depths of the surface city and blah blah blahs.
as the game progresses you learn no, there isnt something wrong in the core, nor did the force abandon *Coruscant * in specific, nor did anything else go wrong "by accident" per se. what is happening is that there's a sith cult who have unearthed new texts that will give them a shortcut to power through the ritual force-digestion of the planet. if they can feed the entire planet to whatever they're chatting with down there, it promises them the power to do the same trick at will to any planet, anywhere, on demand (with practice). and also, its not the force they're in communion with, its (somehow) Palpatine who has been to the realm of the dead and stopped at the gift-shoppe on his way out and thought of a sick new dance he wants to teach you, or something. it doesn't matter, none of this matters.
the part about the planet's crust breaking apart in front of the player in actual real-time is entirely possible now on a technical level. just massive islands of city heaving up and then crashing down -- it gives me bonerz imagining the possibilities
The star wars city planet sounds like a hive city,
and mixes it with my idea of a litteral ice berg=
its vitrue signalling at the top=
but if you go under the ice=
theres a huge building underneath,
and it gets worse the more you go down.
=nazis made it=(the vitrue signalling above the ice.),
pun=😘when nazis fall from buildings onto the ice,theyre metaphysicall snowflakes,not just metaphoricoll 1s...
@@mvrk4044the game sounds cool too,i would want to watch or play it=if i knew half of the comnent when it was on youtube=i would watch like 5 videos=or =to short videos for how long it is.
My ice berg is ment to be a game too.
=the 1st 1 is inspired by let it die/mixed with the fair part and is extremelly😆😆dark...
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 was really hoping someone would mention the Jupiter room
oh wow, that's entirely different!
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.
Have you played INFRA? For a civil engineer it's akin to a horror game.
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 really wanted him to talk about rain world too
I came here to mention rainworld as well. While the megastructure in question may not have fit as neatly with the themes brought up in this video, it's probably the best example of actually exploring a megastructure in gaming. Without going into too much spoilers, there is a megastructure in rainworld which is so large that you explore several different parts of it throughout distinct biomes. The sheer size of this megastructure also explains why an entirely seperate region of the game is perpetually in darkness (because it's under the shadow of the megastructure). And on a final note there is a crucial game mechanic that is influenced by this megastructure (though revealing that would be major spoilers). I know it's one of the games you ended up writing off from your backlog @DarylTalksGames but if you (or anyone) are reading this and want to feel what it's like to explore one of these megastructures then you owe it to yourself to play Rain World.
I was genuine awestruck hearing Stargazer for the first time there
@@jm56585 thats the moment slugcat became Heisenberg
Climbing to the top of The Wall to reach 5 pebbles really cemented the feeling of wandering around a mega structure. In fact, and perhaps ironically, Rainworld is probably the closest one would get to living in a mega-structure world like Blame!
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.
I was thinking of the same thing! Portal 2 has such a unique atmosphere this way.
wow, you have phrased that beautifully... i've always loved the endless-ness of Aperture, especially the bottom parts. like, when you fall, looking up and seeing the giant pillars holding up the rest of the facility, being at the BOTTOM of the bottomless pits... it's just breathtaking. in Portal Revolution there is a giant tower that goes from the absolute bottom of the facility all the way up to the surface. and that area you mentioned of the in-between place, right after you open the giant vault, with the chainlink fences around it... seriously underrated area; i remember exploring it in noclip quite a few times... and then there's the part, i think the main menu scene for one of the chapters, where it's right before you get into a funnel, you can see out over the facility and being illuminated by this yellow light, all the test chambers and everything. you can also see that kinda thing from the very first area, the relaxation vault container ride, if you look up you see all the relaxation vaults just sprawling into the distance... everywhere.
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.
the term people seem to have agreed on for planetary-scale megastructures is 'kilostructures'
I also absolutely love the environment in Stray, i think its my favorite out of any work of art ever
a lot of the setting was inspired by kowloon walled city!
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.
Small nitpick, the garbage patch and debris field aren't really structures. The garbage patch is that big, but it's not like a landmass you can stand on, the huge majority of it is "just" regions of the ocean that have much higher densities of micro plastics and beads and the like. Similarly, the debris field is a loose scattering of stuff. 10,000 tons isn't actually that much material to stretch across the entire planet in orbit.
@@HopperDragonThat's a good point, but structures aren't defined as always being a contiguous object; they just need to share a common arrangement and relationship. A Dyson Swarm of many parts, rather than a Dyson Sphere, would still be considered a structure. Expanded onto a galactic scale, galaxies themselves are also considered structures, and are themselves parts of structures of superclusters, which are then part of galactic filament structures. It's structures all the way down!
Megastructures are more often built as statements of power, grandiosity & splendor than out of "humanitarian needs"; IE. The Colosseum, Great Pyramids of Giza, Circus Maximus, Baths of Caracalla, Versailles in its prime etc.
The works of Étienne-Louis Boullée illustrate this central theme of grandiosity & awe which are core to megastructures. They are as much an aesthetic statement as they are a practicality, if not more-so.
I believe there is an oil well or something that's extremely tall but most of it is underwater and underground so you can't tell.
@@Nykandros I'll counter your examples with the great wall of china, the basilica cistern, the aquaducts of rome, etc.
Perhaps it is that massive essential structures are in fact more numerous than more "boastful" structures, but are simply not often noticed exactly because they usually aren't boastful or eye-catching.
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've been searching for this comment and if it didn't exist I would have made it myself.
I just want to add that the Kármán line is roughly the altitude where the atmosphere gets so thin that it's theoretically no longer possible for an airplane to generate enough lift to stay in the air (or something very similar). At least that was the historical definition, today it's basically just a convention.
Another small correction: the manga Blame! Is actually pronounced Blam (like with long a we in "father")
Armored Core 6's Rubicon is fascinating on every level.
honestly! Your mech is gigantic but once you roam around in the different levels, the model shrinks down significantly, putting into perspective how insanely big the structures around you really are
There's a whole video specifically about the scale of it all.
And also a bunch of much smaller ones, comparing it with more familiar things, like porting ACVI maps into Elden Ring ( as an example, the Xylem is big enough that it goes beyond render distance, and that you can literally put the entirety of the Lands Between on its ring )
@@draghettis6524 ik abt Zullie's vids, I'm moreso talking about the more emotional weight hinging on these mega structures and the wonderful presentation FromSoft put together for them, rather than the scale on a technical level. They're VERY impressive and monumental.
Those final levels in that game are really impressive in emphasising scale. But I think my biggest hype moment was fighting the Ice Worm and having Rusty shoot off a laser beam from so far away.
@@leithaziz2716 wasn't a laser... It was an electromagnetic *cannon.* Emphasis on *Cannon.*
Hey Daryl! Thanks for mentioning my Megastructure book, I really appreciate it!
The existential question that confounds all philosophers for ages to come. “Does it have an Arby’s”?
There's one more megastructure that had me in awe ever since I was a kid: the "moon" from Disney's Treasure Planet. Particularly the way it is shot, closing in from a distant scene of a gaze at the sky and slowly showing a moon made out of buildings, streets and people boarding ships. It's breathtaking to watch the first time and still refreshing nowadays. I miss that kind of animation.
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
This game is an incredible experience! Free and only takes a few hours
I’ll definitely be playing that 👀
@@DarylTalksGames I imagine you like watching video essays about video games as well; here's one by Jacob Geller about Naissancee and it's architecture ruclips.net/video/Zkv6rVcKKg8/видео.htmlsi=p9bcs8Ii8XKVyXBr
Added to the steam library, thanks for the game
I was surprised not seeing it mentioned, so I'm glad it's here in the comments and that Daryl saw this comment.
It starts out weird, unnatural, inhuman, and gets weirder as you go on.
Do take your time to explore.
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!
I'd love to make a video on the difference between giant things in person vs in pictures. We visit the mountains like twice a year and I'm always flabbergasted when I get there at just how... no game or picture or VR can ever quite replicate the scale you feel in person. When your eyes suddenly capture the true depth and distance of your surroundings it's very humbling haha. So yeah, I completely hear where you're coming from.
I haven't seen the Haven City Palace before but that sounds incredible! Thanks so much Skubo :)
I vividly remember getting out of an airport in Barcelona and seeing mountains on the horizon for the first time. Of course I knew what mountains looked like and I was almost 20 years old at the time, but actually seeing them out there in person was just so... different. It's one of the key memories I took home with me from that trip. That, and getting my wallet stolen by someone who looked like a mirror image of one of my friends from home while drunk at a bar.
I do not enjoy cities for this reason. That sense of scale immediately translates into fear in my brain. Don't know what kind of irrational fear that is but it's not fun.
I still revisit Jak II to this day to take in that view. Something about it captivated me when i was younger, and it still does. I think part of it is that you spend so much time in those trench-like streets. The tower from Destiny doesn’t have that same feeling for me, for that reason. Both are pretty skyboxes, but one’s got the “i’ve been in that specific canal there, that’s where i hid the police cruiser i stole!” While the other dosn’t have that recontextualization
@@valettashepard909 I guess playing the Jak games as a kid has that kind of effect on people who enjoyed the games. I've never played Destiny but I totally know what you mean!
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.
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 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
Definitely had me feeling sentimental. I want to go watch Ghost Story now
@@demdelthepoet8885 It's absolutely worth a watch, but you need to make certain you're in the mood for it. There's a lot of sitting and staring. One of my favorite movies of recent years.
I would like to add rain world to this list you basically explore a natural environment that grew out of a long abandoned but still functioning megastructure that's essentially a big computer, so massive it uses entire lakes as cooling
05:49 Doggy was like *"what the fuck dude?"* 😂
I couldn't stop laughing at this moment! Thanks for timestamping it.
I thought the same lol
I appreciate just enough of the interstellar soundtrack to make it recognizable but not enough to be picked up lol.
There's another beautifully tragic layer to the truly absurd megastructures, that not only will we never see them, but the people who start building them will never see them finished.
A dyson sphere, even for a VERY advanced civilisation, could easily take several generations of dedication and unimpeded work to complete.
What would the first generation of architects, engineers, and supply teams think of this marvel, one even their grandkids may not see finished?
A complete megastructure that required many generations of coordinated and uninterrupted or at least unsabotaged work to complete, is not just a wonder of ingenuity and resourcefulness, but a wonder of collaboration across generations.
Some might take so long to complete, that the society that drafted the initial plans would be completely unrecognisable and alien to the society living in the finished product.
That, I think, is as haunting as it is enchanting.
This already happened with buildings like medieval cathedrals, some of which were being built for over hundred years and went through several generations on constructors and architects. In some ways those cathedrals are megastructures of medieval era and they are still impressive hundred years later. Building them with technology so limited compared to now was truly an insane achievement
Shoutouts to the Vascular plant from Armored Core 6, a giant funnel sticking out of the side of the planet meant to suck up all the coral energy from within the planet's core.
Zullie The Witch made a really good video showcasing it's scale.
Darryl is low key becoming a sci Fi nerd
Your description of Ghost Story reminds me of a picture book I read a lot as a child - 'The Little House', it's similar in themes with a small home being swallowed by a city over time as the world moves on without it, but told from the house's perspective instead. It does have a happy ending, where it gets moved back out to the countryside, but I always wondered as a kid if that wasn't just the start of another cycle.
It reminded me of The Giving Tree. I hated that book as a kid, it's so sad. The kid plays with the tree every day, but then grows up and is more interested in girls, work, family, whatever, but every time he comes back the tree wants to play with his friend because the tree hasn't aged. The kid takes and takes and takes from the tree, who just wants to relive the good times, but he never can.
Rain World has this but in 2D and it's so well done. After finding out about the megastructure you realize that many of the game's locations that you traveled through were actually parts of it and the environment, it's ecosystems and thus the gameplay are greatly affected by it's existence. Then the DLC expanded upon it exponentially. Rain World is such an amazing game
Fun fact, in a 0G environment, if both you and the object are moving along the same vector, in your perspective both are stationary. Not to mention the near zero resistance in that environment would not produce the effect of traveling at high speeds as it would on earth. Its Einstein's elevator thought experiement, but just that you have a massive satellite inside with you xD
Yeah, I was going to say, it's all about relativity. Goggling at building things while at orbital speeds is kind of like being amazed that you can build skyscrapers on the equator while the Earth is spinning at 1000 mph and also orbiting the Sun at 67,000 mph!
I thought you can do that without 0G, you can do this on Earth too. As long as you are not accelerating then you cannot feel the effect of high speed.
@@smc9207 for sure, you experience no motion relative to a vehicle such as a train or plane if it's travelling at a constant speed in a straight line. But as EquesTofu mentioned, travelling at high speed in an atmosphere or in contact with the ground leaves you open to interference from turbulence and friction, or from the acceleration experienced while cornering. And if you're not in a contained vehicle, then wind resistance is going to be a problem!
@@CraigJuddI think it's the fact that to get anything up to say, the ISS, you have to reach and match its speed, while also not dropping anything lest it fly around and smack a hole through what you're building. Sure in deep space in the middle of nowhere you'd have no frame of reference beyond your own so speed wouldn't necessarily matter, but in orbit gravity is still at play thus its acceleration still matters.
We're already in Einstein's elevator. We're spinning on Earth, which is orbiting our star, which is orbiting our galactic center, which is _also_ flying through space. If you were suddenly stuck in the same spot relative to the center of the universe, you'd be yanked away from Earth faster than you can say "oops."
theres a page turn in blame where hundreds of years pass, and its just the main character travelling a small section of the mega structure. That's how insanely large the megacity is in blame
I think my favorite thing about Blame! Is all the empty space. There are tight hallways that look almost organic, but there are also city sized spaces in between them, with skyscraper hight drops to an unseen floor. It shows how big the structure is, that they could be so careless with space or that most likely this is where two structures became one is awe inspiring.
Blame! Is a masterpiece.
Not to mention the chamber that is literally the size of Jupiter, which basically confirms that most of the solar system had been swallowed up by the city.
@@fungisrock8955 god I need to re read it
BLAME! is the definition of MEGASTRUCTURES. Its world always creeps me out and makes me feel existentially minuscule.
You should already feel that way simply by existing in this universe.
But I understand you completely, as a physicist I wonder as much about what the future will bring and how humans will continue their ascension to higher scales as I cherish every walks in forest I can do.
I also recommend reading BioMega, at the end there is something you will like.
Just started the video and your obsession is so validating to me. I have always been star struck in awe with fictional megastructures for as long as I can remember. Put a bright big smile on my face to hear someone else express this as well.
Only Daryl can make me and my wife tear up thinking about architecture (and the existentialism of a life that lives beyond us, but mainly the architecture)
I recently played a game called Bleak Faith: Forsaken. The game didn't do super well on release on account of being rather clunky and janky and unpolished, but I had been looking forward to it for so long that I pushed through until I was able to get used to it, and the 3 dev team that's been making it has been adding improvements constantly and making it far better than it was on launch. That aside, the game is heavily inspired by Blame!, specifically the imagery. And there was something so special about wandering through this colossal space. Seeing the imagery in Blame! Is one thing, but actually controlling the act of wandering was something entirely different. At one point, I found a monorail with nothing on it and no way to call for a train or anything, so I started walking across it. It reached out over an abyss below and an abyss above, the sight of steel in the distance the only thing to tell me that I was still moving. I spent several minutes walking across this monorail until eventually I reached a space with skyscrapers and cars, that were completely abandoned. The monorail kept going but was blocked by a broken down train, and the cityscape I was in was completely ruined and empty. There wasn't even an item or reward for my making this journey. But instead of being disappointed by the lack of reward, I was just in awe. The game wasn't perfect and had many flaws, but there were still moments like this, where my wandering was so endless and yet completely fruitless, that really hit the mark of what this game was meant to accomplish. In later parts of the game, you can be walking in what looks like a sort of Nier Automata city ruins type landscape, but if you looked down at a crack in the ground there was nothing below, and if you looked up, it was just an abyss, but through the fog in the far distance, occasionally you could see some giant structure that was moving, it was bone chilling to imagine what it might be. And the last moment from playing this game I wanted to highlight was one many people complained about on launch. I was exploring an area that was rich with structures and enemies and whatnot, it was super dense and felt populated, with many structures stretching up into the sky. I came across an elevator with no markings or anything, and I stepped on it to bring me up or maybe down. The elevator started moving upwards and I sat in that closed off space for a few minutes, which is a long time to sit in a videogame elevator (hence many people's complaints). The thing is, the elevator was moving fast, and when it finally reached the top, I was standing at the top of a massive tower, looking around me there was absolutely nothing but the abyss, and other towers of similar height. Some connected by bridges, others had to be jumped to. In any other game, jumping between towers in the sky would be a normal feat, because if I fell I'd get a quick death animation and respawn to try it again. And while the same thing would happen here, I was terrified to jump out over that void. The looooong elevator ride had conveyed to me just how high up I was, and just how long I would fall for. Many people complained that the elevator was too long, but I believe that it lead me to experience the most vertigo I've ever felt in a game, where I was already feeling so much dread.
I highly recommend this game, despite its issues it has some of the greatest world design, environment art (all of that done by 1 single guy btw!), and exploration ever. Not to mention they've made several improvements since release.
I love the way you can eloquently describe these feelings I've had for years and never quite clocked.
[Just a rant]
For some reason, the game superliminal has been on my mind for quite a while now , playing is was very therapeutic. finishing the game, I had a very cold and calm feeling, and the urge to scream, wiggle my hands, say something and at the same time the inability to make out words in my brain , the urge to get something out of me while absolutely nothing forming , your videos keeps putting me in the same spot, the feeling is both good and infuriating and sad
Thank you for your efforts daryl
Great video! The existential feelings i got when you talked about "A ghost story", combined with the topic of megastructures really reminded me of the manga "Girls' Last Tour". It's about two girls wandering a massive megacity. It's a fairly slow, more laid back manga/show, but it touches on some of the things you bring up in the video. It's a very good manga that I can't recommend enough.
I'm so glad you mentioned Blame! It's a great manga, and I was thinking about it while watching the beginning of the video :)
One thing that people don't often mention about the manga though, there is a scene in I don't remember which volume, where our protagonist comes upon structures being actively built. In this world, there is still active machinery building more and more structures. Why? For whom? We see maybe a few hundred, maybe a few thousands living people throughout the immensity of the mechanical word depicted in the manga, and yet giant machines are building more, building still, building, building, building.
This is one of the most fascinating aspect of the book for me. Machines programmed to build ever more, because we need to keep building, even if there are no longer people who need those new structures. And this has seemingly been going on for a looong time. Are those the same machines that were when humanity was at its most populous? Are the machines still following the original building plans, or are they following new, or corrupted plans? Some of these structures are clearly not fit for human society. Enormous walkways next to bottomless pits with no rail are a huge safety risk for people. But they're not building for people anymore. Right?
Fascinating book, I highly recommend it.
That thumbnail is so perfect. I was literally about to start playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition as this was uploaded.
Hey Daryl! I’m an Architect. Throughout my time in school, I always found myself captivated by the allure of conceptual (or hypothetical) megastructures (though not quite to the gargantuan scale that this video revolves around). They exist, naturally, as landmarks amid all other structures given their scale. This offers them the opportunity to state their design motif to the world in a way that no other building can. They exist as a sort of altar to the design aesthetics of their age. As dystopian and wasteful as these structures would be in reality, I could never deny to myself that I thought they were, simply, cool! A decent amount of my graduate portfolio was dedicated to explorations of architectural design at the mega scale!
I wanted to thank you for this video! Everything you create is excellent, but a half-hour video listening to one of my favorite RUclipsrs talk about the very structures that I used to repin on my Pinterest boards, was such a nice way to end my weekend.
I think you’d be interested in the NEOM project that is being conceptualized and designed in the Middle East currently. It seems we’ll push the boundaries of scale laterally before vertically, for now.
Thank you for another great vid!
Man, I just finished watching the video, and this one thing has been on my mind ever since I discovered Daryl Talks Games back during Covid. Daryl just has a way with words. This man can make me feel emotions in ways no other thing ever can. Not music. Not movies. Not games. Nothing.
The way he can put such complex thoughts into words almost seems inhuman. If this man was a poet a good two hundred years ago people would be looking back on his works, confidently proclaiming him to be one of the smartest minds to ever grace the planet.
It is out of this world how he can make people feel such otherworldly emotions with nothing more than words and video game backdrops. And the craziest part is that it’s not just this video. Far from it. Nearly every video has a conclusion that summarizes such complex emotions with mere words. It honestly really motivates me whenever I watch a video of his cause the emotions I feel by the end are always so otherworldly.
I don’t even care that he doesn’t post super consistently. With how well his scripts are I’m shocked he can even put out more than one video a year. These scripts read as something that the smartest minds took months meticulously crafting. This man deserves way more recognition for that in my opinion.
TLDR: If I were to bet on one person from all of history being able to describe colors to a blind person, I’d pick Daryl in a heartbeat.
Armored Core, and other mech games, explore this idea too, as they usually end up using mechs to build even taller, bigger structures. You could also check out the Wandering Earth movies!
Hatey jokes aside, I can tell you worked super hard on this video. The extra subtleties in your narration, all the outside media you sourced, and just the sheer length. Excellent job, it’s a banger
Been a while since I've watched anything about Rainworld lore (I am checking the wiki though, also big spoilers), but there are massive metal partially organic sapient supercomputers called Iterators in Rain World, and it is implied that the water vapor produced by these machines are what causes the heavy rain that can literally kill you. The ancient civilization that made these supercomputers built cities on top of these Iterators, probably because they couldn't exactly live with the rain. These Iterators were built to figure out how to escape the cycle of rebirth. The ancient civilization found a way anyways by using something called void fluid, however some ended up becoming these permanently non existing yet also alive entities at the same time called Echoes. In the campaign in the Downpour DLC that takes place at the end of Downpour's timeline, you can encounter an Echo by Frigid Coast which directly connects to the wreck of one Iterator. What's interesting though is part of the dialogue.
"I toiled away until my final breath. As did many of us, through countless generations. | Research, shipments, architecture, computation, politics, worship, revolutions! | All for a heap of rusted metal steeped in a puddle of frozen water."
Another of these Echoes isn't near an Iterator who states
"Something still draws me here. Even after all this time. | The weather is so different now, but the fields... | I do not need eyes to know that the grasses still sway gently in the winds."
(Outer Wilds spoilers) In Outer Wilds: Echoes Of The Eye an unnamed alien race has slides depicting them tearing apart resources from their own planet to build a massive space ship. The greenery and clear sky turn murky and brown, you see them tear down their houses and the trees. They end up creating a simulation which you can go into, and it is clearly meant to be a replica of their home planet. Even still, you can see one watching a slideshow of their home planet. The contrast between both of these examples is that unlike "A Ghost Story", what once was isn't torn down once the people who once used or lived in that place move out, but by the hands of the people who lived there. And in both cases, clearly at least a few of people who did so yearn for their old homes.
(Ultrakill spoilers) I don't have a neat way to tie it in but in Ultrakill, there are the partially solar and blood powered Earthmovers made during the great war that people had to live on due to the Earthmovers making what little on the Earth's surface that was still habitable uninhabitable and people had to live on the Earthmovers. The one that you face has a book you can find with some very interesting dialogue ultrakill.fandom.com/wiki/7-4:_...LIKE_ANTENNAS_TO_HEAVEN#Unique_Passage .
This is exactly why I loved the environments and structures of Armored Core 6. Every structure was so ridiculously massive and imposing that I'd always ask myself "how did they build that?!" and "how much did this cost?!"
I’ll go for the obvious one. The Halo rings are a great example of the splendor of fictional megastructures. Every single time I boot up a Halo game and see the see the ring in the skybox, I get chills. There’s something so magical in the implementation that Bungie nailed as early as CE. I think the Citadel from Half-Life gets a close second, especially in Alyx, where Valve gives you as long as you want right at the start to adjust to their VR environment design.
so much of the Forerunner stuff is just mind-bending. Halo is already huge but compared to installation 00 it's tiny. another on etaht got me was Titanfall 2 where at some point i came into an underground facility stretching on for kilometers and i wonder what is this place i ended up following a manufacturing line that builds entire city blocks and when it finally became clear what this entire facility was for i just shook my head it was lunacy.
My favourite (fictional) megastructure is Babylon 5. Five miles long, 2,500,000 tons of spinning metal, holds about 250,000, located in neutral territory. A shining beacon in space. All alone in the night. And our last best hope for peace.
One megastructure that I think encapsulates all of this perfectly are the earthmovers in ultrakill, which are gargantuan war robots of which a single one is enough to level entire cities. As more and more earthmovers were deployed to fight in the war the entire planet started to become uninhabitable, forcing people to start building cities on top of the earthmovers themselves to survive, and it was this that made everyone realize how they had gone way too far
Oh- so, if you’re interested in the duality of megastructures, wonder and loss, then I recommend Girls’ Last Tour. It’s a slice of life manga set in the copse of a megacity.
It also has a sort of . . . Inverse? The author’s next work is called Shimeji Simulation and is set in, well, a simulation. It’s quite fun as well.
Blame! is so good. The size of the "city" is on such a different scale it's litterally impossible to imagine. It's super cool to see Blame! being talked about, it doesn't have nearly the following it deserves.
Not quite the Analemma Tower, but Battle Angel Alita had something similar with its Jeru-Salem structure - basically a barbell held in place by equally gravitational pull and centrifugal force.
I loved the concept (especially since almost nobody on earth knew about it).
My personal favorite is BLAME! though. If you haven't, read NOiSE; it's the prequel to BLAME! and tells how the Megastructure came to be.
Great Video, I'm definitely going to look into Stellar Blade after this, as well as watching Ghost Story.
I will say Rain World incorporates superstructures pretty well. If you have the time, it would be nice to take a look back. It's a slow burn, but really gets going mid-late game once you figure out the game. The game is like Outer Wilds if there wasn't Nomai text to read, and you figured everything out through experimentation. The ecosystem is a lot more complex than the predator-prey dynamic that you can differentiate with observation, that the tutorial doesn't explain because the game trusts the player to figure those aspects out and learn on their own. This kind of turns into an issue for players on a time crunch. This is why reviewers (especially in 2016 with all the other games coming out like BotW) rushed the game for 6 hours, only stayed in the starting area gave the game a mediocre review, where general player review are a lot higher when you can take your time to learn, you actual go through faster. It's a lot like piloting the ship in Outer Wilds, it will be clucky and confusing at first, but once you figure out small things like using back thrusters halfway between your target, you won't crash. Honestly up to you to decide, just explaining why it was a bit unfortunate to play in a backlog challenge like last year when a lot of the games themes and philosophy shows up half way through. And also because I'd be explaining spoilers to the game relating to your video.
Once you get to Shaded Citadel / Exterior and you realize that everything you were in is parts of a giant superstructure that goes all the way up past the clouds, and seeing the cycle end without any rain was so bizarre and amazing, the sunset and night cycle you never get to see at that moment is so nice. Then when you get inside Five Pebbles and see that what you climbed was actually a giant supercomputer with dozens of rooms dedicated to just specific operations for Five Pebbles and the soft drone of synthetics as you get closer to his chamber that grows in intensity with LED's lighting up the entire background is so incredible. The rooms are 4-6 screens sometimes with just empty space the slugcat is so small compared. The area you leave from it also something that amazes me: a city caked with a meter of dust, no other creatures up there but you, and then... looking out you see dozens of more structures in the distance, the same ones as the one you took hours just to climb up. The Downpour DLC also reminds me of Ghost Story in terms that each campaign takes place nearly decades from each other showing how the building of superstructures impacted the environment, and what happens centuries out from the base game.
You have no idea how many times I play these videos in the background during work. Your narration is so soothing and always leaving a sentimental note despite the darkest of stories
I half expected dams to be mentioned for real-life megastructures. They don't have mesmerizing views compared to tall buildings but it always surprises me when I know the amount of water they hold.
I also think about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by CERN just because I'm a nerd.
The Stellaris mod mentioned is Gigastructural Engineering, one of the best mods for Stellaris in my opinion, very in depth and provides so many awesome ideas and bring so many others to life, really expands the game and provides great endgame options (and crisises).
Megastructures are absolutely fascinating and I think it's also interesting to note that a lot of this awe is particularly attached to vertical megastructures. Like... a horizontal megastructure that fills the horizon is impressive, but one could also consider suburbia by that definition, a network of houses, roads and underground utilities stretching beyond the horizon. It's staggering when you think about every piece, but it doesn't generate the same immediate awe as when you put verticality into it. Things that go *up* can be seen, can be appreciated in their scale so much more, and the higher they go, the more they defy gravity, the more boundless they seem.
Coruscant is a great example of this combined because it's not just vertical, stretching up into the original planet's atmosphere, it covers the *entire* planet. It's a megalith housing quadrillions. You can live your whole lives in an area of thirty square kilometers, with a massive city pressing down on you.
I also want to shout-out Rain World, as it's also a game that thrives on scale. Whether it's all that looms backgrounds or getting lost in the iterator's superstructure - climbing around on their surface like a bacteria on skin - the iterators are things that alter the environment so fundamentally so as to give the game it's name, things last for so long the mind can't even fathom it. It's a game that, by design, makes it very clear you are passing through a world that exists without you. And there are these moments where the world just yawns beneath you, but at the same time you come back to the crowded rooms bustling with life that persist despite the iterator's impact. (It's a good game and I think you'd enjoy it, if not playing, then watching.)
Fantastic video, thanks for sharing!
Seconding your recommendation to watch a playthrough of Rain World if the gameplay doesn't click. Rain World is a game I knew I would love due to the setting and art direction but when I played it at launch I couldn't grasp the controls / main gameplay loop. That being said it always stuck in my mind (especially due to the hauntingly beautiful intro music). Eventually after about 5 years I came across Jimmy McGee's video called 'A guided tour of Rain World' and I watched the whole thing in its entirety. I was really blown away by what this game was / set out to do so I finally knuckled down, learned how to comfortably control slugcat and embraced the gameplay loop of exploring a hostile ecosystem. Now that I've beaten the game it's got a special place in my heart for its incredible vision and how it executed those ideas in a game format.
The most depressing thing about this video is that even after all this time passes, all this technological innovation and progress comes to pass, the flow of time stretching on until we don't even know what land is anymore, and Arby's will still be revolting.
The great spirit robot from bionicle is probably my favorite thing like this. The fact that it took 8 years before the whole story was revealed to have taken place in and around a planetary sized sleeping metal man was so crazy.
The abyss from made in abyss is another favorite. Uniquely, it seems to be mostly natural. Natural, or at least made by some unimaginable beings an unimaginably long time ago, if there's even a difference.
Stellar Blade and that ascent up the orbit elevator actually got me looking into space videos, type 1 civilizations, and exo planets. Something about this game really sparked my curiosity and then this video comes out...LETS FREAKIN GO!
Great content as always SIr Daryl- stay chadley my dude.
This reminds me of a Fanfic I read recently. The fic was based on Medieval times with the corresponding technology. No Electricity, no radio, no guns or skyscrapers, just swords and magic and stone buildings.
However the cast eventually end up fighting these bad guys which are much more technologically advanced. Despite this, the technology they encounter is quite limited, they don't even encounter guns, just giant mechs, which they barely have the means to defeat.
Eventually, the cast fight those bad guys and win, allowing them to discover what those villains had been working on, a portal to another time, aka Time Travel.
By an accident of one of their allies, they go through that portal and at first, everything seems normal. It seems like they are in a large empty cavern (really a warehouse for those Mechs they fought). They go through a doorway, exploring this new area... and promptly experience existential dread... because the sky doesn't exist... because the ground is upside down above them.
The characters literally fall to the ground and clutch the grass expecting themselves to fly down to the ground above them, despite there being ground below. In fact, they try and warn additional allies from coming through because of how horrifying the experience is for them, and most of them promptly stumble back into the warehouse where they puke and have a mental breakdown.
The scene was written in a way where even I didn't know what was going on at first because the character's couldn't rationalize the scope they were experiencing. It was only when 1 character pointed out that the ground in the distance was not Hills, but CURVED that I realized they were on a Ringworld, a megastructure functioning as both a planet and a spaceship.
I think the scene accurately portrays the majesty and dread that Megastructures like those provoke, how incredibly fascinating and equally horrifying a concept.
That reminds me of the Slags in Fallout. They were basically a race of humans living underground after the nuclear war, and were able to stay there for a long time since they were self sustaining. Eventually though they struggled with overpopulation so they had to go above ground to start a farm. When they went above ground they had a similar experience to the characters you talked about, they feared falling into the sky and were just simply mortified by the scope of the world. They ended up only going out at night because it was better on their eyes which had been adapted for the darkness of underground, and only sent the few who were brave enough to stand the sensation of possibly falling upward.
My hunch is that any civilization that still has Arby's is not one capable of completing these types of megastructures
i know its a movie, but the movie The Creator, has one of the coolest "orbital Lasers". it just hovers over earth and at any moments notice, youll see a big blue laser light creating a crossair on the surface, and then it just drops a nuke
I’ve had this EXACT existential crisis watching Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. GOT takes place two centuries after HOTD, and it really got me thinking about permanence, legacy, and how much a space can change in the span of generations. Will Westeros ever get an Arby’s? Who’s to say.
This comment wins RUclips for today. Pack it in, y’all
Well idk about an Arby's, but there MUST be a Starbucks based on that cup on the table in the last season of GOT 😂
@@DarylTalksGames 😂
When will public education be established?
When will a maintained road system be implemented?
How will these things affect the trout population?
All of these questions and more will be answered... never.
As always, the best big structurre in games is from Metal Gear Rising. In the bad guy HQ, The internal express elevator will take many many minutes to reach not even the top of the building. Inside one of the floors, there's a multi-stories tall pagoda.
plus raiden gets on it after already sprinting along the outside almost to the top of the building lmao
A Daryl video appears in my notifs and suddenly I’m watching. There’s no thought process in between
One of the most fascinating moments in Blame is when Killy looks up some stairs and the exit is 3000 km away. And when he reaches the top he sees nothing, but ground with no buildings for miles and then there is a person that explains that the whole space is 143.000 km. Also I am pretty sure Killy isn't young, some time stretches are pretty long and his age doesn't change if I remember correctly.
Killy is most definitely not young, considering the stretches of time mentioned in the manga, plus he's mostly synthetic.
@@fungisrock8955 Yeah that's what I thought
Great video! I'm a little surprised there was no mention of Sagrada Familia, a Basilica in Barcelona. Construction was started in 1882 and it is STILL being built. It's a building that will be finished over 100 years after the architect who designed it died. Ever since watching the original Mobile Suit Gundam, I've always held a soft spot for O'Neill Cylinder colonies, but I've always felt a bit of sorrow over the fact that there's no way I'll see construction a space colony be started, let alone completed. And yet Sagrada Familia will be finished in 2026. This is a construction site that has outlived generations, and yet we DO get to see the end of it in our lifetimes.
I didnt know "a ghost story" but the short description and the moment the house getting destroyed almost made me cry
So glad you brought up Blame. That manga is haunting in its beauty and terrifying in its presentation of an artificial world that has outgrown humanity. I've always been fond of megastructures. A very obscure one that I love is called Gearworld, it's a series of art pieces and a fictional blog by Ursula Vernon (and recently a choose-your-own-adventure series on Tumblr), depicting an ancient labyrinth of concrete and gears with no apparent purpose, inhabited by strange beings who keep their goals to themselves.
You know, what's fascinating to me about your central thesis about megastructures is that the D&D campaign I've been working on for the last 7 years is about a very similar concept to megastructures... and it's for a reason highly relevant to A Ghost Story. Ostensibly, it's a campaign about its setting, a low magic medieval world built over the ruins of an ancient empire. But what it's really about is a meditation on deep time. Not merely as represented by the fall of the previous empire, but as represented by the interstellar, planetary-scale superorganism that infected the world thousands of years ago, and has been slowly building miles-tall stalks, organic megastructures, from the surface ever since. A single species, like a cross between a termite swarm and slime mold, operating at colossal scales, with a panspermic reproductive cycle over tens of thousands of years, honed by billions of years of evolution, in a world thoroughly unequipped to comprehend or combat it (the best thing to do being to simply avoid it).
I believe this idea came to me in part because of the sudden passing of the love of my life (at far too young an age), something that impressed on me the cruel callousness of the natural world in general, and the inevitable march of time. As I described it at the time, it was like my entire world ended, but the world kept spinning as if nothing had happened. The setting for my next D&D campaign, therefore, would be one that emphasized the small, fragile, ephemeral nature of human life next to the mindboggling scale of the universe. It seems I was on the same train of thought as your video here.
The megastructures in Armored Core 6 always blew me away. Very cool backdrop of a world that used to be, but is no more, only to be fought over for scraps by warring factions from another star system….
It gives the same vibes as abandoned Appalachian coal mines just on an absolutely massive scale. A huge boom and an import of tons of mining equipment, money flowing in, and then suddenly everybody ups and leaves when there's no more money to be made. Then you have a bunch of rusted mining equipment and abandoned structures with nobody around.
Okay, so I started watching this yesterday, and I had to stop before I got to “the cost.”
I noticed the title and thumbnail change when I clicked on the video today, and it couldn’t be more fitting, now.
I’m at 27:26, and watching this section of the video has finally made me understand the (figurative) gravity of these superstructures and what they imply.
I mean, I have thought constantly about what only the next thirty years will bring, as my generation becomes grandparents, and the newest generation then experiences less problems than ever as the awareness increases of said problems with the age of the internet (I say this as a severe ADHD person who grew up without any help or accommodations aside from medication, and I was never told what was up with my brain til I figured it out on my own in my early 20s- just like racism has arguably declined in the past 100 years, so too will discrimination against LGBTQ+ or Neurodivergence or other isms, I expect and hope) I mean, the development of AI alone can mean HUGE progress in just 200 years. I’m a prospective teacher, and I’ve seen concepts of AI teachers that perfectly adapt to students and their interests and abilities. That sounds like a utopia, but it isn’t all too unrealistic.
But this. This is something else. It paints a picture of what the world could look like in *millions* of years. Not hundreds or thousands. Maybe those years will pass and nothing like these will exist, but the civilization of the future will find the schematics and ponder upon what we were thinking. It’s incredible, but daunting.
Just, wow.
Daryl being a Blame! fan makes me so happy. Nihei's works are really undertated.
When I watched Cowboy Bebop I thought about how cool some aspects of megastructures seem (like the upside down cities built in a huge ring of grass, these look absolutely insane) but didn't think that much about it, this video was so thoughtful and well written congrats fot the work 🙌
Also the hopeful perspective in the last was beautiful damn
Man I'm so happy you had so much fun making this because it really bled through and I had a fantastic time watching this. :)
For 20 minutes I thought "This reminds me so much of Blame"
I'm glad you have included this amazing piece
Daryl, I love your content, you have this way of describing things that makes them feel both so ethereal yet so real. I just wish that I didn't end up feeling super depressed every time I watch one of them. That was a beautiful ending this time though. I wish there were more people who would talk about Megastructures and things like you did here.
The way you play with visuals, your tone and the background music is so good, I cant put it in words
What a great video!
I love the superstructures in armored core VI, it's such an incredible world and the sense of scale truly makes you speechless, if you haven't I really suggest checking it out!
I'll never stop loving the way you look at games and media in general. You give me such a bliss in indulging in details
Man, this channel gotta be the best discovery of the last 2 years, after a year and something more, you entered officially in my god tier channel. Every video is just...so fucking interesting, I missed a channel like that, thank you very much, you are very inspirational even just for the creativity. Wow
Oh my god you just introduced me to a new emotion of nostalgia, existential dread, melancholy and solace by that end ghost film-
Amazing, incredible video and I want you to know that if it’s enough to us viewers if you had fun and a real passion because it really shines through :))
Really enjoy how you bring together such mixed media threads here - manga, film, and video games, melded with a little reality. Fab stuff, and love the A Ghost Story representation!
You should really, really try Lone Echo. From Ready At Dawn. It's a Meta PCVR title.
You start in a space station. The station itself already feels big. Then you go out.
And you realize the whole station is really big and nearby are asteroids and space cargo.
And then you get to travel to those asteroids as well as a black hole and a hundred miles long space ship. You can't get that sense of scale in any other medium. Everything else is a concept, a vision - but Lone Echo truly nailed the expanse of gargantuan space.
The scale of Blame! is unlike anything I've ever seen in other media. Slight spoils for around the middle of the manga below:
At one point, Killy enters into a room that is just pure blackest dark as far as the eye can see. There is a strange person here, who is surprised to see him. He explains that he is studying this room which is just a giant emptiness...the size of JUPITER. The implication is that at one point, the City has reached the orbit of Jupiter, built around it, completely drained the planet of all of it's resources and just left a giant Jupiter-sized hole behind.
Your mind cannot even comprehend the scale of that one room, and it's only a small part of the City.
This is your best one yet. I am a writer and the worldbuilding aspect of this, combined with you phenomenal writing really did it for me. thank you so much for all the time you spent on this. It was well worth it!
The feeling you're describing has a specific name: sublime. 19th century philosophers and poets discussed it profusely. It's the same feeling evoked by massive monuments, romantic landscape paintings, and massive structures in videogames. Cool video, but you're trying to reinvent the wheel
This ended far from where I expected it would and yet I can see and understand how we got there. Well done.
I love a game that when you climb a big tower it makes your hair stand on end, like your really feeling what it would be like to be so high up. I'm afraid of heights so when I'm playing a game that can cause me to feel that sensation then I really admire it for that, that tower climb into space in the first ape escape did that to me, it felt like it just kept going
Incredible video, another incredible megastructure in a game is the Iterators/Iterator Cities in Rain World. Massive, towering, sentient computer structures meant to figure out the species' purpose, with cities built atop them to avoid the rain that results from the megacomputer's water cooling system. Its incredible to think about and look at.
Absolute peak worldbuilding. I love megastructures for the same reason I love hard magic systems: you throw a tiny bit of creative liberty into your story, and you let science do the rest for you. Nothing gets my imagination running like the field of possibilities opened by these kinds of things.
Honestly - I went into this video not expecting much, just looking to fill time while I had my morning coffee.
But your conclusion at the end left me silent and thinking. It's such an amazing way of looking at the - usually very philosophical and not very physical - 'hope for the future' that is often needed to continue living in this day and age.
It's no longer some meme about the indomitable human spirit or the wish to leave the world a bit happier or better for others - but the knowledge that, inevitably, the world _will_ move on without us, and it will be bigger and brighter than we could ever experience in our own lifetimes.
Thanks for putting this together - great video as always.
This is one of your best videos to date.
Wonderful video as always. I'm a bit surprised NaissanceE didn't make the cut for this video being a videogame set in a megastructure though.
It's based on Blame! so I guess it would be a little redundant, but since it's Daryl Talks Games I guess it'd make sense.
Thank you so very very much for your work on these videos, friend.
Two that stuck out to me was first in Gundam 00 where two characters stand on an artifical ring connected to space elevators and look down on Earth, being awestruck by the sight. Second might be that Zacktreiger from Turn A Gundam where they have to match their velocity in order to line up with a huge slingshot in space, and you just get the scale of the thing as it approaches at a blistering speed.
An honorable mention is also the world of Blame which is basically a huge Dyson Sphere.
Amazing video, it really resonated with me when you mentioned how well be long gone when the mega structures are finished but it can still make you feel so alive.
Just the sight and the idea of multi-generational projects on planetary size is so unfathomably large and out of reach, it leaves me in awe.
One of the scenes from Sword Art Online season 3 the Alicization arc, Eugeo mentions how he’s now filling the role of his father to cut the tree down. He mentions something along the lines of being the 7th generation to be tasked with cutting the tree down. Seeing how the progress bar is barely a tenth diminished, it’s just left my mind to wander and think about what that town would look like when the tree is on its last hit point.
Great Video!!! Love the ending very much, you made an amazing point!!
That tower in the beginning is definitely inspired by Zalem from Gunnm !
Ahh. My lore craving heart. I long for the beauty and madness of structures once again.
Thank you for the lovely video.