No mean feat, considering how often the place has been recreated in polygons. It’s certainly the most comprehensive and accurate recreation of Central London ever put to pixels. Watch Dogs: Legion, in contrast, is arguably one of the most street-level accurate locations that has ever been featured in a game. It has a smattering of its landmarks, but the connective tissue is largely an invention of Rockstar, informed by LA’s general look and feel but casually unconcerned by its geography. Iconic locations like Del Perro and Vinewood are vaguely navigable to anyone familiar with Santa Monica or the Sunset Strip, but Los Santos’ compact map barely corresponds to the impossible sprawl of Los Angeles. GTA, for example, isn’t really concerned with recreating Los Angeles as much as it is with bottling its attitude. People even have opinions about how they’re governed when they don’t live there, such is their influence and visibility.īut the London of Legion and the LA of GTA V are not 1:1 recreations, and how they’ve been snipped and warped to suit the needs of those games can tell us a lot about how difficult it is to make believable virtual locations to bottle the magic of a real place and spray it out of televisions. Both games depict an intensely familiar world city the kind of cities that have so embedded themselves in popular culture that everyone on the planet has a strong sense of them. Compare the recent Watch Dogs: Legionwith something like Grand Theft Auto V. More important than laser scans and satellite mapping when it comes to digital tourism. Hong Kong existing on the game disc as an authentic city where complicated lives play themselves out is crucial to managing the game’s pace, contrasting bursts of John Woo bombast with tense micro-dramas and serene moments of levity.īy fleshing out Hong Kong as a city of countless stories, it earns the space to make you care about the one it wants to tell, and serves as a top-shelf example of how cities can be more than curious backdrops to action games. Its overarching plot about a Chinese-American cop infiltrating the Triads regularly gives way to micro-stories involving regular beat cops, working vice, helping people on the street, and reconnecting the protagonist Wei Shen with his roots.
Sleeping Dogs’ mission structure springs from the location like a serialised TV show. Its virtual Hong Kong is not a playground, it’s a setting for dramas big and small. The source of its strength is its unmistakable sense of place. Which it should be, because frankly, it’s the best non- Rockstar open-world game ever made, and it gives the Rockstar ones a good run for their money too. The status of Sleeping Dogs as of 2021 is, well, who knows, but its inclusion by Xbox’s backwards compatibility team in the latest round of FPS Boost enhancements hints that it is still beloved by many. Some lacklustre DLC, an ill-fated multiplayer spin-off, some rudimentary remastering and abandoned plans for a sequel would follow before the studio, United Front Games, slept their last dog in late 2016. The project changed names and owners a number of times originally conceived as a new IP, then folded into an existing franchise as ‘ True Crime: Hong Kong’, under which guise it was unceremoniously cancelled before finally being published under Square Enix back in 2012. The history of Sleeping Dogs is almost as chaotic as that of Hong Kong itself. Whether it corresponds to the vibe of its real-world counterpart is rather beside the point. It has an unmistakable vibe, in the way that all world cities do. It’s all carefully stage-managed and blocked out in very precise and clever ways to sell its illusion, but what an illusion. Sleeping Dogs is one of the greatest games of all time. Betrayed, even, such is the apparent realness of Sleeping Dogs as someone who has never had the privilege of visiting the real place. If I ever visit Hong Kong, and discover that Pork Bun Guys are an invention of the game, I would feel deeply unsettled. What I do know is that Sleeping Dogs’ representation of it is one of the most authentic feeling worlds that has ever been depicted in a video game. Is he real? Am I real? I don’t know if Hong Kong has an abundance of pork bun stalls. READ MORE: Meet the supernatural heroes of ‘Marvel’s Midnight Suns’.He just wants to go home and do some Pork Bun Guy stuff, before these streets once again demand their daily tribute of delicious charred pig in a sweet, soft bun. But that’s of no concern to the Pork Bun Guy. The thick din of Hong Kong’s bustle is broken by the distant revving of engines and wailing sirens.
The Pork Bun Guy thinks about packing up for the day, ending another long streak of serving life-giving snacks to passers-by.