There is a very specific kind of chaos that only British town planning can produce. A roundabout that feeds into another roundabout. A pedestrian crossing that deposits you onto a traffic island with nowhere to go. A Greggs. And then, roughly twelve paces away, another Greggs. If you’ve ever stood in a British town centre genuinely baffled by where any road actually leads, you will recognise something familiar in a surprising number of open world games. Developers spend years crafting vast digital cities, and somehow, open world game city design keeps arriving at the same conclusions as a sleep-deprived planning committee in Wolverhampton circa 1987.
Why Do So Many Game Cities Feel Like Milton Keynes Designed Them?
Milton Keynes gets a lot of stick, and most of it is deserved. Grid systems that look logical on paper but feel genuinely nightmarish to navigate on foot. Roads that loop back on themselves. Roundabouts as far as the eye can see. The thing is, Milton Keynes at least had a plan. The cities in a lot of open world games appear to have been built by someone who started with great ambition, got distracted mid-way through, and then said “that’ll do” before clocking off for a four-day weekend.
Take Cyberpunk 2077. Night City is visually extraordinary, genuinely stunning in places, and utterly impenetrable by any logical means. Roads end without warning. Motorway on-ramps appear, then simply stop. There are multi-storey car parks that you can drive into but cannot drive out of without reversing up a staircase. Replace the neon holograms with a Betfred and a shuttered Debenhams, and you’ve basically got Sheffield city centre during a road resurfacing project.
Grand Theft Auto and the Sacred British One-Way System
The GTA series has always had an oddly British relationship with road logic. Liberty City in GTA IV had entire boroughs you’d circle for twenty minutes before realising the exit you needed was a tiny gap between two bins round the back of a car park. That is not artistic invention. That is Swindon. GTA V’s Los Santos is more open, but the highway systems around the city’s outskirts have a particular quality: they technically connect everything, yet the fastest route to anywhere is somehow always three miles longer than it looks on the map.
British motorway junctions operate on the same principle. The M25 junction at Heathrow doesn’t want you to get to Heathrow quickly. It wants you to spend forty minutes in a spiral of lanes that all seem correct until they suddenly aren’t. Rockstar, consciously or not, has absorbed this energy completely.
The Greggs Placement Problem (A Formal Investigation)
Any serious analysis of open world game city design has to confront the Greggs problem. In real British high streets, Greggs locations follow a logic that defies conventional retail theory. According to data compiled by various food industry analysts, the UK now has over 2,500 Greggs branches. Several of these are within eyeline of each other. This is not a bug in British commercial planning. It is a deeply intentional feature, presumably based on research that concluded the British public cannot walk more than 400 metres without requiring a sausage roll.
Games replicate this accidentally. In Sleeping Dogs, set in Hong Kong, there are noodle stalls on virtually every corner. In Watch Dogs Legion, set in a fictionalised London, there are pubs, convenience shops, and food vendors clustered in ways that feel almost too accurate. At one point I found three separate cafes within a single block in Shoreditch, which, honestly, is underselling it. The real Shoreditch has approximately one coffee shop per square metre, and the other half of the buildings are either a barber or a venue for something described vaguely as a “pop-up experience”.
Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Spiritual Heart of British Road Planning
Bear with me on this one. Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in the American frontier in the late 1800s. And yet the paths through its wilderness feel profoundly, almost cosmically, British. Trails that start confidently and then become a suggestion. Paths that look like they lead somewhere and turn out to be a dead end near a swamp. Fords that only reveal themselves to be impassable once you’re already in them.
This is, essentially, rural Shropshire. You set out from a village with confidence, follow a footpath that your OS map swears is correct, and forty minutes later you are standing in a field with a confused horse and no mobile signal. Rockstar has captured British rural navigation so precisely that I half expected Arthur Morgan to find a sign pointing simultaneously to two different villages both called “Lower Something” with no indication of which direction is which.
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Got Victorian London Exactly Right (And That’s a Problem)
Of all the games that nail open world game city design with a British sensibility, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate deserves special recognition for accuracy that is almost painful. Victorian London was a city built in layers over centuries, with medieval street patterns awkwardly wedged under Georgian expansion, then slapped with Victorian industry, then patched up after the Blitz. The result was a city where no two roads meet at a sensible angle and virtually every junction has at least five exits.
Syndicate replicates this with eerie precision. The map looks coherent from above and makes zero sense at street level. There are districts you can see clearly from a rooftop that take fifteen minutes to reach because of the Thames, a railway viaduct, and what appears to be a wall someone built for no reason. This is historically accurate. The real Thames still does this to people every single day, and Transport for London’s journey planner has the audacity to call it efficient.
The Future of Chaotic Urban Design in Games
As game worlds grow larger and more detailed, developers face a genuine tension. Perfectly logical city layouts feel sterile and fake. Too much chaos and players spend forty minutes trying to find a car park exit. The sweet spot, it turns out, is exactly the level of mild dysfunction that characterises a medium-sized British town. Not quite a disaster, not quite working properly either. The kind of city where the pedestrian crossing takes ninety seconds to change, the bus shelter has no timetable, and the one-way system was last reviewed in 1994.
There’s a strange cottage industry growing around games that deliberately lean into this. Indie titles, city builders, transport simulators. Games that let you be the council planner dropping a roundabout somewhere wildly inconvenient and walking away pleased with yourself. Honestly, if you want to understand why these games feel so lived-in, consider the urban planning decisions behind them the same way you’d consider the branding decisions behind a wellness business. Even something as niche as cbd web design requires thought about layout, flow, and where you put the exits. Games, it turns out, are exactly the same.
The best open world cities are messy, contradictory, and occasionally maddening. Just like the real ones. And that, more than anything, is why they feel so convincingly British.
Honourable Mentions: Games That Deserve Formal Planning Complaints
- Death Stranding — The entire country is one giant public right of way dispute.
- Elden Ring — The Lands Between has no pavements, no signage, and something has clearly been built on a floodplain.
- Cities: Skylines — You built this city. You have no one to blame. And yet somehow there are traffic jams on every road.
- The Witcher 3 — Novigrad’s market district has the energy of a town centre that recently pedestrianised its high street but forgot to tell the delivery lorries.
Every one of these digital spaces scratches that very specific itch: the satisfaction of navigating something chaotic, succeeding despite the layout, and feeling obscurely proud of yourself for finding the way out. British town centres have been providing that experience for centuries. Open world games are just finally catching up.
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