Revealed: The Best and Worst RPGs to Live In 2022

Have you ever loved a game so much, that you’d want to live there? Well, wonder no more as Currys developed a liveability score based on important metrics, such as cost of a pint, cost of transportation and cost of a room. As well as four metrics including safety, employment, work/life balance and entertainment. They enlisted the help of illustrator Jamie O’Neill to bring the reimagined locations to life.

Would you be better off in Whiterun? Skyrim ranked as the best Role-Playing Game (RPG) locale to live in.

The best place to virtually live in is Skyrim as it earned the top score of 28.7 out of 50. If you’re after a good time, a city like Whiterun is the place to be thanks to its plentiful entertainment opportunities, with 153 inns and merchants to enjoy in your free time. However, this game scored a not-so stellar score of 0.1 for cost of housing and average income. In second place is Monster Hunter: World with cities like Astera receiving almost perfect scores for cost of living, which includes the cost of travel, a pint, a meal and housing. However, it scored just a three on the safety metric. In third place is The Witcher 3 and it’s one of the few RPGs listed that allows you to own a home, earning it a score of 9.3 for cost of housing. It’s also a great place to live based on the cost of a pint, setting you back 5 Orens for a pint of lager.

Borderlands 2 is the worst place to live as it scored a mere 7.9 on the liveability metric. There is no housing or room to rent, which means there’s no rest after a long day of quests. Average income is also abysmal, scoring just 0.3 on the metric. Just before Borderlands 2 is Dark Souls 3, with a total score of 20.6. With the cost of housing scoring just a 3.7 and the average income scoring 0.1, the Kingdom of Lothric is an impractical place to live.

Jamie O’Neill reimagines the best game cityscapes as real-world locations

“Based in my hometown on the little island of Jersey, I’ve always been a passionate doodler and love nothing more than to create fresh, eye-catching visuals. Having studied traditional animation and pre-production design at the Bournemouth Arts University, storytelling, expression and narrative are always at the heart of my illustrations. In recent years I’ve developed a fondness for creating bright, vibrant and dynamic digital illustrations of detailed environments, producing the majority of my work using Procreate.”

“When creating this campaign, I took inspiration from my love of video game concept design and my background in animation pre-production to influence my style. When creating these illustrations, I researched existing cities based on their economic likeness to the corresponding RPG environments. I also looked at factors that would pay homage to both the real-life locations and the fictional in-game worlds. This also included the characters that reside in them to create the final digital illustrations.”

The appeal of a virtual life

The metaverse could be described as an all-encompassing digital world that is somewhat similar to virtual reality, and is a place where you can connect to all sorts of digital environments. It can be used for anything, including work, entertainment, concerts and leisure. This provides benefits such as better connectivity with players around the world, new business opportunities and improvements to online learning and education.

Combine this with the main draw for gaming, which is the captivating storylines and the detailed graphics of expansive worlds that people can explore, either on their own or with friends. This social aspect that connects people from around the world is a huge positive as to why people love to game. Plus, their similarities to real-life aid with the escapism aspect thanks to the ability to rent a room, buy a house, eat, drink and earn money.

Where would you like to live?

The methodology behind selecting which real-world locations to use for each RPG was based on the most prominent or interesting metric that was revealed during data collection. For example, a game with a vast amount of entertainment opportunities and missions or ‘employment opportunities’ was compared to a cosmopolitan city.