foliage check

intro

some time ago, i was asked by a friend to do a "foliage check" on some video game scenery. this has now become a recurring thing that i am half-jokingly asked to do when watching any friends playing a game with foliage, whether they ask me themselves or i just do it unprompted.

for background, i am an environment artist, and my father was a landscaper who taught me his stuff, so i am pretty familiar with natural scenery, in addition to how it's implemented in video games. i just can't help it. i love nature!

i rate these on a scale of 1-10, aside from given '0' scores for games that don't feature natural foliage at all. i give consideration to placement, repetition/variation, density/sparsity, and overall visual appeal. this doesn't mean all "photorealistic" games will get a 10/10. skyrim itself doesn't score that high, for example. i may give some value to applicability of a given biome but i want to focus less on the pedantic nature of biomes because video games don't often aim to be 1-to-1 accurate with real life biomes.

they are subject to change over time!

last updated 5/10/25.

score	game title	comments
10/10	sekiro: shadows die twice	well-varied props, brush placement, proper 'clumping' of elements so that paths feel defined, trees feel appropriate for setting and biome, feels well-decorated
9/10	stray	this applies to the places in the game where natural scenery appears. feels lush, vibrant, and overgrown in the right ways.
7/10	the elder scrolls v: skyrim	well-designed prop pieces, varied biomes with appropriate blending between, docked points for having pine trees that look generic af, large swathes of nothing, and icy highlands that lack variety.