Planetary Landing: A nice place to visit, but...

The question is...

Seeing Earth is currently so developed with huge cities and with massive forests and vegetation, how much of that will be in-game?

In the future, how would Earth look? We don't know!

Not knowing seems like a door of opportunity and it comes with a storyline ready for the writing.

Restricting landing a ship to a couple areas on Earth makes sense, but maybe a story of why Earth became what it is in the future could/would dictate limited places to land i.e. "Why can't we land anywhere on Earth?".

Other planets, even the Moon, are easy, there's nothing there, so they say. It's just terrain to deal with.

Since development is all over most of the planet, how do you limit how much of that is seen by a player, and how much would the game have to create? Restrict a player's movement to a defined area so you only have to make those areas in any detail.

What would you see when flying in to land? Now that would be a real large area the pilot could see, at least from altitude of say, below 2 kilometers (6500 feet).

That would be LOT to see. That means a lot to put in-game.

Solution?

Domed developments. Maybe even underground, where you land in an undeveloped isolated area, so it's just procedural nature and you arrive at a port to land at that is under a huge dome, or has landing pads that are elevators to under ground facilities. More than 99% of Earth could only be seen from high altitude, which means simple resolution would be enough to render the terrain. Those few landing zones would need more detail the closer you get to the landing pad. A roof could open for domed locations, or the landing pad lowers to an area underground. Once the player disembarks, they are inside, no nature to render. Maybe have some small area developed that could be seen from a viewing window, but windows would be only above ground.

Tunnels and caves underground present interesting possibilities.

The story why you can't go outside? Pick one. Bugs. Disease. Atmospheric toxins, but humans now live indoors, and any nature is grown inside like house plants. Agriculture is highly managed by technology to make it as efficient and productive as possible.

Flying above the surface could be restricted due to some health concerns. "Don't get too close or you'll get sick", so any incoming ships are required to fly at no lower than a certain altitude till you get to the landing zone. Go outside the zone, and you get a warning, and if ignored to return to the zone, your ship gets vaporized, so as to not harm the environment no doubt.

Maybe the flight system on Earth takes over the ship for an automated landing so you can't go to restricted areas.

Indoors or underground means you have a clean slate, you can do whatever you want rather than be limited by a whole bunch of content that is nothing more than eye-candy but requires a massive amount of work by developers and places constraints on the game's performance.

I don't know what all has been said so far about how the game will approach developing Earth, so sorry if these thoughts have already been answered. I still thinks it's an interesting topic in game development that players who don't know how to make a game can better understand why developers have to do the things they do in a video game.