Starfield: A city is a cluster of shiny Zaha Hadid buildings surrounded by an infinity of unspoiled wilderness full of Resources. If you walk ten meters away from the helipad you can plop down an Outpost that hoovers up all the iridium off the ground. Space is unlimited free real estate and everyone can be their own little self-made yeoman factory baron
Armored Core: This planet has oil so they covered it in drilling platforms the size of continents and sucked the whole thing dry like a capri sun, then bored through the surface and ate its guts from the inside out using literal worms. The sheer scale and inhumanity of capital is utterly beyond comprehension; you're driving a 200-foot-tall death machine but every time you look upwards you feel like a mouse in a sidewalk crack. When the profits fell they built a cage around the entire world and covered it in guns pointing down
