So, I’ve been modeling Narshe from Final Fantasy 6 lately just for fun. It got me wondering, what is the average poly count of a town that size? I tried searching google for something close to an answer, but pretty much only came up with character counts.
All depends on detail level for the buildings… on newer consoles, I get quite liberal with the counts
Hm… probably a smaller town in Morrowind or Oblivion. Of course I’d also be interested in the norm for towns in newer games.
And apparently I posted an earlier picture of it…
It depends on so much that there’s really no meaningful answer.
What kind of game? Where’s the camera? What type of camera and how does it move? Art style? Target platform? Desired performance? So on and so forth.
It really depends on the platform. For mobile games keep it around 300-1500 polys per mesh. But for PC games you shouldn’t really be bothered with the poly count cuz PCs can handle a sh*t load of polys 
I think it’s a shame- it’s very easy to get average poly counts for characters- but when It comes to environments, there is not much detail out their on how to structure your polygons, how many to use, what’s appropriate and where, UV Mapping and all the other modern effects that go into it.
The polycount of an individual building is irrelevant because we don’t know how many buildings (or other objects) are in the scene. I tend to go by the “scene complexity” guideline in the CryEngine docs (it’s not Unity, but it’s comparable). They suggest a well optimized scene could contain 1,042,000 tris and ~2000 draw calls.
+1
It can also be very variable… for instance, detail objects like trees on a terrain that are billboarded at a distance but when you get close will be rendered meshes increasing your polycount. It could seem fine but then you get a stutter if you’ve overloaded.
Thanks everyone, you’ve all be really helpful. Hopefully one day I can use this knowledge in actual game development haha