A Graspable Size Game World

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Inspired by this Jimquisition episode, let's talk about video game environments/maps and their (un-)graspable size! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr3OcN2qmqo

Vice City is my favourite GTA. I knew every alleyway, all the vehicle locations, all the weapon spawns - everything. And I mostly still do. Then San Andreas came along. It was bigger. I explored every nook and cranny of it, yet most of the time I couldn't find my own safe house neighbourhood without the map. GTA IV doesn't have any memorable locations for me either. I think these games trying to be as big as they can works against them. The bigger it got, the more void it felt. And as a result I didn't remember anything about them.

This is what I remember from TES Oblivion: there were plains and caves. I had my eye more on the compass than anything else. Along comes Dark Souls. No map, no indicators. I know every single area from top to bottom. The world of Lordran was complex, but small enough for me to grasp and memorise. Lot's of repetition to visit certain NPC's helped too. Along comes Dark Souls 2. It was by no means as tight or "smartly" designed and as a result - despite 200 hours into it - I have no clue where's what.

Criticise FFX's linearity all you want, but almost every location and map is memorable, or simple enough to memorise. The smart exception however are the cloysters of trials. For some reason they always mess me up - I can't memorise them. Was that awesome map design on purpose?

TLDR: What videogames do you think have grown too big in their maps for you to grasp? What videogame map do you remember from A-Z? Which ones feel like home?

I recently made a comment about how much I adored the level design in Super Mario 64 (which I was playing for the first time) for exactly this reason.

I know everything about Gothic and Risen games, because there are no real maps to help you, and they are exploration-driven open-world games.

Saints' Row 4, I barely know the city at all even though it's the same city as SR3; although that's mostly since you can fly in straight lines over everything with your superpowers.

My favorite aspect of FFXI (the first online one) was memorizing all the zones.

I didn't like Oblivion's world, but I think Skyrim was brilliantly designed (at least above ground). The areas were very very similar but somehow distinct, and it all came together after a while. To be fair, it might also be a function of how much time I spent in the game. The underground areas are repetitive and usually kind of uninspired, especially after a couple hundred hours. ._.

I LOVE Dark Souls' world and the way it connects and the way it's revealed and the way you interact with it. Pretty much perfect.

Final Fantasy XII nails this so well. Besides maybe the deserts and sandseas in the early parts of the game, every single area stands out and not two of them feel alike. The soundtrack probably helped this a lot, giving almost every area a unique background track. I could easily draw the entire world map in my head.

It's not the only FF game that did this well, but XII comes to mind before all others.

On the other hand I always had trouble finding locations in FF IX, especially in the eastern half of the Mist continent. I just couldn't memorize where any of the locations were. And for reasons that can probably be blamed on hardware, the SNES titles had this problem as well. I got lost trying to find certain locations in IV and V so many times. To a lesser extent in VI too. The towns especially just didn't do much to stand out as different from the many towns that look the same. The first map in V was probably the best in that regard but it was still confusing to navigate.

You're absolutely right about GTA. I knew GTA3's Liberty City and also Vice City like the back of my hand. San Andreas I was pretty decent at - I didn't know every street but I knew where every neighbourhood and little town was in relation to each other and I knew how to find my safehouses. IV and V? Don't have a clue! Less is more, sometimes.

WoW's map is the one I have basically memorized. Moreso before the Cataclysm revamp.

Morrowind is where I feel at home :3:

Daggerfall is definitely the biggest that I know of. If I recall correctly the in-game map was the size of Great Britain and would take just as long to walk across - in real time, too. Thank God for fast travel.

WoW pre-Cataclysm really did do its world well. Everywhere was pretty memorable and unique, and it was pretty easy to learn the map.

On the other hand, there is Just Cause 2 which has a huge map that I definitely don't have memorized despite all the hours I've put into that game. I don't mind that though. It's silly fun, and there's a certain joy that comes with grapplechuting around the world to not only randomly come across weird things you haven't seen before but to also stumble upon a familiar place again with fun things to grapple and blow up. I did manage to memorize all of the airports though. That was important for grappling cars to planes and watching the ensuing hilarity.

I've not given much thought on this subject. The Jimquisition episode reminds me that I need to play Resident Evil, though.

The nice thing about Just Cause 2 is that even though it's too big to really memorize, it doesn't matter since just traveling around and blowing trout up is all you want to do anyway.

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Originally Posted by chionos

My favorite aspect of FFXI (the first online one) was memorizing all the zones.

I didn't like Oblivion's world, but I think Skyrim was brilliantly designed (at least above ground). The areas were very very similar but somehow distinct, and it all came together after a while. To be fair, it might also be a function of how much time I spent in the game. The underground areas are repetitive and usually kind of uninspired, especially after a couple hundred hours. ._.

I LOVE Dark Souls' world and the way it connects and the way it's revealed and the way you interact with it. Pretty much perfect.

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You know, it's funny, I was actually really impressed with the diversity of the dungeon design in Skyrim. Most games that attempt something that huge have very copy-paste-y dungeon layouts, lots of right angles, and little creativity, but after a hundred hours of Skyrim I was still finding unique caves, unexpected underground waterfalls, and fun stuff like that. Some of the dwarven ruins were a bit more generic, but I was never bored.

I don't think memorizability (?) is really the issue here, as what he's talking about with the Spencer Mansion and Shadow Moses is a bit different from why he's criticizing modern open world games. Sterling points out how in the last two Far Cry games, the only thing to actually go out and discover are these forgettable, arcade-like minigames with quick and easy objectives. Ex: go kill some defenseless animals with this gun or drive an ATV to that location within 2 minutes. Skyrim and Oblivion may be impossible to memorize but their worlds are filled with hand-placed, and often unexpected, quests and NPCs that stand out from the repetitive side missions that modern games seem to rely on.

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Originally Posted by metagloria

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Originally Posted by chionos

My favorite aspect of FFXI (the first online one) was memorizing all the zones.

I didn't like Oblivion's world, but I think Skyrim was brilliantly designed (at least above ground). The areas were very very similar but somehow distinct, and it all came together after a while. To be fair, it might also be a function of how much time I spent in the game. The underground areas are repetitive and usually kind of uninspired, especially after a couple hundred hours. ._.

I LOVE Dark Souls' world and the way it connects and the way it's revealed and the way you interact with it. Pretty much perfect.

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You know, it's funny, I was actually really impressed with the diversity of the dungeon design in Skyrim. Most games that attempt something that huge have very copy-paste-y dungeon layouts, lots of right angles, and little creativity, but after a hundred hours of Skyrim I was still finding unique caves, unexpected underground waterfalls, and fun stuff like that. Some of the dwarven ruins were a bit more generic, but I was never bored.

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You're right. I guess it's more the dwarven ruins that grow to be rather excruciatingly boring after the first four or five. Also, it's probably more about the lack of creature diversity than the actual environments that bothers me.

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Originally Posted by chionos

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Originally Posted by metagloria

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Originally Posted by chionos

My favorite aspect of FFXI (the first online one) was memorizing all the zones.

I didn't like Oblivion's world, but I think Skyrim was brilliantly designed (at least above ground). The areas were very very similar but somehow distinct, and it all came together after a while. To be fair, it might also be a function of how much time I spent in the game. The underground areas are repetitive and usually kind of uninspired, especially after a couple hundred hours. ._.

I LOVE Dark Souls' world and the way it connects and the way it's revealed and the way you interact with it. Pretty much perfect.

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You know, it's funny, I was actually really impressed with the diversity of the dungeon design in Skyrim. Most games that attempt something that huge have very copy-paste-y dungeon layouts, lots of right angles, and little creativity, but after a hundred hours of Skyrim I was still finding unique caves, unexpected underground waterfalls, and fun stuff like that. Some of the dwarven ruins were a bit more generic, but I was never bored.

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You're right. I guess it's more the dwarven ruins that grow to be rather excruciatingly boring after the first four or five. Also, it's probably more about the lack of creature diversity than the actual environments that bothers me.

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That's a fair point. Oh look, another draugr! Ooh, scary...

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Originally Posted by Bolivar

I don't think memorizability (?) is really the issue here, as what he's talking about with the Spencer Mansion and Shadow Moses is a bit different from why he's criticizing modern open world games. Sterling points out how in the last two Far Cry games, the only thing to actually go out and discover are these forgettable, arcade-like minigames with quick and easy objectives. Ex: go kill some defenseless animals with this gun or drive an ATV to that location within 2 minutes. Skyrim and Oblivion may be impossible to memorize but their worlds are filled with hand-placed, and often unexpected, quests and NPCs that stand out from the repetitive side missions that modern games seem to rely on.

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The problem is, he's grouped two entirely separate issues into a single one, which makes it difficult to establish exactly what he means.

On the one hand, he talks about completely bland worlds with a lot of space, but no content. On the other, he talks about the familiarity and backtracking over a single, small zone.

These two things are not mutually exclusive. You can have a single small area that requires a lot of backtracking, but have it be utterly boring and empty. You can also have large, expansive worlds, filled with beloved pieces that stay with the character forever, even if you never go back to them unless you restart the game (just look at any of the classic Final Fantasy titles).

I hate sandbox type game worlds like in Bully. I like huge and diverse worlds like in Skyrim, GTA V, and Final Fantasy. I don't think it's much of an issue if the making system is really good.

Majora's Mask captures this sentiment pretty much perfectly. The more you play it, the more enjoyable it gets as you get to know the world and every minute of the three days in greater and greater detail.