Knowing the Size of the Map Would ‘Destroy The Illusion’
Open-world games require some crazy work behind the scenes. To this end, a documentary recently released on Youtube goes into the making of Horizon: Zero Dawn. Among the details, celebrations and trivia are some interesting tidbits from Jan-Bart Van Beek, the game’s Art Director. In the documentary, he discusses the techniques used by developers to create a sense of scale while traversing the world map.
According to Van Beek, “everything is smaller. If a mountain is 3000 m high we make it 300 m. So it works, and you can go through it rapidly, but it feels big. It always feels bigger than it is.” This makes perfect sense, from a design perspective. You don’t want to spend an hour in real time scaling a single mountain. Maybe you’ve dinner to cook, or kids to corral, or work to do. Yet Van Beek and his team didn’t want to disclose this info at first.
For the designers, giving concrete details about the map like that “will destroy the illusion. If people knew how big it really was, they’d be disappointed. It’s better to let them experience the world, than to define it in figures.” Yes, this is something you have to do in order to make it possible to navigate a game world. A three kilometer mountain just looks and sounds so much better, is all. On top of that, one has to imagine that creating and maintaining map elements that were actually the described size would be murder on any game engine, even a modern one. What do you think? Would you prefer these worlds be free of trickery? Would you prefer to spend hours or days traversing an enormous world, or do the techniques in question make things better? Let us know in the comments below.