Earth And Beyond Gameplay
Chloe Sarnoff
When creating open-world maps, a big issue to take into consideration is how "borders" of sorts are implemented. Obviously, in an open-world game, there shouldn't be invisible-wall borders, as it ruins immersion, and makes the game feel more "artificial".
1) water solution: I never understood why killing the player with a shark or something. Just let him/her swim infinitely (like with a proceduraly generated infinite ocean). That alone would closer resemble the idea of how distant it would be in real life to cross an ocean by swimming. The player would just get tired at some point of going forward and then would decide to reload (because going back all over again would be just as tedious).
Of course, if you have modern boats, ships, jet-skis, etc, and the concept of gas as resource, that works well too and then it becomes part of the item number 4 below, since the player can just sail until running out of gas. Then, if he/she can swim, it becomes again a problem of just letting him/her swim forever.
2) scene barrier: it does not have to be mountains. A dense forest, as someone else told here. A canyon with a beautiful view. A part of a city with too many buildings in the way and the only possible streets blocked. A huge fire destroying parts of a city, or a gas leak, or a radiation accident in part of a city that blocks the way. If the city was invaded by aliens, maybe the gigantic spaceship is itself blocking the path to other parts of the city as it crushed when arriving. Or, why not, you can have flying islands like in Zelda Skyward Sword, where the boundary is given by not-falling-to-death.
3) challenging who tries: you can always increase the challenge exponentially as far as the player goes. Imagine an open-world in the country fields. The player crosses farms in the direction of the inner-lands of your world. More and more enemies show up with no power-up, health kits or something in the way. If you make these field camps procedural and increase the challenge, the player will eventually get killed without having the feeling that he/she was cheated by an artificial border. I like this approach because it even creates in the mind of the players the impression that there might be something hidden ahead (of course, you have to take care and don't abuse on this illusion, to avoid the players becoming mad at you!).
4) lack of resources: if a player has to eat/take medicine/whatever, and/or if vehicles have gas, you don't need boundaries. Let the player and/or its vehicles die. That is particularly useful in a space game, where creating a non-artificial barrier is quite difficult. In other words, if that suits your gameplay framework, make the open world finite by not being accessible due to being impossible to accumulate resources to go beyond a give distance.
I won't keep going with a ton of suggestions based on storyline and gameplay. My reasons: first I don't know which type of game we are talking about. Second: frankly, as nice as it can be to have a story-line or gameplay related solution such as failing missions because some hostage has died when you tried to get out of the borders, I don't think that is exactly what you meant and, on the contrary, I found those to be usually harmful for immersion. But if you happen to be interested in these types too, let me know and I can drop some ideas that I have either seen or thought.
Also, as a general point, notice that more than once I touched procedural generation. Really, I think procedural generation is your friend here. You don't need to use it only for having infinite worlds. I always say we should start using it much more often to make the finite open-games more realistic and diverse. Using it for a fake endless border would be a neat use.
Different games have different requirements in how realistic they are to their genre, e.g. FPS games can constrain to a building, whereas RPG games like Rust / DayZ / Skyrim have larger and more open world maps to suit their style.
Now we're talking 3D objects, how about a plain old sphere? They don't necessarily have to be as big as Earth. Make them the size of a small moon, like Dactyl, the moon of 243 Ida. I can imagine writing a story for such a setting can be quite the challenge (same goes for the torus).
Basically, you just need to put something at the edge of the world that the player can't move past for some reason. Anything will work, as long as it stops the player from going any further in a particular direction while using the actions allowed by your game.
You are in your normal house during a normal day and suddenly there are news reports and alerts of nuclear bombs (the beginning of the nuclear war of 2077). You are then tasked to go to the nearby vault as soon as possible. But you can take a long time to do so if you wish. The relevant part is that when you try to leave the map, the bomb actually explodes nearby (it normally explodes only when you reached the vault), killing everyone, setting a hidden limit to the map. You can see this in action here.
In the same vein I've seen in Hitman Absolution's Streets of Hope level a border implemented in a similar fashion with a train. In a town, as long as the player stays far from the railroad there is no train, but as soon as the player approaches, the train comes, preventing the player from crossing. The train is actually an infinite train and doesn't end as long as the player stays close. As soon as the player goes far enough, the train ends.
The point is the player need to have a incentive to stay in the game area. This does not have to be by force, as long as it's clear that leaving will have a bad outcome to the story. The player might not be able to rescue his friend, might never be able to unravel the secret story, might not be able to find the holy grail.
In an open world the player might go further out of bound than in a completely railroaded game. However, when the player does not return in time, objectives might run out of time, enemies might replenish or puzzles reset.
The key is to think of normal situations you would find in the environment that is in the game, and to strategically place these situations around your borders so everything looks natural to the user.
Maps require impassable boundaries, but unless we restrict the environments to either interior spaces or steep canyons, these boundaries can't always block the player's view of the outlying, unreachable area. In our more realistic titles, like HL2, these boundaries often require fictional and visual explanations. In the heavily stylized Team Fortress world, however, conspicuous artificiality is a core design principle and so we can simplify or altogether ignore these explanations without compromising the player experience. Playtesting showed, for instance, that these low fences leading to an empty expanse successfully conveyed the message that the area beyond the fence is uninteresting and out-of-bounds.
The beautiful and deep horror game 'Beyond the Oaks' is a third-person shooter game that takes place in a remote stretch of forest and mountain range. After a mysterious object crashes down to earth, causing you to fall down into the entrancing forest, you journey on foot beyond the sturdy old oak trees. With an active volcano, an eruption of powerful dark magic, and a mysterious legend, what lies beyond the oaks is up to you to discover. An exact date will be announced soon.
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