Borders on massive worlds (Open World Design).

How do y'all go about dealing with making natural barriers with massive worlds (E.G. - 100+ Sq KM).

With an island this is pretty easy, but with anything else, when you put things into realistic scale, a single mountain chain in reality could cover that 100 Sq KM pretty easily. Any time I've ever attempted to build natural borders with mountains I find myself either A - The borders look like a giant box around the map, or B - I get the borders good - but based on semi-real scales - they mountains take up A LOT of valuable playing space.

Here's the problem -
1 - If I do a bunch of smaller 'cliffs' it looks like the world is inside a giant box and no mountain in the level can ever be higher than these cliffs as you'll see the nothingness of the skybox behind it. (And they look unnatural)

2 - Giant nice mountains - take up entire chunks of terrain, thus turning a 100 Sq KM map down to like 40 Sq KM as to create natural barriers but now gives less playing room for the players.

If there's any tips, or videos or hints one could give that deals with this very issue I'd be soo appreciative of it.
I find borders (aside from island environments) the hardest part to deal with when dealing with open world designs.

 

If you have places in the map where you can see beyond the mountain cliffs that make your boundary, why can't you simply place decorative mountain objects way in the distance between it and the skybox?

 

hmm didn't even think about that, I feel pretty dumb now lol.

 

There is a series on YouTube called Boundary Break that’ll show you exactly how same games like that trick the player into thinking a world is more full of stuff than it is. Those decorative mountains I talked about will likely just be a billboard with a picture of a mountain.

 

What @newjerseyrunner mentioned is the approach taken by Skyrim. Beyond the game's default borders, there're entire low-res landscapes modeled to maintain the horizon. There're a few examples on youtube of people noclipping beyond the normal borders to explore other regions.

 

I love that series! Regularly watching it
Funny side note: @MrArcher's video recommended me the following video:

 

That stuff is so cool

 

Depending on the setting of your game, your borders could include:

A literal man-made brick wall
A forest that gets increasingly denser
Toxic ground which damages the player the further they venture out
Big unkillable enemies that knock you back and tell you "Get off my land!"

The options are endless but you just need to pick something that fits your lore.

Also, I'd recommend a combination of different barriers so it doesn't feel forced

 

A wall of radioactive fire!!

 

I agree that you should use a variety of tools to keep your player in bounds. Just make sure it makes sense. I hate invisible walls, or paths blocked by sticks that I should easily fit through. Or even worse

 

River. vast open empty area ovviously leading nowhere. Impenetrable forest. Mountains. CLiffs. Chasms. Canyons. City walls. etc etc. Whatever makes sense for the setting.

 

Giant dinos, or othe learhal species areas, meteorites, earthquakes, magic spell as part of story, low oxigen/poison gases, geysers, etc.

 

The edge of the disc.

Spoiler: Discworld

 

I think the best idea ever had in this department of game design was done by the creators of Halo. That might be due to my personal experiences but the best MP map I think was Snowbound in Halo 3. You had the blinding white snow and expansive horizon, all inaccessible to you because of automated gun turrets gun you down if you wander out of bounds. They're placed around the map and some walls prevent traversal in some directions making it a bit more interesting than just a gun turret cage. Gamifying the out of bounds experience can be fun too! Challenge the player instead of just outright murdalizing them when they attempt to dessert the battle area.

 

Agreed, I love the idea of gamifying out of bounds. Usually, you just reward players who make it out with a secret Easter egg or something.


Sand trap on Halo was interesting too. If you ventured out of the map, explosives would pop out of the sand like an old Bouncing Betty mine. The thing is, that in a vehicle, you could just barely outrun the charges, making out of bounds in bounds if you’re a skilled enough driver.

 

This may come in poor taste but I had to do it:

Spoiler: Is it still gamification if...

Is it still gamifying the out of bounds experience when you B U F F E R O V E R F L O W?

/humor

 

I like the way The Witcher 3 handled this. A part beyond the open world boundary was still detailed forest, when you enter you see a warning and when you stray too far you are taken to the fast travel menu

 

What I have been thinking for my game is that the game takes place on a plateau having no walls or mountains bordering it. So, there is no "you cannot go that way" messages or invisible walls blocking player's movement, only very deep chasm and falling prevents from going any further.

 

I hate this idea. This is the "Please return to Battlefield" crap in Halo. It just seems artificial and immersion breaking. This would only seem natural in arcade-style games like DOOM 2016, where immersion in the gameworld is not necessary.

Just make sure the geometry doesn't let you descend. The plateau is a great natural boundary maker, and been done before. Halo CE had a level called Truth and Reconciliation that took place on top of a plateau. Someone may eventually figure out how to get down, but don't worry about them. Let explorers go beyond the boundaries, just make it really hard.

 

@newjerseyrunner I think you've got valid points there. The return to battlefield crap is one dimensional, and boring!

Just implement a kill plane at a certain altitude beneath your level. Remember aesthetics/atmosphere matter too. The Truth and Reconciliation level had that awesome Pelican aerial insertion under cover of night (and a covenant cruiser overhead), and you could look out over the plains below.

Lastly, I just want to make a silly joke about out of bounds experiences:

Spoiler: May trigger some but disclaimer: I am not responsible for your re/actions

BUILD THE WALL.

Spoiler contents are just for fun

 

Are you aware that many games allow to swim. How you will deal with swimming into deep sea otherwise? It would be pointless and boring. So bringing back to a shore makes more sense. Some games give player's damage, when getting too far. Similar applies to walking on large open grounds, forests, or even mountains, etc.

There are plenty air combats and flight simulators, where building a wall, putting artificial sea, or huge canoyns makes no sense, since you can fly. In many games maps tend to be so large anyway, so you know by then, when you reaching nothingness, before game even warns you about end of map. You may try once or twice to get to the edge, to see what will happen. But further attempts will be just waste of time. So really is not any big deal braker. No need for artificial barriers, other than message, that you went too far. Unless map is somehow little, or game offers very little to keep player immersed and occupied otherwise.

 

A sea monster comes to mind. Venture too far out and it’ll attack and kill you. In Snake Rattle n Roll, the instant you go into the water, you start hearing the jaws theme and you have about five seconds to get out of the water.

 

Yeah that is valid solution for sea. However, is equally artificial, as having message to venturing too far. Adding monsters maybe more "sensible" in some cases, but not other (maybe?)

I just can't t imagine, modern jet fighter being warned, about giant pterodactile attacking you, when venturing too far

 

Fair enough, but I could also imagine thicker and thicker salvos of flak and surface to air missiles sitting just out of bounds enforcing a no-fly zone. A ceiling is easy, just make the engines stall out when you go too high, just like real jet engines do.

you could even provide an in-game warning system. Instead of generic “return to battlefield” they can be “oxygen levels too low, reduce altitude” and “warning, missile lock, return to safe zone”

 

Yep, ceiling is simple and intuitive mechanics.

I think I remember some game in past, which simply cause pilot blackout, when crossing beyond map's boundary.
Another solution I am aware from years back, is that you can fly on very large maps. But maps is so big, that you simply wont have enough fuel, to get to its boundary limit. Even refueling in air wasn't an issue for that.

Flacs are good solutions, when entering supposedly enemy territory, as per map borders.

For on ground matter, wild animals / monsters, or pirates / bandits can be indeed good natural feeling borders.

 

It would mean a lot more map, but I always wanted to see a game where the map is bound by becoming too difficult to survive.

 

Yes, for a roleplaying game I definitely think it would be fun to take the "Here Be Dragons" concept literally and have monsters that roam the borderlands that will try to hunt you as soon as you reach a certain depth into their territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons

 

All this discussion of game boundaries just gave me a clever idea for a new game level... hehehe

 

I don't remember being shown a visual warning. I do remember Geralt making in-character remarks about how he was going the wrong way, or various other things to that effect.

Ok, lets think through some alternatives.

Mosters past the boundaries. Well, the whole point is that you're a monster hunter, and you end up hunting some of the most fearful monsters in the realm. You're breaking that if you put arbitrarily more powerful monsters on the roads or rivers which lead to adjacent provinces and such.

Make the boundaries impassable. Maybe this would work, but I feel it'd make areas near the boundaries feel worse. In a picturesque world where individual areas look believable from wherever you stand inside them, suddenly there's roads that just end at cliff faces or turn back on themselves? Impassably dense forests? Swimming is a significant part of the game, so that rules out a bunch of natural barrier options. You could make this an out-of-sight-out-of-mind thing if it were just the in-game view we cared about, but how would you reconcile that with the multi-layered world map? Some people would probably prefer a map with issues than arbitrary in-game borders, which is fair enough, but I think a matter of preference. And you look at the map a reasonable amount, but spend pretty little time near the open-but-impassable parts of the borders.

Gun turrets at the borders. Could be done with spells, or archers, or something like that. Many of the same issues as "mosters past the boundaries", though.

Fundamental map design. Could definitely have worked if the game weren't set in an already established place. Could definitely take some level of creative license here (and perhaps they did, since most of the game does use naturally impassable barriers), but I can see why they wouldn't want to fundamentally change the nature of the world. In a fully original world, though, definitely an option.

Any options I'm missing?

Other character's getting involved. One of the sorceresses could show up and portal you somewhere. I suspect this could be immersion breaking if not done in a highly context-sensitive manner... though if they just take you to the next main quest location with some comment about having more important things to do that'd probably work. Plus, Geralt hates portals, so that'd be an in-universe "punishment" for mucking around instead of getting the job done. That would bring into question, though, why they don't just portal Geralt around everywhere to speed things up.

I'm also note a fan of the whole "force the player to turn around" thing, but I'm struggling to think of an alternative that's really better in this case in the context of the overall game. Considering that there's relatively few parts of the game where this is an issue (the maps are huge, you're not at the edges very often, most of them do have naturally impassable borders) I think that covering them up with an in-character quip and the fast travel screen is... at least ok?

 

I am just finishing the borders on my game. I have the advantage that the story has an actual need for boundaries. In this case, it's a military training course so you are literally told at the beginning where the course boundaries are. But I still want to make them seem natural and believable - not block in everything with cliffs which wouldn't make sense geographically.

So the main boundary I am using is water. It's a swampy area so I just filled in the lowest area's with water and that blocks off the biggest chunks. Then to fill in the gaps, I have an "impact zone" up north, which is blocked by a fence with danger signs.

To the west and east I have military/industrial installations which also are fenced off. At night they have lights that turn on, and because there is no others man-made lights in the game, if you can see these you'll know you are close to the boundary.

I also use power lines as a border. Of course, this only seems like a border because we have told player that it is one. If you are working in fantasy or something and need something that seems like an actual physical border, the job is a bit more difficult I suppose.


Beyond the border I just added another unity terrain with high pixel error to keep the resolution lower. Usually these are covered in tree billboards, but they're bare in the screenshots just cause i had graphics settings turned low. I am sure it would be cheaper to make some low poly meshes with billboards. In this case, I just chose a faster easier workflow.

 

Points for realism.

In many instances you can just throw up an invisible wall...

 

One thing I hope to play one days, is simply only blocking the camera:
- offer a soft barrier that signal the end of the world
- the character can go beyond the soft barrier , but the camera position get stuck on it
- the further the player goes, the more the screen fades
- when the screen has gone black, you transitioned to an opening where the character is moving back at the barrier facing away the soft barrier...

Basically like cinema do, add an ellipse, imho less frustrating than invisible walls, kill limits, etc ...

Though I tend to hide limits with simple funnel and loops, ie funnel the player to a corridor, that bring her back further inside the level, so it doesn't feel like she has stopped to a wall. Bully does it with street.

 

Thats a really cool idea. And as the screen is fading to black, some text like, "the hero wandered on for what seemed like ages..." then when reappear character says, " haven't I been here before?"

 

In this case what you can do is have a live bomb range as one of the borders, with explosions going off (aircraft? long range art? you pick) if the player starts wandering off too far it's 100% inside the lore of the game to just explode him.

 

If I was a AAA studio I might do that. But a fence with a warning sign that you can't cross will do.

And, being realistic, if this impact zone was currently in use, it's not like they are shooting anywhere near the border. Actual impacts would be kilometers away, and before any shooting there is going to be aerial surveillance done to make sure there is nothing living in the immediate danger zone.)