But if the familiarity Ramanan mentions is embraced, perhaps you can open yourself to something else the sense of returning to place. Who knows what you’ll find on your way? It’s a feeling of adventure that’s crucial to how Skyrim works, as it is with so many other open-world games. Pick a landmark, maybe a snow-capped mountain, and start walking towards it. Indeed, when you start a game like Skyrim for the first time, a large part of the pleasure comes from not knowing what’s around you. If you suddenly recognise whole tracts of a fictional city or landscape that illusion is gone.” “An open-world game sets up certain expectations and one of those expectations is that it's a world for you to explore that you've never seen before.

“A re-used world would have to be quite well disguised in order to mitigate a feeling of familiarity, which then feels like you've been cheated out of a new experience,” says video game critic Chella Ramanan. But building iteratively is perhaps more of a challenge for a single-player game, where so much of the experience’s appeal comes from discovery. Slowly tweaking the landscape over time makes sense in that context, as it would do with something like World of Warcraft, drip-feeding challenge. More than simply re-skinning the game, these events affect the landscape, leaving scars in the ground.īut Fortnite is a multiplayer game, and a big part of how multiplayer games work is in players learning the details of a map and using them to their advantage. Rossignol tells me his studio has toyed with the idea of reusing the maps from The Signal From Tölva, “to create different times during the planet's history, giving you scope to explore a familiar topology in a different era.” This chimes with the approach taken by Far Cry New Dawn, but also with something like Fortnite Battle Royale, which is based around a single, unified world that changes over time, with “seasons” bringing craters from meteorites and tundra from iceberg collisions. And I don't think this is laziness or cheapness: part of the challenge is building on what was already there.” “Part of the great challenge of games is simply project management: they are staggeringly hard to put together, and allowing designers to work with spaces they are already familiar with seems like an obvious shortcut.

“The idea that game studios recreate the city of New York over and over again for different games is patently ludicrous,” says Jim Rossignol, head of British game studio Big Robot, which most recently created the open-world shooter The Signal From Tölva.

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