Veteran Game World Designer Explains Why Bigger Game Worlds Aren’t Always Better

Over the years I’ve made efforts to compare gameworlds sizes and cities in them. It’s valuable to see the amount of unique and repeated details to develop a game within a timeframe and team size. Knowing what’s enough physical space to tell the story and support the gameplay within it gives the project a confident foundation to build on.

When something as massive as Just Cause was released, it was accomplished by using terrain which was far less time consuming to model than a large city. The game also featured a lot of modular buildings for asset re-use to create bunkers and forts.

To contrast that, a game city which only has vehicles and no playable characters, such as the Need for Speed or the Burnout series, doesn’t require multiple interiors, back alley combat spaces, and rooftop access. Cities with no player vehicles where you travel on foot, sprinting, climbing, and sometimes jumping, require far more intense immediate layout metrics, such as the Assassin Creed series.

This comparison image is always a work-in-progress. Despite talking with Cyberpunk 2077 designers, I could only narrow Night City’s scale into two possible sizes. The same could be said for Insomniac’s Spider-Man Manhattan and Ghosts of Tsushima pictured. WatchDogs was another one I want to follow-up on.

How Much is Enough?

In preparation for more level design articles, I’ll next share this key image which has helped me over the years understand the scope of a proposed game space. How much is needed and how’s it used to create the illusion of a lived-in, believable environment?

This was made during my time on Bioshock 4 to help the team understand how big a city we were creating. Naturally, I’m not going to share any other observations about that project as it’s still in development.

Bioshock Infinite

The 3rd Bioshock game features a city in the sky with one of those districts being Emporia. It was one of the easier city levels to parse and extract metrics from.

If you want a full walkthrough, take a look at this video:

Results

This is how Emporia measures to 400 meters. The yellow lines represent general player routes to areas explored. The other colors call out different Action Zones. These metrics came directly from Unreal 3.

Dishonored 2

To compare Bioshock to another popular game at the time I used Dishonored 2’s DLC Death of the Outsider. I recreated part of the Upper Cyria District from Missions 2 and 3 in Sketchup. The results were imported into Unreal 4 as a workshop level to help understand the perception of implied roads vs. vehicle-metric roads.

Both Dishonored and Bioshock feature foot travel with no player vehicles with little if any ambient vehicles, so their roads can be smaller than needed in game series such as GTA or Mafia.

The view on the blockout is looking towards marker #6 on the top down map.

Once familiar with Dishonored metrics, I chose a different neighborhood for the final world size comparison for various city structure variety and identity reasons: the Campo Seta Dockyards.

Results

Compared to Bioshock’s Emporia, the Dockyard feels like it takes up less space even after metrics were considered and matched. Considering interior sizes however, it’s not that far off and good enough for gut instinct comparisons.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

The final example for city metrics I used at the time was Deus Ex’s Prague.

Even after speaking with the Senior Level Designer Sylvain Douce, I was never able to 100% verify scale. An in-game section using familiar prop scales, doorways, sidewalks, and streets gave me the metrics to extrapolate from.

Final Results

With these three examples, I can more easily convey world size to the team by matching the scale to prototype world layouts and stamping this image next to it. Helping teams understand the expected level-of-details across a measured space can prevent budget cut surprises later in the project both big and small.

If anyone has proven better metrics for these three examples, please let me know! What are some other popular, wide-audience gameworlds or city levels that could be used to create a new example?

The Perception of City Scale

Do open world games need to be completely open? Do you surround the playable sandbox with water like GTA cities, or surround the space with a larger city you can’t interact with? Does every space within the player sandbox have to be accessible?

The solutions discussed here apply to games where players cannot fly over boundaries.

Bioshock Infinite had a tremendous amount of talent bringing its vibrant city Columbia to life. It suffered from a lack of macro planning however which is why the team was unable to create any meaningful city map of the spaces. Even with the fantastic fiction of floating city blocks open to the sky, with no walls, players were unable to easily make sense of how each district related to one another.

Above is from the boardgame The Siege of Columbia as there was no overall map for Bioshock Infinite’s city in the sky. To contrast that, below is Dishonored’s Karnaca which did a better job at mapping these pockets of city spaces the player explores to help build a mental map of their spatial awareness.

To build the rest of Karnaca would’ve been a massive undertaking however, so a lot of the missions jumped around to different locations. Several levels were contiguous with the next or previous however and a future remaster could join these portions into seamless levels. I’d love to see a Dishonored 3 with a fully seamless open world sandbox experience! Both Bioshock and Dishonored are level-based and not open-world.

Skipping Lots of Filler

For open world games, Mafia 3’s New Bordeaux features a lot of mission spaces within its city that don’t disrupt player exploration in the city. Examples: The Cistern (underground), the Royal Hotel’s Penthouse (vertical), and Les Dames Rouges brothel (hidden with a cityblock).

It only takes a bit of planning and ongoing communication between the Mission team and World team for this to work. A lack of communication from isolated Leads or factory line methods can cause layout warping you see in other games.

However, there are ways to create large contiguous city experiences that don’t require every square inch to be usable by the player. Prey 2 as well as Deux Ex: Mankind Divided both featured sandbox neighborhood hubs inside of a larger backdrop city and placed linear mission spaces (or “dungeons”) around the edges rather than inside the hubs.

This choice allows a neighborhood to keep a believable footprint within a city and not succumb to what I call Dr. Who TARDIS expansions: when a mission space is larger than its exterior space. With this approach, if the mission needs to change its layout, it can freely do so by only maintaining its entry points at the outer edge of the hub.

Let’s take New Bordeaux as a starting point to apply this idea for a new project.

Using only the northern half of New Bordeaux, large mission-specific spaces spin off it, like a hub-and-spoke model. This also includes space for flexible racing routes without impacting the walkable city.

The inner city becomes the sandbox of possibilities while the outer city is reserved and controlled for more hand-crafted routes and story locations.

Take that concept further by chopping the primary sandbox into smaller hubs and spreading the pieces around with connecting “Wide Corridors” to each neighborhood. Add Side Quests and Activities to these corridors so there’s always something of interest when traveling from one hub to another.

This approach reduces the need for creating and populating a lot of unnecessary spaces to support player exploration on-foot or in a vehicle. Maintaining these unused spaces becomes a hidden production cost a lot of teams fail to consider upfront. This also gives Mission Designers more control over their playspaces without having to twist their designs into the existing open world.

Another solution is to destroy large portions of the city using world building stories like previous conflicts or strip mining for resources. Flooding parts of the city is another solution. If your game has no boats players can pilot then it’s acceptable to use water as a barrier. If water is traversable, it’s still a savings of production time because it reduces environment art, ambient pedestrians, and roaming vehicle traffic.

Use all these ideas as fiction for what’s playable, what’s not, and ways to reduce your production costs.

The perception of city scale has a lot of tricks and methods players will accept, giving your team more time for quality and iteration if they aren’t having to drastically rework the foundational city layout when a mission changes or maintain a lot of ultimately background ambient life requiring more content to make it meaningful.

Unused Content in Mafia 3

A lot of depth was put in New Bordeaux by a whole lot of talented people. There’s easily another whole game story that could be told in that city with the unused buildings, and locations in the area built to gameplay metrics. 

Keep track of what’s being used and what’s not throughout production to maximize and promote locations for new gameplay when people ask. Tracking this on Mafia 3 made it very easy to know what’s available at little or no cost for DLC planning.

The Right Amount of Space

Now I’ll introduce a way to measure the number of encounter spaces you imagine in your game and how the size of your world brings players expectations and impacts your project later if you aren’t paying attention.

Open World Cities vs. Linear Cities

What core metric determines the overall size of a game city? It’s the speed players can move through it from one end to the other. Cities with player vehicles need to be larger with more ground to consume at high speeds. On the opposite end, games featuring only foot-travel can be smaller and more intimate.

To help a previous team’s sense of production time for art and gameplay, I compared those single-player cities (Bioshock:Infinite and Dishonored 2) with Mafia 3’s New Bordeaux Downtown district. If their new city was going to be explored only on foot, the city itself did not need to be as large as New Bordeaux which is about the same size as GTA 5’s Los Santos.

In Deux Ex: Mankind Divided the slice of Prague for the game was wisely smaller.

Combat Arenas

When it comes to common action shooters, engagement distances, and therefore balancing layout designs, have not radically changed in decades. This core measurement for a typical combat space is around 100m based on line-of-sight human scale on the screen. Any human 50m away from the player can be difficult to spot without any visual cues or magnifier options like a gun scope.

Placing the player in the middle of a 100m arena will give them the ability to spot enemies from all directions 50m around them. This metric is a good starting point and can have many exceptions for different scenarios.

Is it a Gladiator Arena?

• No, it’s not meant to be a literal colosseum for open combat. It’s purely a way to help designate which areas are focused on combat.

Is the 50–100m critical?

• No, it’s just a rough check on how many you have planned in your game. Each one will require iteration and maintenance over the period of your project.

Is it only for combat?

• No, it can be used for any gameplay you want that involves players interacting in a local area. For example, you could have Puzzle Arenas.

This core Arena metric is what fills larger neighborhoods, regions, and levels in the gameworld. Pictured below is a macro concept of where Arenas are in relation to other gameworld identities.

If you want an older definition of this idea, visit my website here: Design Concepts. Some terminology has changed since I wrote it, but the overall concepts and hierarchy are still valid. Expect a series of updates later this year!

Are Arenas game zones?

• No, game zones are my personal way of describing the purpose of a local space. Arenas are used to measure the local space which may have a variety of zones in it. For example, a Combat Arena can have Safe Zones, Strategic Points, and Killzones. I’ll have a future article discussing what these game zones are.

Why use these Arenas?

Use these 100m Arena cells to help discover how much time and resources will be needed to complete a chunk of the gameworld. Without these general measurements, teams risk cutting content and haphazardly remixing content when it’s beyond the more malleable Blockout stage. If you’re on a team that’s still trying to figure out what makes a good, foundational combat space after its environment has been fully arted, then you’re dealing with leadership who make decisions based on “Look & Feel” and can’t interpret earlier, less expensive stages.

Measuring Scope with Arenas

If you know how much a team can make using these encounter spaces, you can more easily discover your budget of space. Using the Arena concept, you can pre-plan or scout existing locations in your gameworld for primary or secondary content.

In Open World Games, every city space should be considered a viable combat zone. If you have a lot of unused spaces between missions, remember those will need attention too.

Below is a quick example of how many ambient and mission locations needed to support gameplay metrics for Mafia 3’s combat. Easily half of these were never explicitly used for Missions or Activities when the final game, however making the three DLC chapters afterwards leveraged these at little cost.

Remember, a city should always have something interesting around each corner. These Arena cells also help convey the pacing and flow while traveling from location to another.

Early city designs benefit the most from this metric. The next example is an unpublished city design exploring how many encounter spaces could be developed within different sizes. With no player vehicle requirements, this smaller open world could still feel diverse with inspiring vistas, increasing more development time for iteration and details.

In these examples we’re only talking about a flat plain of encounter spaces and not overlapping spaces commonly found in basements, buildings, or subterrain tunnels. Imagine how more complicated it would be to create a city on top of a city!

Conclusion

This measuring exercise becomes less of an issue with organic terrain regions because they are far more flexible throughout development for changes in flow, size, and density of forests and rolling hills.

Recall the above quote from Hubert Corriveau — try to avoid long stretches of filler buildings with nothing of note to explore. In a city where you walk and not drive, make the layout smaller in scope than games that need to support vehicles. If you plan on using vehicles, the density of cross streets and street angles will have to be further apart and more relaxed for high-speed maneuvers.

If your city design is still being discussed, you can use these 50–100m Arenas as a way to anticipate production costs. Teams should have a general idea what their budget is for content creation and maintenance before committing to vague or “feels right” gameworld city scales.