![]() ![]() The playable area of Horizon Zero Dawn takes in an area that covers most of Utah and western Colorado the Frozen Wilds DLC added parts of Wyoming.See also Units Not to Scale, Clown-Car Base, Thriving Ghost Town, and Baby Planet. ![]() ![]() It could be made to look larger with fog, trees, and hills.Miles upon miles of the same terrain isn't exactly the most interesting of things.It's also a waste of developers' resources to program a realistically sized city when less than one percent of the population is of any relevance to the player. Making realistically sized worlds and realistically populated cities is Awesome, but Impractical without using randomly generated maps or Non Player Characters to cut corners. Cutting corners to reduce business costs.Usually it's considered a bad thing for a game to overload and melt most devices available on the market trying to run it. Pick your poison: Loads and Loads of Loading so your hardware isn't put under too much strain as you move from one area to the next, or Loads And Loads of Lagging as your hardware bakes itself trying to render it all.Heck, walking from one major city to another would take days if not weeks. Remember that it was the nineteenth century before 80 days became a plausible amount of time in which to circumnavigate the globe walking from one side of the world map to the other would take years in a realistic scale. Using real-world travel times in a game tends to quickly become tedious, especially if the player is walking and especially if your world takes place with lower levels of technology where cars/planes/teleporters don't exist yet.For a large game, 500 yards is the equivalent of 500 miles.Īn Acceptable Break from Reality for several reasons: Ten yards is turned into ten feet, and ten feet is turned into five feet.The amount of space taken by settlements is also larger than in real life. Fields are so often so tiny that they wouldn't feed even a single person. Forests and deserts aren't more than a few square kilometers large.Even the largest cities aren't larger than a village in real life. Settlements themselves are very small ( but contain all necessary features).The distance between settlements is very small, allowing one to walk from one village to another in a matter of minutes.Sometimes games scale different areas according to their interest / importance to the story, so for example a game taking place in New York and surrounding areas might have Manhattan ( Real Life: 21.5km long) at 1:20 scale (Result: About 1km long), but Long Island ( Real Life: 190km long) at a 1:200 scale (Result: Also about 1km long). (Note, of course, that even in games with said world maps the main game world will still be drastically scaled down.) This freakish distortion of space is becoming more common these days, as the fashion is for photorealistic detail difficult to execute uniformly in a huge world and the banishment of abstractions such as world maps. The usual culprits are fantasy RPGs and Wide-Open Sandbox games. Sometimes a game's environment is blatantly not to scale. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |