There are no invisible walls, no mountain ranges, no screen-dominating message, nothing as immersion-shattering as that. The solution used in Subnautica: Below Zero, on the other hand, is nothing short of brilliant. Twenty seconds later, he was dead and I was yanked right out of the game. What actually happened was that my health bar started ticking down the moment I left the boundary, as if Max were suffering some horrifying arterial gusher. It was stupid, yes, but it promised to be entirely keeping with the barren hellworld of the Mad Max quadrilogy. I’d drive as far as I could before stumbling out, walking as far as my feet could carry me. So, when I drove off the map into the Big Empty, I knew it was a death sentence.īut I wanted to see how I could get into the wilderness. Run out of the latter and you’re walking. Take Mad Max, set in a post-apocalyptic landscape where water and gasoline are the two most precious commodities in the world. What is infuriating, however, is when designers have a solution right in front of them and they overlook it. I’m not advocating infinite, procedurally generated worlds there’s enough busywork in open-world games as it is.

But there are still areas where, if you roam far enough, you slam into an invisible wall, as is often the case with similar titles. Some games do attempt to use geography to corral the player Fallout: New Vegas, for example, has mountains that bar your progress. There are few things more immersion-damaging than seeing a warning message flash across the screen, followed by a near-instant game over. So how do you handle it? In the case of Subnautica: Below Zero, Unknown Worlds has devised a way of penning the player in without making it seem like an insult, a slap in the face that you’ve dared to wonder what’s “out there.” It doesn’t matter how open your open-world game is - sooner or later your players are going to try breaking out of their sandbox.

This article contains mild spoilers for Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero.

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