Invisible Walls

[The_Healer]

A game world that was actually a sphere and therefore had no restrictions would be amazingly cool.

On the story front, I guess it wouldn't matter all that much if you were able to challenge the final boss of the game as soon as you started. As long as you got suitably raped for doing so.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

There have been many games that do not have boundaries in the classical sense. Asteriods for example had no walls - cross the edge of the screen simply resulted in your ship appearing on the opposite edge.

Tribes maps had no true boundaries in most cases. If one were so inclined (and the server did not enforce boundaries that would kill the player if they lingered too long on the unhappy side) a player could fly until the terrain map ended. If they really felt frisky, they could then throw themselves off the terrain map into the perfect void

In most early shooters however, technical requirements in the way clipping and the rest of the rendering process was peformed only worked when dealing with finite distances. The Binary Space Partition for example was one such example and was used in the entire quake series. Introducing a tiny opening in which the interior of a level was exposed to the void means the functions being called cannot be expected to produce the desired result.

These days however, the reasons behind invisible walls are not technological in nature but rather design. Often a game simply wants to give the impression that the world is larger than it is and the designer has no compelling reason to allow a player to travel too far from the tracks. In other cases it's the result of having insufficient resources to accomplish the feat (be it memory, man hours for the required assets or whatever else).

The real question is not why don't they allow you to roam freely. All that really matters is if you really think something would be gained if a given wall was removed entirely.

 

[Twilight_guy]

No, I don't think games are worse for it. I know it's possible to make a game without them but then there tends to be a lot of unswimable oceans and mountains ranges, and tall fences that pop up out of the earth at the edge of your map. I don't think they detach too much from a game as long as they are effectively marked to show that its clearly a wall (or not marked in the case of leading the player with more interesting things). A game must have walls though since no game has content for an infinite amount of space without looping, which would just be making a wall by forcing you back to your start point rather then stopping you and making you turn around.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

The problem with having an endless world map is that it would be completely empty on the outside, with nothing there to see, and it's impossible to animate a limitless globe. You can have a really big world, sure, but it has to end eventually.

It is easily possible to populate an arbitrary space, at least in general.

For example, if we know that the given space the player can view at a moment is finite and the view can only change at a finite speed and the game will only be played for a finite amount of time, then we know that we are in fact not dealing with a limitless space, just a very large space.

One can easily handle dynamic generation of terrain based off any number of algorithms. Depending upon how clever this algorithm is and what base assets we have to use, we could even dynamically add NPC's. AI could be assigned according to a limited set of rules that govern everything from goals (what the AI is trying to do if left to it's own devices), to alliegance (is it friendly to the player, and/or other NPCs?) to probable response patterns (is it likey to fight the player, or will it perhaps run instead?). One could even generate missions dynamically by having lists of criteria for quests and arbitraily stringing them together.

The problem is, however, even with very slick top of the line AI and AAA art assets and control programming, this universe wouldn't be terribly entertaining. Being entirely procedurely generated, on would be left to wonder why exactly they should bother exploring in the first place. If all you do is hand a player a sandbox, what have you accomplished? Sandboxes aren't all that entertaining. At some point, you'll have to step in and hand craft something for the player to do, because shifting sand around in a bucket is going to get old fast.

 

[ottenni]

You think invisible walls are bad, wait until you see invisible spikes!

 

[Sneaklemming]

HAHAHA! I thought you were talking about the Gametrailers podcast!

Well I can think on one game that has no invisible walls- Eve

 

[Tharwen]

Isn't it impossible to have a game with no area limit?

Unless you actually make an entire spherical planet.

 

[Sneaklemming]

Isn't it impossible to have a game with no area limit?

Unless you actually make an entire spherical planet.

Eve online?

 

[Neonbob]

You probably could, but why would you want to?
It's more fun to come up with reasons for why the player cannot go somewhere.
Like giant helicopters made of scorpions patrolling beyond a certain point.

And unless it's not that big of a space, the developers would definitely run out of ideas eventually.
That would lead to tons of "fuckit. CTRL-C/CTRL-V. Done."

 

[TheSeventhLoneWolf]

Some games like to be linier, their invisible walls actually being nicely melded into the background. Even oblivion has invisible walls. But in Resistance, the invisible walls in the city levels were replaced with ''Quaranitined area, do not enter'' Signs, which do a job in telling you 'You're going the wrong bloody way.'

 

[Tharwen]

Isn't it impossible to have a game with no area limit?

Unless you actually make an entire spherical planet.

Eve online?

I expect if you flew far enough on eve, you'd hit a wall at some point, but it would take weeks to get there.

 

[Sneaklemming]

Isn't it impossible to have a game with no area limit?

Unless you actually make an entire spherical planet.

Eve online?

I expect if you flew far enough on eve, you'd hit a wall at some point, but it would take weeks to get there.

Well you mean in terms of solar systems- but there is still no invisible walls.

And just for the sake of argument- because in eve I live at the tail end of the universe, literally of the edge of the map- then I can tell you that wormholes have changed that. Now you can just sit around and wait for a wormhole to gobble you up!

 

[Buck Wilde]

Isn't Morrowind similar, well I know it has invisible walls but those are at the end of the map but i do think you are capable of killing the boss of the main quest whenever you want (I think, i'm not positive but I recall hearding something about that). But yeah I hate invisible walls, specifically in Far Cry 2, "Oh hey look that seems like a reasonable part of the map to get to so I can snipe these guys" nope, invisible wall.