So, I’ve seen many ways of doing this, but I have been unable to find a suitable way of doing this. I’m making a game similar to the new open world Zelda game, I was even thinking about copying how they do world borders for my game, but I can’t really do that since it’s coming out next year, and we haven’t seen what the borders will look like yet. There’s always the classic “mountains to the West and ocean to the East” approach, but I want something new, in my previous games I would usually just have oceans off to all sides, but for this game that won’t work, just because of the envirnment, but I can’t just have mountains off to all sides, since there is a lot of verticality in the game. So how do you guys think I should handle this?
That depends entirely on the game’s setting. You could have natural borders, as you mentioned (mountains, ocean, etc.) You could have police barricades closing off areas due to “whatever reason”.
Personally, I’ve always toyed with the idea of having an endless environment, but having enemies get progressively tougher the further out you go. Eventually, you reach enemies that are literally unbeatable. They will always kill you and send you back to your last save point, thus creating an intangible border.
Discworld
Some games use a huge cliff drop, so you get to the edge and can look out, but if you try to get down you’ll fall and die.
There were some of these in Dragon age 3.
Also in DA3 they sometimes have a sandstorm that sort of pushes you back, creating a sort if boundary.
Dragon’s Dogma had evil tentacle creatures in the water that would kill you if you venture out too far.
Following up on @khanstruct_1 's first question, can you describe the setting and theme of your Zelda-like? A space station could be a self-contained torus, or an underground bunker in an asteroid. A fantasy environment could be on the back of a giant turtle floating through sky or space. If you can tie the boundaries into the setting, players should be more willing to accept them.
Maybe what you can do is about 5 seconds worth of distance from the outer game world boundaries slow the player’s movement speed greatly, start fading out the world and display a wavey text in large print… “Continue into Limbo and be lost forever?” The closer they get to the boundary the more the display fades until finally at about 20% alpha the player loses control and watches their character continue on forward fading into nothingness. Wait a second or two and return to the main menu. Might want to do an autosave first named “EdgeOfLimbo” or such.
Make it a giant floating island and think of your character as one who loves his life enough that he wouldn’t want to jump off.
You could always handle it the way earth does, and make your environment cycle back on itself. Go far enough west and your character actually ends up east of where they started.
If you are going to do soft boundaries like unbeatable creatures, make sure its obvious they are meant to be boundaries. Its easy to get frustrated with a broken game if you come across unbeatable monsters.
You need to talk about anything, “Happy Gamer”?
Make it so that when make it to the border and you come back, you find your aunt and uncle have been murdered by an imperial army, but it’s setup to look like the local traders did the attack. Then it unlocks a huge quest where it turns out the main character is the chosen one of an old religion and discovers his real father isn’t dead!
Nobody will notice. Do it. Do it for the force.
I tried this with a terrain, I flatten the edges to same height then cloned it into a 3x3 gird. The middle was the playable area with triggers on edges to teleport player to other sides. The outer terrains were to make the teleport visually seamless. Beside a split second lag on teleport, I had an endless world. It was a small scale test though so not sure how well it would perform on large terrain with lots of objects.
I suppose it all depends on the story to the game.
Mountains/Oceans make sense if you have a large terrain like that.
Other games use force fields that will push you back if you try to leave.
Frequently a lot of games with an apocalyptic theme have some time of radiation which kills you.
One of my personal favorites is in Halo to have a huge laser strike you down.
Killed by the Guardians.
It sounds like the theme of the game is a natural type of border possibly with a medieval theme or such so I’ll assume that be the case.
Some natural border ideas:
Raging impassible rivers
Forest that gets denser and denser until it cannot be traversed
Orc battle fences with log spikes
Big Rubble
Destroyed village buildings with junked carts or other debris forming a wall – Dead Island did a good job with this by removing the obstruction at a bottleneck when you’ve unlocked another part of the geography.
Low cliffs that the player can see the top where the character is restricted to the traversable area
An endless (looping) desert where the player can turn around and get back to the game quickly
A Ravine, but the rope bridge to cross has been cut
A dust cloud that makes it impossible to see forward (and concealing a forcefield)
A Gnomish mine field that is guaranteed to hit the player after a certain distance
A favorite: player-caused disaster which makes areas borders impassible (fires, giant cracks in the ground, etc)
Some unnatural border ideas (I’m not in-favor of unnatural borders):
A painted red line the player cannot pass
A forcefield / magical wall
I really like the raging river idea, the forest, and ravine/bridge idea. I think I will try those. I actually had already thought about making the game on the back of a giant turtle or other large creature, as the game is focused on large creatures such as the collosi (from SOTC), but I also wanted it to be on Earth, so that wouldn’t work.
Sometimes just being honest with you players is good. Flashing to ext on the screen that says “leaving play area” can be just as effective as contrived natural boundaries, and it prevents confusion when players think they should be able to reach an area.
I prefer the Zelda approach of using mountains, sheer cliff faces, and other ‘obvious’ obstacles to block players into the play area. If the sheer obviousness of the blockage isn’t enough, basic experimentation on the player’s part helps them to understand, “no, you can’t go past this.”
Of course…Zelda also includes subversions to this, in the form of the segment of wall that you can plant a bomb by to find a secret treaure.
lol gta san andreas you fly a plane too far and like … you were travelling too far → and suddenly you are flipped and travelling ← and you hardly even notice it…
Sharks can be very effective borders in water. Also, sandworms, in deserts.
Made of agree… I too enjoy clearly defined play areas that put the attention to the game. For the not so obvious sharks or sandworms. Being able to see the existence of them before getting too far out sounds smart.