In many games with big terrains, you can find level boundaries. They may just be a bunch of box colliders like a invisible barriers, or a fence/sea that goes around the level. These are pretty obvious choices for a way to stop players from going anywhere they shouldn’t (ie off a terrain), but can anyone think of anything more subtle?
A lot of games don’t even have boundaries (Minecraft, …) or lost their interest because they are just empty (Just Cause 2, Trackmania).
Design the area as such that the boundaries are not so obvious to the player…
I would love to see more games like this. I think the only ones I’ve seen so far were text-based, and even then I can’t remember which ones.
No need to actually make it a sphere, though. I’m fine with it infinitely wrapping in an impossible fashion. 
Elder scrolls boundaries are high unscalable mountains. Invisible walls are just lame and lazy.
I always wondered why GTA never did that. I would go as far out to see expecting the world to come full circle.
How about a “Trueman show” style glass bubble? Preferably with a bunch of couch potatos eating popcorn in their pants and watching you.
I suppose it depends on the context for the game.
Another alternative is to have an layer of impossibly hard enemies (giants, dragons, mech robots?) which patrol the edge, that way players are very unlikely to ever see the hard edge, they just think of it as “the place where I will get killed” and stay away from it.
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Another thought. You could go with a “Discworld” style edge of the world - go any further and you fall off
Ok, I’ll stop now but it really does depend on the context of the game. Really, all artificial “game mechanics” should be done in a way to suit the style of the game. If you tell us more about the game we can come up with something more suitable.
I like this idea.
In my current project, though, I’m somewhat limited by the Law of Conservation of Detail. Sure, I could build the entire world that The Hero’s Journey takes place in, but the game is limited to just the Kingdom of Aylea; I have no need to build the neighboring kingdoms (including the one the hero’s father is recuperating from his spelunking injuries in). I have no need to build the whole planet…it’s simply not relevant. By focusing on just the locales this story takes place in, I’ve actually made headway in a project!
…Ok, that’s the worst possible justification. Here’s a better one, that is accomplished at the same time: I limit the amount of information that the player needs to process for navigation, so they can focus on what I want them to focus on, specifically the swordplay.
But, all that is doing is justifying the obvious boundaries (mountains and sea) that the player should instinctively “know” are hemming them in. So, question for the OP: given a standard JRPG world map (or, country map), what do you view as alternatives to ‘explicit’ terrain boundaries like mountains and oceans, exactly?
If you have multiple maps, then a “level boundary” should just exit the map and take you to the world map.
perhaps less obvious boundries (apart from things like rivers/cliffs/walls/sharp rocks/etc) would be “Monotonous dangerous places where you don’t want to go” - say for example a dark forest with wolves and nothing more
I will be faced with a similar problem, The game I will be making is a large world that is fully explorable (Think dayZ style). It needs to be as realistic as possible.
I have several ideas on this, the first one is the player cannot jump and it happens automatically, then their are various obstacles (wooden fences, cars, buildings etc) that the player cannot jump.
Another idea is to have a 1km area in the games world (the entire area is 12 - 13km in length and width, and to have enemies stalk and kill you within this area.
The last is to have physical boundaries to the world and include them as part of the story (Think the movie Doomsday), where there is an obvious wall erected around the games world with automated guns that fire at you if you get too close.
You could do a Blair Witch style containment where if you keep going to wind up back where you started with no obvious explination.
You could take this a step further where the game VERY slowly turns the player around (without them noticing) so it feels like they are back where they started yet they walked that way.
The last option is to do what GTA IV does with the sea, and just allow the player to travel onwards for infinity, with the terrain (or sea) continuously generating but nothing of interest shows up.
Invisible walls (like Fallout 3! and many other games) are just lazy and unrealistic.
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I recommend high mountains and invisible walls applied to them. The mountains are the barrier, but the invisible walls are the fail-safe. If the mountain/cliffs walls are steep enough and placed right then that’s all you need. Then I recommend a fence area in front of the mountains in some places or a thick tree line, just to blur the edges of the game. I recommend making areas beyond where the player can go but can still see plus add secret areas where the player actually can find a way to go, this way the player never knows for sure where the boundaries are.
I can’t stand invisible barriers. I like it when there is actually an object blocking the path, such as a fallen tree, a boulder, or an overturned truck. It helps keep the immersion in a game. You could also surround the playable area with an instant death area (the ocean from Spore, minefields from CoD, ocean from Half Life, etc).
You can do a round planet on a flat plane if when you get to the edge it sends you to the opposite end at the same position. Hard to describe but basically you walk off the map on 1 side and onto the map at the opposite side.
Now you’re thinking with portals.
Just an easy case of changing transform.position, I guess. But only effective if your level is foggy.
A number of games now use “exhaustion zones” where your character slowly becomes fatigued and will die unless returned to explorable areas. It’s a better solution than invisible barriers, but not nearly as cool as an all explorable sphere.
have a giant monster come kill you. Pretty simple.
That’s not a bad idea…
For interior maps, I find locked doors work nicely.