A veteran game world designer has made the case, via 80 Level, that bigger game worlds are not always better — a position that sounds obvious stated plainly and that the industry has spent two decades acting against.
It is worth engaging with here rather than filing under games criticism, because the same argument applies to anything an audience moves through: an installation, an immersive piece, a VR environment, a projection-mapped building, a museum route.
Why size won
Scale is the easiest property to advertise and the hardest to fill.
“Four times the map of our previous game” is a number a marketing department can use. “Our map is the same size and every location now has a reason to exist” is not. One of those is legible to someone who has not played the game.
And scale is the easiest thing to produce, which is the less-discussed half. Procedural terrain, asset libraries, scatter tools and now generative pipelines all make square kilometres cheap. What stays expensive is the thing that makes a square kilometre worth crossing: a reason to be there, written and placed by a person who thought about it.
So the economics push in one direction — cheap area, expensive meaning — and the result is predictable.
The three costs of size, which are all real
Travel time is the cost you cannot design away. Every metre between two interesting things is time the audience spends not being interested. Games mitigate this with mounts, fast travel and vehicles, all of which are admissions that the distance is a problem rather than a feature. And fast travel is self-defeating: a world you skip across is a world you have stopped experiencing.
Density falls, and density is what reads as craft. A smaller space with more considered detail per square metre feels made. A large space with the same total content feels generated — and audiences detect this reliably even when they cannot articulate it. The things people remember from open worlds are almost always the dense bits.
And legibility collapses. A space you can hold in your head is a space you can navigate intentionally, form opinions about, and return to deliberately. Past a certain size the audience stops building a mental map and starts following a marker, at which point the world has become a backdrop to a UI element.
What the good examples have in common
The open worlds that are consistently admired are not the largest. They tend to share three properties:
Verticality and sightlines instead of area. A world you can see across is larger in experience than it is in square kilometres, because every vantage point is a view of other places you have been or might go. Breath of the Wild’s much-copied trick is that from almost anywhere you can see somewhere you want to go — which is a composition problem, not a size one.
Travel that is itself the content. If movement is interesting — climbing, gliding, swimming, driving well — distance stops being dead time. This is the only genuine solution to the travel-time cost, and it is a mechanics decision made early rather than a map decision made late.
And hand-placed landmarks. Procedural systems cannot produce a landmark, because a landmark is defined by being unlike its surroundings. Every memorable location in every open world was put there on purpose.
The direct translation to installation work
Rooms are cheaper than square metres, and both are cheaper than reasons.
The equivalent failure in immersive work is a large dark space with projections on several walls and nothing structuring the visitor’s path through it. The audience enters, looks around, takes a photograph and leaves — not because the content is bad but because nothing told them where to stand, what to attend to, or when something changed.
The same three fixes apply:
Compose sightlines. Barbara Kruger’s installation in Ando’s 30-metre rotunda works because a curved wall denies you a single vantage point and makes reading physical. Abramović’s seven screens with only one playing at a time works because the darkness between them is structured.
Make the transit part of the piece. Walking between stations in the dark is content if you designed it as content.
And place landmarks. One thing in the room that is unlike everything else, positioned deliberately, does more for navigation and memory than an even distribution of good material.
Size is a budget line, not an achievement. The question worth asking of any environment is not how big it is but how much of it the audience will remember — and those two numbers are, past a point, inversely related.