In many games, even from PlayStation 2 era, the games usually looked like it was a continuous map from start to finish. Take God of War, for example. From start to finish, we are going further on the same path. A lot of modern-day games do that too.
Is it really a continuous map? Do stages change during cutscenes and for us, it looks like it’s just one long map from start to finish?
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It all depends on the game, but the game will use different techniques to trick you into thinking you are seeing everything all at once. For instance, if you’re playing a game set in a big city, it’s not going to load little details like litter outside of a pre-programmed range – it’s not loading a million pieces of litter across the *whole* map, just where you are looking at. It also often does not load content, at least not to the same level of detail, when you aren’t looking at it, which is why you might see “pop-in” (objects randomly loading out of nowhere) or textures loading when you quickly do a 180 – the game is trying to load everything as quickly as possible that wasn’t there already.
Certain things might be in their own map – for instance, if you’re playing an open world game that has a mission inside a building, you might only be able to go into that building during that one specific mission. That building’s insides might only exist in its own little sandbox-style environment as a separate map file. This helps cut down on how much has to be loaded at once.
If it’s a more linear game then each level tends to be its own map regardless if it is big and open or not, such as in the original Far Cry game.
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