How do adventure games make the entire game seamless?

Question

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?

In: 0

Answer 1

Loads of loading and unloading things.

If you’re playing something like a Far Cry game, imagine a ring around the player (you) at roughly 256metres and as you’re moving through the world everything inside that ring is loaded and everything outside of that ring, in terms of gameplay, is unloaded. As you move through the world the engine continually loads and unloads things with relation to that ring. This is why you may see things pop into existence, specifically AI or gameplay objects, at a certain distance from the player. LODs can be used to show things in the distance, sometimes even swapping 3D meshes to 2D images (as it doesn’t matter if they’re so far away), but they won’t have any possible interactions with the player as if they’re outside of that ring they’re just background stuff. If you fire that rocket launcher at that building halfway across the map, when you approach it finally you’ll see no damage as it’s outside of that ring.

Games like The Last Of Us do things slightly differently, as did many games in the past. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that there are many moments where the player moves/drops into a new zone and is unable to return to the previous zone. A door closes, the player jumps down platform or over a wall, the building you were JUST IN EXPLODES, etc. This is the moment where it allows the previous zone to be unloaded and the new zone to be fully loaded. These moments are always chosen and set up in a way that it’s seamless to the player.

All of this is worked out by the team during production to ensure that you don’t run out of memory and crash. And have a great experience, of course.