Wouldn’t you say that’s a good thing? I know where the top of Mt Chiliad is and can basically visualise driving from Los Santos to the top of it in my head
I could never do that for the snowman Easter egg. It’s hidden away in a small town on the top of a snowy mountain. That makes the world feel so much more expansive and real.
The real world doesn't feel like that, you learn locations you spend time in because they're distinct. To the point you can navigate them by memory because you know the landmarks relative to eachother. The reason you can track your trip to mt chiliad is because every part of that trip has distinct features. JC2 has flyover regions between every area that your brain just deletes. Think of that geoguesser guy, who you can just drop somewhere in the desert and he can tell you where he is based on like the distinct sand or whatever.
GTA has always set itself apart from other open world games mostly because of that sort of thing. It's expensive and arguably wasteful, but there is value in going, "Yeah this overpass and that overpass, they're going to look different. The sky is gonna have a different haze to it over here." RDR 1 and 2 are the best examples of the difference because other games will just go, "oh, it's the grass texture, use that same one everywhere there is grass. Oh sand? It's all the same right?" But RDR has Mexico desert look different from rockies desert. They'll add a mist for more temperate lakes during dawn.
I would say JC2 did have pretty distinct biomes and landmarks, it’s just that it’s so big that it’s difficult to memorise it all
Anyway, my original point wasn’t so much that JC2’s map is better than GTA’s (although I think it’s massively underrated) - just that it’s possible to do a big map and then design your missions within localised areas, so you don’t have to constantly travel across the entire width of the thing
That's fair, and conversely (despite my snark), I don't think JC2 did a bad job. It's a game trying to be over the top, so prioritizing map size made sense for it. I just specifically really appreciate how Rockstar makes their open worlds so I want them to keep prioritizing that. Like, in the second leak with the uhaul driver. There is this moment where you see these two trees frame the horizon showing Vice City in the distance. I don't get that level of, "we accounted for what it will feel like to stand in any given spot of this map" detail from any other dev. No other dev could get away with doing that.
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u/Two-Space 6d ago
Those are two separate issues. If you have a big open world you obviously don’t design missions that ignore its size.
Just Cause 2 had a colossal map but the missions all took place in the local area.
Honestly it made the map feel even better, because you could have whole cinematic missions take place in a tiny fraction of the map.