Fully Enterable Buildings In Gaming [Future Of Games 1/6]

Install Age of Origins for FREE: bit.ly/3C9QiVE and build your city today! What do you think about Fully Enterable buildings? Would this be good or bad for open-world games? Is it even possible? Is it worthwhile? Let me know if I got something wrong, or you think you have better ideas- I just thought it would be an interesting topic. It seems like games these days focus more on building “in-game stores”, rather than advancing the industry forward with new revolutionary features.

I remember playing GTA IV for the first time and accidentally finding so many enterable buildings. I’ll always love the abandoned casino, lawyer building and sprunk factory. So many fun times with friends and cop fights. GTA V disappointed me with the lack of buildings enterable

They should’ve at least let us use all the interiors already created from the missions.

Interiors were a big part of Saints Row 2's charm. You had multiple multi-floored cribs that could be rag-to-riches upgraded, multi-floored nightclubs, 2 huge museums, a community center, a gambling den underneath it, a playable hotel casino, dozens of hidden locations, quickie marts, restaurants, airport, and every SR2 purist's favorite: the underground mall. Most of these were all a part of the main map and you could walk through the door. The mall has an elevator that ports you in that literally only lasts a second, but even then; you could drive down the parking garage and enter it manually/seamlessly. GTA V may have tons of instanced rooms, but SR2 is the only non-MMO game I can think of that lets you flow through the veins of an open city.

Elder scrolls cities are small, but you can enter basically any building. It adds a lot to the world.

In Assassin’s Creed Unity, a decent part of that game’s map of Paris had fully modeled explorable interiors. I remember parkouring from the roof of a building into the window of another building, running around its interior, then jumping out of another window onto another building. Granted, many of these interiors were copied and reused across the map (I think they may have used procedural generation or something similar but I’m not 100% sure of that) but they were still able to maintain the illusion.

If a game can make you feel small without you being physically smaller that’s in my opinion one of the most important parts of immersion

I’ve always loved this. Back when Vice City had those “secret areas” I remember thinking it would only get better from here.

Even if you’re able to go anywhere, the main problem of a world feeling empty isn’t solved by this. There needs to be uniqueness incorporated into every location in the game. It requires some combination of painstaking manual work or an incredibly well designed procedural generator to make these large worlds feel alive.

One of the reasons I loved playing fallout 4 so much was the fact that many of the buildings could be entered and explored, and all of them felt unique. It felt like there was always something new to see.

This was one of my big fantasies when I was a kid. I sort of just thought of all buildings as "real" and enterable, but maybe not for the PC. I remember just being blown away by GTA because you could exit the vehicle.

True Crime: NY and Morrowind 2002-2004 shocked me with the amount of enterable interiors, it was the 1st time I'd experienced that!

For those interested, in Project Zomboid all of the buildings are enterable and furnished. Not a fully 3d game (its isometric) but its map is a pretty accurate to scale map of the area around Louisville, Kentucky. Great game if you like zombie and or survival games.

The thing that I loved about Ghost Recon Wildlands is that literally every building in the map had an inside, and while a lot of the buildings were generic copy/pastes of others, it allowed for much more dynamic gameplay especially in big cities

What makes Elder Scrolls so great and immersive is every building and every floor of every building is enterable

So glad u mentioned project zomboid, it is one of the best examples imo of the potential of a open world survival game with fully interactible and explorable buildings.

This has been my wish for years. Tried making towers and maps with at least 3 floors back in Halo Reach and 4, but always hit the asset limit. Then i considered making a game packed with content and features and larger maps but with older ps/n64 graphics. But now im glad were at the age where my dreams are more than just wishes, and im pretty excited for it.

This is what I like least about gta5's map, almost nothing has any interiors, and exploring the world gets boring quick because there's only one major city and nothing to really do in it. Rdr2 definitely fixed that issue and I hope to see GTA 6 take the route rdr2 took with random houses, saloons, and shops all having interiors.

This makes me want a Die Hard-style game which takes place entirely inside a single building, but every aspect of that building is fully modeled and realistic allowing for countless approaches to a single objective

This is one for AI to solve. Not just bland, basic procedural generation, but advanced offline ML models infering what interiors should look like and how you can interact with them; paired with a vast amount of variables and finishing touches by artists/devs. Wouldn't be surprised of we have a large open world game doing this by the end of the decade.