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There is always a tradeoff between draw distance and visual quality and simulation complexity that developers need to make in an open world game. Last gen was severely lacking when it came to RAM so there is only so much devs can have visible at any one time, so they made the trade off of having short LOD and using tricks like skyboxes to create the illusion of draw distance. This generation has a lot of RAM so that is less of an issue now as it was as seen in your example of The Witcher 3, however cross gen games like Watch_Dogs still have to be designed with last gen limitations in mind. Also A game set in a city having tall buildings everywhere blocking far views isn't a surprise.

There are some games that handled it well last gen of course with for example the mountains in Skyrim always being visible, or Just Cause 2. And of course it was a hell of a lot better than the prvious gen with shit like Morrowind with it's 10m draw distance with fog etc.

There are some games that still tout draw distance for example ARMA 3 which goes up to 10km.



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