Warning: you are leaving the mission area!

It doesn't bother me.

It sometimes comes in handy. I can get lost pretty quickly in games, so those warnings can really help if I'm going in the wrong direction or too far.

The cutscenes just as bad and hard boundaries are probs just better with a color that fades in when you get close or whatever. The cutscenes are AWFUL because if you keep hitting the wall it wastes your time.

Definitely useful in BO4. Ben a few times where I would try to go somewhere on the map and it's out of bounds.

okay so back in the day, all the gamers whined because you either had: closed off road, ocean, or cliff

and now you want them to go back to that because you don't like WARNING U ARE LEAVIN THE MISSION AREA???

gamers, smdh, they are so hard to please

I feel like it's bad game design.

Why can there be a fence/river/cliff/mountain there or something?

The only game it's ever really mad sense In is CoD4 when you would enter high radiation zones in All Ghillied Up.

Man this helped a ton in Spider-man as I would accidently swing too far out. I dont mind it.

zoodoo said:

Why don't they just block you with something? Why leave the area open and prevent me from going there?

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Definitely a valid question. I guess with all the different traversal options in the game, they don't want to put up a wall to keep people in when you have bodies of water than can be used like in the submarine map with the water on the right side.

zoodoo said:

What are your views on that?

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It's patronizing. I think it's worse than invisible walls. Both are bad though.

I did this in MGSV and Miller was not having it.

Shut up Kaz, it's open world.

Your playing Spider-Man ps4 aren't you lol

Ran into this in AC:Odyssey. It's annoying

It helps game designers limit the scope of missions so that creating and QA testing them is much more feasible. Imagine if you could go anywhere in the world during any mission. You'd have to account for the scripting of NPCs and how they'd react to a random item halfway across the open world of the game. It's just infeasible unless you want your developers to work over 100 hour workweeks.

Profoundly disliked this in Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

It was annoying in horizon ZD, it warrens me if i continue they will restart me from the last checkpoint.

Beyond Good & Evil had a good compromise where you literally get shot back into the play area.

It just tells me the game needs better level-design. There's almost never a good reason to have this kind of shit in your game.

I remember how terrible this was in the battlefield 3 campaign. It had many problems, but when you're in a tiny play area, and an obviously advantageous position is unusable because of this shit, it's really unpleasant.

Dead Island was really bad for it too. In an open world game!

Does the far cry series still do it?

I'd at least prefer it if there was a credible narrative conceit to justify it.

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Never minded it in the AC series as Ubisoft's way of handling it made sense within the story. The most annoying one for me is in Battlefield when you get shot down from a plane and you're miles away from the active part of the map so you're doomed to die!

I don't mind it in an open world as it's better than an invisible wall, but it's absolutely irritating when it happens in small mission area.

Noticed this a lot recently while I was replaying Shadow of Mordor. For instance, it could be one of those missions where you have to follow someone, and if I saw a herb for example and went more than 10 metres away from the guy I'd get a very brief message and then the mission would be cancelled. Or a mission where I'm supposed to disrupt an orc rally or feast, and if I strayed too far away the mission was almost immediately cancelled. The game don't mess around with keeping you in a specific area when you're doing a mission.

Lost said:

I feel like it's bad game design.

Why can there be a fence/river/cliff/mountain there or something?

The only game it's ever really mad sense In is CoD4 when you would enter high radiation zones in All Ghillied Up.

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It depends on the context. In an open world game you don't want to abort the mission and go running off doing something else while the game is still in 'mission mode' for that particular mission, so it stands to be reasonable to automatically cancel the mission if you go to far astray but also giving you the option if it was a mistake. That's good design in that case, not bad design.

Your comment seems more suitable for 'invisible walls'.

I don't see how it's much different at all honestly. I prefer the game just tells me to turn around as I'm leaving the mission area rather than just fail the mission if I go the wrong way without an explicit warning. Especially for games with very limited mission zones like AC: Origins.

I also don't see how coming up with some weird excuse like having your characters loudly thinking "I better stay on my mission!" and stop moving is that much more immersive than a text box on screen that means the exact same thing.

If you're worried about immersion, trying to leave the mission area in the first place is more immersion breaking than the warning message.

Yeah I ran into this in Spiderman when I tried swinging across the bridge.

Lost said:

I feel like it's bad game design.

Why can there be a fence/river/cliff/mountain there or something?

The only game it's ever really mad sense In is CoD4 when you would enter high radiation zones in All Ghillied Up.

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This was perfect implementation

I find it annoying, and it frustrated me when I was recently playing Assassin's Creed Origins. That game has way too many "investigation area" missions to begin with, and they suck.

zoodoo said:

Why don't they just block you with something? Why leave the area open and prevent me from going there?

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Like an invisible wall?

It depends on the game for me. I didn't mind it at all in Spider-Man (PS4) because the boundaries were quite large and it made sense character-wise. It's when games (open world especially) take an otherwise large area and severely constrict it that I take issue. If you're going to give me this kind of restriction, make it big enough that I won't accidentally bump up against the boundary.

Toni said:

Profoundly disliked this in Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

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Yeah, this happened to me during a naval battle and I wasn't even trying to leave when the mission auto failed. Really annoying.

I'm likely in the far minority here with this but i prefer the "go where ever you want"-approach. Reach the part of the map thats just an empty quad? Np. End of the world? Np, fall of and die if you want.
Trackmania turbo does this. So deliberating somehow.

I don't mind. I think it's very hard to avoid in an open world, and I actually really appreciate the option of being able to simply leave an area if I don't want to be bothered with whatever mission I've undertaken.

Creating 'reasons' I can't go somewhere usually feel contrived. Like in Spider-Man, you want to cross the bridge because you can see it's an open pathway, they tell you that you can't. I accept that. It feels cleaner to me than some mysterious gas, or alien wreckage or something that would have to great an impact on the world at large. The game becomes about these boundaries, and I'm glad we've moved past that. Good UI can lead to good UX. It plainly states, you can't go there, so you don't waste your time trying to do that, there is no mystery there.

Wasn't a huge deal but I'd be lying if I wasn't disappointed when it happened. Of course there needs to be an edge of the map, the game world can't go on forever. I just wish there was some other means of stopping you or at least making the edge very far out that you are unlikely to reach it unless you really try.

Tohsaka said:

Yeah, this happened to me during a naval battle and I wasn't even trying to leave when the mission auto failed. Really annoying.

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This sounds like a really bad implementation. I think it works in Spider-Man. They warn you as you swing, so you have time to course correct if need be.

Strafer said:

I did this in MGSV and Miller was not having it.

Shut up Kaz, it's open world.

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miller is such an asshole in MGSV

SuperiorTrashTalk said:

Wasn't a huge deal but I'd be lying if I wasn't disappointed when it happened. Of course there needs to be an edge of the map, the game world can't go on forever. I just wish there was some other means of stopping you or at least making the edge very far out that you are unlikely to reach it unless you really try.

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Oh wow, I didn't know this was possible! So strange based on your map location.

It bothers me more when it appears right before the mission fails for that reason. Happened to me in Far Cry 5 some where I'm given like a second to stop moving and figure out if I move left or right to not fail the mission. It's infuriating...

GTA V handled this quite well, you just swim until you get eaten by a shark or until your plane crashes.

zoodoo said:

Why don't they just block you with something? Why leave the area open and prevent me from going there?

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You're playing a level in a desert, or you're in a ship in the sea, how do you block someone from wandering off?

Armored Core does this and in the earlier games it was actually part of the game design, albeit a frustrating one. I think it is antiquated and no longer needs to be there.

Seeing some crazy tentacle machine god ruins in the mountains at the start of HZD, only for the game to prevent me getting close to and exploring them, pretty much killed the game for me.

It allows me to instantly step back in the boundary and continue playing. Cutscenes are terrible.

I'm usually never trying to leave a mission area, so this is annoying when I see it because I end up feeling like the mission area should be bigger. It's also annoying in Assassin's Creed Odyssey where they're very transparently trying to prevent you from using the terrain to your advantage in the legendary animal fights.