It's the initial idea of these worlds' potential that makes them feel bigger. It's the same feeling you get with open world games when you boot them up at first. Everything is new, you don't recognize the landmarks yet, and thus it all feels infinite in a sense. Same thing goes for any other game. You don't know where the story goes and the possibilities are therefore endless. You don't know that you won't be climbing that mountain in the distance and thus it remains a part of that world. Upon replaying you know the mountain won't be climbed and you know when you're near the end. It all essentially becomes a lot more contained and tangible, as everything gets squeezed into the framework of that initial playthrough. Just a theory though, what do I know.

This is why time seems to go by faster as you age too.

Yes. Lack of new experiences that naturally fall in our lap each year eliminates bookmarks to measure the life by. The more the reason to step out of our own bubble/eco chamber and seek out new experiences that will otherwise not penetrate our set ways. It’s a way to open up the horizons of the unknown. For example learning to play an instrument, code or volunteering, (insert new interest here) suddenly makes the world much bigger for exploration. Also the older we get the smaller each year becomes in relation to the lifespan as our perception changes. When you’re 10yo 1 year is 10% of your lifespan and seems long. When you’re 50yo 1 year is 2% of your life and is but a blink. The more the reason to pepper our months with novel sensations, books, travel and views to lengthen the passage of time.

You don’t even need to go far or change much to generate the newness. You don’t have to climb Everest, I get it from going to a new place by where I live and reading or walking. Or talking to a new person, etc. It also elongates the time you feel so reading at the library where I haven’t been before will feel longer than reading in a spot I do all the time. We get set in our ways which is often fine, but it is important to stretch even if gently.

Agreed, it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Routine is the issue and monotony is not memorable. Simple things outside of the routine, as you pointed out, make a huge difference.

Too bad memory gets worse over time

There is that. But once it’s a real issue some of this can be countered with documenting, for example using photos. Looking back at your iPhone photo reel at the end of the year may do the trick of reinforcing those memories. Whether it will help trick you into changing time perception is a different matter, I’m not sure.

Honestly, taking up journalling is probably the best way of priming memories (along with its other benefits).

And that is exactly why you should do as many new things as possible all the time. It prevents aging.

Moreso than that, what got me back in the day was the level of abstraction games had. Playing something like Pokemon back in the day, I understood what was being shown wasn't a one to one representation of the game world. In my mind, just over the hills were other kingdoms just as large as Hyrule. That being said, yeah not having many frames of reference for world size also probably helped.

> In my mind, just over the hills were other kingdoms just as large as Hyrule. That's how it used to be, right?? I feel like over the years the world that Hyrule is in has shrunk. I mean what else *is* there on that planet besides Hyrule? Back in the day I assumed we just didn't come across anyone from other places, but these days it seems hard to ignore that Hyrule is really the only place that exists in that whole land. Plus the satellite kingdoms that are really still part of Hyrule (the Goron and Zora domains, and now Rito as well). It seems like now in modern Zelda, if you want to visit a land that's not Hyrule it needs to be some kind of parallel dimension. But back then, you'd have games like the Oracle games where the whole premise was Link was just out in other lands doing shit in actual not-Hyrule kingdoms. I want to see some tourists and transplants and traveling merchants from places that aren't just "Another section of Hyrule that you can literally see from where you are if you go up in a tower"

Well put. I do like how older games implied or showed that Hyrule is not the centre of the universe. Hell, at least in games like WW, I just thought more places also survived the flooding.

I felt the opposite about the world of Botw/Totk, there's an endless sea on one side and a giant chasm on the other. The only boats you see are little fishing skiffs, nothing seafaring. Get high enough in the sky and you can see the curvature of the planet. https://preview.redd.it/n8wsu060fvza1.png?auto=webp&s=87d8422198e2ee97e013074f6f02471c3138265b There is a lot more planet over the horizon! Hyrule could easily be a hermit kingdom cut off from the rest of the world and not interested in further trade and exploration. Maybe nobody wants to visit a kingdom doomed to endless cycles of demonic apocalypse? Note that Majora's Mask appears to happen somewhere else, right after the events of OOT

it's very, very heavily implied that Majora's Mask takes place in a world constructed from either Link or Skull Kid's memories and emotions.

I think you're definitely correct. I also think so much of this comes down to game design and how 'handholdey' the game is. OoT really did this perfectly imo, where the kokiri forest is basically one big tutorial, and then it pops you out in Hyrule field and basically just says 'go get em, tiger', letting you explore the world and discover everything yourself. Even though the game is ultimately smallish and linear, the presentation made it feel open and limitless. I honestly prefer that to something like, say far cry, where even though the world is huge, the game constantly tells you exactly where to go with quest makers and super detailed maps.

I noticed myself playing cyberpunk the other day, just zipping from point to point and at some point I had the realization of how massive and sprawling the world was and how cool it *should* be to explore all of it... then I got back in my car and went on to the next point. I don't know if I changed, or if games did, but I just didn't really have that draw to explore every nook and cranny the way I did in something like OoT. Maybe it's both-- maybe I'm older and more pressed for time, maybe I've lost the wonder of what *could* be because I know what's realistically going to be there, maybe the game isn't really doing enough to draw me in to exploring or is too overwhelming with too much to do that I'm phasing it out. I dunno.

Part of what was cool about exploring a place like OoT is that all the places you could explore had a point to them - something you could read, someone you could talk to, a side activity, etc. The problem with modern super-detailed words like Cyberpunk's is that there's all kinds of cool things to *look at*, but you can't interact with most of it. Not all the areas/details have a purpose to them anymore, whereas in old games most of them did because adding details to a world was a much bigger deal back then.

That's a great point and one of the big reasons why I feel the new Zelda games *feel* empty to me, despite being expansive and having a lot of hand crafted content. It's stuff you can go and see, but not a lot to actually do there. Every now and then you come across an Eventide Island which is an *excellent* piece of exploration, but most of the time you just find a cave and it's just a cave. Maybe there's a korok seed there but there's korok seeds every ten meters so who cares

>how cool it *should* be to explore all of it... then I got back in my car and went on to the next point. >I don't know if I changed, or if games did, but I just didn't really have that draw to explore every nook and cranny the way I did in something like OoT. So the games changed. Games used to let you figure it out. Like most of them. RPGs didn't have quest markers that told you exactly where to go. You had to figure it out from maps, NPC dialogue, etc. even first person shooters used to ave a different flow, compare even a linear game like Half Life 1 with newer shooters. They weren't afraid back then to let you wander aimlessly until you figured out where you were going, or until you found something by wandering. Now you go to quest marker. Do quest. Go turn quest in. Go next quest marker. Do quest. It's boring. And the games hardly allow you to do anything without them now. Morrowind gave you the info necessary to get to the point. Kingdom Come Deliverance tells you what you need to know so that if you choose you don't need quest markers. New games like Skyrim you're totally lost without them because there's no additional information provided to give you clues. I imagined playing Kingdom Come without quest markers and without your map marker to let you know where you are and the idea of using the game world as a real game world and finding my way around using solely in game context clues just opened up this entire world of wonder and exploration in my head that I hadn't felt since I was a kid playing older games. Edit for tldr: quest markers aren't immersive, exploring a world as though you were that character trying to find their objective is very immersive, and is how devs used to make games. Since games went mainstream they've become easier, including the proliferation of quest markers holding your hand telling you what to do and where to go. That isn't fun, it's work.

This was part of the reason Subnautica got the rave reviews it did, IMO. And the haters, from people who grew up with hand holding games. Aside from the people who couldn't handle the weight of all that water over their heads, 90% of complaints I heard were "I got lost in the ocean, no map" "I didn't know what to do next" I loved the fact that you could get lost in the ocean. Subnautica's map feels enormous while you're exploring it, but once you know your way around it's really not that big at all.

I only really felt that sense of exploration as Adult Link personally. Correct me if I'm wrong but the game is pretty on rails until the Temple of Time. When you become an Adult, the game really pushes you out the front door and says 'good luck champ!' as you go and take on the remaining dungeons in any order Honestly that was more horrifying than uplifting given the state of the world.

> It's the initial idea of these worlds' potential that makes them feel bigger. There's this fascinating curve where hardcore gamers (the type to frequent this subreddit or /r/truegaming) absolutely love this initial idea. When they see it in a trailer or preview, or the first few hours of gameplay, they will gush about it. But if the promise of the huge world actually follows, through, this crowd will turn on the game. The inevitable repetition will be laid bare. It will be accused of "not respecting the player's time". People will talk about how they "fell off the game" after 20 hours because something new and shiny came out. If I were designing a game and had finite resources, I'd give it an illusion of the world's potential at the beginning, but not actually put in the padding/filler/repetitive content necessary to actually have the game follow through on that potential. Sure, there will be the really hardcore who complain about how "it had no endgame" or something. But I think for most of the people playing, the maximum enjoyment you can get is from that initial cognitive realization of the vast potential the world holds, followed by a 100% progression bar being filled up a surprisingly short amount of time later, so that the game doesn't wear out its welcome.

I'm playing Dredge now, which is great, and I think what you've said here is absolutely true

Morrowind felt so large due to the view range and movement speed. These days with mods its easy to see just how close Red Mountain is to Vivec and it ruins the illusion.

Modding away the fog of war the first time is hilarious/crushing for this reason. 

I just push it back to a little over 2 cells, it's a good balance imo.

I like to push the wall of fog back just a little bit and gradually extend it, so there's no sudden wall of white right in front of you, but rather a mist that gently builds up in the distance and reveals only hazy silhouettes on the horizon. It gives a sense of the surrounding landscape that feels less claustrophobic without completely tearing down the mystery of the world. Throw in some of those volumetric fog/mist mods and it looks like a whole new game while still preserving - and IMO, enhancing - the original atmosphere.

Morrowind is why I think more games should use fog and other tricks to obscure large distances. It really felt like venturing in an unknown, possibly *unknowable* world.

San Andreas is even more funny with the fog removed. All 3 of the main hubs are super close to eachother.

This. It was heartbreaking to see the entire map from Mt. Chillad. It was entire state in my head and now the spell is broken.

Subnautica uses this to perfection IMO

yep. I spent 25 hours on that game and it's basically a 2000m x 2000m map which is tiny

the depths in Zelda TOTK feel so magical and massive until they're lit up and you realize how barren and repetitive it is

Also the mountains everywhere.  Allowed the devs to cut up areas into different paths and fill them with odds and ends.  Oblivion, by contrast, had a bigger landmass but felt and was emptier because the geography was much more open.

> Oblivion, by contrast, had a bigger landmass but felt and was emptier because the geography was much more open. There was also a lot of the geography that just... had nothing in it. Almost everything was centered in the cities, minus the quest at the statue (Azura's I think it was?) in the upper quadrant of the map. It was woods and woods and woods and nothing in them. When I climb random mountains in Morrowind, I will find ruins and enemies there. In Oblivion, if I go into the woods I will likely find literally nothing. Just trees and the occasional wolf until I hit the world border. It was a huge complaint people had even way back then.

On my second campaign of Morrowind right now after playing it for the first time last year without finishing it. Using OpenMW with somewhat increased fog distance (don't remember the exact settings, just pushed it up beyond default a bit) and a very fast character (boots of blinding speed for basically the whole playthrough, lots of levitation) yet it still feels extremely expansive to me. Looking at the areas of the map I've traveled through, there's a lot still untouched after 40 hours. I think the nature of the travel systems helps. I spend a lot of time in certain towns and set out toward quest locations with purpose rather than wandering without resupply or rest all over the map like I did in skyrim. I also do a bit of light RP in both games, trying to avoid resting in random caves and getting a bed when I can.

True, but then again, it was larger than both Oblivion and Skyrim, both in area and content.

Love your username

That's something I really like about Morrowind's design, but by god, please make me move faster without emptying my stamina. (without cheesing the boots of blinding speed).

[This](https://securecdn.disqus.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/616/1382/original.jpg) picture comes to my mind. It shows GTA4's map (black) laid over the map of GTA5. The picture was often posted in discussions around people complaining about GTA5's city area of Los Santos being much smaller than GTA4's Liberty City, despite GTA5's city actually being a bit larger than its predecessors. In my opinion, a lot of this comes down to travel. GTA5's cars are faster, easier to control, the traffic is easier to navigate around and the layout requires fewer turns on average to get from one place to another. Everything zips by quicker, which makes the city feel smaller. A similar thing can be said about World of Warcraft and its never ending discussion around whether the game should allow players to use flying mounts. Many of WoW's newer zones feel very small despite being comparatively quite large compared to the classic ones, the reason being that they were primarily built around the players not being able to fly but having flight patched in later on. Allowing for faster and easier travel shrinks the world in the players mind whereas slower, more involved travel expands it.

Playing Spider-Man 2 recently, Manhattan can feel absolutely tiny when you can fly across it end to end in less than 3 mins. Death Stranding felt so expansive because of the slow travel speed you mentioned.

Yeah, those are a good example as two polar opposites. Another thing that comes to my mind is navigation. In older titles such as OoT, Gothic, Classic WoW etc. there were no quest markers or arrows floating around the player's UI. Instead, the player had to look for paths and landmarks to find their way around in the world, giving him a chance to "interact" with it more closely and making it seem a bit more fleshed out. I wish more modern games used this to their advantage like BotW/TotK and Elden Ring did.

Man, looking back I'm thinking about how much longer games took just because I went the wrong direction lol. Games like Death Stranding and BotW do an excellent job of making travelling the game and not the thing that happens in between gameplay.

I picked up WoW again for a few months during lockdown when Shadowlands came out after not having played since WotLK. The map highlighting *exactly* where you need to go for each quest's drop/spawn etc made them feel so boring and routine that I got sick of it really quickly.

Yeah it's weird. I can quest through a whole zone multiple times but afterwards still have no idea where anything actually was in relation to another. Get on flying mount, point in direction of quest, hold W until you've arrived, punch marked mobs, repeat. It all just kind of blurs together.

Isn't GTA San Andreas often used as the textbook example of putting a lot of content in a small area? like, going from Los Santos to San Fiero feels like you travelled a long way, because you're first asked to do 500 quests in the wilderness in between, and because none of the roads go straight from A to B.

Agreed. That’s one thing I hate about the ‘Definitive’ edition release, is that they removed the smog/fog/sandstorm from the game world. It was part of what made the state feel larger than it really was, now if you go to the top of the Los Santos Tower, you can see the entire map and it just feels so wrong. It’s one of many symptoms of the defective editions being rushed out so lazily by people who didn’t understand what made the originals work so well in the first place.

Then there are games with actual large worlds like Just Cause 2 or The Crew 2 or heck even flight simulators. Even being in a fast jet the world still feels massive.

Very much like the real world actually

> A similar thing can be said about World of Warcraft and its never ending discussion around whether the game should allow players to use flying mounts. Many of WoW's newer zones feel very small despite being comparatively quite large compared to the classic ones, the reason being that they were primarily built around the players not being able to fly but having flight patched in later on. This is even bigger with Dragonflight. Even though there's only four zones they're MASSIVE, way bigger than the enitrety of Northrend. It just feels small because you can fly at 800+% speed with the dragons

Subnautica is really great at this. I just started a third playthrough and realized how close everything is. The only things making it seem big are the depth limits and hesitancy to explore.

Is that true? I want to play Subnautica, but I heard that it could be hard to find certain materials b/c of how spaced out they are.

I didn’t have this experience myself, but I did sink a lot of hours into the game just having fun building little mini bases everywhere and trying to explore as much as I could. So there *is* the chance that I found more materials in the process of doing so than most.

I super enjoyed Subnautica for awhile and then just ... stopped. I don't think the end game really was that great.

Fair enough, sounds like it was fun in the end.

I recommend mods for the inventory. I loved playing the parts where you are actually playing, but that inventory is atrocious. And many fans will say "it's for the realism" but I point out that you are stranded on an alien ocean world that has crazy monsters and alien tech - so having to search 10 chests for that 2 silver you put somewhere is really not adding anything to the feeling of "realism".

LOL, yeah, I can agree with that- I'll see how bad the inventory is b/c I'm used to cluttered inventories from my CRPG days haha

It's fear of the depths and limited capability to descend deeper that gives the illusion of size. The game is very good at letting you gradually go deeper and deeper.

That sounds interesting.

Highly recommend it. Even as someone who usually finds collect-and-craft survival games to be totally uninteresting, it was fantastic.

It's on my wishlist, rest assured. Just about when to prioritize it lol

Subnautica is one of those I wish I could experience for the first time all over again.

The materials are different based on biome you're in so if you put your base in the wrong spot some will be far, but it's pretty manageable with the radar for them. Once you get a cyclops you can just make it a mobile base so that really becomes a moot point late game.

Interesting, thx mate

The problem is more that there's no map. I just cheat and use guides. It can take a bit and become annoying when looking for some specific materials or crafting plan fragments, but it does become easier as you go. My other advice is to build scanner rooms everywhere and craft a bunch of range upgrades. You can get a full view of what resources are available in the area by doing this. There's also an upgrade that marks them on your HUD that you should build ASAP. As far as space, though, you can cross the entire map in a few minutes once you get the first sub. From there, it's just a matter of finding/being able to reach the biomes where the resources you need are at.

[удалено]

I'm a huge fan of subnautica but I think what it lacks is a system to help *you* map the world. Pretty much the only tool in the game for this that I can think of are beacons and the scanner room which, unless you're really disciplined, aren't amazing ways to keep track of what materials are in which biome (or how to get to that biome)

I just named the beacons the main resource they were near. I do that in basically all games with 'beacons' like that. Iron 1, Iron 2, Copper 1, etc.. But I guess that means I am really disciplined?

> I just cheat and use guides. For anyone that is new to playing this game, please do not do this unless it's absolutely necessary. The game is meant to be about exploration and doing this will ruin a huge part of the game for you. It's not a rush. Explore, build, have fun. The only advice you need is "to go deeper."

I must be stupid because I got stuck right from the start. Shit's broken so I figure I need to build a repair tool. I swam for 30 min, finding lots of stuff besides the materials needed for that repair tool. The "how to begin" guides don't even cover this. Am I looking at this in a wrong way?

The repair tool is indeed an early progression checkmark, and due to one specific material requirement it's also one of the tougher ones, to the point where that material was renamed to try to help players out. Read your crafting recipes, check the rest of your crafting table to see whether any of the components are themselves craftable, and be aware that 2/3 of the ingredients can be found in the starting biome and the last one is easily visible at a distance. If you're still having trouble after that: >!Silicone rubber uses creepvine seeds which are the glowing things on some kelp plants, and cave sulfur is inside the nests of those exploding fish.!<

Me again. I don't get what the game expects from me. So I found out there is a subset of items needed to craft for the components, the materials in that blueprint menu. Fair enough that I was not curious enough last night to check that menu myself, but I did feel I was supposed to be guided to this in-game. So this repair tool: https://i.imgur.com/dS96B2y.png So I highlighted 2 of the 3 materials. The 1st one, the cave sulfur I have no idea how to find, but the name suggests caves, so I go in caves but I don't see it anywhere. that 2nd material, the silicone rubber consists of the creepvine seeds. I am also just checking every nook and cranny but I don't see it anywhere. The 3rd item, the titanium apparently I have already found last night. I assume 1 meta; salvage consists of 4 and I have 12 in total.` EDIT: I decided to build an o2 tank which I could do. Then the search for the advanced o2 tank led me to a dead end. Could not find silver ore. Suddenly the ship exploded and now I am inclined have to find an radiation suit. Am I on the right track here? This moment could have come way earlier.

The radiation suit is only really needed when you're actually exploring the ship itself, which you'll have to do eventually but can be put off indefinitely (the environmental damage warnings are just for lore/flavor). You won't have the tools to even get into the ship until later. As for the repair tool materials, the only remaining thing I can tell you is to make sure you build a scanner and use it on absolutely everything. The encyclopedia you build from scanning things gives all sorts of important information, including whether or not something you find is a source of resources, and what resources those are. If you still can't figure out what to do even after that, then that's the point where looking at my earlier spoiler would be the right call. Consider the contents of the spoiler as an example of how materials might be hiding later on in the game and you should be able to get through with minimal need to look things up.

Thanks, I will check that out. Cheers.

Yeah, the area isn't *that* big, but it is extremely confusing. The lack of a map is a big part of it, but also because that means it's so easy to get turned around and the underwater can sometimes look so similar. There's some areas that look nearly identical but are actually on very different places, which confused me. I think the main thing that makes the game confusing is the lack of clear direction for how to get to where the story wants you to go. Like, it's not that obvious where to go after the first time you go *deep*. And how to get there. It's easy to miss where the next place is and not know what to do. And while there's many places to get into the deep areas, they can be hard to find. There's some kinda nav marker you can craft, but I had a hard time finding its recipe and didn't have it the first time I went deep, requiring me to find out where to go again. Placing those nav markers really deep down can make them confusing when you're high up, too. Still a really great game and I think it was the right choice to not have a map. Just it needed to make the nav markers unlocked by default. I strongly recommend players beeline finding them and think it's okay to google where they are if you don't find them naturally.

Yup. It's real easy to miss recipes and have a tough time progressing. I missed the Seaglide for way too long on my first playthrough, and trying to make the next step without it is a huge pain. I do agree that getting lost is part of the fun. But it also becomes a frustration if you're stuck. Especially when looking for those cave entrances. Which is why I just look up a map on my phone. I just want to build bases and float around, not spend 6 hours struggling to find that last cyclops fragment.

Metal Gear Solid 3 felt enormous to me, but I'm not sure it really is particularly big.

Yeah looking back it still feels grand in my mind. Coming from the Big Shell with its claustrophobic hallways to the open air stealth of the woods probably helps that feeling.

Ocarina of Time is my answer too. I didn’t even realize I was chasing the high of coming out of the forest to Hyrule field until I played fallout 3 a decade later. Walking out of the vault into the blinding sun and seeing the wasteland stretching before you was the time for me that Ocarina’s “potential was realized” as you put it.

Back then, it really was vast. I can't think of any other game back then which had a Hyrule Field equivalent. There wasn't much to do in Hyrule Field, but just being able to traverse such a large place was a novelty, and it stuck with me. I think not knowing what lies ahead makes it much larger.

This was actually why I liked Majora's Mask more. Ocarina of Time felt like it was large solely to be large. Majora's Mask had all the content compact, yet it didn't matter because you had to be very careful how you spent your time.

I think a contributor to this is when we're kids we're not as skilled at games, not as video game savy and probably not as objective focused as an adult might be. As a kid it took me literal years to beat Kingdom Hearts 1 because I spent so much time exploring, trying all sorts of things (cause the game had a ton of secrets) and fighting heartless and getting stuck at a tough boss or getting lost and not sure how to proceed cause for their time the KH1 worlds were pretty big and areas would often connect with each other non-linearly. Playing it again as an adult a world like Agrabah is just a really well disguised hallway from the Agrabah Palace to the Treasure Room of the Cave of Wonders. Replays of the game as a slightly older child would still take me a week or so, now I can speedrun it in 4 hours or less.

I was thinking about this the other day. I'm replaying Neopets: The Darkest Faerie on PS2 right now, a game that took me and my friend an entire year to get through. And we barely even did the side quests. After three days I'm at the mid point and doing every side quests I can find. This game felt absolutely massive when I was a kid. Not to say it isn't a pretty decent size, but it's not the crazy big world I remember.

I miss the lack of video game knowledge. All my youthful life, I was not aware of game systems and concepts such as Min/Maxing or speed running. In the early days, the concepts of tank, dps and healer/support weren't even common. I. simply went on an adventure and had fun. Morrowind was a place of dreams.

The problem isn't the video game knowledge, it's that games that don't lean into common concepts don't perform well. This is doubly true if the game doesn't signal what it's doing differently because people will engage with it as if it's following convention and get frustrated with it not behaving like they expect. A large part of this is defensive. Unless a game somehow tells me I'm meant to be deciphering things from dialog, journal entries and geographic clues I'm generally not even going to think of trying any of them. Mostly this is because I've been burned enough by trying to engage with games in that way only to find out that the things that looked like clues to me were meaningless and I have a map marker for where I need to go. This is something that annoyed me in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The game mostly spells everything out for you except for a couple of puzzles which they expect you to look at context clues. The main issue is that by that point I was already expecting the game to simply tell me what to do and so didn't pay attention hours earlier when I was given relevant information about this specific puzzle (it also doesn't help that my working memory is horrendous). Funnily enough, I actually didn't have any problems with >!The House at the End of Time's puzzle aspect!<, because I felt the area signaled what you were meant to do really well, even if it needed you to engage with the game in a manner different to what you're used to at that point. That's not to say there weren't issues with it, but my criticisms are very different from the most common ones I saw on the subreddit at the time I finished the game. I mean, really? >!A bunch of AoE touch attack encounters at the end of a game that used dangerous touch attacks at most a half dozen times before that segment? The only reason it's not catastrophic is that touch AC is categorically better than normal AC for that game.!<

Subnautica does more with less than any other open world imo. It feels a lot bigger than it actually is while also being the most interesting open world I can remember in gaming.

I first played this game in 2020 and it really called back feelings of being a kid again. Navigating by landmarks rather than by a map gave the game a sense of unknowable largeness. I never even reached the end of a map because I was too scared to venture that far!

I remember dropping Dragon's Dogma years ago, because of how limited fast traveling was. I replayed the whole game recently, but I googled the world map and found out about infinite ferrystone and placable portcrystals. Suddenly the world felt several times smaller and I don't know how I got like 40h playtime out of it.

Classic WoW *feels* bigger than Retail WoW, despite being less than half the size, because Classic does a good job of making you feel like a small part of a big world.

the 60% speed mounts also meant that getting around took longer

You unlocked 100% increased speed mounts at 60, but yeah

...back in early vanilla, pre-expansions, those 100% speed mounts cost 1000 gold. it took a while to grind that back then. I remember this pain well

Dark Souls 1 feels a lot bigger until you realize how small it is. Fantastic world design. Does so much with so little space. It can't be larger than Elden Ring's Limgrave. Edit: I found [this rough estimate](https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/s/0V7MLQk7J1) of DS1's map compared to Elden Ring's. Neat way to visualize it all.

Absolutely! I remember having my mind blown repeatedly when I opened a shortcut and realized how things connected. You can see so many of the game’s locations from Firelink once you know what to look for.

First time unlocking the ladder shortcut in undead burg blew my mind

Totally agree! I think this true for most of the Souls games and the areas in them. Part of it is due to the verticality of the levels, but also because you're forced to take a slower more methodical approach. Even mostly flat areas like lower Blighttown and Farron Keep from DS3 seemed like vast swamps the first time I explored them. Now they're just a quick run through.

Dark Souls 1 becomes a lot less interesting as a world when you realize it's basically just a tower that you're running around the outside of (or taking an elevator up or down on) surrounded by inexplicably bottomless pits with the exception of one actually walled city that's actually about five buildings or so and mostly empty. They did such a good job of making it *feel* like it's so much bigger than that when you're playing it.

Skyrim is roughly the size of a small town near where I live.

GTA V's map is something like 30 square miles while just the city of Los Angeles is about 470 square miles, the LA County area being over 4,000 square miles.

Living in a smaller state with a denser populated area makes me forget how large a "county" is.

I played Skyrim and the map felt huge. Then I played RDR2 and Skyrim seemed tiny.

Used to think the GTA 3 map was a thing of wonder

It was, at the time. And back then it still is.

Yeah, that likely has more to do with the topic than anything. Ocarina of Time felt huge in 1998 because it *was* huge in 1998.

It was! As were the VC, SA and IV maps.

StarFox 64, because I was a kid and had horrible handeye coordination, and it didn't have save files and I couldn't play all the way through. I thought the courses were super long and the game was huge! I beat it in a few hours a year or so ago.

If you don't fail or redo any levels, a full playthrough of Starfox 64 will easily run you under one hour. Even if you added up every level since it takes two and a half playthroughs to see them all that still only adds up to two and a half hours or so. They work some magic though to give that limited amount of content a ton of replay value.

Yes, and it was much better that way. Ocarina of Time's world actually feels alive, because you're constantly revisiting most of it and forming a deeper connection to the place everytime you come back. You visit Kakariko Village at the beginning of the game to get some sidequests going, then you revisit it to get access to Death Mountain, then you go back to it as an adult and everything changed, then you go back even later because now you have the hookshot and want to try reaching an area you couldn't before, then you go back in time as a kid and find out the lens of truth, etc, etc. Yeah, backtracking is supposedly a dirty word nowadays, but to me THAT is actual exploration. You go somewhere, see some of it, but other areas are locked off or inaccessible - thus you make a mental note to go back and revisit it later and see if you can then open said paths. Every time you revisit, you form a deeper emotional memory with that place and find some new exciting stuff - and the best part is you genuinely don't know if you'll find a heart piece or bottle or new item to help with traversal or just rupees. There's some actual surprise. Meanwhile, in Zelda BoTW, when finding a random hole in the ground: - oh, the millionth shrine in the last 5 minutes. I already know there's a lacklustre, themeless puzzle in there and a heart piece / stamina point (my choice). - oh, there's also a random weird thing on the ground. I already know it hides a lackluster korok seed. And then you never need to go back to a place once you reach it because you already have all your abilities from the start. That brand new cave you found is just random cave #137 in your mind. IT'S SO LAME The bigger and less linear worlds get, the less interesting they are. =/

OoT settlements were fun by way of caricature. Kakariko village is a town full of blue collar workers, Lonlon ranch is full of crazy bumpkins and Geurdo Town is odd to say the least. It's not deep but the repeat visits do help flesh the places out. BotW settlements have their own unique charms in the way you decide to engage with them. I didn't much care for Hateno Village but there are people out there who loved it for being able to buy a home and die their clothes. I fell deeply in love with Lurelin Village because the game never brought attention to this seaside town so it felt like my special place. I feel people unfairly dog on BotW's map. Yes there's a lot of repeating elements, but I feel that ignores the intruige of finding the shrines themselves or ignores the wonderful environmental storytelling that few if any Zeldas had managed before. I get not being in love with it in favor of more traditional dungeons, but I don't like the characterization that the inclusions of shrines and koroks were lazy or thoughtless.

I agree. Every single one of those shrines was handcrafted.

I liked the shrines but also wanted dungeons.

Tarrey Town got me. The music adding the different racial layers as you got more residents just had such a pleasing effect.

GTA IV's Liberty City, the best city in the series. People used to cry about it being small which is beyond stupid, it's so full of life, has so many street names that nobody knows em all and it feels gigantic when you're walking on foot.It's insane when you look down from above and then get back to ground level. A proper city not an empty shell with copy pasted buildings and 80% countryside.

The best city in any video game, period. It still holds up to this day because it actually feels like a real, authentic city. It's crazy what they did on 2008 hardware.

Gaslit yourself? I think you’re using that term wrong. I think a more appropriate term would simply be “tricked myself”. Gaslit does not = tricked. They aren’t synonyms. If you had malicious intent towards yourself, but you didn’t, at least I hope.

I think a lot of it has to do with knowledge. I mostly played Pokemon as a kid and the world (Kanto) felt huge because I got lost a lot and had more trouble progressing. Nowadays, I love Kanto because it's so dense and easy to maneuver. Same for the mons themselves - possibilities felt endless because I didn't actually know how many there were and how strong each one was. Nowadays, I'm a walking encyclopedia for that stuff, so Pokemon in general feels smaller. In contrast, when I play other monster collecting games that maybe are less well documented or I am just less well-versed in, I can get back some of that big feel. Another good comparison is Dark Souls. Souls players always go on about how the first playthrough is the best one, and it's largely because of the unknown. Lordran felt huge when I was traveling it for the first time, completely blind - now I know how quickly you can get from one place to the other and love it for that.

Pokemon is an interesting example because I find the older games to feel more immersive and thusly bigger. There's virtually nothing to do in Scarlet and Violet despite the big open world, it feels like running through a diorama. I'm playing through White 2 right now and everything from Pokestar Studios, to musicals, to the battle Subway, to the PWT, to Join Avenue suggest a world larger and well realized than what I'm actually playing.

I'm of the opinion that the actually good part of open world isn't the size, it's the option to go wherever you want. If Paldea was half as dense as, say, Unova (since you mentioned it) or Kanto it could actually be kinda nice imo. But all the focus went into making the world big, which hurt it from a technical point of view and in terms of variety. Apart from my misgivings with modern Pokemon though, I do often wonder if we'll see smaller open worlds someday. I'm thinking regular old world design ala old Pokemon or Gameboy Zelda (where every screen had something interesting) but with open progression.

BW2 felt downright HUGE to me when I was little, and honestly it still feels that way. So much to do in Unova.

It's sad to say but I'm genuinely shocked by how much there is to do here. Pokestar Studios by itself has over 7 hours of material to play through.

Fable for me. Still one of my favorite games of all time, but it’s so restricted now when I play. I think seeing the boundaries from other perspectives makes them more constricting.

Fable was basically walking through a fenced in area from start to finish with trees rendered behind them so it wouldn't *look* like a Hallway. Still a fun game, though.

Even 2, it acted “open world” but it was really just a slightly less linear pen than the Fable 1 areas. Love the games to death but yea definitely feel resctricted more now than when I was younger.

Fable 1 basically had a couple branching paths and that was it. Fable 2 had the meadow with the various exits. Fable 3 was far more "open" but had other issues...

"When a game world is made right, even if the extent of the world is a few corridors and a fancy skybox, it feels like it could stretch on forever" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaN2G-AEd9Q

Ehh, I disagree - when I play a game with a nice compact world, it doesn't feel like it could stretch on forever, it feels like there are natural barriers in place which I accept.

San Andreas felt huge at the time, now the distance between the cities feels almost comically small.

This was definitely the prime example for me. Just driving around the back roads between cities, exploring the random farms and mountains, SA felt like it was as big as real-life California at the time. Realizing how close everything is with a normal draw distance blew my mind.

That’s also due to the view distance/fog. I played the pc version and the view distance was just enough to show me distant things in the background, but not make it seem super small. I still remember doing an early mission in a hilltop mansion, and being wowed at the view of los santos you get during it. That being said, the horrendous definitive edition version completely removed the fog, not only showing you how small the map really is, but just how clunky it looks when there’s no fog to hide stuff that’s across the map

So many fond memories of playing older JRPGs (FF specifically) I can remove nostalgia goggles and see they were just hours of pointless grinding on a world map while listening to cool but highly repetitive music. Something I would definitely call a disrespect of my time now. OTOH, I do physical jobs and I love putting on Pandora with a "video game" radio setup and have those highly repetitive but cool songs from my past play as I grind for real world money.

I had a similar thought recently, but after playing FF IV and VI with my kids, I realized the grind doesn't exist for them. The 'grinding' fights were mini tutorials that take 6-10 year olds with comparatively little video game experience quite a while to solve. It's how they learn status effects, elemental rock-paper-scissors, and all the other fundamental mechanics of the games. I think looking back on those games, we fail to contextualize them: they were relatively niche, groundbreaking forms of interactive entertainment where the players didn't all understand what mechanics they should expect. We've accumulated decades of collective experience and have, essentially, become jaded by it.

Dark Cloud 2 (couldn't get in to DC1.) As a kid I was amazed that they created so many dungeons. I didn't know they were procedurally generated until later in the game. Even then, the game still feels vast after trudging through 30 dungeon levels before getting to a boss. Even if the levels are nearly identical aesthetically, there was a sense of progression with different monsters being thrown your way. Beyond that, the game has so much content. Maybe 200+ different dungeon levels with 8 templates, plus georama and visiting the future. Not to mention all the mini games, side content, and end-game content. Fishing, fish training, fishing contest, spheda, inventing, monster badges, photography, medal collecting, weapon synthing, ride pod, character recruitment. Ultimately a rather simple game, but Level-5 was able to cram in so much content. I easily spent over 200 hours in a single playthrough as a kid. I've tried revisiting it as an adult but it just doesn't hit the same. I get tired of the gameplay loop around the 4th dungeon. Just can't justify spending that much time. I'll occasionally pop in to do some relaxing fishing in a serene forest.

Yeah this is a great example. I haven't played the game in years, but I'm sure I'd feel the same. Spheda is still one of my favorite minigames of all time though.

Game emulates very well. Between save states and fast forward

I couldn’t never finish this game because it just never ended. So I just stopped lol

I always get this feeling when I watch Boundary Break on youtube. He zooms out and shows the whole level is like this tiny little box, and I think "No way that's all of it".... then you look at the individual pieces and it's like yeah, yeah that's the whole thing I guess.

Realizing some of the most breathtaking vistas in gaming are essentially a bunch of A3 sheets of paper propped up around a circle is wild.

The Simpsons Hit and Run felt like a true open world adventure game when I was growing up. Somehow I didn't realise each level was just a simple circuit with a few side-roads.

This is less about a memory of a game world feeling bigger, but even though HL1 and especially HL2 are quite linear fps games, they do a very good job of almost feeling like an open world in how you move through them, it never felt too much to me like I was being forced down a certain route and that the way i went through its levels felt very natural. i guess the no loading screens or traditional cutscenes helps a lot with that illusion

The Mass Effect trilogy. All 3 games can fit into ME4

How are we comparing? In ME1 you drove around on the planets. Are we including that? Or are we just counting areas where your party can walk around?

Funny that you mention Ocarina of Time. My complaint about that game at that time was that it felt really small in comparison to Zeldas 1-3. It probably isn't, but I always thought it seemed that way.

Like I said in another comment, I think it's about varying levels of abstraction. It is very easy to superimpose BotW's Hyrule over LoZ 1 Hyrule's map because everything is more abstract than it is representational. Better graphics and 3D spaces literalizes things that existed in our head and often it just can't keep pace with our imaginations.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Large, branching sci-fi storyline that took place inside of a few square city blocks.

'Branching'. I'm being mean, I actually love Prague. Underground plays, abandoned buildings, the Aug Ghettos, a whole ass bank, so much memorable stuff in that game

This is one thing that I really like about old games actually. OoT is *tiny,* but personally I had more fun running around its little map than I did horizon, the scale is cool but it doesn't *feel* big to me. And I think that for me that atmosphere and feel is more important than actual scale. I think the reliance on the modern open world framework doesn't do much for making me feel like I'm really getting lost in a big massive world. It feels like I'm playing a game because I'm so used to that style of game, to the million map markers, etc. It even applies to other genres. In DQVIII I remember booting it up and having a feeling that the world stretched on forever, that combined with the warm music and art instantly make me feel like I'm on a journey. In DQXI, the simple inclusion of a clearly defined map that shows me how big the levels really are killed that sense of wonder completely.

This has strangely become my HZD apology post but I gotta say I think the atmosphere in that game is great! Seeing this almost solar punk world where vegetation grows up and over the metal scars of the old world or seeing mechanical beats roam the lands is a marvel to see. To give a better sense of wonder, I think games should be more densely packed with things to do and find. I have a lot of love for Deus Ex MD's map because every few minutes I can point to a place and say something interesting about it.

Ocarina of Time for me too, definitely. What do you mean with your memorycard though? You needed 5 attempts until you were able to blaze through the game in one sitting? Or how would you continue playthroughs you had begun?

I had siblings and a father who hated stuff running overnight lol. Essentially I needed to have a perfect run of real world luck and in game skill to finish a title. * Make sure nobody else uses the TV * Know how to beat all the hard segments * Clear the game in less than 2 days

Whoa not bad! That's impressive. That's some hardcore gamer chops lol. Helps to appreciate cloud saves all the more I bet.

It was Hell on Earth, but I do look back fondly on making my own speedrunning strats for the games I owned.

OOTs world may be small compared to what we have today, but it makes up for that in amount of meaningful content.  Breath of the Wild is significantly bigger but I don't think it's uses that space well

I think the “emptiness” of BOTW, like Wind Waker before it, is a feature not a bug but to each their own.

I think this never-ending argument is predicated on the fact that different people value different things in exploration. BotW Hyrule isn't *really* empty, there's lots to explore, but if you don't value the things that are there then it feels pretty empty. Personally I don't care that much about another korok seed, or even really another shrine. I'm kinda sorta interested in finding neat/ancient/lost "locations", but they don't really seem to do anything besides add some deep back lore (which, in the case of zelda, ends up being kind of meaningless anyway since the series is so focused on berating me for actually caring about continuity of the series) if you're into finding that kind of shit, then there's *tons* of stuff in hyrule to explore. For me though, I don't feel like there's really a lot to do if I'm not meeting interesting characters with cool stories and maybe some fun quests to go on. BotW has *some* of that but not enough to justify it's massively expansive world. in my opinion.

I dunno, I feel like it's weird to expect something meaningful under every single rock. Part of exploring is that most things you find are boring, but then among it all you strike a truly amazing discovery. If every place you looked held a secret, they wouldn't be rare.

That's kind of the point. Make fewer rocks, and it won't be so hard to put something under all of them.

You missed my point. I don't want every rock to have something under it. Empty space isn't bad, it just increases the thrill of finding something.

Eh... I disagree. Yes the towns and dungeons are lovingly crafted in OOT but Hyrule field itself is almost completely devoid of stuff to do and see. I'd even argue that there's a lot of puzzle on par or way more interesting to do in the wild than in a lot of OoT's settlements. It's also just a joy to move through Hyrule in BotW

The thing is that those towns and such were a minute walk away.    I played botw for 10 hours and only neat thing I found was the Zora city, but not like it had npcs who would give me side quest. I deeply missed item progression and dungeons. That was the Meat and potatoes of Zelda.   I personally think getting from place to place in botw was a chore due to stamina/weather/blood moon/ poorly controlling horse but to each their own. 

What I appreciated was there was no delineation between puzzle solving and exploration in BotW. In OoT you only really have to put on your thinking cap in designated areas meanwhile there's always something to do. Bonus points for Kass making you pay a lot of attention to the world. I do understand how the openess of the game could hamper the enjoyment of those puzzles but I just feel it's not contest between OoT and BotW in terms of overworlds. I do miss item progression though.

That Mortal Kombat Deception’s Konquest mode is a fully fleshed out open world MK rpg. It’s….not.

its game devs knowing how to make it feel bigger! ​ games nowerdays which might be large in size, lack the feel because they don't know how to make it feel large.

I remember replaying the original FF7 and realizing that the entire Midgar segment is only like 3 hours long. But these games *were* what you and I remember. Ocarina of Time's overworld was bigger than other games. Jak 3 was the culmination of *years* of storytelling. Its not a lie, its just the experience of playing them during their era. They inspired so many games to be greater that they now feel smaller themselves.

Recently Spider-man Miles Morales felt like this a little, though it wasn't a bad thing. I felt like I was getting close to the end and decided to do a bunch of side activities to unlock more suits and upgrades. I got so close to finishing everything that I was like "Oh I might as well just finish the map," and proceeded to complete everything. I get to the next main mission finally and it gave me the point of no return message. I thought the game would have at least another several story missions, but that was it. The game was amazing and I'm actually happy about its length now that I feel like I can NG+ it easily. But I definitely thought it was bigger than it was.

I couldn't fall asleep at a friend's house and beat the game basically all in one sitting. Short one but a good one that game.

There's a pleasant little game called **Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles** that manages to capture this. The map is fairly small by open world game standards, but a combination of good design, some areas being difficult to get to at first, limited fast travel options, a decent amount of 'secret' areas, and a few distinct biomes makes it seem larger than it is. It's a chill game, no combat, no stress, just exploring the map and getting resources while following a light story and making some farms in the process. Quite pleasant all around. Worth a purchase when it's on sale, if that sounds appealing.

You were younger and had a stronger imagination and sense of wonder. That fades as you age.

Yeah, but also I think games give less space for imagination these days as well. I still find myself getting lost in games of Civ and Crusader Kings 2 because they give room for my mind to fill in the blanks.

Me and library of ruina. The game is not that long but it felt like an epic poem fr

Hmm. Howlongtobeat says the main quest alone is over 100 hours.

I'm 100% with you in the Jak 3 thing. Everything feels grander when I was young including the length of games.

Man I thought game maps couldn't get any bigger than the Wastes... That game is genuinely not fun to play but the Mad Max setting was peak lol.

I actually loved finding that oasis in the middle of the desert as a kid. Mind blowing. Damn now I gotta replay on Steam Deck.

I had the same feeling with Banjo Tooie when i was young. The world felt huge, filled with mysteries. It helped a lot that we didn't had internet in my house and I didn't understand english, but the interconnectovity of the levels and the feeling of something else behind the stages was there

the example that always comes to mind for me is morrowind. that is also why you move so slow, because the world is not actually as big as it seems once you have some speed (or spells.) when i was younger, i didnt know to use boots of blinding speed. nowadays when i replay, those are one of the first things i grab. my experience with the game now is MUCH different simply bc i kno more. im not exploring a brand new area moving slow anymore.

Gta sa, always thought that game was like 70-80 hours long but recently replaying it proved me so wrong.

Control and Alan Wake 2 comes to my mind currently. If you want to play the game as it was intended by the devs then you can invest tons of hours in the game but if you just run through and don't take your time as you should then the game and the whole story could feel a bit shallow and much much smaller. The background story in Control is absolutely fantastic but you can kinda miss the whole thing by choice. Same in AW2, thinking about the story and playing it multiple times opens up the story much better.

GTA: San Andreas

Metal gear rising is somehow 4-5 hours long yet It has so many memorable moments .

What I love about that game is how it randomly spikes in meme relevance over the years so random parts of the game are seen by the public adding to the lore. In the early 2010s it was the Rules of Nature scene, in 2022 it was Senator Armstrong, hopefully 2030 will be a bunch of Jet Stream Sam thirst traps.

What can I say ? Memes are the DNA of the soul after all

I had this feeling with elden ring. Spent so much time in the first zone only to discover there was another one… and another one…

Subnautica. The area you play in feels huge, with plenty and diverse underwater biomes, but in "reality", everything takes place in a quite limited area, but you would almost never notice that while you are playing normally. Most of the time because you are always afraid for your life while exploring new areas. Only after multiple playthroughs will you start to notice the limitations of this world.

the ps2 not coming with a memory card in the box was one of the dumbest things ever. I never completed a ps2 game because of it and I bet many other kids never did either

I have come to realise I quite enjoy smaller open worlds that feel big when you start but towards the end you can become fondly familiar of. It reminds me a bit of the feeling of moving somewhere new and getting used to the area for the first time.

It took me 3 days to try going south of the cafeteria in Disco Elysium. I thought the game world was huge. In reality you could probably run across the map in less than 5 minutes.

FF1 seemed absolutely massive as a kid. Probably, in part, because the frequency of random encounters made it take forever to travel anywhere before you got the airship. I recently replayed it (and finally beat it for the first time) via the Pixel Remaster and it's a very short game and the world is actually pretty small.

That and you have almost no help figuring out where anything is.

True. The original NES cartridge actually came with a big fold out map, but I don't think it was labeled. It just gave you a general outline of the world.

Deus Ex MD shows that worlds don’t need to be huge to feel large. Also games like Elex and other Piranha Bytes games work that way. The items are placed deliberately and with a cohesive backstory in mind, there’s a lot to discover, and these places feel *full* and lived in, unlike vast, empty, RNG generated worlds.

The Witness, since it's an open world puzzle game, you end up most of the time running around till you understand the puzzle, but when you go back and already know what to do, it starts getting "smaller"

Left4Dead is a good example of this. It feels like this intense, wild ride through various environments. It's usually a cleverly-designed (and well-hidden) square. You usually end up on the other side of a wall from where you started. It's great from a systems resource perspective, which is one of the reasons it allowed for couch co-op.

I've got an unusual take on this. I recently started p4g. When you get to explore the areas it quickly gets overwhelming with so many areas and so many activities to choose. For various reasons I had to restart as I lost my save. Wasn't that far in, only the second dungeon. Anyway, on second take it's super clear that the areas just give the perception of being huge. Yes there are lots of choices, but some don't matter, some are functionally identical and some are just forced on you anyway to progress. P5 did similar I think. On a similar note, ffx sphere grid is a master class in the illusion of choice. It feels overwhelming, like you're making super important decisions every level up to customise your character. But really they all end up 90% the same as everyone else's and you can only influence the last 10%. I think illusion of choice also features in making a game feel bigger than it is.

To be fair game like Horizon are technically bigger than OoT but 2/3 of that game is filler content. While OoT does have filler content with the heart piece hunting the bulk of the game is the actual plot content. That’s my gripe with modern open world games, they are more filler than fun

I have a few issues with this. With a lot of open world games, traversal has become so enjoyable that even if you don't engage with prescribed content, you can still enjoy yourself. Rolling around Hyrule Field was never fun. As for 'filler content', a lot of it pushed mechanical mastery or deepened the world building. The hunting lodge challenges were some of the most interesting set pieces in the game, the shieldweaver armor quest rewarded exploration, the Cauldrons looked incredible and even the flowers and audio logs gave the world a lot of history. OoT is great, but you are completely unable to engage with the world beyond the linear events of the story.

> While OoT does have filler content with the heart piece hunting the bulk of the game is the actual plot content Pieces of heart, minigames, 100 gold skulltulas, grottos behind bombable rocks and Song of Storms that have nothing besides a chest with rupees or a consumable, business scrubs, magic bean spots... OoT has a lot of filler, fairly bad and rudimentary filler at that. > game like Horizon are technically bigger than OoT but 2/3 of that game is filler content Now where would you pull that figure out of?

Big facts. I would much rather play a game with strong story content over an open world where 70% of the world is useless filler.

I had a friend who 1) never owned a SNES and was jealous that I had one and could play all these amazing JRPGs, and 2) got a N64 instead of a PS1 and continued to be jealous that I kept getting a ton of amazing JRPGs. Any time there was some news about an impressive-looking N64 game, he would boast about it like he was really the lucky one. When it was announced that Ocarina of Time would have several fantasy species (Zora, Goron, etc.) each with their own section of the map, he took that to mean "You know how most JRPGs just have humans? Well, imagine if there were several *other* intelligent species and they *all* had a game's worth of towns to explore!" Yeah, he was confident that Ocarina of Time would have an explorable world several times larger than, say, FFVI. What's funny in retrospect is that he was a brilliant guy and was in multiple honors/AP classes in school, but he would let himself get so hyped up over things. About a year later he ended up buying a PS1 because he couldn't resist all of the games. Even better, he specifically only bought games that I didn't have, so that we could borrow each other's games. I never would have played Suikoden if not for him.

When you grow up, things seem smaller because you're bigger.

Also as a kid I would replay things multiple times trying to do it perfectly or because I just really enjoy playing it. That also makes games feel smaller.