Open-world games usually combine deliberate level design with procedural tools: designers plan the geography, routes, landmarks, and important gameplay spaces, while systems can help shape terrain and populate broad areas with vegetation and other environmental details. The game then streams nearby parts of the world as needed. NPC placement and NPC navigation are separate problems: game-specific rules decide where characters appear, while navigation data and AI systems help active characters move through the world.
How are open-world maps made?
A world begins with decisions about the experience it needs to support: its regions, traversal routes, sightlines, settlements, mission spaces, and landmarks. Real topography can provide useful reference, but a game map may need changes so that terrain supports its mechanics and pacing. In a 2026 interview, Expression Games senior art director Ryan Playle-Howard said the team used topographical references and digital elevation models for Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, adapting spaces to support gameplay.
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From there, teams build large-scale landforms and add environmental detail. Terrain can be sculpted by artists, derived from height data, generated procedurally, or made with a combination of methods. SideFX’s Houdini terrain workflow, for example, uses heightfields to layer shapes, add noise, and run erosion simulations.
A typical production sequence
- Plan the playable geography. Set the major regions, routes, vistas, landmarks, and gameplay spaces.
- Build the landform. Create or adapt terrain through sculpting, reference data, procedural tools, or a hybrid workflow.
- Set rules for broad environmental layers. Use tools to distribute or generate suitable terrain textures, vegetation, rocks, and other approved assets.
- Refine important spaces by hand. Tune mission areas, settlements, roads, capture points, and other locations where layout and gameplay need precise control.
- Prepare the world for streaming and AI. Organize world data so the game can load relevant areas and provide traversable routes for active NPCs.
Are open-world games procedurally generated?
Sometimes, but “procedural” does not necessarily mean a complete world is randomly invented while the player watches. A procedural system can be a set of rules and controls that artists or designers use during authoring; some systems can also generate content at runtime. Unreal Engine’s PCG framework supports editor and runtime generation. Its tools can sample spatial data, generate and transform points, and spawn assets. Epic’s documentation describes biome generation as a common use for procedural tools in open worlds.
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For example, a forest-generation rule might sample a landscape, avoid unsuitable slopes or biome regions, vary the density and transforms of points, and choose trees or other assets from an approved set. The result still needs design judgment and validation: the rule does not automatically ensure a forest has useful sightlines, supports a mission, permits navigation, or meets performance needs. Unreal’s documentation includes tools to inspect and debug PCG point data.
What gets generated—and what stays authored?
Procedural generation is especially useful for extending broad environmental layers and iterating on coverage. Designers can still hand-author roads, combat spaces, settlements, landmarks, and other places where a specific layout matters. Ubisoft’s 2018 GDC session on Far Cry 5 described procedural tools for filling broad wilderness while retaining fine control over smaller locations. Expression Games described dense procedural jungle between more art-directed capture points and points of interest in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam.
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These examples also show why “procedural is faster” is too simple. Playle-Howard said PCG had “fundamentally changed how we approach world building at scale,” but also described the effort involved in maturing the tools and building an asset library while preserving level-design control. The practical trade-offs include authorial control, coverage and iteration, repetition risk, tooling and asset costs, performance, and how much cleanup generated results require.
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How do large maps load without loading all at once?
Large-world streaming divides world data into regions and loads or unloads them according to what is relevant to the player. In Unreal Engine 5.8, World Partition divides a persistent level into grid cells and loads them based on distance from streaming sources such as the player. Unreal’s Open World template includes World Partition, Data Layers, One File Per Actor, and Hierarchical Level of Detail (HLOD) support. HLODs can show proxy versions of distant static environment objects while their world cells are unloaded.
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This is an Unreal Engine implementation, not a universal description of every game engine. The general purpose is to manage what world content is resident, rather than requiring every detailed region to be loaded at once.
Do developers place every tree and character by hand?
No single approach applies to every game. Teams may place objects and characters manually, use rule-based tools, or combine both. Broad foliage coverage is a natural candidate for procedural placement, while a mission-critical landmark may need deliberate placement and tuning. The tools still depend on suitable assets, defined rules, and review of the generated result.
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NPC placement is particularly game-specific. A game’s rules determine where characters can appear, how many are active, and what triggers them. Public descriptions of the examples here do not establish the exact spawning rules, schedules, or population counts for Far Cry 5 or Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, so those details should not be inferred from their map-making tools.
How do NPCs know where to walk?
Placement is separate from navigation. In Unreal Engine, a navigation mesh represents traversable space derived from collision geometry. Pathfinding uses that data to find routes; area costs can influence which route an agent chooses, while systems such as RVO or Detour Crowd Manager can help agents avoid dynamic obstacles and one another.
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A navigation mesh is not an NPC population system or an AI brain. It helps an active agent move through available space, but does not by itself decide when that character appears, what it wants, or how it responds to the player. In streamed worlds, navigation data must also correspond to world regions as they become available. Unreal’s World Partitioned Navigation Mesh feature is marked Experimental in the cited documentation, which recommends caution when considering it for a shipping game; that status can change between engine releases.
What do published map-size figures tell us?
Published examples give a sense of scale, but they describe different games and production contexts—not directly comparable measures of playable area or generation efficiency.
| Example | Reported figure | What the source describes |
|---|---|---|
| Far Cry 5 (GDC Vault session listing, 2018) | 100 square kilometres of wilderness | The session listing frames the challenge as filling this wilderness and describes Ubisoft tools for biome generation, terrain texturing, freshwater networks, and cliff rocks. It does not mean every square metre was generated automatically. |
| Hell Let Loose: Vietnam (Creative Bloq interview, 2026) | Around 24 square kilometres across six launch maps | Playle-Howard described extensive jungle biomes between more art-directed capture points and points of interest. The figure is approximate and belongs to this interview’s account. |
Neither figure establishes a typical open-world size. Each reflects a particular project and how its source describes the landscape.
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