I don't mind visible barriers that give a boundary to a level as long as they make some kind of sense. It's the totally invisible walls, short walls or objects that you would be easily able to get over in real life and things like that which irritate me too. I also hate indestructible doors or walls in games in which you can destroy or open all the other doors and walls.

Tss, there's invisible walls in old games? You people must be young. It's the new games that have them, when I think of invisble walls it's immediatly a lot of new games that come to mind. Personally I hate really obvious barries almost even more, like in the Half-life series for example. There almost every road is blocked off by a car, a tree or whatever and almost every time it looks like I should be able to get past, if I was a real person. But Gordon Freeman can't. I'd just want to see one game where you could actually climb a piece of rubble, where you could break open doors with just a stupid little marker on them, where I can move a bloody bookcase out of the way or jump over a car, to see what's on the other side.

An invisible wall is at least a clear sign, while the others just remind you every time that you're not a real person, you can lift your legs a little higher, you can't climb, and you can't exert force, or bend or anything. Personally, I'd try to avoid both, just make sure that, for whatever reason, the player doesn't walk there.

Oblivion's invisible walls annoyed the hell out of me. Endless ocean? Fine. Cliff the size of the walls in the Grand Canyon, mountains the size of Denali, border guards refusing to let my ass through on pain of amazingly overpowered Level 255 death weapon/magic? I can live with that. But showing me a wide-open space in front of me and then saying "You cannot go that way. Turn back"? Lazy. Half-assed.

At least in Oblivion.ini you can turn those invisible walls off, but it does you little good to have an endless expanse of monster-free procedurally-generated countryside for miles and miles on end (except when using said lands as a shortcut from, say, Bravil to Anvil across "Valenwood").

I think that any game that simply gives a pop up saying turn back, should be taken back and finished. What does that say about the creaters...we don't care enough about the player to actually give you a wall to walk into, we just want to say Hey Turn Back There's Nothing Out Here deal with it or quit.
If I ever did anything even similar to that it would be a joke like: Ha Ha! There's a wall here, we put the ultimate tereasure out here so you can see it but can get to it Ha!

What needs to happen in future games is a sandbox-type world. Make a huge environment, and make it wrap around like a small planet. Use a thrilling storyline to keep the player on track.

Silvertounge:
There almost every road is blocked off by a car, a tree or whatever and almost every time it looks like I should be able to get past, if I was a real person. But Gordon Freeman can't.

Gordan Freeman is magical. Do not question what he will and will not do.
... Ok, that sounded stupid and fangirlish. Still.
I'm willing to make exceptions about that only because he's Gordan Freeman.

I like the idea used in games like GTA where the ocean is jut endless.

As for the whole "You cannot go past this point" thing in Fallout 3 being a post apocalyptic game could they not have just put concentrated deadly radiation and flat ground around the map?

Well, there are other games that have a tiny fence or bush that a tank/mech/army cannot cross which seems even worse than invisible boundries. Can't developers just make a mountain or something?

I can't remember the game but I once spent half an hour laughing my ass off as I pretended my character was a mime...k...

Anyways, in Fallout all they had to do was make the edges of the map have super radiation problems, then they wouldn't have had to use invisible walls.

The worst I've experienced was in Brothers in Arms (what a shit game, too!). I'd walk into this back alley trying to find a way around the Germans (which is what you do the whole damn game anyway).. "Ah! This leads somewhere!" .. and then.. bump. "What's this?! The Nazis have developed forcefield technology now?!?!?!"

Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault have the solution: Every (noncustom) map is an island. Therefore, it's surrounded by water. But the water loops infinitely, so basically you have an infinite battleground.. even though it's.. battlewater at that point..

Also Starsiege Tribes (the first one anyway) had an interesting maplayout. There's the map, which is basically a square, which is then multiplied in the 8 surrounding areas, creating a larger square.. It's basically a double map in all directions, though obviously the other part wouldn't have any objects.. and the places where structures were placed, were big gaping white holes of the abyss. In fact, the whole border was just that. The end of the map. Go beyond that point and you'd fall infinitely towards the.. well.. abyss, I guess. Not that you'd come across any ground on your way. Or the core of the world.. or whatever. Good thing CTRL + K = suicide.

I have to admit that I think an impassable block is more aggravating than a simple invisible wall, but again either one is, in my opinion, unnecessary in the fact that designers could simply use a natural or larger man made obstacle instead.

I really, really don't care as long as I have my friend noclip by my side.

Some games, like Half Life 2 (woah, big surprise) don't really need invisible walls; they use natural barriers like iminite death to prevent the player from wandering off the beaten path.
But, I guess some developers are just lazy, or forced by the bigger companies that own them to hurry up.

"*cracks whip* stay on the path." - Invisible Wall

toastybuds:
"*cracks whip* stay on the path." - Invisible Wall

Yeah that sums it up pretty well.

kanada514:
Not just the older ones. Check out Kingdom Under Fire Circle of Doom for the 360.
They invisible walls are ever present.

Oh do I know what you mean, those walls drove me crazy, and at sometimes I thought if they were even necesary in some parts.

And on topic, I really don't think they are necessary but sometimes it will help make it easier, and the ones in the middle of no where can get annoying as hell. God I hate them, but they are dieing down, or just being moved farther away. Which is a good thing,

I think it's better than having stuff that's pretty easy to climb or knock over(like chairs, tables, fences, etc.) to prevent you from going any further.

I know of a lot of games that have the annoying invisible walls but I want to know about Assassins Creed. They advertised it as anywhere you see you can go to. I haven't played the game but how did they limit you from going "out of bounds?"

chromewarriorXIII:
I know of a lot of games that have the annoying invisible walls but I want to know about Assassins Creed. They advertised it as anywhere you see you can go to. I haven't played the game but how did they limit you from going "out of bounds?"

There was a giant blue wall and the excuse they gave was that you could not syncronise with that memory. There are also alot of places water is used as a barrier.

im not that frustrated over invisible walls, except when i see an interesting place of some sorts just to find out that im not supposed to go there

thats why i hardly buy linear games nowadays.

Assassins creed was horrible for walls in the middle of the enironment. even though theyre not invisible they pop up so fast they might as well have been.best game ive played so for regarding the IW is shadow of the colossus. If there was an invisible wall I didnt notice it and the map is so big that i never felt the need to go to the border.

If you want to get rid of invisible walls, then you have to deal with the fact that you can't have free-roaming gameplay(i.e. you go back to the old-school days of game design). If you want free-roaming gameplay, then you have to deal with the fact there will be invisible walls. The reason is that no matter how powerful the machine or how capable the developer, the two are always still woefully, pitifully limited compared to reality. Boundaries have to be created to fit the game into the machine's memory and processing and the developer's lifetime(you could spend forever just trying to perfectly replicate a parking lot). While the developer can do his best to hide the walls, there will always be some evidence of the walls and, thus, those who will feel the immersion broken. The developer could put the game world on a sphere to not have walls, but then people would complain the sphere breaks immersion because it's too small compared to the real world. The upshot is that your demand is not realizable.

Well, think about a game like Oblivion. Yes, the area you can explore is massive, but it can't just randomly get bigger because you walked to the edge. And it wouldn't make any sense for Cyrodil to be surrounded by a huge towering brick wall. I will say that games that work the reason for the walls into the story, like SotC, really make me respect the game designers that made a concious decision to not say "Oh and you can't leave because we said so".

neoman10:
mountains! gods walls

bwahahahahahahahahaha!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFzrgsR_0vg

I've recently run into invisible boundaries in Fallout 3. You hit the edge of the map and run smack into an invisible wall, then it gives you a message "Please turn around."

There is no geographical reason to turn around. There is no visible boundary.

I'm reminded of Resident Evil 4. There's land there, but I can't go there.

i dont mean to sound like a fanboy, but if ff IV can manage a whole world (granted its in 2d, but this is still a snes game im talking about) and an underworld, why cant a ps3 handle something similar? Zelda games have always been good with the boundary thing... a massive wall of rock blocks your path, a huge gate gguarded by moblins etc...

rosac

SuperFriendBFG:
As long as it's not painfully done like we saw in Resistance 2 then it's all good in my book.

Which bits were "painfully done"? Having just played through Resistance 2 I can't say I noticed any obvious invisible walls. There are numerous cliffs and ledges which are waiting to kill you but invisible walls...? Perhaps I didn't explore enough.

With modern systems invisible walls are just developers being too lazy to come up with anything that would make sense to stop you from going somewhere you shouldn't. That or they designed themselves into a hole were their is no real logical reason you shouldn't be able to go somewhere, yet they don't want to draw attention to that. See Half-Life 2 for a game with enough competent level designers to work around invisible walls, for the most part.

My favourite invisible wall was ina motocross game; it was a massive rock wall surrounding the level but past it was an invisible wall that would shoot you like a cannonball back into the map. I once managed to scale the cliffs then get catapulted from one invisible wall to the wall on the other side of the map, this caused a game of pong until I broke out of the game world and was surrounded by oblivion.

Listen, as much as I'd like to go search yonder mountain city, or whatever you're looking at so far away, the point is that that's not part of the game. It sounds like your problem is that the maps aren't large enough, because the "Invisble Walls" are where the game ends and the devlopers put some nice scenery in there for you. If you want they can take it away and put some drab, grey-colored nothing in there. They aren't trying to kill your buzz, just being nice.

Invisible walls are a necessary evil, because there is an inverse relationship between game/graphics quality and playable area, in most cases. For instance, Morrowind is roughly 6 sq miles of play area, and the graphics were excellent for 2002, and Oblivion has about 16 sq miles, and the graphics are even better. But if you look at TES2:Daggerfall, you have a playable area the size of 62394 sq miles, but the graphics quality much poorer than other 1996 games, such as Descent II or Duke Nukem 3D. In fact, I think the graphics of Doom are of higher quality than Daggerfall (and Doom is 3 years older).

TL;DR: The bigger the gameplay area, the lower the quality. Walls, invisible or otherwise, are the hated, but necessary, artifacts of quality control.

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but one that really annoys me for its invisible walls, is Oblivion.
Especially since its laid out so that i cannot tell the difference from the normal game area and the 'out of bounds' area.
But all of a sudden, my character freezes mid-stride, and an irritating caption appears in the top-left corner.

Yeah it's been mentioned a few times, but it's alright becuase it proves that Oblivion sucks in that aspect.

i like how bad company didn't use walls just an airstrike that was basically guaranteed death. but the one that's come to my mind is fable 2 has invisible walls near cliffs and sides of bridges.

The biggest invisible wall issue isn't the level boundaries (HI TONY HAWK GAMES WASSUP), but rather the ones that apply to knee-high crates, cool backgrounds, and the ones that stick out like four feet from a mountain. THOSE annoy me. I don't mind random stacked rocks or actual walls or whatever, but when it's those, I just go ":|". Or when the edge of something that leads to another something isn't something you can jump over. Instead it's something the character awkwardly bumps into and slides on. Invisibly.

Left 4 Dead has a funny one, theres police do not cross tape in a few of the levels. They must really like obeying laws to follow them during a zombie apocalypse.