10 Things Video Games Do Secretly

STREAMING IN OPEN WORLD GAMES

Open world games are a tricky business, and get trickier and trickier as they get bigger, denser, and more complicated. Obviously though, given the limitations of most hardware and just how massive and detailed open worlds tend to be nowadays, you won’t really come across games that have their entire world loaded down to the minutes of details at all times. As players move through the world, the game pulls data and assets from the system’s memory to stream in more of that world around the player. This can also play into how the player moves at times in some interesting ways. In Marvel’s Spider-Man, for instance, the speed at which Spidey could zip through the city had to be slowed down to ensure that the PS4 could keep up with streaming in the world as players moved through it.