Open-world maps are usually built with a mix of deliberate design and procedural tools. Developers shape major terrain, routes, settlements, missions, and landmarks; rules-based systems can help create or fill broad areas with vegetation, terrain detail, and other environmental features. Streaming systems load nearby parts of a large world as needed. NPC placement is a separate, game-specific problem from NPC navigation: developers decide where and when characters appear, while navigation data and AI systems help active characters move through the world.
How are open-world maps made?
A map begins with decisions about the experience it needs to support: where players can travel, what routes connect regions, which views frame the journey, and where important gameplay spaces and landmarks belong. Real-world terrain and reference can inform a map, but a game map may need significant changes to support combat, traversal, or mission design.
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From there, teams establish the large-scale landforms and environment. Terrain may be sculpted by artists, derived from elevation data, generated procedurally, or built with a hybrid workflow. SideFX describes using Houdini heightfields to layer terrain shapes, add noise, and simulate erosion. These tools help produce terrain, but a generated landform still needs to fit the intended play space.
Procedural tools fill broad environmental layers
Procedural generation means using defined inputs and rules to create or place content. It does not necessarily mean that a game invents its whole world randomly while the player is playing. A studio can generate content during development, at runtime, or with a combination of the two.
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For example, a forest-placement graph might sample the landscape, exclude slopes or biome types that do not suit the foliage, vary the density and orientation of points, and choose from an approved set of plants. Epic’s Unreal Engine PCG documentation describes graphs that sample spatial data, generate and transform points, and spawn assets; its forest example uses a landscape to place a biome. The output depends on the rules, input data, and asset library the team has made. It also needs inspection and debugging: a forest that looks plausible may still block a route, obscure a useful sightline, or perform poorly.
Procedural tools can help cover large areas and make iteration easier, but they do not decide whether a generated area works for navigation, mission pacing, storytelling, or performance. Designers and artists set those goals and validate the results.
Landmarks and gameplay spaces need deliberate control
Teams commonly keep close control over the locations where a player must understand the world or complete a specific task. Roads, settlements, combat areas, capture points, and distinctive landmarks can be art-directed or hand-tuned even when surrounding terrain and foliage are generated with rules.
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Ubisoft’s 2018 GDC session on Far Cry 5 described procedural tools for filling broad wilderness, including biome generation, terrain texturing, freshwater networks, and cliff rocks, while retaining fine control over smaller locations. Expression Games described a similar balance for Hell Let Loose: Vietnam: dense procedural jungle between more art-directed capture points and points of interest. In both cases, procedural coverage and authored design serve different needs rather than acting as mutually exclusive methods.
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What is the difference between hand-authored and procedural maps?
Hand-authored work gives designers direct control over specific spaces. Procedural tools apply rules across larger areas or help teams produce and revise environmental content. Many open worlds combine them; the balance depends on the game, the studio’s tools, and the content being made.
| Approach | Where it helps | What still needs attention |
|---|---|---|
| Hand-authored or art-directed | Mission spaces, story locations, routes, settlements, and landmarks that need precise composition or gameplay control. | Building and refining large areas can require substantial manual work. |
| Procedural generation | Applying environmental rules across broad regions, producing variation, and iterating on terrain or asset placement. | Teams must build the rules and asset library, tune outputs, and check for repetition, navigation problems, visual issues, and performance costs. |
| Hybrid production | Using procedural content for broad coverage while keeping important playable spaces under direct design control. | The handoff between generated areas and authored locations must feel coherent and support the game’s requirements. |
These are not guarantees of speed or quality. Expression Games’ account of Hell Let Loose: Vietnam noted significant effort in maturing its procedural content generation tools and building an asset library while preserving level-design control.
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How do games handle maps that are too large to load all at once?
Large worlds can be divided into regions that load and unload as the player or other streaming sources move. In Unreal Engine 5.8, World Partition divides a persistent level into grid cells and streams cells based on distance from streaming sources such as the player. Epic’s Unreal Open World template includes World Partition, Data Layers, One File Per Actor, and HLODs.
Hierarchical Level of Detail (HLOD) systems can represent distant static environment objects with proxy content while the original cells are unloaded. That lets a world retain a distant view without keeping every detailed object loaded. The exact setup is engine- and project-specific; World Partition is an Unreal Engine workflow, not a description of how every studio streams its world.
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How do NPCs know where to walk?
Navigation is not the same thing as deciding which characters exist in the world. A navigation mesh represents areas an AI agent can traverse. Pathfinding uses that representation to find a route; area costs can make some routes more or less attractive, and avoidance systems can help moving agents steer around obstacles or one another.
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In Unreal Engine, AI pathfinding can use a navigation mesh derived from collision geometry. Epic documents RVO and Detour Crowd Manager as options for avoiding dynamic obstacles and other agents. Those systems help active NPCs move through available space; they do not determine an NPC’s identity, schedule, or reason for appearing.
For large streamed worlds, navigation data also has to correspond to the cells that are available. Epic’s World Partitioned Navigation Mesh documentation describes chunking and streaming navigation data, but marks the feature Experimental and advises caution before shipping. That status is specific to the documented engine version and should be checked against the release a project uses.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How are NPCs placed and populated in an open world?
NPC population rules decide where characters appear, how many are active, and what triggers them. A game may use hand placement, rule-based spawning, or both. The exact logic varies by title, and public sources do not establish the spawn rules for Far Cry 5 or Hell Let Loose: Vietnam. It would therefore be misleading to assign those games specific spawn radii, schedules, population totals, or links between NPC spawning and world streaming.
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Keeping placement separate from navigation explains why a character can be correctly spawned but still fail to move as intended: the spawn conditions and the route through the active world are different systems that must work together. The sources available here describe navigation technology at a general level, not one universal population recipe or a typical NPC count.
What do published map-size examples tell us?
Two public examples show the scale of the work, but they describe different games and production contexts, not a like-for-like measure of playable area or procedural efficiency.
Quick Recap
| Example | Reported scale and context |
|---|---|
| Far Cry 5 — Ubisoft, GDC session listing, 2018 | The session framed the challenge as filling “100 square km of wilderness” and described tools for biomes, terrain textures, freshwater networks, and cliff rocks. This is the scale stated in the session listing, not a claim that every part of that area was generated automatically. |
| Hell Let Loose: Vietnam — Creative Bloq interview, 2026 | Expression Games senior art director Ryan Playle-Howard said the six launch maps covered around 24 square kilometres of landscape, with extensive jungle between more art-directed capture points and points of interest. The figure is approximate and attributed to that interview. |
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