Eidos Montreal

Eidos Montreal built Prague small so every block holds something to find. Prague in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has four train stations, a few hundred buildings and a couple of districts, with many enterable interiors packed side by side. Designer Hubert Corriveau said the team did not want players walking eight blocks of vanilla buildings to reach a mission.

Prague is a hub, not a true open world: you can run across it in a few minutes, and it splinters off into other areas for certain missions. Corriveau: "We just wanted people to walk into the city and always have something to find." Warren Spector, director of the original Deus Ex, put the idea as "an inch wide and a mile deep" rather than "a mile wide and an inch deep."

Small spaces crossed repeatedly let environmental details tell stories. Because players cross the same streets dozens of times on foot, graffiti, posters and signs get noticed. Hidden stories are pieced together from clues like a corpse with a casing linked to a Prague police handgun, a telescope aimed at Jensen's door, and a bigoted politician's campaign office with a seedy secret in the basement.

One trashed, blood-stained painter's apartment holds clues on a computer and a pocket secretary hidden in a vent. These small stories and side quests, such as hunting a serial killer who targets only the augmented or shutting down a fake police stop, treat prejudice more subtly than the heavy-handed main plot.

A small set forces side quests to rely on character, not filler. With no room for fetch quests, street races or enemy-clearing filler, side missions work like a TV bottle episode, leaning on character and dialogue instead of combat.

They also fill in Jensen's past, covering events between Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.

Clues in the world can replace the waypoint as navigation. Characters give real street addresses, so players can find an unrented top-floor apartment at 33 Hlavni or a name on a buzzer with waypoint helpers turned off. Emails and pocket secretaries point to Apartment 202 or a drug lab under the Zelen apartments, and one clue is a map scribbled on a receipt.

It is not perfect, and players sometimes still open the in-game map. Reading the world to navigate is gameplay with a win and a fail state, which most developers throw away.

Density did not make Prague a living simulation. Time freezes between missions and characters stand around forever, ignoring threats; they do not react if you put a bucket on their head.

No Man's Sky shows how a huge procedural world runs thin. No Man's Sky, launched the same month as Mankind Divided, has 18 quintillion algorithm-made planets, but the same structures repeat on every planet, content sits miles apart, and caves have nothing inside.

Players also find their "unique" planet has already been discovered elsewhere. Yakuza 2, Majora's Mask and Bully are cited as other games that use small spaces for vivid detail or visible character routines.