There's so many things in games that are taken for granted at play time but which actually take a lot of thinking and work to get right. Roads for instance aren't something which your typical player will look too closely at... but they will notice if they look or behave in a way that seems wrong.

I've been playing Kingdom Come 2 of late, and I find it's natural to just kind of take the world they've created for granted - just like we do the real world. But when you actually stop and look you have to consider that every one of the finely crafted details was built by someone's sweat and tears, be it artists, programmers, or designers at edit time.

No wonder it's an industry of crunch, the work involved can be uniquely daunting.

Another area of hidden complexity is doors in video games. Almost no game has life sized doors because they introduce gameplay issues, almost all doors in video games are at least 30% bigger than in real life and you see an overabundance of sliding doors vs swinging doors because of the complexity swinging doors bring to video game physics.

https://lizengland.com/blog/the-door-problem/

https://www.ign.com/articles/putting-doors-in-video-games-is...

Ah yeah, this is actually part of why I never complete games.. I spend so much time messing around looking at all the cool little details, exploring the environment and generally "experiencing the place" moreso that pursuing game mechanics or completing levels/quests/etc. ... some of my favorite games, I've played probably like 1/4 of lol

> There's so many things in games that are taken for granted at play time but which actually take a lot of thinking and work to get right.

I have a small list of these things in game dev. Over the years, I found some games that were more playable (in my opinion) than I thought they deserved to be. Kind of like a well written book with a bad story.

For me at least, the number one most important thing is how well the character -- person, car, spaceship, whatever -- moves. Does it handle well, as expected. I'm at the point where I think this may be the single most important aspect of a game that finds itself in a competitive space.

I think blizzard stands out for this with Overwatch and World of Warcraft. They avoid the jerky start and stops with their characters. Their characters feel both performant and natural at the same time, adhering to reality but breaking physics as necessary (air strafing for example).

Building out roads correctly feels like an offshoot of this for games which include cars. A car should be able to navigate a turn without going through weird contortions as it hits pinch points, or unnatural wiggles when roads join.

I absolutely love how Skyrim's world is built. A lot of details that would fly past most players' attention are quite thought through. How roads connect, where do rivers intersect, where do lakes get their water from, in which direction do they flow etc.

Yep, the most impressive work in games is the stuff players never consciously think about