10 Video Games That Put Insane Work Into Tiny Details
Yup, there's a whole natural ecosystem in Horizon.
As a gamer, it's incredibly easy to take things for granted - AAA games generally have a baseline level of polish that allows us to forget the thousands of man-hours that goes into crafting even the most rudimentary elements of a video game.
And while it of course makes sense to commit major resources to the building blocks of any game, sometimes developers end up investing frankly absurd amounts of time, energy, and effort into details which might go totally unseen by the vast majority of players.
These 10 games undeniably spent an over-the-odds amount of time developing complex systems which were ultimately appreciated by precious few players.
For the most part, these attention-to-detail elements wouldn't be sorely missed by most, and yet, the fact that they made it into these games regardless is a testament to the obsessive perfectionism of the artists at the forefront.
At least in the case of these 10 games, all of them hugely acclaimed releases, you can't really argue that these details were obsessed over at the expense of another gameplay element which desperately needed fixing...
10. Sinks Have Full Plumbing Modelled Underneath (In Case You Shoot Them) - The Division 2
Destructible environments have been a major technical gaming breakthrough over the last 20 years, with games like Red Faction ushering in the ability for players to wreck a large portion of the surrounding scenery with their arsenal of weaponry.
But generally speaking the destruction is usually fairly superficial, because just how much attention are most players going to really pay to the wreckage left behind?
Well, Ubisoft took things to the next level with The Division 2, whereby players could shoot ceramic sinks and peer into the photoreal plumbing that had been lovingly modelled underneath.
This bafflingly meticulous detail was discovered by Redditor tony-alexander, confirming just how much effort the developers put into making the destructible elements as tactile and authentic as possible.
Considering 99.8% of players have never even noticed this, it's both impressive and maddening that an artist clearly spent a lot of time creating these absurdly realistic plumbing models.