10 Video Game Design Rules You Can Never Unsee

9. Invisible Walls

One of the most pervasive design tropes across video game genres is the invisible wall, a boundary placed in the video game world to stop players venturing outside of it.

Because a literal brick wall would be too immersion-breaking, developers tend to throw up an invisible wall in the hope that players will only occasionally stumble across it and remember they're actually playing a game.

Though more creative dev teams have come up with novel ways to mask their map's limitations - Grand Theft Auto closes parts of the map off with traffic barriers, for instance - it's still relatively common in modern AAA games to find invisible walls if you venture far enough off the prescribed path.

Even a game as brilliant as Horizon Zero Dawn uses the trick, which runs counter to its emphasis on freedom and exploration, though avoiding the invisible wall is an undeniably tough nut to crack from a developmental standpoint.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind did find a clever way to avoid it, however, by having the main bulk of the game take place on the island of Vvardenfell, where if players attempt to swim away from the island, the ocean simply expands out infinitely. Genius.