10 Video Games That Blew Your Mind (Without You Realising)

Getting an open world to run on hardware without making the console explode from the heat is a tricky thing. We're starting to get it down better now, but occasionally, certain tricks are still called for to make it run smoothly without actually murdering your dev team.

Horizon Zero Dawn found a genuinely clever trick to get around having to render the entire game world all at once, and all without the player ever noticing. Horizon ZD only renders what the player immediately sees, in a single straight line. if it is obscured from the player's view, the game just doesn't render it.

This not only takes the processing load off of the game, helping it run like butter on any hardware you play it on, but also does it without the player ever once noticing. This is contrast to other games like the original Jak and Daxter, which had to come up with more noticeable tells like Jak tripping and falling over to ensure the player doesn't run into a part of the game that hadn't loaded in yet.