Making Navigation Work (2017)

As a level designer many years ago for a team FPS, I found it worth while to play and analyze lots of games from that level design perspective. There was one interesting navigational design pattern in World of Warcraft I saw, what I called the "20 second rule" at the time.

Essentially, any time you were on a path there would be something interesting or noteworthy about every 20 seconds of walking. It might be that the path had a bridge that crossed a stream, or it took a bend, or there was a large rock or a small house, or a fork in the path. This was really noteworthy in Teldrassil, the Night Elf starting area.

I think without these landmarks, you have this nagging feeling like, "Did I miss something and should I continue down this path? Or should I go back? Maybe I did miss something."

Overall it is astounding how easy it can be to get lost in a basic first person game environment - one that you would never get lost in if it was real. I found for my own work at the time, I'd do simple things in an essentially symmetrical map like "Team A side of town has all brick buildings, Team B side of town has timbered/wooden buildings". Or place a large distinctive building on each side. Or have some aspect of the skybox stand out, like "hilly Mountain to West, distant hills in East".