Playing Subnautica 2, early access version.

There's red fences around the world that clearly delineate the section of the world you're supposed to stay within. I recently got a 450m depth module for my Tadpole which has allowed me to easily follow the fences all the way around the map. Now they just feel like part of the game.

Presumably they'll go away as the game is finished, either by expanding the world or by just having them be invisible. But in the meantime, having them show exactly where the border are sort of...detracts from the experience a bit.

So I was trying to think of something that would be better. What I've decided is that, ideally, the borders should be (a) somewhat fuzzy, and (b) non-obvious.

By 'fuzzy' I mean that there should not be a hard line at which you get eaten by a giant squid. Maybe you do 50% of the time, but sometimes you can get a bit further. And by 'non-obvious', I mean that the player should never be 100% certain if there is even supposed to be a fence. Maybe there is some super secret stuff a bit further out that they just haven't figured out how to reach yet.

Procedurally generated infinite worlds like Minecraft and Factorio don't achieve this. You know where the borders are. They're effectively infinitely far away. And you know it's just going to be procedurally generated terrain from here to the edge. So there's no mystery there.

And I'm remembering that in Epic Island Exploration Dream, not only was there that infinite procedurally-generated forest at the end, but that a feature of the first part that gave it the feeling it had was that the borders of the island seemed a bit flexible. Could I just get on a boat and go around it? Well it seemed like I had tried that, but I wasn't entirely certain it wouldn't work (and in the end, doing something funny with the boat did get me past an impasse).

Related thoughts and other entries on the subject:

• "the scope of the search is unknown" -- Epic Island Exploration Dream

• "If you try to go out there [beyond where you're 'supposed to' be] it usually just stops you with an invisible force field, which is super lame." -- Boy and His Blob dream
• Magic is only magic if it's not completely understood. If it can be mastered, it's not magic anymore. The best wizards should still be subject to some unexplainable variations in how well their spells work.
• Is that subtly non-euclidean shortcut through the neighborhood going to work today? To evoke the 'fuzzy boundaries' feeling, it might need to be that your memory of how you even get to it is unreliable, so that some days you think it was all a dream.

One way to create a game world that gives the 'flexible boundaries' feeling might be to have a hand-crafted core that blends seamlessly with a procedurally-generated outer world. And maybe it should becomes more and more difficult, but never impossible (hence the procedural generation being necessary), to push further into, the farther out you go. Which sounds like a challenge to implement.

And procedural generation for outer reaches could, of course, actually be implemented by me building the world in front of people before they can get to it. Some online worlds work like this; the trick would be that players don't know what's newly added and what's been there the whole time, waiting for someone to find it.

I want there to be whole secret worlds in Mario and Doom and secret raytracers inside Bionic Commando.