We Haven’t Properly Mourned the Death of RPG Overworlds

By Elijah Gonzalez | September 26, 2025 | 3:45pm

Video Games Features RPGs

We Haven’t Properly Mourned the Death of RPG Overworlds

Editor’s Note: This week at Endless Mode, we’re exploring maps and how they help us navigate virtual spaces, both literally and not-so-literally. Whether it’s RPG overworlds that work as abstractions for a larger backdrop or scribbles that offer more insight into the person who sketched them than actual directions, we’ll be offering our thoughts on the near constant presence of in-game maps.

This probably goes without saying, but over the last few decades, the shape and form of big-budget RPGs have transformed dramatically. Whether it’s the adoption (and then general abandonment) of a particular brand of turn-based combat, the evolution of random encounters, or the replacement of D&D-style stat sheets with more streamlined progression systems, the RPGs of today often look quite different from games like Ultima 1 and its direct descendants. And while many of these changes have been celebrated, there’s one loss that stings in particular: the death of overworld maps.

Okay, maybe using the word “death” is a bit dramatic; after all, one of the best games of this year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, shows that the perfect way to iterate on this largely abandoned presentation is to introduce a whimsical French marshmallow man to act as your airship equivalent. And that’s not to mention the approximately eight billion RPG Maker games and beyond, which often draw on an era when this presentation was the norm. Still, when it comes to most modern big-budget titles, overworlds have been left in the lurch, as these games have opted for much shinier, market-tested open worlds that seek to drown the player in a vast ocean of Stuff that will (allegedly) keep engagement high.

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In some ways, it is unsurprising that overworlds were largely abandoned by modern “cutting-edge” RPGs. This high-level, abstracted presentation was a way to get around technical limitations of the time, and I’m sure if you asked developers behind many classics from the ‘80s and ‘90s, they’d say they would have preferred to create the type of large-scale, seamlessly interconnected spaces utilized in many contemporary games. But, as it goes with many design innovations that arose out of necessity, this old-school style of presentation still comes with many boons.

For starters, overworlds can help with pacing. When handled well, they act like a good editor, encouraging designers to cut away the tedious interstitial bits between points of interest. Instead of cataloging every moment of a lengthy trek from a castle to a faraway dungeon, with each stray monster and blade of grass rendered in 1:1 exactitude, you’re instead placed on a map that acts as a sort of summary, reducing the downtime between important events (assuming you don’t run into too many randomized encounters, of course).

It can be tempting for designers and storytellers to fill in every little detail of their settings (ask any first-time Dungeon Master), but the reality is that constraint can be a virtue: “brevity is the soul of wit,” and all that. With a zoomed-out, top-down perspective of the world, designers are given more control over the narrative’s pacing, as they don’t have to worry that the player will become obsessed with tracking down every tower, collectible, or whatever other brain-numbing task distracts them from the next seemingly-pressing-but-not-actually story beat. At the same time, they also offer room for some amount of exploration, with the particularly good ones finding a balance by leaving plenty to do without drowning the player in “content.”

A weird irony when it comes to this shift in games is that movies sort of developed in the opposite direction. Most films used to utilize something called continuity editing, where storytellers would detail exactly how characters got from one place to another with shots that depicted transit and so on—in the context of old school Hollywood films, this is called classical continuity. However, after a wonderful band of French freaks kicked off the French New Wave (bear with me as I very reductively summarize the intricacies of film history), these existing conventions were challenged, resulting in an uptick of techniques like jump cuts, which jolt the audience from one scene to the next with little warning. Basically, you went from films generally being slower paced, with many extraneous details, to movies that were often more to the point.

I bring this up because I think the shift in how games are presented is less an artistic choice, like this transformation that happened with film, and more a natural byproduct of an industry obsessed with overcoming the next technical challenge: sometimes, the question asked by publishers is whether something can be done, rather than if it should. More powerful computer chips mean that games can now render massive environments full of foliage, wildlife, NPCs, and other extraneous details, allegedly wowing “potential consumers” with this impressive degree of fidelity.

This increasing scope is particularly common when it comes to big-budget sequels, as developers try to one-up themselves in pursuit of a bullet point on the back of the box that explains just how much “more game” there is this time around. Instead of a little chibi sprite wandering through a topographical representation of a continent while riding a giant yellow bird, what if you could seamlessly explore said continent and its every nook as an uncannily realistic anime boy who rides an even larger yellow bird?

This brings us to one of the most night-and-day examples of designing a game around an overworld versus an open world: the contrast between the original Final Fantasy VII and last year’s bloated Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. While there are some charms that come from how Rebirth fills Gaia to the brim, like how we get to spend more time with its deeply lovable cast of characters, the end result is a game that feels like it goes on forever.

Cloud and his buddies’ mission to save the world loses any semblance of momentum as Chadley repeatedly rears his ugly head, pushing you back towards the largely forgettable wilds that connect each area. Not only is there a lack of satisfying traversal options to make the act of getting around inherently fun, like those found in games modeled after Breath of the Wild, but Rebirth’s open world design sort of makes its sights all bleed together, with nightmarish minigames (the Tifa fitness challenge still haunts me) leaving more of an impact than any natural or manmade landmarks. There’s certainly a time and place for exploration, and many of these older RPGs had overworlds that offered plenty of room to go off the beaten path, but the vastness of this rendition of Gaia flattens everything in its wake.

By contrast, the original Final Fantasy VII’s various locales are burned into my brain forever: Midgar’s Sector 7 undercity and its misshapen shanty towns watched over by the community watering hole Seventh Heaven, Mythril Mines’ glowing Mako caverns that paint everything in a radiant green, or the City of the Ancients and its deep-sea architecture that exists in deep harmony with its surroundings. While the latest remake also includes many of these specific areas, they aren’t emphasized in the same way because they’re more or less given equal footing as another round of Queen’s Blood.

Weirdly enough, even though much more of Rebirth is spent navigating large-scale areas, the 1997 game’s version of this planet ends up feeling much bigger. Since an open world title has to allow players to seamlessly go from place to place, they inevitably have to shrink the distances between destinations compared to what they would look like in the real world; it can’t take literal days to get somewhere on Chocobo-back. However, when that same journey happens on an overworld map, it becomes much easier to imagine this space as unfathomably grandiose, one that’s essentially been edited down so we don’t have to see every moment of dry travel.

And perhaps most meaningfully for the original Final Fantasy VII, as we come back to this map again and again, our affinity for this setting grows. It’s like a mini-version of the Overview Effect, a phenomenon many astronauts experience when they see the Earth from space for the first time, as the view emphasizes both humanity’s fundamental togetherness and stokes a desire to protect this place. It’s pretty damn fitting that a game about saving the world from ecological disaster constantly reminds us of the place we’re fighting to protect.

Because while plenty of open world games make the most of their settings, like how the new Legend of Zelda games find moody ambiance in a desolate Hyrule, the wholesale shift towards massive spaces is misguided. Designers have lost a tool in their arsenal, all so that they can participate in a technical arms race or cash in on a trend pushed by publishers. It’s way more work for less reward.

The ridiculousness of the situation is maybe best described by everyone’s favorite Argentine magical realist short story author (or at least mine), Jorge Luis Borges, a man who loved poking at humanity’s long-abiding affinity for making things much more difficult than they need to be for no apparent reason. In his paragraph-long micro story, On Exactitude in Science, he describes a long-dead Empire that was so obsessed with “the Art of Cartography” that it created massive maps that were increasingly detailed. Eventually, the “Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,” a feat that future generations would describe as “Useless” and so baffling that they concluded it could have only been created by godly beings beyond mortal understanding and not by humans who couldn’t help themselves.

While Borges wasn’t specifically talking about the 2025 video game Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, mostly because both Final Fantasy and also video games weren’t invented yet, you’d be forgiven for making that mistake. If an overworld is an abstraction that lets the viewer focus on the details that matter, many modern open world games tend to do anything but.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.