Soapbox: I Want Better Levels on PS5, Not Bigger Worlds

Size doesn’t matter.

I think it was GoldenEye 007 that made me fall in love with big, varied levels in games. For those of you who’ve played Rare’s legendary Nintendo 64 first-person shooter, you’ll remember that the title gave you the tools to approach stages in a variety of different ways. In the opening objective Dam, for example, you could choose to fight your way across the upper level of the facility before bungee-jumping down – or you could instead opt to fight your way through the bowels instead.

Practically all the game’s levels have this blackbox style of design, where there are multiple paths you can take and various solutions to the same problem. Crucially, though, none of these environments are open world – they’re simply intricately designed, single stages that are densely populated with things to interact with. As I’ve gotten older and my taste has refined, I’ve realised that I vastly prefer these smaller sandboxes to gigantic sprawling maps.

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