I’m building ALIS, an early single-player UE5 survival prototype around a reconstructed real-world city location.
The question I want to test is whether familiarity with the place changes a player’s decisions and sense of risk, instead of being only scenery. The current public release is an early Windows prototype, not a finished game.
Project context and ways to follow or take part: https://fall.is/community/
Would you prefer survival in a recognizable real place or in a completely fictional map—and what would the setting need to affect before it mattered to you?
Pretty soon after you start playing you learn the map just like when you move to a new place irl. I don’t see a real difference especially since even if you choose a popular city, only a small percentage of people know it. I mean take LA how many people know 3 highways there? If you lived there sure, but if you’re from Kansas?
That’s fair — most players won’t recognize the place at first. But recognition isn’t the main goal of ALIS: we’re reconstructing real places so the geography, infrastructure, distances, and practical knowledge you learn in the game correspond to something that actually exists.
Infection free zone does this well with open street maps to rebuild society, I don’t know how it would change as a first person survival. I might get annoyed that macro differences in what I know is there compared to what is there in game.
Infection Free Zone is a good example of using real map data. For ALIS, though, reconstructing the real world is one of the goals itself — so you’re right that differences in a place you know can become annoying, and reducing those differences is part of the challenge we’re taking on. The reason is that we want the geography, infrastructure and knowledge you encounter in the game to correspond to something real, not just provide a familiar backdrop.
For me, I think recognising the street would only effect things for me in a horror game
Fair point. For ALIS, though, recognition itself isn’t the goal — reconstructing the real world is one of the foundations of the project, with its places, systems, and practical knowledge becoming part of the game.
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