[2021] BW3 playable area. Big focus on perf and stability, and of course the Arctic biome. Your mission will be “Icebreaker”

Removing the map, for now at least, is deliberate for two reasons. It reduced the problems we faced when making a lot of map changes and fixes in a small time, as we had to bake out the map and that is a non-trivial task. Second, it gives us metrics on how players move around terrain when they can’t know what’s there. That’s very useful information for some of our potential plans later on. I do appreciate it’s annoying for now though. But the beta is about learning what we can to make the game best it can be at launch and beyond

For me a key to a good survival game is agency. But it’s not just about agency. It’s about having agency of decisions that matter. So being able to go “everywhere” doesn’t matter as much if that doesn’t have meaning and impact. The approach we took to map design, I developed after talking a lot with Chet Faliszek formerly from Valve who took me through the processes they used in L4D maps. It’s about giving agency with decisions of consequence. So the idea is to use impassible terrain to provide decisions and journerys… reducing the agency of moving everywhere in favor of giving much more consequence to the decision of travelling in general. I think that’s a huge win. I think too many survival games suffer for an obsession of “go literally everywhere” when that can have tremendous impact on game balance, pacing, and decision consequence.

Not to mention, it’s very inauthentic to “go anywhere”. I consider myself an accomplished mountaineer. Any mountain that isn’t part of your climb, you generally consider as impassible. Climbing many serious mountains is a major commitment far outside the capability of a team that is not prepared and focused on it.

Also worth noting you can go a long way up the mountains, so the playable area we show is actually much wider than what is shown. The area shows the flat area I would consider generally of practical use.