Seamless world

Video game concept

The game world is without level, zone, stage, etc. transitions that break immersion.

90
games
19
platforms

Alternate names: Transitionless, Background loading

Some games famous for this actually do break the seamless nature in various cases, such as the Elder Scrolls series, where entering buildings or dungeons does impose a transition.
Mostly this denotes that there's no loading screen when you go work on the next mission. You can freely move back and forth without ever seeing a loading screen or level transition that hides travel between regions or drastic changes in an area.

The appearance of loading screen in case of "fast travel" (such as teleportation) can be ignored, as long as this is only an alternative method of traveling that distance. The reason this is ignored is because the hardware simply can't cope with the sudden demand for the amount of new information required to accomplish smooth transitions in case of like teleportation, and skipping the traveling bit with "fast travel" is usually a convenience thing for players.

Space sims where travel between star systems is only possible through warp can be ignored (travel between star systems and even planets takes so long time that it's practically meaningless to use normal sub-light travel between them), as long as the warp appears to happen in-game.

Common spots to do loading without breaking immersion and keeping it in the background is airlocks, elevators and possibly even any windowless rooms with no visibility to certain areas. Others (usually top-down games) simply smartly keep nearby areas loaded regardless of visibility for fast access and load and unload them as player moves.

The first Seamless world video game was released on April 16, 1992.

Electronic Arts, EA Partners and Activision published most of these games.

Parent groups

Immersion, Loadless

Platforms

Windows 31
X360 8
PS3 8
Linux 7
Mac OS X 6
MS-DOS 5
Xbox 4
Mac OS Classic 3
GP2X 3
PS2 2
Amiga 2
BeOS 2
Pandora 2
Zaurus 2
Wii 1
SNES 1
PS4 1
PS 1
Dreamcast 1

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