One of the biggest immersion killers for me in both FO3/FNV/Skyrim was/is buildings with no entrances and invisible walls. I am hoping that Bethesda has done their best to limit this (like to 1 maybe 2). I prefer making a mountain cliff/building ledge look like it can't be scaled rather than placing an invisible barrier on this.

I remember feeling a sense of let down every time I came upon a building I couldn't explore in FO3. In FNV/Skyrim I remember feeling frustrated not being able to get to a certain ledge or building corner because of the infamous "invisible barrier". To me there really isn't anything else that breaks my role-playing enjoyment than when I hit these two problems. Has any one heard if this is something that Bethesda has addressed?

I share your pain on this issue my friend, its something I experience with all open world games! It's a pet hate of mine not being able to get past certain objects, only to find I'm on the edge of the map (insert sad face). Until Bethesda come up with some kind of random world generator dynamic I can't see an end to the invisible walls problem. But I live in hope.

NV in particular was awful with this. So many tiny hills/cliff faces, that were scalable in places, over which were completely playable areas, but they would only let you take their chosen path so there were invisible walls blocking your way and you had to go alll the way around. Presumably to make you face those damn cazadores or deathclaws they wanted to put in your way.

F3 had a lot to explore. Some buildings are gonna be boarded up/caved in, etc.

Definitely feel you on invisible walls, though. At least make some geography or other type of physical barrier.

Personally, I didn't have any real issues with non-explorable buildings in FO3. They'd never have been able to finish/ship the game, if every single doorway & structure had been detailed inside. (Well, I suppose they could have thrown together a bunch of procedurally generated crap to fill up all the buildings without it requiring infinite work, but I prefer the more handmade buildings that they did have.)

...plus, all those doorways gave modders lots of places to stick their own new content. For example, the DC Interiors project - they went around and made mods that filled in a lot of those empty buildings. Which leads me to a thought..... on the one hand, having all those buildings to explore/etc is fun. On the other hand, it can become overwhelming to look at the local map for a neighborhood and see 20-30+ doorway symbols. If all the doors in the entire game had been usable? Honestly, it probably would have svcked. Especially if many of them were copy/paste.

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re: invisible walls. Don't recall many in FO3, besides the edges of the world map. And I think I'd find a conveniently-perfect physical obstruction that runs around the entire "world" to be much more fake than the "sorry, can't go this way" message. At least with the invis wall around the world, you can still have a view that stretches further.

It's a massive city scape.. There are going to be tons of buildings that won't have interior exploration. As long as they look like they are all boarded up and crumbly I don't usually have a problem with it. It's only when I come across a building that has a pristine window that I somehow can't smash that it feels wrong. New Vegas did have some pretty bad invisible walls but that wasn't Bethesda.. Usually Beth is pretty good about where they place the invisible barriers and you really have to go to the extreme areas of the map to even bump into them. Even then they are usually hidden behind something. However, It was weird in Skyrim that a few of those end roads had open gates that just lead to an invisible wall. I didn't mind at all if I came across a closed gate but an open one?.. c'mon.. how hard is it to put a gate there?

F3 was pretty good on not doing invisible walls for anything but borders. You could pretty much jump climb anything. That made them stand out much more in NV's interior.

Heck, yeah, New Vegas had invisible walls. Everywhere, it seemed like. Obsidian just screwed up the terrain creation, honestly. There were SO many spots you could climb up to the top of a mountain or hill and then discover there is an invisible wall preventing you from crossing the flat 3 feet in front of you to go down the otherside.

I feel like FO3 and Skyrim handled this pretty well. You usually didn't run into an invisible barrier, but instead an actual barrier, like a wall of rubble, or an unscaleable cliff. I hope Bethesda handled the sea edges of the map in Fallout 4 with something other than an invisible way. Maybe have a mutated shark or kraken eat you if you go too far out of bounds. (Ominous music starts getting louder and louder the farther you go out until ... sudden death!)

Non-explorable buildings don't bother me but invisible walls are the bane of my existence. If I crawled over that pile of rubble I want to go over it goddamit.

I definitely think you have a point here with the millions of buildings being explorable...still the greedy explorer in me makes me wanna say "Bethesda, don't copy paste anything nor abandon any opportunity. Be a craftsman to all explorable areas." Then again, it could make for extreme repetitive play so I get the balancing act here. Then there is the point of the mods filling these holes which DC Interiors did in fact do fantastically.

Thanks to all for all the feedback on this, nice to know I'm not alone in the invisible wall frustration. Here's to hoping we don't run into this in Boston! WOOHOO!!!

Invisible barriers - To my knowledge, and biased opinion , Witcher 3 handled this issue better than most open world games that I've played. The major downside it created was the fact you weren't always sure where the map ended precisely. You would find yourself viewing your map, seeing a patch of land ahead, the mouse cursor extending to these areas (its ideal to have a cursor limitation so the player does have an idea where the world ends) Geralt would cont. moving past "explorable terrain" until you finally reached the true end of the world space, then he would quip "I'm too old for this" , " I'm gonna need a boat for that" to paraphrase a few of the things that he would say aloud.Then the overworld map would pop up implying fast travel - "you've now really, really reached the end buddy".

This is my rough explanation though that is pretty much how it worked. CDPR surrounded the regions with a 2 kilometers wide 'ring' of visible, but not explorable terrain. This as you would imagine, gave the player something to look at off in the distance and gave the world a larger feeling without actually filling in the surrounding space. For those who have played Witcher 3, you already know what I'm talking about.

The Borderlands series also has a very clever border implementation with the turrets that will shoot you dead if you try to move past a certain threshold of the map (In locations where a natural world restriction wasn't present.)

The door problem can be a pain, especially when you see so many missed opportunities for adventure and exploration! (insatiable, we wants it, we needs it!) as others have said, I believe FO4 will offer many more interiors and/or at least, many more open interiors compared to previous BGS games. We already know that downtown Boston is for the most part open and that Howard and Co. said that this was one of the toughest parts to implement during development. Any non-enterable buildings are ripe for DLC, However, BGS are known for creating completely different locations outside and away from the main world map. Still, not a bad idea if you ask me.

We have D.C. Interior-esque mods and quest mods to come to our rescue if we desire more

I'm pretty sure you forgot that most rubble walls weren't giant, building-size piles, some of them were actually decent enough that someone would think they can go there, only to be disappointed at the invisible wall issue.

There it is. You said my trigger word. Now I have to kill a puppy somewhere.

(note:That was sarcasm in case you couldn't tell.)

The fact is, every game is going to have places you can see but cant go. They're not infinite. And buildings you cant enter is a memory problem. It will probably be a few years before you encounter games with massive cities with no entrances. But they've said this game is "dense" so i'm assuming there will be many more buildings and places to explore than ones you cant enter in FNV or F3 Have faith in Lord Gaben. lol

Put something behind every door and we'll get 100 *more* threads about "lazy" Bethesda making small, forgettable, nonlinear interior content.

The bigger the game worlds get, the more resources they'll have to spend cordoning off the the birders, making every inch satisfy a high aesthetic. For the amount of content that actually exists at the world'a edge, I'm quite satisfied with good enough.