musing : game worlds need equators

[anindigomind]

I got thinkin' about that 'everything in hawaii at noon is a bad video game render' tumblr post, and you know? i wish move video games actually looked like that, in the sense of... hmm, geo position diversity? Having places where there AREN'T shadows at noon, or locations where the sun doesn't completely set at night, where that was a deliberate part of the setting. What a sense of distance it would have created, for Hyrule's Akkala to never experience true darkness or linger in darkness for 90% of the day? If noon in the Gerudo desert had meant a near complete lack of shadows? Or Thedas! Somewhere north of Seheron and the Anderfels is a land without shadows, and south of the Kocari Wilds is a dark of ceaseless darkness and endless light. (midnight sun with two moons would be a pretty badass setting; what would the elves there be like? does the border of the veil shimmer in the air like the northern lights?)

My head hurts just thinking about the coding an open world game would need to pull that off. But honestly there's no reason why something along the lines of a Final Fantasy or a Dark Souls couldn't do that, they already have in limited ways. Heck, the load times in Dragon Age are long enough.