Infinity Moif

Where Wishfield, Elderwood Forest, and Spira feel like they were designed to feel like "sandboxes" that facilitate letting the played interact with or navigate the world and its inhabitants in a variety of ways. You're meant to feel like you're kind of dropping into the middle of a slice of life in this world. Yes, there's a linear story that gates you from parts of these maps and do change parts of them, but the maps do not feel like they are designed completely around the story and more like they could be real places even being a fantasy world.

The Boneyard does retain a lot of elements of prior map design, but it's a lot more "theme park" in that it largely exists to facilitate the main story. You move through it in a much more linear fashion. Just like a theme park where you go from attraction to attraction, the story moves you from set piece to set piece. The fact it feels like there are a lot less ambient, random npcs with dialogue also contributs to feeling like this. It's much more about telling the main story than about fully immersing in the world–that's not necessarily a bad thing. Neither approach is fully better than the other, and I think the Boneyard works well for its story. I just hope they can balance both feelings well!