POINTS OF INTEREST
Discrete discoverable locations scattered across a world — ruins, camps, shrines, vistas, question-marks on the map — each holding a morsel of content and together forming exploration's connective tissue.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN OPEN-WORLD · RPG · ACTION-ADVENTURE · SURVIVAL
Breath of the Wild's shrines and korok seeds are the modern reference (density tuned so something is always visible on the horizon), The Witcher 3's question marks became the term's shorthand (and its cautionary tale — Skellige's sea of identical smuggler caches), Elden Ring hides POIs behind other POIs as its core trick, and survival maps anchor player routes around known locations. Designers structure worlds as POI constellations because open space without destinations is dead air: each point is a promise that pulls movement, and the spacing between points is the actual designed experience — the journey's texture, the horizon-scanning habit, the 'just one more' chain as each discovery reveals two more silhouettes. POI density and disclosure are the twin dials that define an open world's personality: BOTW discloses almost nothing (discovery is the reward), Ubisoft-style maps disclose everything (completion is the reward), and the two philosophies produce opposite relationships with the map screen. Key decisions: hand-authored uniqueness versus template categories (camps, caches, shrines — templates scale but telegraph), disclosure method (map icons, rumors, line-of-sight, tower-unlocked regions), and content-per-point floors — every empty ruin spends trust. Pitfall: POI as checkbox filler — when points share three templates and the map shows two hundred of them upfront, exploration inverts into inventory clearance, and the player stops looking at the world to look at the list; the mechanic's soul is curiosity, which dies precisely when discovery becomes disclosure.