Introduction

The ingame locations in games can have a distinct feeling of physical presence. The opposite of this is when a game feels like it only has one area that shifts in background and tile composition. The feeling of physical presence can greatly help player immersion.

Ways to heighten this effect

Nonlinear Gameplay

One of the most fundamental parts of producing physical presence feeling is to make the game world feel persistent and omnipresent. It's not merely a theater scene to present a scenario for you, to be discarded after you have used it, but a real physical place surrounding you whether you need it or not.

Games like Megaman and Mario have a hard time creating any physical presence feel because their worlds are fundamentally just obstacle courses. Games like Zelda and Dark Souls often has you revisit old areas, both for quest and travel purposes.

Themed Locations

By giving various world locations their own graphics, color scheme, enemy fauna, and music, the feeling of distinctiveness can be increased. This greatly helps separate the world into many different areas, rather than one big physical distance that the player must conquer.

Interesting Content

Part of the problem that makes ingame locations bland is that they get "exhausted" by the player. After every secret has been collected, every area has been explored, a ingame forest will seem empty and pointless, just a place to travel quickly though to get to other places.

By ensuring that ingame locations are not exhausted, they feel much more relevant to the player for a longer time, and thus has a much stronger feeling of physical presence for them. One can use things like procedural content to help keep the area filled with content.

One can also simply make an area contain lots of things that the player is yet unable to unlock, but letting them be within view. This keeps the idea that the forest contains undiscovered secrets in the player's mind.

Pitfalls

Fast Travel

Fast travel can easily lead to loss of the physical presence feeling in the player. When you can instantly warp across the game world, it diminishes the feeling that the world is a huge vast expanse that you can travel. Players will naturally attempt to save as much time as possible by fast traveling everywhere they can, resulting in regular travel only being used when exploring a new area. The end result can turn out so that the player only uses regular travel to "tag" new places, so that fast travel can be used.