You are Krutor, a wild barbarian from the land of Morkroch. You have travelled a very long journey, across high mountains to the famous imperial city of Lhota, the capitol of the world and largest agglomeration in the known universe, whose fame touches the stars.
The city consists of precisely fifteen buildings (one of which is the imperial palace); the town is inhabited by 30 NPCs, including Emperor Lojza, Archmage Lotrando and all of the members of the guilds of thieves, mages and warriors.
You visit the emperor, who sits alone in the throne hall, and he assigns you with an quest. The land is terrorised by an evil dragon from hell and Lojza is powerless. He has sent an entire imperial army against it, but the monster has killed all five soldiers. Now, he needs a hero like you! You have to find and climb the mystical mountain, Lohen, on which no human has ever set foot, and behead the dragon.
You accept the quest and set out from the town gate. The mystic mountain Lohen is precisely 150 metres from the gate and is about 50 metres high. All of the inhabitants of the city are either [censored], blind or crippled and they have not managed to notice it for centuries.
After an approximately 30-metre walk to the mountain, you come to ‘no man’s land’ and are attacked by bandits. During another 120m walk to the peak, you also notice an ancient fortress Rumloch, a secret dungeon of doom and a bandit hideout. At the peak of the mountain, you kill a one-hundred-metre dragon by beating its foot with a rusty sword and drinking potions. Then, you rob the corpses of the imperial army (all five) and on the way back to the castle are killed by a wild boar.
Welcome to an average RPG.

Potato-Landscape Compression

You might have already figured out where I am headed with this. The design map of today’s RPGs is useless, because everything is compressed so that every ten metres you could find something fantastic or at least could be attacked by a monster every ten seconds, because otherwise it would just be ‘boring’...
This environment compression however negatively affects the graphics. In order to place a castle, cave or bandit camp every ten metres, you have to create a lunar landscape and hide the locations in nonsensical craters or beyond a hills that you must make as high as possible so that it would not be possible to see very far behind them. The result is an environment which is miles away from a real landscape, it is absolutely impossible to orientate within it without a map and in most cases looks bad. I call it a potato landscape, because the terrain surface is reminiscent of a potato’s surface.
It is probably obvious to you that what I have just described is a path that we definitely do not want to set out on. We try to make a realistic game and we want to have a beautiful realistic landscape. If you however find it suspicious that all developers would be so ‘stupid’ and do it badly the whole time instead of simply taking a real map and copying it into the game, you are right – they are not, because that is not at all so simple, and using the example of landscape for our game I will try to explain to you why.
Our game is historical and takes place in entirely specific real places. While nobody can say how exactly these places looked a few hundred years ago, rivers still flow in the same streambeds, the paths still run more or less the same ways and the towns and villages are still in the same places. And because I am a bit of a perverse pedant, I want to have it right in our game. I would not be able to claim that our game takes place in Prague and then create some nonsensical village in a potato landscape.