Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s Map is One of the Game’s Best Assets

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home December 15, 2024 2 Views 6 Min Read
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's Map is One of the Game's Best Assets

Just like RPG mechanics like skill trees and dialogue choices, the open-world structure has started to evolve and seep into other video game genres. Now, action-adventure games will often drop players into an open area that isn’t quite a fully-fledged open-world, but does still offer a large map to explore, side quests to complete, and collectibles to find. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is one such game.




Indiana Jones and the Great Circle spreads its respectable runtime over a handful of open areas, each one being packed with optional content that ranges from Fieldwork side quests, to Mysteries, to environmental puzzles, and a few in between. There’s a lot to see and do in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and thankfully, its in-game map is there to make the whole journey feel a lot more intuitive.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Great Circle Reference

Related
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s Last Crusade Easter Egg Explained

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is filled with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter eggs, and there’s one that ties directly to The Last Crusade.

How Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s Map Enhances its Open Level Design

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s Map Keeps Everything Clear

A somewhat common issue in non-open-world games that still have open areas is an unintuitive map. 2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a good example of this. Though its environments look great and capture the trademark Star Wars atmosphere well, Jedi: Fallen Order suffered from very poor map design, with BD-1’s Holograph not showing locked doors or open pathways clearly enough, and its vertical layers being plastered over one another, thus obscuring everything.


Thankfully, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle‘s in-game map avoids this criticism entirely. In fact, the map is one of The Great Circle‘s best assets. Available at any time by pressing the “View” button on the Xbox controller, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle‘s map will clearly display a bright orange marker on the location related to the player’s current objective.

As well as appearing on the map itself, this objective marker also appears in the game world when players look up from the map. If players are near the objective, the marker will hover directly over it. But if players need to pass through several areas to reach their objective, the in-world marker will instead hover above doorways that will take them to the objective area, guiding them step-by-step as they pass through each one.


Along with an exceptionally clear objective marker system, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle‘s map also features a player-character icon that moves in real-time, showing the direction the player is moving in. It’s far from the first game to use this icon system, but it’s another way in which Indy‘s map keeps the adventure feeling intuitive, which in turn helps to keep the game’s pacing feeling natural.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s Map Reinforces its Immersion

A major strength of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – and something that sets it apart from its adventure game contemporaries – is its immersive sim qualities. Much of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle‘s gameplay systems work in tandem to create an experience that deeply immerses the player into its world, and its map is one such system.

Rather than pause the game and have players sift through several menus, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle‘s map functions in real-time, and appears in-universe, with Indy holding his notebook in front of him. It’s a rather subtle feature, but it’s another element that keeps players immersed in The Great Circle‘s world.

Source link