| Let's pretend for a moment that you're reading previews on two massively multiplayer, post-apocalyptic car combat games. You've been keeping tabs on both and are trying to determine which to buy. The hands-on description of one game reads as follows: "You're driving across a vast, empty wasteland. The ground is brown and there are sparse clumps of trees around you. As you drive on, you see some rocks up ahead. Miles onward, the ground is less brown and more yellow."
 
The other article goes like this: "The heavy rain pelts your car and drenches the ruins all around you. Tendrils of gray fog snake into the air, and the menacingly dark sky seems to hang too close, roiling and churning. The Pike assault vehicle that you're pouring lead into is fast; the driver darts between two crumbling structures and is already vanishing into the wet, swirling mists ahead. As you accelerate to pursue him, a brilliant bolt of lightning crashes down on a ruined street lamp not twenty feet ahead of you, splitting your eardrums and shattering the entire lamppost into pieces. The wreckage falls to the pavement directly ahead of you, and you swerve to avoid colliding with it. You're going to need every bit of speed you can muster to catch the bandit. Up ahead, you can faintly make out two red lights shining out of the fog, and even as thunder again peals overhead, you see your opportunity to head him off before he ever sees you coming. You've got him."
 
Which one sounds like more fun?
Early in our public beta testing process, NetDevil heard the same concern several times from the testing community – players were concerned that while the game had massive areas of land and lots of places to go, there wasn't a lot of variety or uniqueness within the maps. One end of a six-mile-long highway usually looked exactly like the other end. This started us thinking. Certainly our approach was realistic – not much changes in six miles in the real world – but it didn't feel right from a gameplay standpoint. We began to brainstorm, and decided that each map should be divided into zones, each with its own unique lighting colors, fog, and environmental effects – each area should be landmarked with a definite and distinct look and feel. There would have to be some new technology added to the game in order to make this happen, though, so we also came up with a list of items for the engineers to add to our toolset.
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