Take a look at Battlefield 4’s multiplayer maps completely untouched, without any strategic or tactical indicators or any other information.
As you can see, DICE has taken the trouble to fill out the areas surrounding these multiplayer maps, to help explain where these land masses lead to. While you will never be able to access these areas that go beyond the map, they add another layer of verisimilitude to the game overall.
It’s actually astounding how much knowledge of geology, particularly terrain formation, was necessary to visualize these locations. While first-person shooters have not been necessarily evolved to recreate absolute realism, this is one aspect where realism clearly benefits the game, and so DICE, as well as Infinity Ward and many others, have been moving towards improving realism in this direction.
It’s also testament to DICE’s creativity that they made sure to go for different kinds of land masses and terrain for these maps. It results in dramatically different experiences in each map available, and is certainly a boon to the players. You may want to take some time to study them from this point of view, since it helps paint a clearer picture on what is and is not possible in each scenario.
In case you had not yet figured it out, these were basically the overview minimap images blown up and cleaned up to show the pure terrain. Check out how each multiplayer map appears for US, China, and Russia here, and compare and contrast with the full maps as we have them below.
Source: Reddit
