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Development
7 min read
Why Pale Orison has no map
We built a map, tested it for four months and cut it. Here is what players did without one, and why we think it made the cathedral better.
Ines Harrow, game director
From the game
Pale Orison
In development · spring 2027
For the first year of development Pale Orison had a map. It was a good map. It showed every room you had seen and marked the ones that had changed.
What the map did to players
In playtests, players with the map spent 38% of their time looking at it. They stopped looking at the cathedral. When the rooms shifted, they checked the map instead of noticing.
We cut it in March. Players got lost more, died more, and in the exit survey rated the world as more memorable by a wide margin.
What replaced it
Landmarks. Every wing now has one thing you can see from anywhere in it: a broken bell, a burning window, a stair that goes nowhere.
