Another aspect of video games that most video games can’t do without is something called a skybox. A skybox is a texture that wraps around the playable area, giving the illusion that there is a sky (or clouds, a faraway cave ceiling, etc.). Essentially, it helps make the game feel like it isn’t floating in a void, but is a part of a greater world the player can’t see.
Skyboxes can take several different shapes. Two of the most common are cuboidal and spherical, with the game map being placed in the center. When done right, the player would have no idea that the “sky” in the game world has a shape, or that it encompasses the entire map, not just the sky itself.
However, a lot of modern games use layered skyboxes — two or more layers of textures of varying opacities that give a more realistic sky effect. Those skyboxes are also usually tied to the camera, instead of the map itself.
What that means is that, no matter how close the player will get to the skybox, they will never reach it. With the old method, the player would eventually reach and cross the skybox, being able to see the other side of it. (All of this is assuming the player has the cheats/debug mode enabled that allows them to fly/walk to the skybox to begin with. If not, it is usually impossible to reach the skybox.)
One of the most important aspects of a skybox is the ability to hide it from the player. If the player can tell they are looking at a defined texture map, then it ruins the effect, and makes the game feel almost like a cage instead of an open world.
However, sometimes, there are ways for the player to see the skybox in a way that wasn’t intended. Most of the time this involves clipping out of bounds and exploring areas that were never meant to be explored. But sometimes, the player can come across areas within the defined playable space and see the skybox in ways not intended.
In the image above, the player can climb on top of some pillars and look over the edge. If they move the camera to look down, they can see where the skybox texture was stitched together. The player can also see that the skybox is spherical, at least for this specific map.
This one is an odd example because, as described above, it is visible within the playable area without having to access any inaccessible areas. So the developers would have had to know that the skybox was visible. Either they didn’t care enough to try and fix the stitching or they (or the game’s play testers) never saw it to begin with.
In this next image, the same issue can be seen. Where the skybox was stitched together can be seen well within the playable area.
Also, an enemy managed to fall off the edge, past the death barrier. The death barrier is an invisible layer that kills whatever crosses it. Developers add it in to prevent players from going below the map (or any other areas they don’t want the player having access to), and to despawn enemies that happen to cross it. However, a bug occurred and this enemy was unaffected by the death barrier, and continued to move around at the bottom of the map.
This last image is interesting because the skybox texture itself is stitched together above the map, or in other words, in the sky. Absolutely nothing special needs to be done to see this; just walk to this area in-game and look slightly up.
I have no idea whatsoever why this is like this. I have a hard time seeing how no developer or play tester managed to miss this broken texture. Or how, if they did notice it, how no one thought to take the time to try and fix it.
The only explanation I can think of is that, since this is one of the last playable areas in the game, this might have been overlooked simply because it would have taken too much time to fix before needing to finish the game, and since it is at the end of the game, not too many people would notice or care at that point.
Still a fairly lazy answer, but outside of that, I don’t have any clue how that managed to slip by.
