Why Every Open World Puts a Tower on the Map

“Ubisoft tower” is an insult now. It has been for about a decade — shorthand for open-world design by checklist, for sixty square kilometres of countryside processed like a spreadsheet, for the specific tiredness of climbing your eleventh radio mast in a game you were enjoying six hours ago. Ubisoft themselves took the hint and pulled the towers out of Far Cry 5 in 2018, which is roughly the point at which a design idea has been declared dead by its own parents.

The consensus is wrong, or at least it is aimed at the wrong component. The tower is a genuinely elegant solution to a genuinely hard problem, and it spread across the industry because it works. What broke is a separate thing, bolted on top, and untangling the two is worth doing — because the good version of the tower is sitting in one of the most admired games of the last decade and almost nobody calls it a tower.

The problem the tower solves

An open world has a legibility crisis, and it is structural.

A linear game shapes your understanding with level design. A corridor points; a skybox promises; a locked door defers. The designer controls what you know because they control where you can stand. Take that away — hand the player a landmass and a horse — and the designer loses their entire vocabulary for telling you what is out there. You are standing in a field. There are hills. Somewhere beyond the hills there is presumably a game.

So the world needs a way to hand you a mental model of itself, and the crude solution is a menu: open the map, here is everything, off you go. That works and it is inert. It costs nothing, means nothing, and teaches you that the map is the real game and the terrain is the loading screen between its entries.

The tower is the fix. It takes that menu action — reveal the map — and converts it into a spatial one. You have to see the tower from the ground, cross the distance, solve the climb, and stand at the top. The information is now something you earned with traversal, and the act of earning it is a small physical drama with a view at the end. Assassin’s Creed’s viewpoints in 2007 even had the decency to justify it in fiction: you were synchronising a memory, and the leap of faith at the end was the reward for the effort.

That is good design. It is diegetic, it is legible, it teaches the world’s shape by making you move through the world, and it is why every studio in the business copied it inside five years. The tower is fine.

The payload is the problem

Here is where it goes wrong. Ask what arrives when you reach the top.

In the Far Cry 3 model — the one that calcified into the insult — reaching the top of the radio tower unfogs the region and populates it with icons. Every collectible, every outpost, every hunting ground, every side activity, marked, sorted, and listed. You have climbed a tower to receive a to-do list.

Watch what that does to the player’s attention. Before the climb, you looked at the world, because the world was the only source of information you had. After the climb, you look at the minimap, because the minimap is strictly better: it knows everything the world knows, it is legible at a glance, and it never has a tree in the way. The tower does not fail because it is repetitive. It fails because its output makes the world redundant. A studio spends two years and a hundred artists building a forest and then hands the player a device that means they will spend the next forty hours looking at a small translucent circle in the corner.

And the repetitiveness everyone actually complains about is downstream of that. The eleventh tower is tedious because the first ten taught you that towers produce lists and lists produce chores. If the reward at the top were interesting, the climb would be interesting. Nobody complains about doing something eleven times if the eleventh time tells them something new.

This is the same disease I have written about in the quest marker and the death of navigation and in the map screen as an admission of failure: a UI element that answers the question the world was supposed to ask. And it pairs with fast travel into a closed loop that deletes the middle of the game — the icon tells you where, the fast travel takes you there, and the sixty square kilometres you paid for become a menu with weather.

The good version has been sitting in front of us

Breath of the Wild has fifteen Sheikah Towers. You see them from the ground, you cross the distance, you solve the climb, you stand at the top. Structurally it is the Ubisoft tower exactly, and Nintendo made no secret of it.

Then look at the payload. Activating a Sheikah Tower reveals topography — the shape of the land, the rivers, the ridgelines, the coast — and nothing else. No collectibles. No shrine markers. No outposts. You get a contour map of a region you have never visited and precisely zero instructions about what is in it.

What you do at the top is the actual invention. You raise the Sheikah Slate’s scope and you look, and when you see something that interests you — a spire on a distant plateau, an odd rock formation, smoke — you drop your own pin on it. The tower’s output is a question. The player supplies the answers by using their eyes, and every marker on that map exists because a human being looked at a horizon and decided something over there was worth the walk.

Identical tower. Opposite game. The variable is only ever the payload.

Everyone good has since converged on the same insight from different angles. Ghost of Tsushima replaced the marker with a wind you swipe into existence, so the navigational information arrives in the world as moving grass rather than on a HUD. Elden Ring gives you no map at all until you find a stone stele with a fragment on it, and even then the map marks terrain and grace sites while leaving the interesting things entirely undocumented — the open world FromSoftware earned is earned largely by that restraint. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey shipped an exploration mode that strips its own quest markers and gives you regional descriptions instead, which is Ubisoft admitting the problem in the form of an options toggle.

The real ancestor

The lineage everyone assumes is Assassin’s Creed to Far Cry to everything. The mechanism is older, and it comes from two places.

The icon lineage descends from real-time strategy. Fog of war in Dune II and everything after it means the map is black until a unit stands there, and revealing terrain is a resource you spend scouts to acquire. The Ubisoft tower is a fog-of-war reveal with a climbing animation attached and a player character cast as the scout. That heritage explains the icons perfectly — an RTS reveal should produce a list of objects, because an RTS commander is managing objects and has no eyes to look with.

The good lineage is British, and it is older still. In 1984 Mike Singleton built Lords of Midnight around a technique he called Landscaping: from any location you could look in eight directions and see the actual horizon — mountains, keeps, forests, drawn as a panorama. The entire interface was standing somewhere and looking at what was there. I played it on a C64 as a child and it never occurred to me that it was a map system, because it was just a view, which is exactly the point.

Singleton then made Midwinter in 1989 — an open island you crossed on skis, where high ground plus a pair of binoculars was how you found anything at all. Climb, look, identify, mark, plan the route. That is the Sheikah Slate, twenty-eight years early, on an Atari ST. And Hunter in 1991 went further and simply declined to help you, which is a position I respect more than I enjoy.

So the tower has two grandparents, and the industry picked the wrong one. It inherited the RTS’s answer — reveal the objects — when it had a home-computer tradition sitting right there that had already worked out the better one: reveal the terrain and make the player look.

What it means

The tower will not go away, and it should not. Converting a menu action into a physical act is one of the few reliable tricks we have for making information feel earned, and an open world without some legibility mechanism is a field.

The design question is only ever this: at the top of the climb, does the game tell the player what is out there, or does it show them what it looks like? One produces a queue. The other produces an intention. Far Cry 5 removed its towers and kept its icons, which fixed nothing and cost it the one moment where you got a view. Breath of the Wild kept its towers, gave you a horizon and a pin, and got a decade of people talking about the time they saw something odd in the distance and went to find out what it was.

Climb the tower. Just make sure there is something up there worth looking at.