Eh, except so many double-down (or triple) on the swamps and caves while omitting more interesting settings like glaciers, oases, rainforests, and river deltas.
If a game is supposed to take after earth then ofc its gonna look like earth. I don't really see the point here. The last couple open world game I have played are cyberpunk and satisfactory so I definitely don't see the point here.
I think it is funny because, in reality, these different features would not appear in the world right next to one another. This map is a dramatization of geological features with no variation or nuance that naturally occurs. But for video games, it is easier to differentiate areas with these clear geological differences so the player can be like, "Oh yes, the island town." Or "it's close to the mountain" It's just an acknowlegdment if how so many video games have done the same strange thing in order to streamline gameplay.
Satisfactory does it really well. You've got all those biomes (except ice?) but some areas are really three dimension or twisted up. Exploring in Satisfactory 1.0 is a real highlight in what is otherwise a very chill sanbox building game.
As an American, now living in Canada for the past 20 years, I am really not into the winter area in games I'm currently playing PoE Deadfire Breath of Winter and I want to go back to the beaches and kill stuff :D
I remember when Skyrim came out I was living in a drafty house with no heat in a snowy winter. I was wrapped in like 5 layers sitting at my PC going "Why couldn't this have been in a desert" lol
I never completed that one but had explored most of the mainland. I really need to go back and go through it all again. I loved the small details throughout the world. The wilderness and countryside was so well done, with little shrines along the roads here and there and so many lived-in places throughout. I spent 75% of my playtime with Roach set to a slow trot just so I could really absorb the world and feel like I was making a journey on those old roads. There's something so profoundly Witcher about quietly riding dark paths at night and stopping to hear a monster in the woods. You climb off Roach and draw your silver sword, then make your way into that decrepit forest to deal with whatever is going on out there.
You're lucky if the game has reasonable climate progression like this. Most games the frozen zone is right next to forest zone which is right next to the volcano zone.
Size and/or shape. A gulf is bigger than a bay (e.g. compare the Gulf of Mexico to Tampa Bay), and a sound is more about the opening to the larger body of water than it is about the partially-enclosed body of water itself.
In regards to the pictures a gulf seems to be a coastline fed by a river. A bay being a mostly round coastline and a wound being a small coastline that gets bigger.