“The player can look and be anywhere in the world at any time, and the traditional ways of doing optimizations on a game is knowing that the player is only in this space, and that means the rest of the world can just be forgotten.”

You can tell it’s been a while since he’s been in the trenches, because over the last decade or two game technology has moved away from this paradigm and into heavy use of level-of-detail and asset streaming. Vision-based culling still happens, but it’s done at the engine/shader level and not something level designers are forced to laboriously set up triggers for anymore.

Not that it matters anyway. I can’t imagine an amount of improvements and visual upgrades that would prevent even the largest Black & White world from fitting entirely into memory at all times.