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-The world is a wide open span, not individual levels. The terrain is based in a post-apocalyptic America. This does not mean that it is going to be all desert and barren wastelands. Instead it will be a world where the natural will be competing with the man made. There will be deserted areas with destroyed remnants of cities with forests and other natural environments spilling in and intermixing with these ruins. In other areas however cities and civilizations will be either still thriving or repopulating and re colonizing. And there will be many variations of these extremes.

Interaction with Environment
-Not all of the game is combat oriented. As such, there will be times when the menus and actions available will not be conducive to what you are trying to achieve. To help with this, at different times you will be able to change options/hotkeys/ settings/ menus to best fit your interactions with the world around you. For example, if you are foraging for weapons or ammo then you might set up your control scheme to focus on using buttons to run, look closely, use/interact with objects, shine light, etc, while if you are about to enter combat you might want to have more aim down sights, sprint, lock to cover, melee, etc.
These options will be available to set at any time in order to maximize interactions with your surroundings. However not all options will be available at the offset of the game. Certain traits will have to be upgraded and new skills learned in order to unlock all options.

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Destructability

We are aiming to make this game to be as destructable as you can imagine. If you shoot a tree with a pistol, not much is going to happen, however if you come back with a chain gun youll be able to mow through the tree which will cause it to fall making it great for cover or for killing a giant group of enemies at once or blocking a path. Similarly if a door is heavily guarded, depending on the buildings materials you will be able to use explosives or a rocket launcher to blow a hole in the side of the building to create a new entranceway. Also if you wanted you could set charges or use a rocket launcher to weaken a building structurally, thus bringing the whole building down. Similar concepts with cutting through chain link fences or blowing wood doors open with a shotgun, basically if you think you can destroy it, you probably can.  

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Interaction cont.

Objects in the game will have realistic properties as if you would come up to them in real life. Say you are in a firefight and come across a park bench or a table you want to use as cover. You will be able to interact with that object and it would flip over on its side much like a normal table would if you pushed it over. similar would be if you picked up a steel pipe or an aluminum bat, you would swing that object much like you would normally swing it in real life. So in short, objects will act as they normally do whenever you interact with them.

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Without building an entire world that's totally intractable with (unless that is the idea) the player, how are we going to limit where they can and can't go? ...because, unless there are limits then the player can essentially go anywhere, anytime, any country, continent, without impedance; like hop on a plane from L.A. to D.C., maybe even blow the freaking plane up and parachute out over Nevada. I think that’s a helluva' lot of infrastructure to map out and design, but if that's what ya’ll are going for than that is freaking awesome!

But if that is the case, then we need to figure out time disparity between things, like, say, if you did get on a plane, then how much game time would that consume travelling?

Also need to consider scale of the map too, like how far would the distance be from L.A to D.C.be in the game, unless it's going to be 1:1 scale...?

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What you said about post apocalyptic, with natural competing with man made, here are some pics from Chernobyl and Pripyat today, this would be about what a deserted city would look like after 2 and a half decades.

http://mirroreyes.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/chernobyl-and-pripyat/

http://forum.santabanta.com/showthread.htm?t=216603

This won't be what the whole place looks like but could be an idea for the concept artists

And to add to this, maybe there could be just a few totally **** areas of the map. I'm not talkin about a total supernatural horror fest, but say, you walk into a city, and its totally deserted, no one around, with random graffiti like on Dead Space, maybe where some bands of savages once roamed but are no longer around, the sound track could totally fade away, leaving only environmental sounds... the creakin door or wooden floor, the collapsing rotten wooden house, an overhead highway road sign creeking in the wind, the "imaginary" echo of children laughing, debris shuffling along the ground in the wind... that type of stuff

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Yeah, the ideas of these decimated areas is for some reason one of the things I see most attractive about the post-apocalyptic motif. I have a big assortment of post apo pics that I'll share here. All photos come from their perspective artists on Deviantart.com

http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/085/c/7/post_apo_02_by_nivelis-d3chksa.jpg

http://earthtojeremy.deviantart.com/     (Check out this guys gallery, tons of good stuff)

http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs38/f/2008/319/8/f/War_by_alexiuss.jpg

http://th04.deviantart.net/fs38/PRE/f/2008/320/7/d/Tetris_by_alexiuss.jpg

Just a couple, though I'll have to really search to find some really good stuff I dug up not too long ago.

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Im not sure if you were already thinking of this, but the destructibility of ground, depending on what material (cement, grass, sand) an explosive hits it leaves a small crater and explosion mark, Ex. A Mercenary throws a grenade in sand and it blows up leaving a crater but the sand falls in, or if a grenade hits grass a tiny crater would form. With this concept comes maybe tools like shovels to be able to make environmental cover, like a foxhole or a entire trench system.