You're dealing with two major considerations right now: you're trying to build a reveal for the player, but you also have to have performance considerations — when is this stuff going to stream in, when is this stuff all going to move into memory — and you don't want to have to load the entire cave when they're still so far away?
TL;DRMost content is already loaded so it's mainly a culling concern, and locations use bends and doglegs both to protect performance and because straight corridors are boring.
Yeah, most of the stuff is already loaded, so it's more about the culling, I would say. But yeah, absolutely. A lot of locations that we have in the game, you will notice that when you move into them, there's a dogleg or something that just brings you around the corner. Because let's say that you have a long chain of rooms, all the doors are lining up, and 20 players each stand in one doorway and create this two-kilometer tunnel where you can see down. It's going to bring everyone's performance down to even lower levels. So that would be an unfortunate thing.
That would also be boring. So you can also create more interesting ideas.
Exactly. If you look at a combat space, for example, a straight corridor that just goes on forever, that's not really interesting. You want to have some bends. You want to have some nooks and crannies to take cover behind and create this interesting... You line up there, you peek around the corner, and then you move forward. It's not just straight. No one likes to explore just a straight tunnel route.