Summary
Maps for navigation have become an integral part ofopen-world games. Many incorporate quest markers and a map shown on a HUD (head-up display) to help players locate their next objective. Without them, the casual gamer may get lost in the hyper-detailed worlds. However, some games have the option to remove the HUD altogether, encouraging players to recall locations from memory.
Some of these games use NPC dialogue to direct you to the desired locations. Others will provide you with a low-resolution map that excludes the character’s location, forcing you to figure it out based on visual cues only. These strategies increase difficulty, but make the game world more immersive compared to following predetermined paths that lead straight to a mission.
Minecraft revolves around ideas of self-sufficiency and survival, which means you can expect very little help in terms of gameplay. It also means no map when the world loads up for the first time. Instead, the game forces you to craft maps that only show the surface and cover an area of 128x128 blocks—a tiny portion of the expansive world of Minecraft with caves and underground structures.
On their own, maps can be pretty unreliable. Thankfully, the game has a coordinate system that logs the XYZ coordinate of the block you’re standing on. You can use this to record the positions of your home base, cave, or any other landmark you wish to return to. It’s easy to forget where you are without this system, especially inside caves ordeadly biomeswhere every direction looks the same.
Outward welcomes you with open arms and simultaneously pushes you to be an explorer. You play as a commoner forced out of their home to earn money and pay off a debt. Learning efficient resource management and crafting is essential to survival. You will also encounter many enemies, including wildlife and elementals, and memorizing their attack patterns is the key to defeating them. It’s a challenging game, but that’s what makes it beautiful.
What makes Outward even more difficult is that the map doesn’t tell you where you are. This choice makes the gameplay more immersive, as it expects you to know the world like the back of your hand, forcing you to pay more attention to specific landmarks and value true exploration.
5Starsands
Contains Stunning Oases
Starsands is an open-world survival game with a unique premise. You play as a marathon runner hit by a sandstorm mid-race and find yourself in the middle of nowhere. With little to no resources at your disposal, you must learn to survive the harsh elements of the desert while maintaining thirst, hunger, and health.
In the beginning, you will have a blank map and must build it yourself while exploring the desert. You will come across many sites and points of interest for later return, including pyramids, oases, and ruins—all of which you can place on the map as markers.
Fextralife Wiki
Unlike many open-world RPGs, Kingdom Come delivers (pun-intended) fiction grounded in reality. It’s a close representation of life in the Medieval period and follows the story of Henry of Skalitz, a blacksmith’s son thrown into a life of violence and adventure. The game explores themes of moral complexities of revenge while challenging you to master its daunting combat.
Maps didn’t have quest markers in the 14th century, so the game allows you to turn them off for complete immersion. So, how do you figure out where you need to go? The answer is context clues and dialogue. You figure out where you are by looking at your surroundings and where you need to go by following the instructions of NPCs.
Outer Wilds is one of those games thatuses time loopsto tell a story. You’re on a distant solar system about to die due to a supernova at the end of the 22-minute loop, giving you barely enough time to land on other planets and look for clues that the ancient civilizations have left behind.
Outer Wilds is further enhanced by its exclusion of quest markers and maps that seem to squish vast spaces down to fit onto a screen. Sure, the game’s galaxy map allows you to see which planet you’re on, but except for that, you’re practically on your own in your journey to decipher ancient lore before the next cycle begins.
To say that Dark Souls is influential is an understatement. One unique feature of the game is the lack of navigation systems in a medieval landscape. You’re expected to memorize paths and landmarks without as much as a hint about the precise locations of your next objective.
The maze-like interconnected quality of the world allows you to look for shortcuts and alternate paths, giving a sense of exploration and discovery. This strategy introduces cohesion to the world, making it feel less like a series of disconnected levels the character needs to move through.
Fewopen-world games focus on underwater exploration, except for Subnautica. The game throws you onto an oceanic planet, the sheer scale of which is both overwhelming and beautiful. As a challenge, you must explore the world, but not without encountering dangerous underwater lifeforms.
Keeping with the spirit of exploration, the game doesn’t give you a map or explicit directions. It also doesn’t have a quest system that lists what you need to do. Instead, you listen to a radio or read a PDA, which points you towards a few bases, and except for these, you’re on your own.
