What games do exploring right?

What games do exploring right?

unironically minecraft

It gets boring and repetitive after a couple of hours.

Hollow Knight does it almost right. It would be perfect if it didn't have the map.

Breath of the Wild

Darkest Dungeon, in its limited form.

The Dishonored games. Detail in every corner.

NaissanceE is a neat exploration walking sim

Dark souls

...

These, and also Terraria, STALKER and Horizon Zero Awards.

Uncharted

Classic shooters like Doom, Quake and Blood. You are encouraged to explore every single nook and cranny of even the smallest maps for secrets.

hollow knight

Thief, Gothic 2

I'm sorry but no. In fact, BOTW is a prime example of exploration done wrong. Because after two hours, there's nothing more to explore in 90% of the world, because you've seen everything already.
All exploration leads to the same things you've already known: shrines and koroks. And no, don't list the fucking horse god now. There's a reason I said 90% and not 100%.

Inherently the design for the exploration in BOTW is GOAT. Because the world is varied as fuck and the geographical design is top notch. But if you only have a limited amount of content, it simply falls flat.
It only took 1/3 of the game, until I had almost no interest in even going anywhere but the titans anymore, because I already knew whats on top of that mountain, or behind the next corner.

>sonybro

Mechanically speaking, the best exploration I've seen in a game was probably in a forgotten title called "Miasmata". The combination of it's momentum-driven movement system, where actually traversing wide landscapes could be dangerous and required thought of it own, with it's "cartography" mechanic, forcing the player to move around and explore as an actual person on an uncharted island would: It was fucking ingenious.
Shame the game bombed. It had a lot of flaws (but then again, it was a fucking two-man made indie game with no kickstarting or anything), but it introduced some of the most clever pieces of design and mechanics I've seen in an FP game in a while.

I also actually think Subnautica did a surprisingly good job with it's approach to exploration, free roaming and progression/gating mechanisms.

Finally, I really did enjoy exploring Morrowind and The Witcher, mostly due to simply good world-design, even if mechanically they were hardly stellar.

Also - how could I have forgotten: STALKER. Though mechanically, it could do with a LOT of work too.

Morrowind in terms of exploring a culture more than a landscape.

This thread is a proof that actual videogame discussion just does not work on this site anymore.

Don't see you discussing anything.

>posted 6:31 CST

I loved everything about Miasmata until I saw the thing that was stalking me and it got a lot worse when I saw it move. What a wasted potential.

Thank you for proving my point so aptly. The only post that got replies is the one that actually does not talk videogames.

See that's where the difference between what people consider exploration comes afloat.
To me, exploration is the sense of scale and wonder I get from the endless grasslands in BotW, it's not being able to see what be hiding behind a mountain, it's difference in terrain and towns which make me think about the surroundings, all wrapped up in a package of beauty where traveling actually takes time.
BotW was the game I bought an used wii u for, and to this day I don't regret it, despite only playing that game on it.

Actually, that thing was pretty damn interesting. It looked kinda funny (well, at day at least, running into the shit at night was a whole different story). The point was that it wasn't supposed to be a Monster, but rather an animal.
And when it comes to A.I., I've actually haven't seen as interesting behavior until Alien Isolation some years later.

>first game takes place on a single continent
>sequel expands to the whole world

This is the good shit

Dark Souls and Stalker come to mind
Bioshock as limited as it is still manages to capture the feeling amazingly

I thought it looked too weird with its long legs.
It's the animation that killed it for me, I remember it being really fucking bad. Haven't played the game in years though so nothing specific comes to mind.

I still enjoyed the game, the exploration and map uncovering the story and map were great. Nightime was fucking terrifying.

INFRA is pretty good

Bioshock was actually absolutely fucking ATROCIOUS in this regard. Awful, poorly designed, claustrophobic and largely linear levels with absolutely NO sense of proper scale, logical distribution or set-up, or anything. It was fucking, fucking, fucking awful.

If you want to see a well realized environments in similar scale to Bioshock but NOT ABSOLUTE GARBAGE, Alien Isolation and the recent Prey are much better example. Hell, even fucking Dead Space 1 was better than Bioshock at setting a sense of a place.

I don't remember the animation being that bad, it moved like a cat. Of course the whole game was technically a bit iffy, but not that terrible.

What I remember most vividly was how varied and fun and actually logical was the behavior of the thing - how it actually reacted to you the way an actual predator would. How you could fool it, scary it away, distract it, confuse the hell out of it.

so easy to trigger

First of all, what is exploration?

I'd say its the difficulty to the player to find parts of the map not critical to the main story.

It sounds like you interacted with the cat much more than I did. I think I actually saw it once or twice. I was impressed by the exploration and world. The forests in it felt like actual forests instead of a flat piece of land with trees.

Fuck now I have to play it again.

>even fucking Dead Space 1 was better than Bioshock at setting a sense of a place
nah

A game where wandering around and finding new places is satisfying?

Yeah, most people actually missed out on what was arguably the most impressive part of the game, the creature A.I., because they just did not even think of trying to interact with it too much.

The little bastard was actually really quite fun. For an example, he reacts differently to you turning your back or your face to it. The worst thing you can do: turn your back AND start to run. He just assumes that you are prey and will start to chase you.
BUT if you stop suddenly and face him, he'll get confused as fuck. You can't hurt him, but if you manage to get a lucky hit on him, especially if you generally act non-scared, you can actually convince him that you are not worth the trouble and make him leave you. Also, he is FASCINATED by fire, and you can actually lure him away or at least distract him by throwing lit branches away from yourself.

There are all these kinds of small alterations to his behavior (he acts differently if you stay perfectly motionless, differently if you move BUT show no fear/even display willingness to fight, and differently when you display clear fear) that made the animal actually THE most impressive part of the already really quite cleverly designed game.

Shame that it A) did not come together all that well, and B) REALLY failed to sell itself to the audience.
Like, most people did not actually even realize the motion system is intentional and not just "laggy controls". The game really had issue selling it's strong points to it's players.

Breath of the Wild and Dark Souls.

idk but I've really started to dislike minimaps or even maps in general, there's some special enjoyment I get out of fully understanding a place like the inside of my glove just from traversing it and checking out every nook and cranny of it. It just becomes far more immersive and atmospheric that way. Any game that has a minimap usually doesn't give me any reason to focus on that stuff and it's kind of like I'm just staring at the minimap more than I'm looking at anything else in the game. It also makes me appreciate "open" games that are not huge sandbox worlds but instead compact and loaded with details, for example bloodborne or deus ex mankind divided. Take something like TW3 on the other hand which is the kind of game you'd look at and thing "wow it would be great to just run around this world and explore it" but in actuality it's one of the least rewarding games when it comes to exploration, a major reason for that being the minimap issue and another being that it's just straight up lacking lacking in rewards for it. It doesn't have to be epic loot or whatever, it can just be cool little side stories attached to places or easter eggs or whatever. Something, anything. I would say TW3, and many games like it don't actually have exploration, they just have sightseeing.

Dark Souls, Castlevania, Dragon's Dogma, Jedi Knight 2

Vanilla through Wrath WoW

Gothic 1, 2, Risen, Dark Souls

Dense, content filled locations with meaningful items hidden about.

Dark Messiah.

>"I wonder what's over in that hard to get but unassuming place"
>It's a unique sword
>"That's a weird wood beam hiddon in darkness on the ceiling in this tomb"
>Shoot 3 rope arrows and finally get on top of some cramped place
>Find stealth armor and a unique holy sword you can't use yet

Just endless stuff like this.

Elex

>First of all, what is exploration?
Exploration is an actual INSTINCT, that comes from organic benefits from being aware and knowleable about your surroundings.

It has several levels to it.
On most basic level, it's the instinct to orient yourself in the environment, knowing where things are in relation to each other, so that you can navigate the space safely and take advantage of it.
On second level it's the ability to discover untapped resources in the environment - finding "hidden treasures" and such.
On next level it's identifying more abstract patterns or logic in your surroundings: "Making sense of it". Identifying purpose of artifical structures, learning about the history or events in the place, and so on.

To put it into perspective, games like Miasmata which we discussed is an example of great exploitation of exploratory instinct on the first level. Few games however manage to really take advantage of this.
Exploration in the sense of finding secrets like in Doom, or collectables like in BOTW or AssCreed is an example of the second level.
And exploration for the purpose of learning about culture in Morrowind, or about the past events in Velen in Witcher 3 is an example of targeting the "third level" of exploration.

...

The Forest, at least the current version.

You have three reasons to explore:
1. Find your son
2. Uncover the mystery
3. Equip yourself better to deal with threats

It does help there's interesting stuff everywhere, some more hidden than others. The caves are absolutely amazing. Progress on the topside is "realistically" stopped by lack of resources and clothes you gotta make from wild animals. Plus the cannibals get more numerous and aggressive.

...

Fallout 4
Bitch about the story all you want, i do too.
But the map is well made

I love this game

The first half of the game is really fucking good actually until it turns into 100% scripted sequences. The opening area where you're climbing down that giant abyss is fantastic.

There's no content to explore though. If anything, Terraria have much better exploration gameplay because you can actually find lots of cool things in the world.

Me and a friend managed to make The Forest one of the most boring games ever.
Right at the start we bailed from the airplane until we found a suitable place to make camp and then we proceeded to kill every cannibal that saw our camp so the AI had no idea where we were. Didn't see a cannibal for days after that.

Granted this was ages ago, that might not be possible anymore.

La-Mulana is one of the few games where discovering something new (area, weapon, item etc.) actually feels satisfying because you had to earn it.

There are so many parts in the game that will probably confuse you first but once you figure out what to do it feels amazing.

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable reaction from the game. I'd love for the cannibals to fuck off for a couple of days. It's way better than the alpha which had "kill x cannibals and they go extinct".

Now they even steal your food if they get the chance. My current fort would be so fucked if we didn't enable no destruction because I'd rather not babysit my base day in and night out when there's a whole island to explore out there. Too bad there's no STALKER difficulty where everyone dies quick. Instead they have health sponge stuff and make the cannibals hit harder. Makes you rely on traps way too much instead of risking yourself going out. No one should survive 20 consecutive hits from a machete.

Thief
Zelda
Gothic
Ultima
Minecraft

Oh it's a completely realistic reaction from the game. It was a cool thing to notice, but it made the game too boring so we restarted.

Aight. My biggest gripe so far is how easily you trivalize combat by having a height advantage on terrain they can't get to. This is most prevalent in the caves.

They really need more ranged dudes than the rare molotov guys. All the big mutants are harmless if you stand above and just keep chucking rocks, arrows, spears, molos and bombs on them. It doesn't help how you can jump like crazy on walls and rocks. Just the other day I slid down the sinkhole area to the very bottom and climbed up again with climber axe. Messed up the progression of things.

>molotov guys.

Man I haven't played in over a year, I should check it out again.

Every single Xenoblade (especially X)
Zelda BotW

That pic is beautiful, post more

Morrowind and New Vegas

Morrowind
Hollow Knight
Elex

rain world

FF12