In many ways, contemporary open-world games have taken a step back by relying too heavily on guiding players to the next area of interest, but Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey manage to make matters right.

Too often, open world games have actually become linear in gameplay, as some players find themselves traversing in a straight line across the map in the direction of the quest marker on the compass or mini-map. This is one of the reasons Far Cry 5 removed the mini-map, for example, but still kept the compass.

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Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey both offer players the optional feature of turning off the compass and mini-map, forcing players to use clues given to them by the quest's offering and visualizing their surroundings to navigate towards the next destination, including many hidden areas of Red Dead Redemption 2.

More games should offer players these options to make the environments more immersive and realistic in their navigation by using their visuals as clues for where to go next. In older games, quest-markers on the mini map and compasses were actually non-existent, and the feature came along later on.

For example, many players praise Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind over Skyrim in regards to its exploration. It was released in 2002 and essentially established vast and epic open-world exploration on both PC and console. Furthermore, Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind did not include the compass nor quest-markers on the map, and each quest given was rich with information to provide players the necessary clues for where to search for the quest's next landmark or location.

When World of Warcraft first came out, it too did not include quest-markers on the map nor navigation to guide the player to the next location. Similar to Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, each quest provided plenty of information to investigate the surroundings in search of the quest's starting point or next location. For many players, there was a great level of satisfaction in finding the location of where the next quest begins, and in itself it was a sense of accomplishment.

The Elder Scrolls 6 story tease Morrowind

Only after most players took advantage of mods which added in the quest-markers on the map and compass, did Blizzard officially add in the feature themselves to World of Warcraft. Thankfully, there is still an option to remove the quest guidance system. This could be one of the reasons World of Warcraft Vanilla is making a comeback.

As open-world games become the new standard for level-design in many of today's action-adventure and RPG games, developers should rethink the ways in which players navigate the map system and open world environment.

Perhaps developers should draw inspiration from older games, as well as newer games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassins Cred Odyssey in allowing players to navigate the maps using more realistic methodologies, which often lead to secret side quests in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, for example.

 

Furthermore, going bigger in size is not always the solution as well. Metro: Exodus demonstrated that smaller sized maps which are incredibly dense in ensuring that each location looks unique and hand-crafted can also go a long ways in ensuring players are immersed in their environment. Metro: Exodus' brilliant open-world designs also allow players to have a sense of where they are on the map based on the visualization of their surroundings, without constantly eyeing the mini-map.

There is no excuse to not ensure that every quest given provides enough information for the player to clue themselves in towards the next key location on the maps. After all, this is generally how real-life worked before we had GPS, and many players would like a realistic experience in open-world games.

Future open-world games need to provide players the option to turn off map-markers in the way that Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassins Creed Odyssey have done, as well as others. But perhaps the solution for some games is to get rid of the map-markers altogether, or include other forms of visual cues on a map, as developers should be looking for new ways to innovate exploration in open-world environments to maximize immersion into the environments.

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