What’s the point of an open world if you’ve marked everything on the map before I even leave the tutorial?
Exploration in modern games is a chore. You open the map and it’s already full of icons. Points of interest, collectibles, shops, events, fast travel markers, and three different currencies you didn’t ask for. There’s no discovery. You’re not exploring, you’re clearing a checklist.
It didn’t used to be like this.
Older games didn’t tell you where everything was. You stumbled across secrets by paying attention. A cracked wall. A weird noise. A platform just out of reach. And when you found something, it felt earned. You figured it out. You were rewarded for curiosity, not for doing side content in the right order.
Games like Metroid, Dark Souls, Morrowind, and Deus Ex didn’t hold your hand. They trusted you to look around, test things, and connect the dots. There were whole systems buried just off the main path. Hidden bosses. Secret areas. Entire questlines you could miss. Not because the game was trying to waste your time, but because it respected your attention span.
Now you’ve got glowing paths telling you exactly where to go. Compass markers that float in the sky. Maps that update themselves. Journal entries that spell everything out. And every corner of the game world has been algorithmically populated with side quests and activities to keep engagement high. You’re not exploring, you’re following instructions.
Even the secrets aren’t secret anymore. They’re announced in the patch notes. They’re part of a “Mystery” category in your quest log. They get marked off with a gold star and tracked by percentage. There’s no wonder in that. No sense of surprise. Just more boxes to tick.
Some of this comes from user testing. Developers track how players engage, and if something gets missed too often, it gets pushed into the main path. Some of it comes from fear that players will miss content, get confused, or lose interest. So everything gets surfaced. Everything gets explained. And the game starts to feel more like a job than an adventure.
Exploration used to feel like part of the game, not something managed by a UI overlay. You were encouraged to look, to try things, to get lost. That sense of control over your own pace is gone in most modern games, and it’s hard to ignore once you notice it.
That kind of discovery creates stories you remember. “I found this hidden door behind the waterfall” means more than “I cleared all six caves in Region 3.” But most games don’t let you have that moment anymore. They need you to stay on track. They need to make sure you’ve seen everything. So they flatten the experience into a to-do list.
Some developers still get it. Outer Wilds gives you an entire solar system of secrets and tells you almost nothing. Elden Ring doesn’t point you anywhere. Teardown hides tools and pathways that only reveal themselves when you try something stupid. These games aren’t confusing. They’re interesting. There’s a difference.
Games don’t need to be obscure or punishing to feel rewarding. But they do need to let you wonder. Let you get lost. Let you poke at the edges of the world and find something unexpected. Because that’s what turns a level into a place. That’s what makes it worth remembering.
What was the last game that made you feel like you’d found something no one else had?
