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[Gambit2483]

Morrowind.

You actually had to listen to the directions the quest giver provides. Imagine that.

We really have regressed.

My cousin tried so hard to get me into this game back in the day...I wish I had listened sooner.

 

[SEGA_2012]

Adventure, from Atari.

 

[The Stig]

Missed opportunity to use this gif:

its more appropriate.

when I was starting this playthrough I listed all those gameplay modifiers to my girlfriend she said "why are you doing this to yourself?"

well im in the 2nd half of the game now. No turning back.

see you in 2024 when i finish it lol

 

[Kvally]

 

[rofif]

Morrowind.

You actually had to listen to the directions the quest giver provides. Imagine that.

We really have regressed.

Morrowind was my first thought.
"the thing is by the rock near the biggest rock on the north bye"

 

[GHG]

its more appropriate.

when I was starting this playthrough I listed all those gameplay modifiers to my girlfriend she said "why are you doing this to yourself?"

well im in the 2nd half of the game now. No turning back.

see you in 2024 when i finish it lol

I played it on its hardest mode at the time of release and loved every minute of it. If what you described was available then I would have done it that way instead, survival and immersion dialled up to 100 is the way that game is meant to be played IMO.

 

[Crayon]

Tail of the Sun

 

[AJUMP23]

If you turn off the mini map in RDR2 then Npcs will describe landmarks in order to get to locations.

 

[Gojiira]

Honestly that looks dope as shit. Although the store page doesn't really mention anything about story - does this have any story and NPC interactions, or is this completely sandbox that you play just for the sake of playing?

Its garbage, tiny world, nothing to do, boring quests. OP should have specified ‘Good’ games.

 

[brian0057]

Play Daggerfall.
Only then will you truly understand just how low both open worlds and RPGs have fallen.

 

[Mayar]

One of the best games that doesn't lead you by the hand and you really need to know the world of the game is probably Outward. For people who want to immerse themselves in the world and love to explore the world, one of the best games I've played.

P.S - Many people write about Morrowind, this is true, but this game has aged very badly, it will be excruciatingly painful to play vanilla now, so it’s better to fix it with mods...

 

[mitch1971]

Keep that games name out your fucking mouth!

 

[Three]

Not sure if this counts because it's not strictly openworld even though it gives you the illusion of one with big open areas that offer a lot of freedom to move around but Journey used landmarks without a map very well.

 

[Guilty_AI]

Play Daggerfall.
Only then will you truly understand just how low both open worlds and RPGs have fallen.

>gets quest
>"Deliver this book to Mendragorian Marduke in the Big Bad Whale Lodging"
>no quest mark on the map, no names, no nothing. wtf do i do.
>have brilliant idea. decide to ask random mobs in the streets for directions.
>politely asks someone where the Big Bad Whale is.
>mob tells me to go fuck myself.

Immersion 10/10

 

[Trogdor1123]

Kings field maybe? It had very
Little guidance. I loved it

 

[kicker]

Already mentioned but Outward is a good example, even though you can place markers and do have a hud.

Also, it won't count according to your specifications but I'm pretty sure Kingdom Come Deliverance can be customized to be *really* hands-off

 

[calistan]

The Witness. It's open world in that you can go pretty much anywhere from the start, there isn't a word of explanation in the entire thing, and the endgame is accessible inside the first 30 seconds if you'd only known what the game wanted you to do.

 

[Warablo]

Red Dead had some landmarks and stuff, but of course had a full game map in the menu's. The treasure hunting was decent looking for landmarks.

 

[Maddux4164]

I’m going with Dark Souls 1

Zero map. Zero markers. Zero compass. Zero anything. Can go anywhere at anytime. If you don’t know the way…. Best start walking in a direction. That’s all.

 

[Drizzlehell]

If you turn off the mini map in RDR2 then Npcs will describe landmarks in order to get to locations.

Too bad some missions are pretty much impossible to complete unless you have a minimap enabled because it just keeps guiding you to some arbitrary spots that you have to step on in order to trigger the next mission script and there's like zero effort put into actual player agency and freedom. Oh god, I miss GTA 3...

Anyway, I expected Red Dead to be mentioned eventually but IMO it's the most deceptive game in that category. Maybe once you're done with the story and just wanna roam around the world, then you can ditch the HUD but otherwise it's absolutely essential.

 

[ProgenitorCastle]

 

[Goalus]

Ultima 4

I have fond memories of it, the game introduced me to the WRPG genre. No handholding, no journal, no quest markers. You can travel across the entire map right from the start und have to find out for yourself where you should go and where you shouldn't and what you have to do in what order. It was a truly magical experience.

 

[deriks]

I guess that the original Harvest Moon

 

[bender]

I'm sure it was a bug but one of my favorite things in Morrowind is a quest giver that gave you incorrect directions.

 

[Beastclaw Raider]

This post reminds me of everquest. No map, nothing. It could take you an hour to move to a certain zone and if you were unfortunate enough to die without binding to another city, you had to restart over while reading some other players shout "has anyone seen my corpse?" in some zones

You had to learn and remember every zones layout, and you actually felt in danger everytime you were travelling.

Ah the good old days

 

[Laptop1991]

Yeah i can only think of Morrowind i played that i can remember getting lost quite a bit in due to no waypoint's or compass, i played Daggerfall way back when it came out but can't remember if it had a compass or not, the game bugged up lol, after 2 months and i couldn't recover my save, i never played it again.

 

[salva]

Dayz and Arma: Reforger come to my mind.

 

[nkarafo]

Early vanilla WoW was like that. There were no map direction to where the quests are. You had to ask around like in a real world. Or actually read the quest descriptions/dialog to figure out what you are looking for.

 

[ReBurn]

Adventure on Atari 2600

 

[Mr.Phoenix]

SOTC....

All you have is something that points you in the general direction of your next target. Even the Map was just a fog that only opened up after you ad traversed the area. And this may sound crazy, but you map gets populated with things you have discovered... not with the things you should go and discover.

 

[WoJ]

Days Gone in survival mode.

It's hard 2 mode (which is tough as nails anyway)

as well as:

In the Days Gone Survival Mode has the following features:

• No Survival Vision feature which normally helps you locate enemies and items on other difficulty levels.
• No fast travelling
• No HUD.
• Map waypoints are removed.
• Extremely scarce resources.
• Enemies have an incredible amount of health.
• Many enemies can kill you in one or two hits.
• Freakers can smell you from a mile away.
• Can't lower difficulty.

I am currently playing this. Its super hard. The big brute enemies (the breaker) take FOREVER to kill.

I loved Days Gone enough to platinum it. This sounds like a fun way to play. I may go back and give it another playthrough in this mode.

 

[CamHostage]

I'm sure it was a bug but one of my favorite things in Morrowind is a quest giver that gave you incorrect directions.

Ha ha, well then, does Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest count? They couldn't do "open-world" back then in 2d platforming and the world had barriers of you didn't have the right items (also I think it had a block map on the pause screen?), but it did just drop you in and let you roam even past dungeon entrances, plus the town folk fed you some straight up bullshit about what you were supposed to do (especially in the English localization. )

It doesn't count, but it is interesting how little games cared if you knew that the heck to do back then. (Of course, back then, we at least had Nintendo Power. )

 

[Pasta la Vista]

FFXI. This was a pre WoW style mmo. No set map markers, no mini map. Any general maps of a specific zone need to be bought or found in coffers that require specific keys.

 

[RainblowDash]

I remember Magna Carta 2 would only show markers on the minimap which drove me crazy considering it was really small and you couldn’t zoom in.

 

[bender]

Ha ha, well then, does Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest count? They couldn't do "open-world" back then in 2d platforming and the world had barriers of you didn't have the right items (also I think it had a block map on the pause screen?), but it did just drop you in and let you roam even past dungeon entrances, plus the town folk fed you some straight up bullshit about what you were supposed to do (especially in the English localization. )

It doesn't count, but it is interesting how little games cared if you knew that the heck to do back then. (Of course, back then, we at least had Nintendo Power. )

Simon's Quest was probably more of a lost in translation thing. If I had to guess, Morrowind was either someone getting East/West confused or the location of a dungeon being moved after the quest dialog was written. Even if it was by mistake, it makes the world feel incredibly human. It's also probably part of the reason they switched to waypoint markers on a compass in future games (along with their worlds relying more on procedural generation). Fallout or Fallout 2 had an NPC intentionally give you wrong directions to buried treasure.

 

[CamHostage]

Simon's Quest was probably more of a lost in translation thing.

Partly yes, partly not. There are some translation errors in typos or over-shortening, and also just text not matched to gameplay because the writers didn't have the game to work with (did the translator ever know there was a down button action when he had to put text on about the "Graveyard Duck"?

However, even in the Japanese version, the people will just lie to you, or tell you things which seem like clues but are red herrings. They intended the second line in the game to be a hint not to trust everybody, but back then (and even now, ) players had no context for NPCs lying to them.

https://collider.com/castlevania-2-simons-quest-npc-mistranslations-explained/

 

[bender]

Partly yes, partly not. There are some translation errors in typos or over-shortening, and also just text not matched to gameplay because the writers didn't have the game to work with (did the translator ever know there was a down button action when he had to put text on about the "Graveyard Duck"?

However, even in the Japanese version, the people will just lie to you, or tell you things which seem like clues but are red herrings. They intended the second line in the game to be a hint not to trust everybody, but back then (and even now, ) players had no context for NPCs lying to them.

https://collider.com/castlevania-2-simons-quest-npc-mistranslations-explained/

That's really neat.

 

[CamHostage]

That's really neat.

Could you imagine, a game today, a character telling you like, "For the Hightower Key, you must retrace the long route back to your hometown, and you must not travel fastly. Speak to Rodanza the Wizard and he will give you what you seek..."

So you walk all the way back, figuring fast-travel would break the quest, and you speak with everybody in the village until you discover Rodanza, and he says to you, "What? I don't have no key, I'm just a ditchdigger here. Oh, i bet my damned brother Carl set you up for this, he pulls that stunt all the time on wandering warriors!"

Quest over, no loot.

 

[bitbydeath]

Technically open world.

 

[TexMex]

Myst

 

[Ocean Dweller]

Days Gone in survival mode.

 

[93xfan]

Castlevania 2

 

[Comandr]

EverQuest was like this for years. Not sure if that qualifies as open world, though some of the zones were absolutely huge. Iceclad Ocean was 20 square miles. You came into the zone on a boat, and had to transfer to another boat to get to the main island. If you fell off that boat in transit...

The only sort of navigation you have is either your /location which gives you an x y z coordinate that you're currently at, or your Sense Heading ability, if you bothered to ever get the skill from your class trainer. And even then, it can take hours of using the skill constantly before it will maybe tell you "you think you are heading north." There weren't any visual navigation elements of any kind until about 4 years in. Falling off a boat in EQ in the old days was awful and dangerous. If you were a class that couldn't use a return to respawn point spell, your option was either... swim in a direction for however long to maybe find land or a zone line and hope you didn't get eaten by whatever lurks beneath the waves... or intentionally drown yourself and beg someone to travel with you to the zone and summon+resurrect your corpse, because of course everything you own stays on your body when you die.

There were no quest markers. There wasn't even a quest log of any kind. No indicators to let you know if a given NPC even OFFERED a quest of any kind. You just waddle up to an NPC and hail them. Maybe they say [something back to you] and you then type out a response related to that blurb of text. They would tell you where to go or maybe describe something to get, and that's all you got. Hope you wrote it down because... again there's no in game record of you ever speaking to this person. So you kept a RL journal. You learned landmarks. Certain hills and trees. It was certainly a lot more immersive than just following a glowy trail or watching a minimap constantly or ticked boxes on a screen.

In a way I miss that.

 

[Spukc]

Valheim
Botw

 

[Fredrik]

SotC

You have a light showing the direction to the next colossus, OP is talking about games where there is no exploration hand-holding at all.

 

[Fredrik]

Elden Ring is close but you do have a map. Can’t think of anything modern that leave you all on your own. There are old ones though. I used to make my own maps in Bard’s Tale. Faery Tale Adventure was huge and just left you with no help at all. Well there was a compass.

 

[vaibhavpisal]

Survival games like Grounded, Minecraft.

Or Sea of Thieves. In that game you have to find your objective by looking at hints in your journal. True pirate style.

 

[Griffon]

Pretty much all the FROM Software Souls-likes fit the bill, with the exceptions of Elden Ring an Demon's. And I love that shit.

 

[Esppiral]

Shenmue

 

[thelurkinghorror]

Take a game like Gothic for example.

No maps, no quest markers, not even a little compass on the screen with tiny icons indicating that there's something nearby. All you could rely on were your wits, the road signs, and a big scary monster running at you in a sign that you should probably do a 180 and get the fuck out of there.

And all of that was baked into the game's dough, so it's not like this HUD-less experience was an optional one. Any game that offers any kind of HUD-based directions wouldn't count in this little exercise, so don't you go mentioning... whatever game you were thinking about right now, because it's probably not what I'm talking about.

I honestly struggle to think of too many games like that.

Miasmata