It seems like open-world games have resigned themselves to leaning on quest markers to guide players through increasingly massive game worlds. While these are helpful and sometimes essential, they definitely take away from the immersive aspect of the games themselves. After all, there are no quest markers in real life. If you want to feel like you’re truly living in the game you’re playing, following a floating dot on your screen does little to help that process.
Best Co-Op Open-World Games
Here are a variety of options for the best co-op games that can be experienced in an open world setting.
That’s where these next open-world games stand out. They scrap all of that handholding, from quest markers to tutorials, and drop you into their worlds with little more than the clothes on your back (sometimes literally). Instead of being guided through every step of your journey, the onus falls to you: figure out how to succeed, and in some cases what you want to succeed at, and then make it happen. No quest markers, no handholding; these open-world games leave figuring things out entirely up to you.
Outer Wilds
Let Curiosity Be Your Guide
Outer Wilds would never work with quest markers guiding you to every destination. The whole point of the game is to encourage you to explore, but not in any one particular way, or in any specific direction. Instead, once you have your spaceship, the lack of direction for what to do next means that the only thing driving you is your own curiosity.
Most people likely go to Giant’s Deep first, since it’s the planet you see in the sky above you when you wake up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t head straight for the Ash Twins, Brittle Hollow, or even the Sun Station. The only “guidance” you get is your ship’s log, which tracks all the important information you’ve already found and tells you if there’s more to uncover in a given location. Beyond that, the direction you travel in and the tasks you take on are entirely up to you.
Pathologic 2
If The Answers Were Obvious, Anyone Could Do It
Pathologic 2 is almost like a complete reversal of Outer Wilds. Here, the lack of guidance isn’t to encourage you to explore; it’s to force you into situations that make you regret your choices. Your goal is to find a cure for a mysterious plague that has swept through your hometown. The plague can shut down entire districts and even infect key NPCs, and if you can’t cure them, they will die.
You’ll always have a vague sense of what needs to happen next, but knowing how to go about it is on you to figure out. This amps up the pressure in an already high-stakes situation, pushing you to make choices about how you’ll spend your time each day while knowing that if you don’t work fast, things are just going to get harder. You may want to keep notes about where specific NPCs are located in town, because they don’t show up on the map, and you will inevitably need to find them in a hurry.
The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom
Any Direction, In Any Order, For As Long As You’d Like
Much like its predecessor, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom takes the training wheels off after a quick tutorial and, from that point on, you’re free to explore the map, take on quests, and tackle side activities in whatever order and through whatever method you’d like. Not only are there no quest markers, but most things in the world need to be pinned to your map manually if you want to keep track of their position.
This focus on player freedom is amplified by the Fuse mechanic, which allows you to combine items in the world to create your own structures, weapons, vehicles, and more. This amount of creative expression afforded to the player is in a league of its own, even almost three years later. There’s no handholding in Tears of the Kingdom because the game wants you to do everything your own way, and while some trial and error is essential, the satisfaction that comes from thinking up a unique way to solve an in-game challenge is unmatched.
Outward
Survival Mechanics, RPG Mechanics, And An Omniscient Autosave
The early game in Outward is a phenomenal experience. You’re dropped into the world with your created character and are given virtually no information about how things work. Your job is to figure that out. Combat is Soulslike in nature, meaning lots of rolling and learning attack patterns, but there are also survival mechanics at play here that will sneak up on you if you’re not paying attention.
Your character can get cold, hungry, fatigued, or fall ill, and learning how to avoid these conditions and treat them when they arise is half the fun. The game has a persistent autosave, so loading a previous save when things get hairy isn’t an option. While it’s a good solo experience, going through that trial-and-error phase with a buddy in co-op is a great time, and makes it a lot less frustrating when you can bounce theories off of each other.
Kenshi
No Quest Means No Quest Markers
Kenshi
- Released
-
December 6, 2018
Kenshi’s goal is to remove the one thing that pushed players in a particular direction in every RPG: a main quest. Instead, you are dropped into the world and forced to survive, but how you do so (and why) is entirely up to you. Getting stronger works like a more punishing form of Skyrim’s system, where doing certain things will level up those skills. Steal a lot, and you’ll level up thievery; fight a lot, and your combat skills will improve.
8 Reasons Why You Should Play Kenshi
Kenshi offers a desolate open-world survival experience. Here are some great reasons why you should play this unique game.
There doesn’t have to be any purpose to your actions, but you can set a goal for yourself and then go about making it a reality. There aren’t many limits on what you can do in Kenshi. The challenge comes from figuring out how to do it and surviving long enough to complete your task. Recruiting characters to your squad, building a settlement, exploring the world, or just seeing how long you can last; everything is on the table. You just have to decide what seems interesting.
Shadow Of The Colossus
Follow The Light
While there are no quest markers in Shadow of the Colossus, you do get a little bit of guidance on where to go. Dormin, the mysterious being in the temple ceiling that promises to help Wander save a woman’s life if he kills the 16 colossi, will tell you which colossus to pursue next, and give you a vague sense of where they are. Then, when you leave the temple, holding Wander’s sword up to the sunlight will reflect a beam of light in the direction of the next colossus.
That’s all you get. Not only that, but you don’t actually have to follow Dormin’s guidance or the sunlight beam. You can just set off in a direction and start exploring. Sometimes, it feels like the game would actually prefer if you do that, as there are plenty of sights to take in throughout the world in places that you never actually need to visit on your quest. The map in Shadow of the Colossus is pretty vacant beyond the titular colossi, with no NPCs to chat with or side quests to distract you, but there are still lots of reasons to take Agro for a ride, even just to see what else is out there.
Elden Ring
Wandering Off Is The Point
When FromSoftware announced they were making Elden Ring an open-world game, fans were understandably excited at the prospect, but it’s unlikely any of them imagined how massive that open world would end up being. There is so much content scattered across The Lands Between that you can very easily forget about the “main quest” entirely and still find 100 hours of entertainment here. Hell, the main quest only requires you to visit around half of the game’s main locations. Everything else is optional side content.
That description sells that content short, though. From legacy dungeons to NPC quests to hidden bosses and entirely new maps, there is so much to discover in Elden Ring that sticking to the well-worn path is practically a travesty. Exploring and discovering are what make the game so rich and satisfying. There’s more to discover than one could possibly imagine at the outset, and when all of it is of such high quality and so memorable, there’s really no reason to crit path the main quest unless you’re on a second or third playthrough.
Subnautica
How Deep Will You Go?
As far as survival games go, Subnautica often veers into the realm of horror in a way that few other games in the genre attempt. Sure, survival can be scary, but the creatures lurking in the deepest depths of 4546B’s ocean are a special kind of terrifying, doubly so because you’ll often be pushed to swim right into their domain while looking for that one resource you need to finish building your next project.
Subnautica: 25 Scariest Creatures, Ranked
Many creatures live under the sea in Subnautica but some are far more frightening than the rest.
That’s the brilliance of Subnautica. You technically don’t need to swim down deep to finish the game, but if you want to build higher-end shelters, submersibles, and tools, well, that’s where you’ll need to go. This brilliant method of enticing players to ignore their survival instincts in a survival game is a stroke of genius, especially because, at the end of the day, the choice is yours. You’re the one who has to decide that descending to the depths where Reapers and Ghost Leviathans hunt is necessary; no quest marker is going to force you to go down there.
Project Zomboid
You’re Going To Die Anyway
There aren’t a lot of games that embrace the inevitability of death like Project Zomboid does, but in doing so, it removes the need for any kind of guidance or markers to point you in the right direction. That’s because there is no right direction. Zombies are everywhere, and loot is scarce, but you need food, weapons, fuel, medicine, and shelter, so off you go. Whether or not you find what you need is irrelevant; you’ll find something out in the world, and that will inform your next choice, and the one after that, and so on.
If you die in Project Zomboid, you temporarily lose all of your collected gear, but your old survivor then becomes a zombie in the world. To get your gear back, you have to hunt down your old self and take it back. That’s about as much direction as you’ll get. Otherwise, the process of trying to survive will result in a hierarchy of priorities for you to check off. If you cut yourself while finding food, you may get an infection, so now you need to treat that. There’s your next “quest.” If your shelter gets overrun by zombies, you’ll need to seek out a new place to hole up. That’s another “quest.” Instead of predetermined tasks, Project Zomboid lets your immediate priorities dictate what you’ll do next, and it makes for a deeply immersive experience.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
Anything For The Clan
There has never been another game like Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. Instead of playing a human, or even a human-like fantasy race, you control a clan of apes on the cusp of evolution. You need to search for food, water, and shelter for your clan while avoiding other dangerous animals and deadly traversal obstacles that will hinder your progress. While you can use your senses to pinpoint nearby predators and your intelligence to locate nearby food, everything else is down to you exploring the various shifting biomes, discovering, and then making the best use of what you find.
Much like Outward, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey will grant you progression based on the actions you take. However, instead of leveling up your character, these actions will push you closer to evolving your species. Crafting tools, learning to make medicine, or conquering locations will reward you with dopamine, which will, in turn, stave off fear and promote progression. Sleeping will also allow you to learn new skills like standing upright, which are then passed on to future generations. All of this happens organically, as there is nothing to point you to your next objective. You need to explore carefully, find ways to help your clan survive, and do everything you can to learn new skills and evolve, because if your clan gets wiped out, you have to start the whole thing from the beginning.
Free Open-World Games With The Best Exploration
These free open-world games offer vast and beautiful open worlds, great exploration, loads of content; there’s almost no catch.
