Rambling about exploration in games
I've been playing Dragon's Dogma recently and rediscovering the feeling of slow-and-steady exploration in a fantasy world. It's been awesome. It's hard to find games that feed you that sense of discovering things in an organic way, so to speak, since most will railroad you into a main quest (that's not always that interesting) or some other content, and the map is there just to fill up space (in a bad way). And I really wish more games had the budget and the means to create an enthralling exploration with a more reactive world.
Skyrim is, maybe, a great example of exploration, at least for me, because I had way more fun in that game by traveling around the map than following quests and quest markers. The writing there isn't up to par and it always ruins the experience: it is a very immersive game, with great ambiance, until you have to talk to an NPC. Bethesda tried to bring an experience that's been around since Morrowind to newer tech (or tech that was new 13 years ago, at least), but it lacks the narrative depth of that game. Unlike Oblivion, though, Skyrim has a more interesting and better-populated map, full of stuff hidden away. Inevitably, you would be led to these things via some sort of quest or side quest, but I found the game to be the most fun when ignoring questlines and just walking about, going "oooh, I wonder what's over there".
Better than Skyrim, though, are the games from Piranha Bytes. The games being janky or not, their world always had a "handcrafted" flavor, with designs that seemed to be very deliberate, sometimes even populated with stuff that was irrelevant to the game itself, but which cemented the world or scenario we were in. I didn't play Elex II, but the first one kept me captivated for a long time due to how detailed the environment was. The story isn't that good, to be honest, but walking around the map avoiding high-level enemies, and finding things like the ruins of a house with diary entries from before the apocalypse was awesome. It didn't add anything narratively, it was there just because, but gave a great feeling of discovery while also grounding the world as a "real" place, not just a playground for the player.
And it's hard to talk about exploration and uncovering what happened to the world without mentioning Elden Ring. I mean, that game is the pinnacle of 3D RPG exploration, in my humble opinion. Despite the allures of combat, the most interesting thing is seeing something in the distance and finding a way to get there. It's full of nooks and crannies, all very detailed, with a somewhat rich background. Every place you explore is thematically grounded, from architecture to enemies and items. It's a joy to walk around. And even though the overworld is there mostly for you to fight your way through it, the way things are placed and spaced, the route enemies move, all give the illusion of a "living world" (I don't like this descriptor, but it fits here). Not everything makes sense in Elden Ring, of course. FromSoftware likes to make things as nebulous as possible. But it's still fun to walk around, poking your head into dark and forgotten places and seeing what's there. It brings a great sense of discovery, which is what compels further exploration, at least for me.
Probably, this sense of discovery is what makes exploration so rewarding in most games. Even with non-procedural maps, even with the most bland scenario possible, there's something really cool about exploring a fantastical world and figuring out what's beyond that hill over there. It's even better when the game switches your brain into explorer mode and makes you think like someone from that world would when preparing for a long trip, along the lines of "which supplies should I stock before this journey?". Dragon's Dogma has been doing this to me, but Outward did the same in the past.
Outward is a neat indie game that really leans in on this aspect. Maybe the survival aspect -- having to drink water and eat food -- won't be everyone's cup of tea, but man, talk about setting out on a journey. After all, it's a game where you even have to carry your camping gear with you. It does bring a bit of a sense of adventure to it, and although I cut my exploration short when I played it, I want to get back to it and get to the end.
Caves of Qud is another one. It markets itself as a roguelike, but if you enable save states in the options, it plays like an RPG (which is the best way to be played, in my opinion). Judging by its cover, the game seems just to be a typical combat-focused roguelike, but it actually has deeply entrenched lore that's revealed through the main quest -- and by exploring other maps. Despite having random bits of text from the past be procedurally generated, it serves as a good platform that brings everything together the more you learn about the world.
Also, being a 2D sprite-based game, it allowed the developers to create a highly reactive environment. While the story won't change, the whole game has complex systems that interact with one another, creating emergent storytelling. The story-outside-the-main-story is built as you play with your character and learn the tricks to survive this harsh world, and the game expects its rules to be subverted. As it should be, it's all propelled forward through preparation and exploration, and the faction system at least guarantees some diversity in how you interact with other living beings.
I could spend a whole day talking about how "roleplay-ish" Caves of Qud can be despite, at its most basic level, being just combat-focused.
One of the games that surprised me the most in relation to exploration, though, was a one-man effort called Roadwarden. I'll praise this game to the day I die, because it really is wonderful. While playing like a CYOA, it has some RPG influences there with a heavy focus on exploration as, after all, you are literally exploring a peninsula that's been somewhat cut off from the rest of the "empire". And really, it goes to great lengths to show that nobody needs fancy 3D graphics -- or complex interwoven systems that expect to be subverted -- to create an immersive experience. It's a game that is explored narratively, and although you don't really walk around on the map, the soundtrack and the writing provide everything that's needed to feel like you are in a forest, or in a village, or by the sea, and so on. Every place, and every character, brings such a rich experience that I don't even know how to describe them. And the world is highly reactive to the player's actions, in a way that I don't think 3D games will ever be unless they have stupidly high budgets. The game has a demo, and I highly recommend checking it out.
There are so many more games I could talk about that bring a great sense of exploration. Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies are wonderful, and they both carry that great Failbetter narrative quality. Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 have an "event-based" main quest that progresses as you explore the "open world" -- limited by the 16-bit era technology, of course. Moonring has a world that begs to be explored so it can be understood, with a great depth to its storytelling, all neatly packed in a free game. Vagrus is a game about literally traveling and exploring an overworld filled with narrative events. Kenshi is just a sandbox RPG that brings a strange post-apoc continent to explore. STALKER is an FPS, but it has such an atmospheric and lively world that's easy to lose yourself just wandering around. Even TESOnline has a world that's more fun to explore on your own than to experience through questlines.
Despite all of this, I do feel like rich worlds made for exploration are becoming rarer. They are either a focused effort from developers that mastered its designs (like FromSoftware) or from indie devs exploring new ways to bring a world to life while on a tight budget. And while Ubisoft and Ubisoft-like games do bring expansive worlds filled with things to do, they are there mostly to serve as a completionist checklist, as background furniture, which kinda kills the magic of exploration.
On the other hand, I do think it's probably easier to create an interesting narrative to follow than to create an interesting world to explore. That's probably why, despite lots of games having "open worlds" nowadays, most of them just use map navigation as a narrative setpiece, instead of map exploration as a living part of their story. I do wish more games at least followed the Romancing SaGa formula of "trigger-based main quest relying on exploration" though. I can only imagine what we could have had if this formula had been refined over the decades.