Why the Best Open World Games Ignore Their Own Maps

There’s a moment in every open world game where you stop looking at the world and start looking at the map. The icons take over. The quest markers stack up. The compass fills with diamonds and arrows and tiny skulls. And somewhere between the 40th bandit camp and the 60th collectible, the world itself becomes wallpaper for a checklist.

We’ve been thinking about this a lot at Choost Games. We’re an indie studio — we make a bullet heaven called Granny’s Rampage and a deckbuilder roguelike called Granny’s Gambit — so we’re not building open worlds ourselves. But we study game design across every genre, and the open world space is where the gap between “technically impressive” and “actually fun” is widest and most instructive.

The games that get open worlds right tend to share one trait: they make the map less important than the world. And the ones that get it wrong make the map the entire game.

The Ubisoft Problem (and Why It’s Not Just Ubisoft)

The icon-cluttered open world didn’t start with Ubisoft, but they perfected the formula and everyone copied it. Climb a tower, reveal a region, mark every activity on the map, travel between markers, clear the activity, repeat. It works in the sense that it keeps players engaged through a completionist feedback loop. It fails in the sense that the world stops being a place and becomes a spreadsheet with pretty scenery.

The problem isn’t the icons themselves. It’s that the icons replace discovery. When every point of interest is pre-marked, there’s no reason to wander. There’s no moment where you see something on the horizon, get curious, and walk toward it to find out what it is. The map already told you. It’s a cave. It has a treasure chest and three enemies. You know this before you arrive.

This matters because curiosity is the engine that makes open worlds feel alive. Remove it and you’re left with logistics — the most efficient route between markers. That’s a delivery game, not an exploration game.

Breath of the Wild Figured This Out in 2017

Nintendo’s approach to Hyrule in Breath of the Wild was radical in how simple it was. No quest markers on the overworld. No minimap pulling your eyes to the corner of the screen. Towers reveal geography, not icons. If you see a mountain, you can climb it. If you see a shrine, you can walk to it. But nobody tells you the shrine is there until you’re close enough to spot the orange glow yourself.

The result is a game where every player’s experience diverges almost immediately. Two people can play Breath of the Wild for 50 hours and explore completely different parts of the map, find completely different shrines, and fight the Divine Beasts in completely different orders. That kind of personal ownership over a playthrough is what open worlds promise and almost never deliver.

Tears of the Kingdom pushed the idea further by adding the Ultrahand building system, which turns every problem into a creative sandbox. The open world isn’t just a space to explore — it’s a space to reshape. We wrote about both games and how they compare to every other open world on the platform in our best open world games on Switch roundup, and the Zelda entries are the reason the Switch punches so far above its hardware weight class.

The PS5 Generation: Power Without Clarity

The PlayStation 5 can render open worlds that are staggering to look at. Horizon Forbidden West’s landscapes are photorealistic. Spider-Man 2’s Manhattan is dense to the point of sensory overload. Cyberpunk 2077 in its current state is the most atmospheric city in gaming. The hardware bottleneck is gone. The question now is whether the designers have something to say with all that rendering power.

Some of them do. Elden Ring uses the PS5’s capacity to build a world that’s vast and empty in the right places — the negative space between discoveries makes each discovery feel earned. Ghost of Tsushima replaces the minimap with wind direction, which is a deceptively brilliant design choice that forces your eyes to stay on the world instead of a UI element. Death Stranding makes the terrain itself the antagonist, turning every walk across a mountain into a resource management puzzle.

Others use the power to build bigger checklists with prettier icons. More map, same design philosophy.

We broke down the full PS5 landscape in our best open world games on PS5 post, and the through-line across the best entries is restraint. The games that use the PS5 well aren’t the ones that fill every square meter with content. They’re the ones that make you care about the square meters they chose to fill.

Survival Games Solved It by Accident

Here’s something interesting: the genre that handles open worlds most honestly isn’t the AAA action-adventure space. It’s survival games. In a survival game, the world isn’t a backdrop for quests. The world is the antagonist. The terrain, the weather, the resource distribution, the predator spawns — all of it is mechanically relevant at all times. You don’t ignore the landscape between quest markers because the landscape is trying to kill you.

Subnautica is the clearest example. The ocean floor isn’t decorated with icons. It’s layered by depth, and each depth layer introduces new resources, new creatures, and new threats. You go deeper because you need materials that only exist deeper, and deeper is more dangerous. The map is in your head, built from memory and fear. “Don’t go near that cave, something screamed at me from inside it” is a more effective navigation system than any waypoint.

Valheim does something similar on land. The biome progression gates exploration behind gear requirements, but within each biome, you’re charting your own path. The game marks nothing. You mark things yourself, on a map that starts blank. Discovery is literally the gameplay.

We covered the full spread in our best open world survival games post, and the pattern holds across every entry: the less the game tells you, the more you pay attention to the world.

What Retro Games Knew That We Forgot

The PS1 era didn’t have the technology for massive open worlds, but it had something the modern era sometimes lacks: trust in the player’s intelligence. Games like Final Fantasy VII gave you a world map and let you wander it. There were no breadcrumbs. Towns existed on the map, and you found them by walking. Optional content was hidden, not highlighted. The Chocobo breeding sidequest, the Weapons, the materia caves — none of it was marked. You found it through experimentation, word of mouth, or sheer stubbornness.

That design philosophy extended across the platform’s RPGs. Vagrant Story’s interconnected dungeon rewarded spatial memory. Xenogears hid entire story sequences behind optional exploration. Suikoden II’s 108 recruitable characters were scattered across the world with no tracker telling you who you’d missed. The PS1 RPG generation trusted players to engage with the world on its terms rather than the game’s terms.

We’ve been on a deep dive into that era recently — our best PS1 games of all time and best PS1 RPGs posts cover the standouts, and revisiting them makes the contrast with modern design even sharper.

The Map vs. The World

The tension in every open world game is between the map and the world. The map is a tool for navigating the world, but it can also replace the world. When you fast-travel between quest markers, the space between them stops existing. When every point of interest is pre-marked, the act of discovering something is reduced to the act of walking to something you already know about.

The best open world games resolve this tension by making the world more interesting than the map. Breath of the Wild does it with emergent physics. Elden Ring does it with hidden content. Subnautica does it with depth as a difficulty axis. Ghost of Tsushima does it by literally removing the minimap. Each approach is different, but the principle is the same: reward the player for paying attention to the world itself, not to the abstraction of the world.

The worst open world games resolve the tension by making the map the game. Follow the arrow. Clear the icon. Move to the next one. The world is beautiful and completely irrelevant.

The Co-op Factor Nobody Talks About

There’s a secondary layer to the open world map problem that gets ignored in most design discussions: multiplayer. When you play an open world game co-op, the icon-cluttered map becomes even more reductive, because now two or more players are negotiating which icon to clear next. The world becomes a task list that a group is optimizing.

Survival games handle this naturally because the world’s hostility creates organic teamwork. In Valheim, one person gathers wood while another mines copper while a third defends the base from greydwarf attacks. Nobody assigned those roles. The environment’s pressure distributed the labor. In Raft, the co-op is the gameplay — one person steers while another hooks debris while a third repairs the shark damage. The world forces cooperation without a quest log telling you to cooperate.

Compare that to most AAA open world co-op, where multiplayer means two people following the same quest marker independently while occupying the same server. The map flattens the experience to such a degree that having a second player barely changes anything. You’re both doing the same checklist, just faster.

The survival games we covered in our best open world survival games post almost universally handle co-op better than their AAA counterparts, and it’s because their worlds are designed as systems rather than content containers. Systems create emergent teamwork. Content containers create parallel solo experiences with shared loot.

What This Means for Smaller Games

We don’t make open world games at Choost. A bullet heaven like Granny’s Rampage has a single arena, not a sprawling map. A deckbuilder like Granny’s Gambit progresses through encounters, not geography. But the design lesson scales down perfectly: don’t tell the player everything. Let them discover mechanics, synergies, and strategies through play rather than tutorials and tooltips.

The moment you over-explain is the moment curiosity dies. And curiosity is what makes games feel like worlds rather than software.

Every genre benefits from that principle. The best roguelites hide their deepest synergies behind experimentation. The best metroidvanias gate areas behind abilities without telling you which ability opens which path. The best puzzle games teach through level design, not text boxes. The common thread is trust — trusting the player to figure it out.

Where Open Worlds Go Next

The next generation of open world games will have even more power to work with. The question is whether designers will use that power to render more icons at higher fidelity or to build worlds that reward genuine curiosity. The trajectory is encouraging. Elden Ring was a massive commercial success that proved players don’t need handholding. Tears of the Kingdom proved systems-driven design can outsell spectacle-driven design. The survival genre keeps growing because it respects the player’s agency.

The map will always exist. It’s a necessary tool. But the best open worlds are the ones where you open the map, glance at it, close it, and go back to looking at the world. Because the world is where the game lives.

Choost Games is an indie studio building Granny’s Rampage and Granny’s Gambit. We write about game design, development, and the games that shaped us at choostgames.com/blog.