Some of the best moments in gaming happen when a player ignores the objective entirely and goes to look at something on the horizon instead.

Exploration is one of the most powerful tools in game design, and one of the easiest to get wrong. A world can hold three hundred marked locations and still feel like a checklist. Another can be a fraction of the size and stay in your memory for years. The difference is rarely the map. It is whether the world gives players reasons to look, and whether looking is repaid.

Here are seven things the games that get it right have in common.

1. Put Something on the Horizon Worth Walking Toward

Curiosity starts before the player arrives anywhere.

A distant castle, an unusual rock formation, a structure glowing faintly at the edge of a valley — anything that breaks the pattern of its surroundings will pull players toward it. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is built almost entirely on this principle. There is nearly always something odd in view, and nearly always a way to reach it.

Landmarks do navigational work too. Recognising a tower or a mountain from a new angle is how a large space starts to feel like a place rather than a grid. Elden Ring uses the Erdtree the same way: visible from almost everywhere, orienting you constantly without a single waypoint.

The weak version of this is a map covered in icons. Icons tell players where things are. Landmarks make them want to find out.

2. Make the Detour Worth the Walk

Players will leave the main path readily. They stop leaving it once they learn the detour never pays.

A hidden cave, an abandoned settlement, a structure that clearly predates everything around it — any of these can turn a journey into something worth remembering. What ruins it is repetition. When the fourth cave contains the same three crates as the first three, players correctly conclude that the fifth is not worth the climb.

The discoveries that hold up tend to be one of a few things:

  • A location with its own atmosphere and implied history.
  • A piece of equipment that changes how you approach problems, not just your damage numbers.
  • A shortcut that permanently reshapes how you move through the world.
  • An encounter you would never have seen on the critical path.

Not every find needs to be a reward in the mechanical sense. A Short Hike is two hours long and most of what you discover is simply a nice view and someone to talk to, and it works completely. The requirement is not value. It is that the detour was not a waste of the player’s time.

Our piece on why more gamers are tired of open-world games goes further into what happens when this breaks down at scale.

3. Make the Travelling Itself Enjoyable

If getting somewhere is a chore, players will stop going anywhere optional.

This is why traversal systems matter so much more than they look on a feature list. Climbing, gliding, swinging, swimming and driving are not just transport — they determine whether the space between two points is dead time or the best part of the game. Marvel’s Spider-Man is the clearest case: web-swinging is good enough that fast travel feels like cheating yourself out of the experience.

Good traversal also makes players re-read places they have already been. A ledge that was out of reach becomes reachable, and a familiar area quietly becomes a new one. Hollow Knight runs on this. So does almost every Metroidvania worth the name.

Death Stranding takes the idea to its limit by making terrain itself the obstacle, and turning the planning of a route into the actual game. It is divisive for exactly that reason, but nobody who liked it was bored on the way.

4. Let the Environment Carry the Story

Not every story needs dialogue, and the ones that don’t are often the ones players remember.

An abandoned camp, a door barricaded from the inside, personal belongings left in a pattern that implies a hurry — these ask the player to work out what happened here. Return of the Obra Dinn builds an entire game from it: you reconstruct sixty deaths aboard a ghost ship using nothing but frozen scenes and deduction.

The appeal is interpretive. A world that explains itself completely leaves nothing for the player to do but listen. A world that leaves evidence makes them an investigator, and a conclusion you reached yourself is far stickier than one you were told.

It also makes a place feel like it existed before you arrived — which is most of what separates a setting from a backdrop. We’ve written more on this in why some game worlds feel more like places than levels.

5. Reward the Player Who Is Actually Looking

Some of the most satisfying discoveries are sitting in plain view of anyone paying attention.

A wall textured slightly differently from its neighbours. A sound with no visible source. A path worn into grass that leads somewhere the map does not mention. These reward observation rather than compliance, which is a meaningfully different skill from following a marker.

The distinction that matters is between a secret that is hidden and one that is arbitrary. A good secret can be reconstructed afterwards — the player can look back and see the clue they walked past. Tunic is built on this almost perfectly: its manual pages teach you to re-read everything you have already seen. Animal Well and Blue Prince work the same way, burying systems that only become visible once you know to look.

Get this right consistently and something shifts in how players behave. They stop scanning for icons and start scanning the actual world. Even ordinary rooms become worth a second pass.

6. Let Discovery Change What the Player Understands

The strongest exploration systems treat knowledge as the reward.

A new ability opening a sealed area is the familiar version. The more interesting one is when a discovery changes the meaning of something you already saw. Outer Wilds is the purest example in the medium: you gain no equipment at all across the entire game. Every bit of progress is something you now understand, and the twenty-two-minute loop never changes — only you do.

This produces a different kind of motivation. Players keep going because they want an answer, not because they need better gear. It also gives old locations new weight. A room you walked through in the first hour becomes the most important place in the game once you know what happened in it.

7. Leave Room for Things Nobody Designed

Not every memorable moment should be authored.

Sometimes a player takes a wrong turn into an encounter far above their level, or two systems collide in a way no designer sat down and planned. Subnautica generates most of its best stories this way — running low on oxygen somewhere you should not have swum is not a scripted event, but everyone who played it has that story.

Dynamic encounters, changing conditions, interconnected spaces and systems that interact rather than run in parallel all feed this. So does restraint: a world that tightly controls every outcome cannot surprise anyone.

This is also why some worlds stay interesting long after the credits. There is still a chance something unplanned is waiting. Our look at the sandbox generation covers how this changed what players expect from an open world.

Size Is Not the Point

A large map does not make a great world.

An environment can hold hundreds of locations and feel repetitive, because players learn quickly whether investigation pays. A much smaller world can be unforgettable when its places are deliberate and its discoveries mean something. Outer Wilds takes place across a solar system you can cross in under a minute.

What the best worlds share is not scale. It is that they trust the player to be curious, give them something worth being curious about, and repay the curiosity when it shows up. A memorable world is not measured by how many locations appear on its map, but by how many of them made someone stop and look around.

If you’re after a world worth getting lost in, the Field Guide filters by platform, mood, genre and how much time you’ve got.