Many games treat players like workers following a very long list of tasks. Players stop looking at the beautiful scenery because they are too busy staring at a map, wondering what to do next. That sense of wonder usually dies when a game tells a player what objectives to achieve. Thankfully, there are several open-world games that try to satisfy the curiosity of players.
7 Open-World Games That Let You Play At Your Own Pace
For players who do not like rushing their journey or feeling extra pressure, these open-world titles let you take things at your own speed.
Thanks to the freedom of play, these open-world games remove pressure from players. There is no single “correct” way to move through the world. So players can spend their time experimenting, observing patterns, or following a personal hunch just to see where it leads.
No Man’s Sky
Exploring An Infinite Universe
- A procedurally generated universe with countless planets.
- Players are free to explore without a forced path or fixed goal.
The scale of No Man’s Sky is difficult to grasp because it contains over 18 quintillion planets. This massive digital universe does not force a player to follow a specific path. Instead, it places a traveler in a broken ship on a random planet and asks them to look around. A player might spend hours looking at strange, neon-colored plants or chasing bizarre, multi-legged creatures just because they find them interesting.
On some planets, there are strange creatures that have never been seen by most players before, and in others, there are ancient ruins or hidden sights that reward closer attention. Players survive by discovering new resources, cataloguing alien life, building bases, and trading goods they find across hundreds of star systems. No Man’s Sky is a masterpiece of procedural generation that rewards those who enjoy the journey more than the destination.
Minecraft
Building Without Boundaries
- An endless block-shaped world with no required story or mandatory progression path.
- Survival mode rewards curiosity through exploration and resource discovery, while Creative mode removes all limits and turns the world into a pure space for experimentation.
The idea behind Minecraft is simple. Just place a player in an endless block-shaped world where almost anything is possible. There is no single story that players are forced to follow, and there are no mission markers that guide them from one location to another. In survival mode, curiosity about what lies around the next corner leads to new discoveries as players search for resources to build shelters, craft tools, and protect themselves from hostile creatures.
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In creative mode, all threats are removed so the world becomes a blank canvas, and the game lives or dies by the ideas players bring into it. Because there is no scripted goal telling players what they must complete, people are free to explore, build, and experiment until they shape their own fun.
Kenshi
Players Forge Their Own Path For Survival
- Players start with no special powers and must learn how to navigate a harsh post-apocalyptic landscape to stay alive.
- The lack of direction allows people to take on various roles, such as wandering traders, sneaky thieves, or leaders of a powerful army.
In most games, the player is a hero, but in Kenshi, they start as absolutely nothing. There is no main quest, no "chosen one" pathway, and no hand-holding. This harsh reality forces players to be curious about how the world works just to stay alive. Some may choose to survive one day at a time, seeking food and safe ground. Others may slowly train characters to increase their abilities, building up a squad of allies and eventually establishing a fortress.
The freedom in Kenshi comes from its lack of direction. Players can choose any role they like, from a wandering nomad to a trader moving goods between settlements, from a thief surviving off scraps to a warlord building an army. The game world doesn’t change its goals for you; players shape their own goals through the choices they make and the stories they create while exploring its open, post-apocalyptic environment.
Sea of Thieves
A Pirate World Driven by Instinct and Discovery
- An open sea that encourages players to set their own goals.
- Players can choose to do anything from just exploring to treasure hunting.
Players are pirates in this open-world game and sail their own ships across wide seas filled with islands, hidden coves, and underwater kingdoms. The world in Sea of Thieves encourages players to set their own goals, so some may hunt for buried treasure hidden under shifting sands, others may explore the depths for ancient relics, and still others may simply chart unknown waters to see what they find next.
The game supports optional story content in the form of Tall Tales, but even these are extras that players can choose to engage with instead of fixed requirements. Whether somebody wants to search for lost pirate legends, race through storms with friends, or engage other crews in high seas combat, the world of Sea of Thieves lets players chase their own instincts.
Elite Dangerous
A Full Galaxy Waiting to Be Explored
- The game simulates the Milky Way Galaxy at a 1:1 scale, giving pilots a small ship and total freedom in deep space.
- Activities like exploration, trading, mining, and combat are chosen by the player, with community actions shaping the future of the galaxy.
For those who find the scale of Earth too small, Elite: Dangerous offers a 1:1 scale simulation of the entire Milky Way Galaxy. With numerous star systems to explore, it is a game designed for the ultimate sci-fi curiosity. There are no missions that take a player by the hand through the universe. Instead, players start with a small starship and as much freedom as the emptiness of space itself.
It’s up to each player to choose what they want to pursue. They can fly toward unexplored regions simply to chart new territory, land on distant planets with atmospheres or no atmosphere at all, trade rare items, mine items for profit, take on bounty hunting or piracy, and even join other players in shaping the community goals that influence the galaxy’s future.
Starbound
Freedom To Explore a Procedurally Generated Universe
- A procedurally generated universe where each planet is different, encouraging exploration through strange environments and hidden dangers.
- Players choose how to engage with the world, from building and crafting to hunting treasures.
At the start of Starbound, a player’s character escapes a destroyed home world and ends up stranded in space with a damaged ship. From that moment, there is essentially no roadmap telling players what they must do next. The galaxies and planets that Starbound makes are procedurally generated, so the game itself creates environments, creatures, and materials in unique ways every time a player visits a place. Because of this, no two planets look exactly alike.
Players are free to beam down to any planet their ship can reach, gather resources, build shelters, craft tools, hunt for treasure, or simply see what lurks in strange forests and barren deserts. The fun in Starbound comes from discovering things for themselves rather than being guided by fixed objectives.
Stardew Valley
Farm Life Has Never Been More Fun
- Farm life simulator.
- A player inherits an old farm and decides how to fill their days by fishing and exploring deep mines.
Stardew Valley may look like a basic farming simulator, but it is actually a deep open world filled with social and environmental mysteries. After inheriting a grandfather's old farm, a player is free to spend their days however they wish. While the game suggests fixing up the farm, it never punishes a person for ignoring the crops to go fishing or to explore the local mines.
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Stardew Valley encourages players to find what matters to them, which could be mastering farming skills, finding special items in mines, collecting every fish, or becoming part of the town’s rhythm, and filling their days with those discoveries.
Animal Crossing
Follows a Real Time Clock for a Relaxing Island Life
- A real-time world with no real objective, allowing players to live daily life at their own pace.
- Exploration comes through seasonal changes, collecting items, decorating spaces, and building relationships.
Animal Crossing is known for being open-ended, so there is no required objective that players must finish before the game ends. Players are free to shape their lives however they choose, exploring the world, engaging in activities, or simply enjoying daily routines without pressure.
One of the coolest aspects of Animal Crossing is that the world runs on an internal clock that matches real time, so day turns into night and seasons roll past just as they would in reality. Within the world, players can fish in ponds, catch bugs on warm afternoons, dig up fossils on sandy beaches, decorate homes and landscapes however they like, and learn new crafting recipes from neighbors.
EVE Online
A Player-Created Universe
- A single shared galaxy where thousands of star systems exist in a persistent sandbox shaped almost entirely by players.
- Exploration, trade, warfare, and politics emerge from player curiosity and decisions.
EVE Online is a massive space game built around a huge shared universe where players shape nearly everything that happens. In this game, a player does not follow a fixed set of missions handed down by the game itself. Instead, people enter a persistent sandbox world called New Eden, made up of thousands of star systems that players can travel between freely.
Players can choose from many activities such as exploration, mining asteroids, trading goods between star systems, building and manufacturing items, or engaging in intense space battles with others. Because all of New Eden’s star systems are connected on a single server, every choice, trade, alliance, or conflict becomes part of the evolving history and economy of the world as a whole. This means that the universe feels active and unpredictable, not guided by scripted quests but by the collective decisions and curiosity of the people within it.
Terraria
Procedurally Generated 2D World Where Players Can Explore, Dig, Fight, and Build
- Terraria is a procedurally generated 2D world filled with underground mysteries, diverse biomes, and unexpected discoveries.
- Players decide how to engage with exploration, combat, building, or crafting.
At first glance, Terraria appears to be a simple 2D building game, but it is actually a massive adventure focused on the mysteries hidden within the environment. When a player starts Terraria, they are placed in a procedurally generated environment, which means the terrain, underground caves, biomes like deserts and forests, and hidden features all come from a world-generation system rather than a fixed map.
The game includes many systems like exploration, building, crafting, combat, and survival, but they are flexible, so players decide how they want to engage with what the world offers. Some players might dig down for rare items that only appear in specific layers, while others spend time exploring wide caverns filled with enemies or searching for floating islands in the sky. Still others devote hours to constructing towns or complex underground bases with the materials they find.
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