Summary
- Open-world games often prioritize exploration over main story campaigns.
- Game worlds can be exhausting if filled with too many collectibles and side activities.
- Stamina meters, vast maps, and numerous collectibles can make exploration challenging and tiring.
Open-world games have wowed players with increasingly vast worlds where they could explore every nook and cranny, though whether they had anything worth finding was another matter. Not every street corner has a key collectible in it, nor every mountain a horde of gold or the like. Sometimes, it’s just a piece of scenery.
It’s a common bugbear of the genre, where it feels like the tame spacing out random activities, items, etc., between wide spaces of nothingness, rather than making the most out of their space. But whether the game’s worlds are as wide as the horizon, or are just a chunk of a city, there are plenty of ways for open-world games to make exploration exhausting.
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These open-world games do offer a main story campaign to complete, but their settings are so immersive that exploration almost always takes priority.
8 Dying Light 2: Stay Human
Left For Dead By the Stamina Meter
Dying Light 2 Stay Human
- Released
- February 4, 2022
WHERE TO PLAY
- Developer(s)
- Techland
- Franchise
- Dying Light
- Platform(s)
- Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5
- OpenCritic Rating
- Strong
Dying Light 2: Stay Human takes the term literally by making movement exhausting. Aiden can use his parkour skills to climb, run, leap, use grappling hooks, paraglide, and more to get around the infected zombies in the city of Villedor. But they’re all tied to a stamina meter, so if Aiden gets tired with the undead on his tail, he’s going to have a tough time escaping.
If anything, some players found he got tired too quickly, as melee combat and 100-meter sprints took a lot out of him too. Granted, that could simply be a skill issue as getting the hang of the stamina meter takes some practice. But even skilled players will take a while to find everything in Villedor — especially when night falls, as that makes going anywhere beyond the rooftops a riskier endeavor.
7 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Will Leave Link Breathing Heavily
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Released
- March 3, 2017
WHERE TO PLAY
- Developer(s)
- Nintendo EPD
- Franchise
- The Legend of Zelda
- Platform(s)
- Nintendo Wii U, Switch
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
This entry could also apply to Tears of the Kingdom, as it uses the same Hyrule as Breath of the Wild. But its sequel threw in the nifty Autobuild ability where, with time and the right parts, players can make vehicles that could help them travel across the map quickly. In BotW, they only have Epona and whatever animal they can tame to become their steed, and some are way better than others.
The game does have some mercy, as it has a fast travel system, but the fast-travel points do require unlocking. This means players still need to hoof it around Hyrule in the early goings, and Link’s tied down with a stamina bar and breakable weapons. So, they’ll have to plot their routes carefully until they can get the right upgrades. No wonder some classic fans miss the old Ocarina of Time formula.
6 Yakuza 5
The Biggest Game in the Series is the Most Tiring
Yakuza 5
- Released
- December 8, 2015
WHERE TO PLAY
Compared to most other open-world games, the Yakuza/LAD maps are pretty small. Even if they didn’t have taxis to act as fast travel, it’s not usually too testing to dash from one end of Kamurochō to the other. But then Yakuza 5 came along and decided to live up to its number by offering five playable characters and five different cities, each with their own unique collectibles, substories, and side activities.
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Driving a taxi around Fukuoka with Kiryu is simple enough. But hunting animals and treasure map pieces with Saejima is taxing, and doing dance battles and pop star functions with Haruka really pushed it. That's putting aside Akiyama's clean-up and Shinada's baseball games. By the time they’ve finally got all five protagonists into Kamurochō, players might not want to see another shining collectible, J-Pop concert, or yakuza grunt ever again.
5 Cyberpunk 2077
Exploring the City and its Citizens
Cyberpunk 2077
- Released
- December 10, 2020
WHERE TO PLAY
- Developer(s)
- CD Projekt Red
- Franchise
- Cyberpunk
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch 2, PC
- OpenCritic Rating
- Strong
Yakuza 5 at least split its different activities and locations into different character campaigns. With Cyberpunk 2077, players have reported feeling overwhelmed as its combat can feel chaotic, and navigating V’s skill tree can feel as daunting as getting through Night City itself. And Night City offers a ton of stuff for players to do.
If they’re not grabbing iconic weapons, cyberware, quickhacks, daemons, etc., players are doing gigs for side characters like Regina or Mr Hands, among others. That’s not to mention the side quests and romances, which can require multiple playthroughs with different Vs to achieve different aims, as certain characters are only attracted to certain genders and/or body types. Clearly, Night City is easier to explore than its social links.
4 Red Dead Redemption 2
The Wild West at a Mild Pace
Red Dead Redemption 2
- Released
- October 26, 2018
WHERE TO PLAY
Rockstar wanted to make Red Dead Redemption 2 bigger than its predecessor, and they succeeded. By combining multiple game studios to work across six years with a near $540 million budget, they created five states to ride across, and a new story following Arthur Morgan as he and his gang see the Wild West get tamed by modernization. Though by the end, some players were likely hoping modernization could come faster.
Going from state to state on a single horse can feel slow, no matter how pretty the vistas are. Even if the player's nag is the next coming of Red Hare, they can’t gallop at full pace everywhere, as their horse has its own stamina meter. Ride it too hard, take a bad tumble, or run into trouble, and it could die, leaving Morgan to hoof it on his own to the nearest stable, camp, or stagecoach for a fresh ride.
3 Elden Ring
Making Players Feel Older
Elden Ring
- Released
- February 25, 2022
WHERE TO PLAY
- Developer(s)
- From Software
- Platform(s)
- PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
Elden Ring is Soulsborne gameplay in an open-world setting. Most people can probably guess why roaming its eerily pretty yet equally foreboding lands can be tiring. It’s hard by default and requires getting used to its style of combat to get ahead, or players will pay hard for their mistakes. And that's \on top of quests and collectibles that are spread far and wide across its different maps.
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That said, some of those maps offer more to do than others. On the one hand, some people might find this a welcome addition after going through Ubisoft’s over-the-top collect-a-thons. But on the other hand, they can make certain side quests feel longer, as they're making players track and backtrack through the same settings and fighting off the same foes to exchange one item or another.
2 Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
The Dark Age of Item Collecting
Assassin's Creed Valhalla
- Released
- November 10, 2020
WHERE TO PLAY
- Developer(s)
- Ubisoft
- Franchise
- Assassin's Creed
- Platform(s)
- Stadia, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
- OpenCritic Rating
- Strong
Speaking of Ubisoft collect-a-thons, the Assassin’s Creed games have increasingly been filled with more items to collect across their growing maps. Any woes players in the past might have had about tracking down feathers in Assassin’s Creed 2 feel like chicken feed when Assassin’s Creed Valhalla makes them track down chests across Viking England and Norway.
If players had all the DLC, they’d have a total of 782 collectibles to track down across those two maps and Vinland, Ireland, France, the Isle of Skye, and fictional locations like Asgard, Jotunheim and Svartalfheim. Even without the DLC, they’d still be scouring England’s shires for mysteries, wealth, and side quests dotted about the map. It's enough to make players forget about the side content and race through the main story instead to get it over with.
1 Starfield
When Warp Speed Feels Like a Snail's Pace
Starfield
- Released
- September 6, 2023
WHERE TO PLAY
- Developer(s)
- Bethesda
- Platform(s)
- PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
Starfield being at the top here doesn’t mean it’s the best of the most exhausting open-world games. Its reviews saw it get reasonable ratings, though it struggled to gain much clout with players. But it is potentially the most exhausting open-world game around as it offers 1,000 planets to explore across a hundred different star systems.
There are bigger maps out there, with the old alien-making game Spore being surprisingly gargantuan in scale, but making monstrosities took precedent over exploration there. Starfield encourages exploration, completing side quests, all the standard open-world deals, but it feels more Sisyphean here. It leaves players racing across space to explore its nooks and crannies, just to tick that completion metric up by a single percentage or so.
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