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Have you ever thought about the difference between traveling across an open world and exploring one? I'll admit that I hadn't deeply, at least not until A Short Hike creator Adam Robinson-Yu pointed it out.
Robinson-Yu was speaking to Edge magazine, as part of a roundtable interview exploring the state of open world games in issue 413, when he reflected on his hesitance towards the ever-increasing sprawl of virtual worlds. "When I think of an open-world game, I don't inherently think that's a good thing, right?"
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Robinson-Yu contrasts with his own experience of wandering the wilds IRL. "Exploration is the key thing I think about during times when I've been hiking, or when I was a kid exploring the wilderness. You just want to explore, and you want to see cool things. I feel like some open-world games can make it feel like you're not really exploring, you're just traveling."
It's this distinction between exploring and traveling, Robinson-Yu contests, that can be transformative for open world games – particularly in the ways in which they reward players for being inquisitive.
"[Dark Souls] felt like it had depth and richness, because there were always secret corridors to find and there are always places to go. And for me, the feeling of exploration in Dark Souls really got it, because there was also a struggle to get to these places. It's very easy for an RPG to give you rewards. [But] it was rewarding to explore Dark Souls because you're poking around corners, and you'll find a corridor, and that leads you to a whole new area."
You may not know it from a quick glance, but A Short Hike does inherently understand the strength in asking players to explore. Like Zelda: Breath of the Wild before it, it's a game that delights in its freedom; and like Dark Souls, there's a richness in the way A Short Hike presents its world as a tapestry rather than patchwork biomes. Still, Robinson-Yu is keenly aware that grappling with this style is tricky – particularly as we begin to consider how sprawling AAA open-world games are becoming.
"A sense of exploration is difficult to create in games. Real life is so rich and interesting… You can find a cool-looking rock on the beach, and that's a neat thing in real life. In a video game, you pass over a thousand prefab rocks. There's only so much that you can do. I want to reward players for exploring. But does that make [exploring] less meaningful if I'm trying to reward them? And so the rewards that I like to think of are things that are just something to do, something to see – something unique, like a vibe. So it's about finding stuff like that to put in your world."
I don't know about you, but vibe-based exploration is certainly a direction I hope more open-world games follow in the future. There's always going to be room in the genre for the titans of distraction – the likes of Assassin's Creed Shadows and Death Stranding 2, where traveling between waypoints is the name of the game. But there's also space for adventures with quieter conditions for progression.
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, with its boundless secrets to uncover. The likes of Elden Ring, with its seemingly limitless frontier to explore. A Short Hike, with its simple task of scaling a mountaintop. There is, Robinson-Yu says, magic in the mystery. "For me, when you miss things in games, or you've heard about things that you've missed, I have this feeling that it's OK to have content in the game that people will never see, because some people will and some people won't."
"You'll either read about it or you will stumble upon something yourself that feels rare. You'll be like, 'Oh, I could have missed this! The game designer could have easily drawn more attention to this. But they didn't, and that made finding it special."
Take some time to explore a new virtual world with one of our picks of the best open world games to play in 2025.
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