Following the Little Dotted Line | Game Maker's Toolkit

GTA 4 is really different without GPS, you just notice all the beautiful world around.

I think part of the trouble in the Witcher 3 is that it's just so big. White Orchard is small compared to later parts of the game, and it's far easier to tell where you are without waypoints. Then you get dropped into the massive swamps and marches that make up Velen and you're completely turned around, God forbid you go off road

World of Warcraft used to be like that

GR Breakpoint did something similar to this with its immersive mode

Not making a point to not change it, but other witchers and most specially Geralt (yeah, he has amnesia, but excluding this) can remember line by line a text they read several decades ago, and they are known to be really good detectives and rangers, and specially Geralt.
So it makes total narrative sense to me that the secrets are somewhat obvious to him and that he knows exactly his paths, for me it doesn't really make sense for a character like him to get lost, though I agree that great experiences can come from surprises in the world and more freedom of exploration.

Not quite the same thing, but a similar concept is displayed in the original Resident Evils. They tell you almost nothing and just leave you to find and figure out where to go, how to open certain doors, unlock safes, where to find tools and where to use them, all of that good stuff. The original RE2 is by far one of my favourite games of all time.

Papyrus puzzles from origins is really satisfying.

Morrowind doesn’t have anything that crazy interesting to find

Well for people who tend to focus on exploration figuring out the map by themselves may be fun. But for me who is a player who tend to focus more on actually completing the game without any disturbance things like this would be annoying soon. Maybe it's fun for like 3 or 5 times doing this but for the whole gameplay? When will i finish the game? I still have a lot of games on my list to play.
If i want to explore I'll explore. With or without the mini map and guiding lines

I've had an idea for a game rolling around in my head where the difficulty level chosen at the beginning of the game would affect a lot of these things. It was right around the time that zombie apocalypse media started taking over, so I thought it up around the idea of survivors immediately following the major outbreak(I tired quickly of the "woke up in the hospital after SHTF" trope). On the easiest level of difficulty, your character is a former special forces soldier, which gives you things like better physical fitness(faster/stronger/more stamina), more useful weapons and related skills(faster reloads, better accuracy), and position-tracking GPS. On the highest difficulty, the player is represented by a senior citizen or a parent trying to get their young child to safety. Their story would begin in a more densely populated urban setting, they wouldn't be able to move as fast or carry as much, they wouldn't start with access to the same weapons or have the same degree of proficiency with them, and their navigation would be restricted to hand-drawn maps that didn't show the player's location, and/or weren't as accurate. The idea was to tell the same story of a zombie apocalypse, but from the perspectives of three or four different characters, with the quests and goals changed around to reflect the different priorities of each. That way it can be engaging to players who want/need all the UI amenities, whereas those seeking more of a challenge could play essentially a stripped down version, where everything – not just combat – was more of a challenge. Would anyone reading this play something like that?

I understand where you're coming from but I can't say I personally agree with this assessment. It reminds me a bit of the whole "should a game have fast travel or not" argument? Removing it is more immersive and allows you to smell the roses, but as a game increases in scale it leads to a whole host of frustrations. I really enjoyed the mini-map in the Witcher and while I might have enjoyed smelling the roses for the first 30minutes, the constant searching for locations using in-game landmarks would eventually have become an annoyance. I've experienced it a few times in other games and I am not a fan. A very well put together video, though, and it's nice to see that quite a lot of people agree with you.

That's why I hated Kingdom Come hardcore at first, now I like it. Especially treasure hunting is more fun there

So very true. Games have become very casualised and that has taken away from the experience mostly because "WAHHHHHHHHH WAHHHHHHHHHHHHH TOO MUCH EFFORT REQUIREDDDDD". Basically, whiny cry babies with no patience and a history of games handing out instant gratification has melted the minds of people and now an entire generation of games has been ruined. As much as I enjoyed The Witcher 3, that dot shit and the special senses view ruined the shit out of it.

You see, they tried to do that in assassin origins, as a very position in the game can me remembered. But they're stucked with the idea of absolute accessibility. Every idiot must be able to complète it easily. So they threw it off. :/

2:02 Dishonored just in case you were wondering

THANK YOU dude, all I've seen on YouTube so far about The Witcher 3 is praise, which baffles me because the game has almost no gameplay. The fight system is so boring and everything else is all cutscenes. Gwent was the best part, but then they ruined it by trying to turn it into an eSport and changing everything about it

I admit focusing on navigation and stuff makes me not fully take in any game world. I noticed that with Horizon Zero Dawn. But, who do u think we are? professional gamers? We have jobs and kids and only an hour every night. We need way markers.

This is the reason I never fast travel in skyrim

You should play kingdom come: deliverance on hardcore mode
No markers on the map
No compass
No health bar
No stamina bar
And the game is designed to be played like that

I agree with almost everything, but I gotta say: Goddess Cubes are a shitty waste of time. Delaying gratification while making us play a tricky section or having engage our brains to piece together clues is fine. But the Goddess cubes just withhold your reward until you can be bothered to go back to the sky world, and fly around for 15 minutes sweeping up the half a dozen goddess cube chests you unlocked since your last sweep. You won't even know, nor care, which cube opened which chest.

And that sky world has exactly the problem you describe here: There is fuck all reason to explore all the tiny islands. Just go to the ones the map tell you have an unlocked goddess cube chest, and ignore all the others until the map tells you there's something to do.