Good games for discovery/exploration

[Loony BoB]

Ever played a Civ game and got to that point that you have explored every tile on the planet, and suddenly found the rest of the game a little... lacking? Well, that's what I'm like, anyway. If there's one part of gaming that I adore, it's exploring. Be it in Final Fantasy VIII, roaming around the planet, or Freelancer exploring a galaxy, I thrive on going places I've never been before. What's a really good game for this sort of thing - a game where there is almost endless exploration to be done, and preferrably not just the same-old throughout the lot of it (I found Oblivion, while huge, had little in the way of variety in it's scenery)?

[Roto13]

There's always mumorpuguhs

[blackmage_nuke]

Or explore the real world. It has higher bit depth and a better screen resolution too.

[KentaRawr!]

Real life actually sounds like a good thing for exploration. But, then again, what happens when you find IT a little lacking?

Uh-oh.

[Shoeberto]

That's really a tough thing to find, because to have a large amount of exploration without repetition in the design is just, well, hard for developers to pull off. Most of the time games with big environment have them mostly generated by a program then have little tweaks here and there by the artist. MMOs do tend to have a lot of unique towns and the like, though you have to travel through a lot of boring sameness to get there.

I guess I would recommend any of the 3D Grand Theft Autos or World of Warcraft.

[Dreddz]

I think Knytt is what your looking for.

[Loony BoB]

Or explore the real world. It has higher bit depth and a better screen resolution too.

Too expensive to get the expansion packs.

[KentaRawr!]

Adventure games such as the Zelda Series have very unique areas, but the problem is, it's not completely non-linear exploration, and you get stuck in non-explorative areas for a while. >_>

[Madame Adequate]

I think Knytt is what your looking for.

I think Knytt is what he's looking for.

[Roto13]

I don't think Knytt is what he's looking for. xP

Knytt is all about exploration, but it's a very short game. Still, I think everyone should play Knytt at some point in their lives.

Actually, I guess Knytt Stories would help a lot with that issue, with the hundreds of user-created levels to explore.

Knytt Experiment consists pretty much entirely of exploring user created levels (and absolutely nothing else), but it's mysteriously missing from Nifflas' site now. It seems to have been abandoned.

[Madame Adequate]

True in terms of time consumed, but in terms of actually exploring things? Knytt's hard to beat.

Morrowind, I can't recall if you've ever said you played it or not - it's like Oblivion, only engaging and interesting.

But yeah mumorpuguhs are a good bet here, expensive they may be, but also expansive.

[KentaRawr!]

FFXI has pretty great areas for exploring, but the main problem is how much time it takes to not die.

[Shoeberto]

Adventure games such as the Zelda Series have very unique areas, but the problem is, it's not completely non-linear exploration, and you get stuck in non-explorative areas for a while. >_>

Twilight Princess was pretty great for exploration. It revolves a lot around new areas basically until you're at the very end of the game. There's a very grand sense of scale to it. Same could be said for Wind Waker, though there's some serious tedium involved in getting from place to place. It's probably moot though since I don't think you have a Wii or Gamecube requisite for playing them.

[Larahl]

I know you didn't like Oblivion, but the only game that I ever played (except for Knytt) that really had the all exploration thing done so well is Morrowind.

[JKTrix]

Dragon Quest 8