I feel like Subnautica was such a good exploration game that I don't know if anything else will ever really compare.
Actually, from what I watched of my partner playing Breath of the Wild, that looked pretty dang solid too.
The big thing that both of these had was the sensation that if you just picked a direction and started moving, you'd run into *something* new and interesting.
@starkatt oh! Morrowind is pretty good for that too
@Felthry Minecraft exploration is like 3/4th of the way there for me, but that last fourth is pretty important. The problem is it was hard to try and collect resources in any sort of non-local or directed way.
@Felthry Minecraft is in the category of "games I really wanted to like, but fell flat"
@starkatt we've found it's quite enjoyable if you add a ridiculous amount of mods
@Felthry yeah that makes sense but the base game didn't tease me enough that figuring out a mod stack felt worth the effort.
I guess what I really wanted was actual industrial supply chains and more localized resources. Which I'm aware that mods do, but eh.
I should maybe pick up Factorio though.
@starkatt Factorio is enjoyable. Add Bob's mods and you have either a real time sink or frustration machine
@Felthry lol I watched a let's play of Factorio with the Pyanodon mod set. That was absurd. Literally dozen of different kinds of fluids. The diamond refining process alone was like eight steps long with three feedback loops.
@starkatt we've never tried that one! The current mods for that sort of thing are Bob's and Angel's, which are intercompatible so you see people talking about Angelbobs a lot
@Felthry sidebar, I am absolutely in love with the term "low-density structures" for material components of rocket construction.
@Felthry it's both perfectly accurate and fits the voice of the game in a way the more obvious "rocket parts" would not.
@Felthry Ironically enough, the actual *mining* was boring as fuck since ores were randomly distributed, not localized into followable veins or anything. So the efficient mining was just algorithmic volume-removal.
@starkatt there are mods for that too!
@starkatt Anyway, back to the original topic, if you want a game where you can just pick a direction and find something, we have to recommend Morrowind
@Felthry AHHHH morrowind was so dang good when I played it as a teenager.
@starkatt it's still so dang good today! Borderline one-of-the-best-games-ever material. Would definitely be such if not for the clunky interface.
@starkatt Subnautica was designed, most exploration games aren't. It shows.
@Doephin yeah being not procedural was a big part of why it succeeds.
@starkatt minecraft has a bit of that, especially if you add some worldgen mods, but it's not the same thing