Games that are purely about exploration

[Kelron]

I haven't played many games that are solely about exploration, but some of my favourite games have exploration as a driving force.

There's Love, which I'm sure many people here are familiar with from RPS coverage. A small scale MMO set in a procedurally generated world that is constantly rebuilding itself, inhabited by potentially hostile AI tribes.

Lesser known is Shores of Hazeron, an incredibly ambitious space MMO that's like Spore grown up (and regressed 15 years graphically). You design your species, build up Sim City-style and produce higher tech goods until you're ready for your first space launch. Jetting off from your planet (and probably crashing a few times) in a chemical rocket, you can set up a moon colony to mine materials for proper spacecraft construction. You then design your own ship (tile by tile, very flexible) and begin exploring your solar system and the gigantic galaxy. You can chart the wormhole network, which can take you to distant space quickly, or you could construct a giant colony ship and manually set a course for other stars in the sky.

There's a hell of a lot more to it than exploration, but it all hangs together on the exploration. You want to find more resources to build bigger and better ships. You want to find other civilisations to invade or trade with. Maybe you want to settle as many planets as you can, or find one of the elusive ringworlds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn7BRf7XSsU.

[Wizardry]

Journey does look awesome, but I think those dudes are part owned by Sony, so there will never be a PC release.

@Wizardry: well I don't want to lock it down to *just* movement, but I am thinking games that you can get a kick out of exploring the world and see what is out there, rather than being funnelled and channelled and controlled in terms of how you play. No linear game is truly exploration based, for example.

In that case, Ultima VII has more stuff per square metre than any other game I've played. It's just full of content to find while being completely open world. I can't think of a more fun exploration game than Ultima VII. You can find to-scale renders of the entire game world here, though the full image is 84mb. You can download each quadrant of the game world for ~25mb per image.

[squirrel]

Afrika for Playstation 3. Sadly no PC version though.

Very rare genre I guess, I am also interested in. I may have entered my middle age that I start to be more keen in documentaries about exploration. Look forward to a good safari simulation that would be published for PC.

[Skalpadda]

Shamus Young is making a thing that might be of interest to explorers. Supposedly it's going to be a game eventually, but for now it's just a program that procedurally generates a (very big) world. Worth taking a look at, and reading about the development process is fascinating.

[agentorange]

The Path, and most other Tale of Tales games are comprised mostly of exploration.

[Lambchops]

Oh, I forgot Aquaria, but I've only played a little of it, so I don't know if it gets very fight-y later on.

It has plenty of boss battles and areas which (I found at least) that you couldn't really progress through safely without having upgraded your abilities.

It's definitely exploration heavy, but not purely exploration.

[dyst]

The Path, and most other Tale of Tales games are comprised mostly of exploration.

but they're also unbelievably pretentious to the point where I can physically no longer play them.

[Spacewalk]

There's Proteus that you wrote about on the front page Jim if I'm remembering correctly.

[mrpier]

Excel (97?) "Flight Simulator", I don't think there was anything to do in it except fly around the landscape :-)

[Megagun]

Only one that comes to mind right now is Noctis.

Yes, Noctis is one of the few games that is purely about exploration, without having anything that's not exploration. The game never ends, and there are no goals other than exploration and writing about the things you've explored.

(Disclaimer: I was one of the two main developers of the Noctis IV CE mod, and have also been one of the two main developers of the Noctis IV Plus modification that backported popular features from CE into a more vanilla, bug-free version of Noctis IV)

Noctis IV has a fully procedurally generated universe. 70 billion stars, each containing up to 128 planets and moons (if I recall correctly; it's been a while). There's planets containing life, planets that resemble Mars, planets that resemble Venus, gas giants, planets resembling Io (one of Jupiter's moons, Noctis IV CE only), and various types of rocky/icy no-atmosphere worlds. Best of all, all of this is rendered in an amazing screen resolution of 320x200. :)

Every planet and star you find can be named and commented upon through a console aboard your ship. Once you're done, you can compile a list of changes and send a file to the Starmap maintainer to get your comments included in a next release of the Starmap. The current starmap can be browsed over at the GOESXNET website. Do search for Felysia and Suricrasia to read some of the notes people have written over the past few years.

Noctis has notoriously difficult controls. For one, there's no WASD+mouse. Instead, you just use the mouse to move, and hold the right mouse button to look up and down. Furthermore, most of your ship controls are located within the ship itself. You'll have to walk over to the main console and (somewhat) push a button, in order to move towards a star. Noctis IV CE and Noctis IV Plus somewhat improve upon this, luckily.

Noctis is also notoriously difficult to start up. It's a DOS game, and the recent improvements in technology have made it nearly impossible to play on a modern Windows 7 system. DosBOX is just a bit too slow.

There are currently two ways to play Noctis effectively and painlessly on a modern PC: VNoctis, a virtualized environment for Virtualbox, and The Noctis USB Bootdisk. VNoctis should work nicely with vanilla Noctis IV and Noctis IV Plus (as long as you have hardware virtualization acceleration; AMD CPUs usually have them, with Intel it's unfortunately a shot in the dark). The USB bootdisk should work well with Noctis IV CE, too, but it has the significant disadvantage that you can't open up a webbrowser to read the manual as you're playing. :)

Here is a neat Youtube video showing off some random scenes.

[squirrel]

Oh, since you guys count the flight sim in, you shouldn't miss the infamous X-Plane. The X-Plane 9 has kind of stupid advertising that it has 60GB data. What the hell why would one desire larger disk space being occupied?

[Veracity]

The Path is the only thing I've played I can dredge up that more or less qualifies.

I don't think Metroidvanias or Zelda clones work. They have fail states and goals, right? Anyway, a bit of sequence breaking aside, I've never been clear at what point "exploration" becomes dominant enough to stop a game being a stabby platformer or action-RPG, or some such. The progression gating in most of these things is just blue, yellow and red keys made a little less blatant and requiring a bit more attention.

[vinraith]

Oh, I forgot Aquaria, but I've only played a little of it, so I don't know if it gets very fight-y later on.

Sadly yes, it does. Those first 30 minutes or so when it appears to be a pure exploration and puzzle solving game had me so excited, too.

[Mihkel]

I don't know about pure exploration games or something like that but I always liked all sorts of space games alot (Homeworld, Freespace, Freelancer, X series) and this Infinity: Quest for Earth seems to have the exploration on a very big scale.

[Icarus]

Sadly yes, it does. Those first 30 minutes or so when it appears to be a pure exploration and puzzle solving game had me so excited, too.

*buys a ticket for a ride on the what-a-shame train*

[J-snukk]

Needs more star trek-esque exploration games, Star Quest Online would have promise if the devs weren't trolls (oh think the devs have actually removed themselves from the project though) and it was free to play (doesn't have enough players). Also Shores of Hazeron is good, but the lag is really, really bad.

[Cooper]

Knytt Stories, definitely.

Aquaria gets really combat-finicky later on. I gave up aboutb half way through. might try again now I have a pad.

And another shout for Noctis. Amazing thing that is, even if it looks pretty dated now.

[J Arcane]

Starflight and Starflight II are my first thoughts for this type of thing, though I personally prefer the Genesis version for the better visuals.

The Uncharted Waters series is pure classical exploration. It's possible to get into combat but it's so completely rare that I think I only ever fought a ship once in the whole time I played those games. They're on PC too, and Mac I think for the first one, though I don't recall much about the quality of the ports.

I personally pretty much played San Andreas solely for the exploration. I can't stand the stories in GTA games, the missions are always awful and frustrating, so I'd just download a completed save and drive around exploring and looking for cool stuff to jump off of.

[sk2k]

Hmm, i remember Below the Root from the C64 era. I LOVED and played it to death.

http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=255

[Maykael]

Minecraft on Easy? I'll confess I haven't played that much of the game.. I've been waiting for the Adventure Update. But, from what I remember on Easy there was no combat and you can easily ignore the crafting and just go wandering about. I hope the adventure update is not centered only on combat, but also on some sightseeing of sorts.

Also, Jonathan Blow's The Witness seems to be centered on exploration and puzzles, but it's still in development.

There are truly to few games that emphasize exploration.