10 Open World Game Tropes We NEVER Want To See Again
4. Unclear On-Screen Navigation
Arguably the main draw of open-world games is the ability to get lost in the landscape and do whatever you want. Naturally, that can involve charting a unique path to a mission or mucking around for hours and potentially coming across new secrets, missions, and random weird happenings.
In other words, half of the fun is the freedom to meander around town and explore without stipulations about where you should be heading. That’s why there’s a sizable portion of the online gaming sphere who feel that waypoints, quest markers, and the like are counterintuitive to the experience and diminish players' enjoyment.
What’s more egregious is when those things are displayed via imperceptible on-screen navigation that leads players to wander aimlessly and annoyed as they figure out where to go and/or what to do.
Usually, this is indicated by a small dot that too rarely makes it clear where exactly the character needs to go once they’re in the general vicinity of the objective.
Should they go upstairs or downstairs? Is the item they’re looking for buried beneath rubble? It can be a fool’s errand trying to guess, and the tiny arrows that show up alongside the indictor aren’t much help.