One of the issues I have with my everyday life is that I am a pretty solitary person and I like to be alone sometimes.  Not that I dislike being around people in general--I have to have a few to hang out with to remain sane, like most humans--but a frequent occurrence is wanting to feel alone when I am not.  Furthermore, I really like nature, but I live in a town without lots of it to offer, with the nearest suitably natural-looking park about a 20 minute drive from here.  Getting that alone feeling can be tough.

Oh wait, nope.  I have games for that.  Maybe it is not exactly the same, but it really comes through for me sometimes.

Before I start talking about the games with the serious real estate, let me describe what I mean about exploration, and why that is not always necessary.  What I mean when I talk about exploration in video games is that the environment has features that encourage investigation.  That may be items or resources, all the way up to land forms and planets.  It depends on the scale of the game, and the level of detail that the developers have put into the game (technical limitations considered).

Kinda wish I could talk about the mystery genre for this, because they usually do this quite a bit.  You have to hunt down the clues to solve the mystery, obviously.  So do a lot of point-and-click-type games, though those are not really my speed, either.  Something more like an RPG or a space sim... that suits me better.

When it comes to RPGs, I am a fan of the Elder Scrolls series.  Not just Skyrim, which is popular lately for its good graphics and coming on Steam.  I actually started with Morrowind (the third game in the main series).  It took some getting used to--the beginning of the game can be tough, especially the first few times--but ultimately, there were a few things that stood out to me and still do.  For its time, it is a huge game.  Just because you have the world map, and your position on it, does not mean you can find your way to the nearest town to take a break when the cliff racers make you want to kick babies.  There were also numerous unique dungeons to explore, some with pretty extraordinary loot.  Even in the towns, there was quite a bit of detail to check out, with clutter sitting around on practically every surface and containers holding things you might want to steal.  Oh, and this was before Oblivion introduced fast travel and quest markers, so you had a lot of legwork to do, forcing you to feel the vastness that was Vvardenfell.

You might wonder why that legwork did not push me away from Morrowind.  Well, truth is, there is no way to make a game feel big like making you do some walking.  Morrowind did have a few fast travel options, but they made sense, at least in the context of the world (and paying people to take you places on a boat is even pretty sensible in our world).  But they were limited.  I mean, I doubt you could coax the driver of a Greyhound bus to take you to some random farm a hundred miles off their route because you have to kill a guy.  You might have the cops called on you, too.  After all, random wilderness is often scarier in games than in real life, even on a good day, especially since our fantasy counterpart Greyhound driver is actually on an uncovered wagon or somesuch without half an inch of metal and glass protecting him from marauding grizzly bears or zombies.

The solution to this, by the way, was an excellent touch for immersion; the NPCs would give you directions, complete with roads, landmarks, and whatever else they thought was necessary for you to get there.  Neat.  If you did not pay attention, or forgot about the journal, you might have issues, and Morrowind was a pretty unforgiving game in some ways.

Enough about Morrowind for now, though.  It is hardly the only game that I use to sate my wanderlust.  What about the sci-fi side of me?  Lots of space sim-type games also have big worlds to explore, and where fantasy games can make you feel more one with nature, sci-fi games can make you feel completely independent of all that.

One of the best series in that regard, in my opinion, is StarWraith's Evochron series.  Most people have no semblance of how ridiculously huge space is, but even with easy FTL travel, Evochron does it some justice.  There are planets and space stations to land at as well as enemies to fight and trade to conduct.  It has quite a few other features I like, of course--no game I intend to mention in my posts has only one thing going for it--including customizing your spaceship to your needs and Newtonian physics that make combat different from other space sims.  It also has a somewhat relaxing soundtrack that can leave you in awe of the pretty starfields in your viewport.

Now, when I mentioned "easy FTL travel" in the previous paragraph, I mean all you need to do is set your coordinates by clicking where you want to go on the map, and hit F2.  As long as you have enough energy, you make the jump.  Simple as that.  So why does Evochron feel so big?  Aside from having a limited range with your drive (i.e. you cannot just jump across the entire map in one go, and sometimes getting around within systems takes multiple jumps), you can only get so close to structures and planets without... you know... running into them and exploding.  Which is bad.  Planets, in particular, take a little while to land on, because the atmosphere will destroy you if you come out of a jump in it.  They also take a long time to fly around, and going between planets without jumping takes a really, really long time.  Trust me, you put some miles on that jump drive.

Without the jump gates (which you can use to cover a lot of distance in a short time, taking you only to predetermined places), it takes upwards of half an hour to get between relatively close-together systems, even constantly jumping to the limit of your jump drive, and assuming that you have enough fuel to get there in such a way.  Like I said, there are Newtonian physics, so you could just accelerate to a really fast speed and drift to your destination, but be prepared to leave the computer on for a few days if you want to get any farther than the next planet.  When I said it is a big game, I am not kidding, and much of it is empty space, leaving the stars as your only companions.

Though those are a couple of my favorite games for exploring, there are plenty of others that have an exploration component.  For example, one of the things I enjoyed most about Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker was randomly sailing around to different islands in the middle of the sea.  I also really like early stages of a lot of 4X-type strategy games, such as the Civilization series or Sins of a Solar Empire, generally involving exploring the region to discover resources and expand.  Most things with randomly-determined world maps are also of interest to me, as it adds replayability as a bonus.

Now, one thing I should mention is that not all games with a big world map really involve much exploring.  If all of the locations on the map are directly tied to the story, the world feels a little more closed.  Likewise, if the map has no unique features to distinguish different regions, there is little point to exploring; if you have seen one part of the map, you have seen it all.  In a game that requires real exploring, the world should be engaging, even if it is not consequential to the story.  If a game has real estate, so to speak, it ought to be filled with things that make it worth visiting.

So, that is about what I have to say about exploration in games.  It is a thing I really love, and most games that involve it get pretty high places on my favorites list.  Have to get some alone time somehow, after all.