How to Get Into Open World Games

Open world games are the most inviting genre to look at and the most intimidating to actually begin. You boot up something like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring, step out of the opening area, and the horizon unrolls in every direction with no clear instruction on where to walk first. For a newcomer, that freedom lands as pressure rather than possibility. The good news is that getting comfortable in these sprawling worlds is a learnable skill, and the habits that make them click are nothing like the ones that serve you in a linear shooter or a tight platformer.

Why the scale overwhelms at first

The early panic almost always traces back to a single instinct carried over from smaller games: the urge to finish. In a six-hour story campaign, you can realistically see everything, so leaving a side path unexplored feels like a mistake. Transplant that mindset into a seventy-hour map crammed with icons and it curdles into dread. Red Dead Redemption 2 alone holds hundreds of discrete encounters, and nobody experiences all of them. Accepting that you will leave content behind is not giving up, it is the price of admission. Once you stop treating the map as a checklist, the same density that felt suffocating starts to feel generous.

Start with a world that respects your time

Your first open world game matters more than most people admit, because a badly chosen entry point can sour you on the whole genre. Avoid the bloated, icon-vomit designs for now and pick something with a strong sense of direction underneath the freedom. The Witcher 3 is a popular first pick precisely because its side quests are written like short stories rather than busywork, so wandering feels rewarded instead of padded. If you want to understand how to weigh one of these sprawling purchases before you commit, our guide on choosing your next game to play covers the time-versus-payoff math in detail. And when the big worlds leave you drained and you only have twenty minutes, a quick round at a lighter games hub like ankertoto can reset your appetite before you dive back in. The point is to vary the pace so the genre stays a pleasure and never becomes a second job.

Ignore the map markers for a while

Here is the advice that runs against the grain: for your first several hours, stop clearing the map. The conventional wisdom says to sweep each region systematically, towers first, then every question mark, before you move on. That approach turns a living world into a spreadsheet and burns players out faster than anything else. Breath of the Wild was deliberately built to reward the opposite impulse, following whatever catches your eye on the horizon rather than the nearest objective dot. Walk toward the strange rock formation because it looks interesting, not because an icon told you to. The map markers will still be there later, and the memories you make chasing curiosity are the ones that keep you coming back.

Treat the main quest as a thread, not a leash

A reliable rhythm for staying oriented without feeling railroaded is to use the critical path as a loose anchor. Play a chunk of the main story until it drops you in a new region, then let yourself drift and explore that area organically before picking the thread back up. This keeps you progressing through the authored high points, the set pieces and boss fights the designers labored over, while still leaving room for the unscripted detours that define the genre. It also solves the common trap of over-leveling in one zone until the story becomes trivial, or wandering so far off that you forget the plot entirely. The main quest is a rope you can hold when you feel lost, not a track you are forced to ride.

Build a personal pace

Pacing yourself is the quiet discipline that separates players who adore open worlds from those who bounce off them. Decide before a session roughly what you want from it, maybe one story mission and a bit of free exploration, and give yourself permission to stop there. These games are engineered to blur the hours, and that is wonderful on a free weekend and miserable on a work night. Setting a soft intention protects the hobby from itself. If a growing pile of unfinished worlds is starting to weigh on you, the same mindset we describe in our piece on beating the backlog of games you own applies directly here.

Common questions from players

How long should I give an open world game before deciding it is not for me? Give it a genuine three to four hours rather than the usual twenty minutes, because these games open slowly by design and the systems that make them sing rarely reveal themselves in the tutorial. The first town, the first real choice, the first time the map stops holding your hand, that is where the genre actually begins. Judging one by its opening is like judging a novel by its copyright page.

Do I need to play every side quest to enjoy the story? Not at all, and trying to will almost certainly wear you down. Side content in the best of these games is optional texture, there to be sampled according to your taste, not consumed wholesale. Follow the threads that sound appealing from their descriptions and skip the fetch errands that read like chores. A curated path through the side content is far more satisfying than a complete but exhausted one.

Which open world game is the easiest to get into for a total beginner? Most people point to Breath of the Wild or The Witcher 3, for different reasons. The former teaches exploration gently and never punishes aimless wandering, while the latter hooks you with memorable characters so the scale feels motivated rather than arbitrary. Either gives a newcomer a soft landing. You can browse more entry points in our games section or the full blog archive.

The freedom is the point

Getting into open world games is mostly a matter of unlearning the completionist reflex and replacing it with curiosity. Pick a forgiving world, follow what interests you instead of what the interface demands, lean on the main quest only when you feel adrift, and set a pace that leaves you wanting more rather than wrung out. Do that and the vastness stops being a wall and becomes exactly what the designers intended, a place to get happily, deliberately lost.