A lot of times, I play video games because I enjoy the feeling of Going Somewhere.
This doesn't have to be about entering a new world and learning about it. It doesn't have to entail the epic Hero's Journey, gaining power along the way, and fighting an Ultimate Evil, with all of the story beats that this would otherwise come with. And much as I enjoy the odd Metroidvania Search Action Game exploration platformer, it doesn't have to mean exploring a maze-like location and remembering all of the stuff that used to be gated off. Sometimes, I'm more interested in the travel than the destination. I want a point A, a point B, and all the time in between them.
This is a big reason why I get into open-world games in general, because I enjoy the moment-to-moment travel and movement. I like stopping and looking around once in a while, observing the scenery. Maybe I'll pull up to a random building in the middle of nowhere, that otherwise has no gameplay function, and hang out with the chickens that some artist decided to put there. The occupants do not have any quests or items for me. They're often not even at home. It's arguable they don't even exist, in the context of this world. But I'm here for the vibe. I don't need Content. I just need a place.
Steam says I have 17.4 hours logged on Codemasters' 2009 driving game, FUEL. This game was something of a technical revelation when it came out, as developer Asobo Studio had figured out a way to procedurally, deterministically re-create terrain to such a scale that the in-game map is literally thousands of kilometers across. It is, nominally, a racing game; the end goal of all of this terrain is specifically to get players to start race events and win them to unlock more vehicles and more fast-travel points in its massive playable area. Roughly only one hour of FUEL, for me, was spent actually racing; I found racing AI drivers to be frustrating, as they are often not beholden to logic and physics, and tended to kick my butt while I struggled to get up a hill or recover from a spin-out. "Try Again - Or Fail Forever!" it would repeat if I somehow failed to place first. A refrain I'd very much get sick of. The other 16 hours of my logged play time, I'd presume, involved me slapping a waypoint marker down somewhere and just driving.
FUEL really does try to make the moment-to-moment driving interesting, by littering the countryside with fuel-barrels (literally, barrels emblazoned with the game's logo, that reward you with fuel - currency, by the game's vague Mad Max reckoning - for bumping into them), "vista points" (arbitrary collectables that serve no other function), stunt ramps, and occasional radar trucks you can catch that reveal more things on the map. Occasionally there will be hills to climb, and FUEL does a reasonable job of simulating vehicle torque in such a way that you could learn about how professional drivers do hill-climbs in their 4x4s. Or you could just drive around them. The game doesn't judge. At no point does it buzz you, Navi-the-Fairy-style, and remind you of what you're "supposed" to be doing.
This is the experience I've been seeking, time and again, through other open world games, and especially open world games about driving. I am not interested in being faster than the other drivers. I enjoy picking my favorite car, slapping a waypoint somewhere across the map, and just going. I put on music (Golden Earring's Radar Love is a frequent favorite) and lose myself in the speed and zen of weaving through roads and randomly generated traffic. Sometimes I'll tire of the "safe" roads and veer off into the brush, plowing through plant life and occasional small rocks, and see if I hit any sweet jumps by accident.
A lot of this depends on the game actually allowing me to do it, though; some games don't. Ubisoft's The Crew - itself gaining recent notoriety due to Ubisoft's absolute refusal to let it live - is one such game that failed that test, for me. Sure, it does let you go off road, and there are cars specifically made for that purpose. But there's nothing there, if the story doesn't have anything for you. The game will happily let you fast-travel to a random part of the United States and drive, but there are relatively few cities represented in the game, and between them, there is nothing. If you are not supposed to be in a city as part of the story, there is nothing there to do. Not even shops will be opened to you. At one point I flew to San Francisco, and decided to drive north to see if any part of Oregon was represented in The Crew. I drove and drove, up the interstate, and roughly 30 minutes later, I found myself in Seattle. Huh? All I'd seen, between central California and northern Washington, was a fairly generic interstate highway flanked with trees. It never felt like the terrain was varying. There were no random challenges or vistas, nothing to make me pull over and admire this world that they'd created. The drive was just a drive.
Forza Horizon 5 became a recent favorite of mine roughly when it came out, and again recently due to renewed interest by one of my online hangouts. While I find the Mexico map to be somewhat less interesting than that of earlier Horizon installments, it still scratches the Road Trip itch. The map is large but not massive, it is populated but not crowded. Terrain is varied enough to make a trip interesting without relying on shoving random collectibles and Game Mechanics everywhere. I can just pick a direction and drive - road or otherwise. It's actually fairly fun, even, to throw my vehicle at random countryside and smash the gas pedal down, watching myself go airborne and even flip over upon hitting a slightly too large boulder or clipping a slightly too thick tree trunk. I can pick any random cliffside and zoom off it for no reason, and even if I don't land on my tires, I can just rewind from the top and do it again. The game never judges. The game doesn't care if I'm in an S2-class, pro-grade rally monster, or a D-class, "0-60mph Eventually" family sedan. The game is fully willing to let me buy something as stupid as a Peel Trident (a bubble-topped, three-wheeled miniature Jetsons car from the 1960s) and swap the engine for some overpowered I4 from a rally bike, producing a car that can and will roll over from a standstill, and threaten to do backflips every time I shift gears. And once I get to terms with the eccentricities of my vehicle of choice, I can impose my own self-challenge of driving all the way from the east-coast beach town, to the arid baja on the opposite end of the map. No time limits, no opponents, no objectives or penalties. Just drive.
Anything that happens along the way? Whether I decide to pull over and tweak the tuning values, take a photo, honk my horn (an ultra-loud vanity train horn) at some random players, see what top speed I can do on the central highway, crash one of the festival sites and take a flying leap over the parked cargo plane? Well, that's up to me to decide in the moment.
The world is my oyster. And I'll happily just drive circles around it and admire it rather than try to force it open.