I haven’t played it, but my understanding is that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 works this way. Meet a person who tells you something’s happening tonight, and you better get there tonight if you want to see/do it. Maybe someone who’s played the game can chime in.

It’s a great game, much like its predecessor. However, it’s still linear in most ways. You miss out on those small side quests but that was true of the first game too.

I’d love for a game to set the stage like: “Bad person/thing does bad stuff to good town” like intro, then it’s just you in a field by a small village where you live that is now in ashes due to bad event that happened while you weren’t there. Game On…

From there, don’t give a single hint until a player did something that could actually do something if they do it right.

An example would be early days of Minecraft before notch sold his soul, you wouldn’t have a guide or achievements or anything to help you. There were no wikis, only a small forum of people asking why are people punching trees?

Games need to feel more exploratory without giving everyone GPS direct to the next XP machine.