Far Cry 5 and Assassin’s Creed: Origins have plenty in common, but one of their more understated similarities is that both Ubisoft teams decided to drop the mini-map. When you’re running around the world in Assassin’s Creed your cool eagle friend is your only immediate form of navigation, and in Far Cry 5, it’s your trusty binoculars. In Origins and Far Cry 5, you’ll still see icons representing points of interest while looking through both bird and binoculars, but the move reinforces a trend in open world games that relies more on notable geography and player curiosity for getting around in the world. Let’s hope you can turn off icons entirely across the board.
Personally, I’d love to see every open world embrace this style of navigation. Give more games a map made entirely of player-placed markers a la The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If the world isn’t naturally notable, maybe it shouldn’t even be an open world to begin with. Having played both Far Cry 5 and Origins for an about an hour each, I got distracted from the demo quests and wandered off towards curious points of interest right away. With no mini-maps as a constant distraction, I spent more time checking out the landscape. You damn millennials and your minimaps should try looking up once in awhile!
