When you're a kid, playing outside in the summer as the sun starts to set, you know that the worst thing possible is going to happen: A parent is going to call you inside. You don't want to leave the playground. Playing open-world games, especially those like Cyberpunk 2077 and the most recent Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, can sometimes feel like that--a playground that we don't want to leave, while the developers are our parents, trying to look out for us.

These games always offer a campaign of some sort--a story to play through that takes you through the major features their game has to offer. Compelling stories, though, often bring meaningful changes to their protagonists and worlds, and herein lies the trouble. For many players, we want our game worlds to stay ripe with possibility so that we can explore them with the excitement of them always being there, always having something new to offer us, and these changes can cut us off from that possibility. This problem is most apparent at the ending of these games, but it reaches much further back, to these games' opening moments.

Why do gamers love these games?

While some players undoubtedly focus on the main story quests of these games, that's not what many of us are there for. Some of this applies to story-based games in general, but it's especially the case with these immersive open-world games. They offer us two primary things: a place to explore that is both more exciting and less dangerous than the real world, and the opportunity to check lots of boxes.