When I was a kid, I was such a nerd, that I invented my own decimal timekeeping system.
Even wrote a little macOS menubar clock for it — I was dead-serious.
Edit: omg the website still works, even though I never put any real content there …
Edit 2: Found this old explanation I apparently put together in July 2010, according to my image archive:
Yeah; it feels a little naive to think “bad associations with the word” come from past-tense propaganda instead of current-tense propaganda.
Like, nobody cares if you say “mother-fucker” anymore; and that was unthinkable, what, two decades ago? Less?
Without active, current, pervasive propaganda about the ‘bad intentions’ of the left, the word ‘communist’ would also lose stigma in the U.S. within a similar timeframe.
(I’m open to being told I’m wrong about this …)
Oh man Astroneer is so good — but I don’t think it’s up OP’s alley. There’s no quests to speak of, or even goals really, besides the 1. tutorial stuff, and 2. overall “reach the end” — besides that, it’s up to you to be self-directed.
Context: my breath-of-the-wild loving partners didn’t much get into Astroneer, unless I specifically set them goals and they didn’t have to figure anything out for themselves. :P (Well, one of them, at least …)
I think the “map marker check mark” dopamine game is a whole different thing from ‘true’ open-world … well, that’d unnecessarily exclusionary. Neither one is truer than the other. But they’re definitely extremely different.
Anyway, OP, my suggestion in that vibe would definitely be the Fallout or Assassin’s Creed serieses. Or Horizon: Zero Dawn! Great sidequest-driven, exploration-heavy, gigaaaaaantic games, all of them!