My struggles finding my way; from Night City to Hyrule

I put 70 hours into Cyberpunk 2077 on a single playthrough. That’s 70 hours zipping around on Jackie’s ARCH through the streets of Night City, chasing the next sidequest as I avoid finishing the main story too quickly. That should have been more than enough time to learn my way around.

I absolutely did not.

Yeah, once I got somewhere, it all looked familiar. But if I hadn’t set a waypoint, I’d have been aimlessly wandering the streets trying to find V’s apartment.

Sure, you might think this is understandable. Even with directions on the map, it can be really hard to see if I should be turning down a street or using the on-ramp for the road that goes above it. It’s even worse when I’m playing on my Steam Deck instead of my PC with its 32-inch monitor.

But it’s not just Cyberpunk.

It took me literal years, but I can finally make my way around a third of Grand Theft Auto V on my own, which is embarrassing when compared to a time with smaller maps. I still know GTA: III like the back of my hand. At some point, I became fully reliant on using the tracker in the HUD maps to find even the most basic of locations.

My issues became horrifically apparent when you drop me into a game like Breath of the Wild. I never could get into that game, and it might be because it is too open world for me. I got lost as soon as I started.

The first summer the Switch was out, I was given Breath of the Wild, and I was so excited. I had fond memories of both Oracle of Ages and Ocarina of Time, the two Zelda games I had spent the most time in. There was no way I wouldn’t enjoy a beautifully crafted, modern Zelda game on the Switch.

A few aimless hours later, I was ducking behind boulders and shooting tiny arrows at a boss for a good twenty minutes. There was no way this game should’ve been so hard. I died a few times, and was determined to continue my hide and shoot strategy for as long as it would take. When I finally beat the fight (I can’t remember where or who it was), I searched for information online, just to find out that was a part of the game most people get into much later.

The final straw was me accidentally wandering into a part of the map where I kept freezing to death. And of course that’s where an auto-save triggered. So I was stuck in an endless loop of taking a few steps, dying, and starting over.

Yeah, needless to say, Breath of the Wild has not left its case in years. 

With games like PUBG and Fortnite, I don’t even bother trying to learn the maps. I open the map, see if I’m going in the vague direction of the circle, and run like hell trying to make it in. 

My most recent gaming addiction is really testing my limits of being directionally challenged. Mon Bazou is an open-world racing simulator where you have to find ways to make money to upgrade your beater car that’s waiting outside your trailer when you start the game. The game has the most basic map, which you have to press a button to physically hold up. The locations are shoddily marked, and there’s no way to mark locations or even know where you are on the map. 

I’ve finally learned how to find all of three places in the game: my brother’s house, the gas station and the bar. It only took me starting the game over completely from the beginning a handful of times because I kept losing control of the truck and flipping off the sides of the mountains.

That wasn’t me being directionally challenged. I’m just really bad at driving in the game, which isn’t great for a racing game. I probably could have kept playing, but I had either lost essential tools when my truck flipped, or I had been coming back from the gas station and flipped and lost all of the items I had bought, and had no money to replace them.

All this to say: if Grand Theft Auto VI ever releases, I’m terrified of having to find my way around the new Vice City.