Outcast

I think Outcast and Dark Souls are at the moment my two prime examples of how to make open world adventure games in general, whether they are more rpg or action oriented (or both).

Modern open world games (and games in general) feel like made in compliance with some unwritten industry standard (lots of cheap achievement oriented activities, fast travel, small number of unique content with lots of duplication, very detailed automap, guiding players by hand) which makes all of them a totally wasted experience for me. They feel like playing themselves because of that, simplifying as much as they can for the benefit of more fluent, cinematic experience.

Outcast does not tell you anything about what you have to do and where to go. You are stuck in parallel universe and well you have to deal with that somehow. It requires some effort on your side in order to progress. You need to talk with people and learn about the place you are stuck in. Everything existing in this world has a story and is there for a reason, but at the beggining it feels like nothing makes sense, so there is lot of talking to do, and you will actually have to pay attention, because the game journal updates briefly your goals, not how to achieve them.

The other things worth mentioned: story is great from beginning to the end, characters and dialogues are phenomenal, combat and AI is more interesting and fun than it looks. Technically it aged horribly in some aspects and still looks fascinating in some other.

On the downside: the game is full of horrible bugs, sometimes even making finishing it impossible. I do not give this 5.0 only because of those issues, I think there are too many of them and they cost me too much frustration to just ignore them.