One thing I've been meaning to try in more games for a while is something a friend has long advocated for when playing open-world games: turn off the minimap. As it happens, Oblivion doesn't have a minimap, and as such by fiddling around with the game, I'm getting the chance to try out this philosophy of open-world gaming — and I like it.
The trouble with minimaps is that they encourage you to stare at them. You end up spending all your time looking at the minimap and the markers on it rather than actually paying any attention to the world around you. You'll inevitably end up trying to take "straight lines" to the nearest markers you need to get to, and you'll usually miss some of the more interesting, well-crafted parts of the world in the process. This isn't always the case, of course — Final Fantasy XIV strikes a nice balance between the minimap being useful and navigating by sight being important — but in Oblivion it really drives home how much more immersive things are if you're actually looking where you're going.
It's beneficial in the long term, too. If you need to get somewhere quickly, it's much better to be able to navigate by visual landmarks than attempting to parse a 2D map into 3D. It gives you a much better sense of where things are in relation to one another — especially helpful in towns — and just helps the whole "worldbuilding" thing feel a whole lot better.
Plus it encourages you to go on adventures and get into mischief. My most fun times in Oblivion so far have involved just following a path, then seeing something that looks interesting and going to see what it is. You don't get any of that if you're staring at a minimap or, worse, fast travelling everywhere. And then I would never have won a fight by allowing a wolf to hurl itself off a slope too steep for itself, leading to it dying from fall damage rather than a killing blow from me. Marvellous.
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