Witcher 3 for sure.
Control.
Dark Souls 3.
Bloodborne.
Not exactly action, but Shadows of Doubt has moments of action, lots of exploration, and amazing detective mechanics.
Valheim
Subnautica
The Little Big Adventure remake.
Metro Exodus
Haven't heard a couple of these, will check out Shadow of Doubt
It's a little janky, and the blocky aesthetic may or may not be your thing, but it handles the idea of detective work better than any other game I've ever played. It's not just "Walk around in detective vision until you assemble enough clues for the character to tell you the solution." You have to actually think about things, examine the evidence, assemble a theory of the crime. Which is doubly impressive given that every crime is procedurally generated.
Bloodborne
IF ONLY
Huh, my bad. For some reason I thought there was a PC port already.
That Mad Max game deeply discounted on steam RN, pretty cool action, in car and out, nice exploration, not BotW levels but good enough.
Mad Max was way better than it had any right to be.
I just started playing Terraria again for the first time in a few years. TMODLoader is now a supported extension of it, so there's a ton of extra content and difficulty modifiers to play with. Having a randomly generated world with a mess of new and unknown stuff definitely scratches that exploration itch.
Did you ever play Divinity: Original Sin 2? Since you mentioned Baldur's Gate 3, it plays a lot like that, just minus the license and a much greater emphasis on environmental effects. It was super well-received at the time.
Have you tried the Star Wars Jedi games? Fallen Order should run fine on your machine and possibly Survivor too but that might be a little much for your rig. \
They're both wicked fun games that award exploration. I would call them souls-lite not soulslike since they are much easier than something like elden ring or sekiro (that doesn't mean they are easy though).
if i was planning to upgrade my rig soon i’d save these games for the new hardware.
Yeah these games are great, although clearly not perfect.
I enjoy them but some buggy technical aspects in the second one are quite distracting.
But you have a lot to explore in an interesting way.
They remind my of the first new God of War but in a Star Wars world.
Anything 2D should run on a toaster.
I'm legally obligated to shill CrossCode as the greatest RPG ever made.
The Witcher series
The Metro series (Exodus is the most open-world)
The Assassins Creed series
The Far Cry series
All have plenty of titles that are playable on a 9800
TYRANNY! It's an RPG from Obsidian that shares the Pillars of Eternity engine, very cool premise and story, main campaign is short so it shouldn't keep you occupied long, unless you decide to replay of course, the storyline changes A LOT depending on your actions (and even upon choices you make before even playing), so replayability is very high.
So you don't actually explore map, but lore.
Metroidvanias have a blend of action and exploration but in 2d. Some recs: hollow Knight, nine sols.
Only play this if you have the self control to never spend any money on it, but genshin has some pretty good open world exploration.
You can emulate BOTW on PC.
Second for BotW emulation, if you haven't played that yet. I took the emulation opportunity to set max_durability of all items at 400% with a helper program. Frick that noise, hahaha.
Actually on Nine Sols now, but the amount of concentration it needs it's quite high, so I can't stay in a session too long. Thinking of doing a Hollow Knight replay
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