Sleeping Dog‘s action steals the show in a way that you just don’t see in a lot of open-world games. I’ll never know why there aren’t more truly great martial arts games, but I do know that whenever I find myself lamenting the lack of noteworthy entries into that subgenre, I can always turn to Sleeping Dogs for comfort. While it’s a little sad that Dragon’s Dogma‘s best ideas haven’t found their way to more titles, the lack of suitable copycats ensures that Dragon’s Dogma remains unique and special. Many of the systems created for Dragon’s Dogma (such as the player-built Pawn allies that others can recruit) have yet to properly appear in other games. Exploration in this game certainly isn’t limited to discovering new locations. Sure, you can rely on the same kinds of abilities and attacks found in other hack-and-slash titles, but Dragon’s Dogma also lets you do things like grapple smaller creatures and climb over bigger monsters to hit different weak spots.
What makes that already appealing experience really work are the ways that this game gives you free rein to tackle combat pretty much however they see fit. Dragon’s Dogmaĭragon’s Dogma is sometimes best thought of as what might happen if Capcom took the giant creatures from Monster Hunter and placed them in a large medieval fantasy RPG. The more creative the player, the more fun they’ll have in this all-time great digital sandbox. Other open-world games let players pilot tanks and helicopters, but only Just Cause 4 lets gamers shoot a tank into the air with rockets and balloons, then dive out of it so that they can seamlessly hijack a helicopter.
The latest game in the series gives players an arsenal of weapons (including a utility belt full of special grappling cables and booster rockets) that allow them to manifest their destructive imaginations like never before. While each entry encourages players to blow up enemy outposts in creative ways, Just Cause 4 makes the most out of more modern technology to really up the ante (even if some of the game’s structured missions don’t quite live up to the standards set by its free-roaming activities). The Just Cause franchise thrives on its physics-based open-world sandbox gameplay. With that out of the way, here are the 25 best open-world games ever made:
That makes it easier to separate entries in certain franchises that offer relatively similar experiences as well as shine a light on a few games that don’t always get the love they deserve when compared to the titles in juggernaut open-world franchises like Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls. Finally, there is a “one entry per franchise” rule in place for this list.An open-world title’s “fun factor,” historical significance, and the ways it uses its world to provide an experience that wouldn’t be possible in other formats were all major factors that helped determine whether or not a game made this list and where it ranked.While we initially considered various games that offer a large area that you’re able to explore with some degree of freedom, certain “large-world” or structurally segmented games were ultimately excluded from further consideration.
Now, you find variations of that concept in many of the best modern blockbuster titles. The idea of being left to your own devices in a massive digital world where nearly anything was possible was one of those things we used to only be able to dream about. Even during the open-world genre’s earliest days when developers were forced to rely on smoke and mirrors to make their visions come to life, the very concept of open-world gaming always felt like the future of the medium.