Best Open World Games
Settle it: two at a time →Open world games earn a place here by making the map itself worth traversing, not by counting square kilometers. Entries range from Minecraft's procedural sandboxes to authored worlds like Night City and the Lands Between, and they qualify on how much of the world rewards a detour rather than how much of it exists. The top few pair scale with density: quests, systems and encounters that hold up whether a player follows the main path or ignores it for forty hours.
Ranked by 1 person · 15 items
How the opening order was chosen
The opening order is the order I added the items in. Every ballot moves the ranking from there.
A reasonable ordering weighs how often leaving the road pays off, which favors handcrafted worlds over procedural ones and systems over checklists. The contention sits at the top: Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring reward pure curiosity, while Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3 answer with writing and detail that no emergent system can generate.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is first on the one ballot cast so far.
Global Ranking
Nintendo's 2017 Switch launch title won Game of the Year at The Game Awards and has passed 32 million copies on Switch alone, the best-selling Zelda. Its chemistry engine, where fire spreads uphill and metal attracts lightning, let players solve shrines in unscripted ways.
FromSoftware built the Lands Between with worldbuilding from George R.R. Martin, then took Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2022 on the way to 30 million copies sold. Shadow of the Erdtree, the 2024 expansion, moved 5 million copies in its first three days.
CD Projekt Red's 2015 RPG collected more than 250 game of the year awards, a haul later surpassed by The Last of Us Part II. The side quests carry the argument: the Bloody Baron arc turns a missing-person errand into family tragedy, and 2016's Blood and Wine runs longer than most full games.
Rockstar's 1899 frontier has shipped more than 70 million copies, putting it among the best-selling games ever made. Arthur Morgan's tuberculosis diagnosis reframes the entire second half, turning an outlaw sandbox into a story about what a dying man does with his remaining time.
Bethesda's 2011 RPG has sold past 60 million copies and been re-released on nearly every platform since, from Xbox 360 to Switch to the 2021 Anniversary Edition. Dragon shouts and radiant quests keep Tamriel producing new work long after the main story ends.
Los Santos has moved more than 215 million copies since 2013, trailing only Minecraft among the best-selling games ever. Three playable leads let heists change perspective mid-job, and GTA Online kept the same map commercially dominant for more than a decade.
A December 2020 launch arrived broken enough that Sony pulled Night City from the PlayStation Store for six months, a hole closed by the 2.0 overhaul and Phantom Liberty in 2023. Sales have since passed 30 million, with Keanu Reeves voicing the ghost in V's head.
Guerrilla Games traded Killzone for a post-apocalypse of robotic megafauna, and the February 2017 debut became the best-selling new first-party PS4 IP at the time. Sales have since topped 20 million, with each machine fought as a puzzle of exposed weak points.
Sucker Punch set its 2020 samurai game during the Mongol invasion of Tsushima in 1274, and it has since passed 13 million copies. Kurosawa Mode, a black-and-white filter approved by the filmmaker's estate, pairs with a guiding wind that replaces the usual minimap.
Mojang's sandbox is the best-selling video game ever at more than 300 million copies, a total nothing else in the medium approaches. Procedural terrain means no two seeds match, and survival mode builds an entire progression out of punching a tree before the first nightfall.
The Caribbean stays worth sailing after the icons run out, because getting anywhere means wind, boarding actions, and a crew singing shanties, and a distant sail can always turn a commute into a fight. Its own franchise is the anchor: every forced tailing mission and modern-day office interlude is time confiscated from being a pirate.
Obsidian built the Mojave in a famously short window on borrowed Bethesda tech, and the bugs at launch showed it. What it does better than Skyrim is make the map political: every settlement is a bargaining chip between the NCR, the Legion, and Mr. House, and your reputation decides which gates open. The trade is scenery, since brown desert highway cannot compete with dragons on the horizon.
The only map here that is worth crossing purely for the crossing, since web-swinging turns every errand into the best part of the game, though the checklist underneath, towers, backpacks, repeating street crimes, loses to the worlds that reward curiosity over completion.
No game here offers more ways into a single outpost: cut the power, tranquilize the commander, balloon the entire garrison into the sky. Between those outposts Afghanistan is mostly cliff corridor funneling you along roads, closer to a mission select screen than a place. And the story famously stops rather than ends, a cut mission surfacing only as unfinished footage on a bonus disc.
It fixes the thing Breath of the Wild kept getting dinged for, thin dungeons and disposable gear, by letting players glue their own machines together and drop into a darkness layer beneath the whole map. The cost is familiarity: this is the same Hyrule surface, and anyone who finished the 2017 game starts out walking ground they already know.
