Being told exactly where to go? No thanks. That’s the entire point.
Open world games shouldn’t hold your hand — or at least not for the whole ride. I want the freedom to stray off the marked route and find out what happens. Sometimes the reward is fantastic loot. Sometimes it’s a dragon that takes your head off. Not knowing what waits around the next bend is exactly where the fun lives.
What follows are five games capable of swallowing you whole. Loads of brilliant open worlds missed the list, but these are the ones still hiding surprises years past launch, still worth booting up purely to roam around and absorb the atmosphere. Think I’ve got it wrong? The comment section is right below. Let me have it.
Hyrule got bigger, and that’s the whole argument
So why pick Tears of the Kingdom ahead of Breath of the Wild? Easy: there’s simply more of it.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom returns you to the same Hyrule you memorised back in 2017’s Breath of the Wild, then piles fresh territory on top. Islands of every size hang scattered across the sky. Underneath Hyrule waits a frightening cavernous void with distinct Upside-Down energy. And the surface itself is now peppered with caves and wells hiding things you’d never anticipate.
Half the enjoyment is the travelling itself, since the game lets you move basically any way you fancy. Thanks to Link’s build-anything powers, you can hoverbike your way across the clouds, grind through the depths inside a beefy tank, or keep it traditional and enjoy the view from horseback.
Hundreds of hours in, and it still doesn’t feel like I’ve seen the whole thing.
Ancient Greece is too big, and I mean that as a compliment
Of everything featured here, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey leans hardest on formula. I won’t pretend otherwise. But what it gives up in originality it repays in raw size.
Bigger doesn’t automatically mean better, and if you argued that this map of Ancient Greece is oversized, I wouldn’t fight you on it. Even so, there’s genuine pleasure in sailing island to island and discovering whatever fresh danger is lurking on the next one. That goes double straight after watching Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey.
This world hates you and wants you dead
A few entries here work nicely as wind-down games. Elden Ring absolutely isn’t one of them.
Venturing through The Lands Between demands constant focus and awareness of every possible threat. You’ll fight your way down a dungeon packed with lethal traps only to find an ancient tree demon at the bottom that guts you. You’ll pop open a treasure chest and get teleported into a region crawling with absurdly powerful enemies that skewer you like a kebab. You’ll stroll past a slumbering dragon and be roasted alive.
The number of ways this place can kill you is genuinely absurd. What makes it special is gradually assembling an understanding of the world regardless, and figuring out how to put down the things roaming it.
Eight years on, nothing looks like Red Dead 2
When it comes to sheer beauty and detail, nothing else here is in the same conversation as Red Dead Redemption 2. Eight years on, this Rockstar Games masterpiece remains among the finest-looking games ever produced — an absolute feast for the eyes.
Set aside the narrative and the performances, both of which are superb, and simply occupying the world is remarkable by itself.
Pulling on the dusty boots of Arthur Morgan — and no one else, since we all know the story wraps up before Micah gets sprung from jail — lands just as hard in 2026 as it did back in 2018. The world genuinely breathes, and that’s mostly down to the random encounters dotted all over it. You can pour hundreds of hours into it and something will still blindside you on your next run.
Good luck reaching that quest marker
Between the packed streets of Novigrad and the sprawling moors and waters of Skellige, the open world of The Witcher 3 is staggering in scale. Quests, monsters, dungeons, secrets, treasure. There’s arguably too much of it.
Honestly, just try travelling from any given spot to your quest marker without at least five or six question marks dragging you off course on the way. It might be a fearsome beast. It might be a cave loaded with loot and rare gear. On a good day, it’s somebody up for a round of Gwent.
The amount of time I’ve poured into this game is honestly a bit worrying, and the thought of yet another replay still gives me a small thrill. There’s new DLC arriving next year, and words fail me.