If you fancy getting lost in breathtakingly detailed landscapes and intriguingly unfamiliar worlds, you won’t need to look further than a high-quality role-playing experience. As well as offering players a captivating narrative to follow, good RPGs will present you with a dense and rich world to explore.
As games have matured and technology has improved, the worlds you can inhabit have only become more content-rich as the years have gone by. Whether it’s an expansive radioactive wasteland, a dystopian far future, a vast magical snowy tundra, or even the impossibly large expanse of outer space, there’s something to satisfy the gamer in all of us.
10 Guild Wars 2
Despite being an MMORPG, Guild Wars 2 is a fantastic open-ended adventure that is full of wonder and discovery. In addition to its captivating story, there is a huge and beautifully detailed map filled with things to explore.
The world has an array of hidden secrets, waypoints, Assassin's Creed-style vistas, challenges, and points of interest to discover. It works really well for solo play, especially when you take the game’s dynamic levelling system into account when exploring the gargantuan map. The game has continually evolved since its launch, with huge expansions, significant content drops, and regular seasonal updates to keep things as fresh and exciting as possible.
9 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is one of the best contemporary RPGs ever made. It has an intimidatingly large amount of content to get lost in and includes multiple paths that ensure that each playthrough is wildly different from the last.
The world of Rivellon changes based on the player’s decisions and interaction with the world. It’s staggeringly large and open from the get-go, allowing you to explore and experiment with the game’s dynamic systems at your own pace. There’s so much to discover that a single playthrough could easily take over 100 hours to complete, with the promise of vastly different experiences when choosing different classes or companions from the offset.
8 Fallout 3
Although many will argue that Obsidian Entertainment’s Fallout: New Vegas did it better, Bethesda’s Fallout 3 was the first to take the series in a bold new direction and is the game that made many fans of the series fall in love with the hopelessly bleak wasteland.
In true Bethesda fashion, you spawn in the middle of a massive map, with opportunity and potential around every corner. Fallout 3 does a fantastic job of making its dangerous dystopia feel believably lived in, as each dwelling or underground ruin you stumble across is rich in grisly detail with its own lore and story to tell. There are plenty of dynamic random encounters to stumble upon when exploring, often pitting you against the world’s tough radioactively-inclined inhabitants in bouts of tense firefights.
7 Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Ever since the series’ inception, the game worlds in Xenoblade Chronicles have always taken center stage. The map in each game is fully explorable and intimidatingly large, with incredibly rich and detailed world-building. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is no different and pushes you to explore every nook and cranny that Aionios has to offer.
The sprawling map is littered with activities, including Ferronis bases to unlock, collectables to find, and landmarks to discover. The game does a much better job of incentivizing exploration than previous iterations, and makes marked improvements with its side quests and optional content.
6 Horizon Forbidden West
In both Horizon games, you get to experience amazing open worlds that have cutting-edge graphics and jaw-droppingly gorgeous expansive environments. Horizon Forbidden West sees Aloy head into the depths of a far-future dystopian Nevada, Utah and California, and includes some of the most iconic areas of the region, albeit a little worse for wear.
The huge map is an absolute joy to explore and get lost in. There are plenty of recognizable real-world locations that have been reimagined with a nihilistic post-apocalyptic twist. One of the most beautiful of these is the ruins of Las Vegas, which is buried in a huge underground cavern, with an assortment of neon-lit buildings and attractions that echo a more innocent and lucrative past.
5 Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Before the vast procedurally generated universes of games like No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous, the best way to explore the emptiness of space was with the brilliant Mass Effect series. The game’s Milky Way galaxy opted for smaller and more hand-crafted locations for its more linear, focussed missions and explorable hub areas.
While the first Mass Effect allowed you to land and explore a planet’s surface using the Mako, the best parts of the entire trilogy were had when exploring the game’s many space stations, magnificent cities, and beautiful alien home worlds. One of the most memorable aspects of each game was the breathtaking Citadel – the bustling Galactic capital that houses the captivatingly diverse denizens from all corners of the galaxy.
4 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Despite the ridiculously huge procedurally generated map of Daggerfall and the intricate attention to detail of Morrowind, for our money, Skyrim offers the best world to get stuck into and explore. It offers a more polished and streamlined experience that gamers have come to know intimately over the years since its celebrated release.
Gamers have lost countless hours spelunking in caves, clearing out bandit hideaways, taking part in political conflicts, and stumbling upon the game’s richly detailed lore. Whether you play an upscaled remaster, portably on the Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, or even have the game narrated to you through Amazon Alexa, there are a huge number of ways to explore the snowy tundras and impressive mountainous landscapes of Skyrim.
3 The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild
Rather than filling the map with boring yawn-inducing checklists, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild instead opted to give you a much more exciting sense of discovery when exploring its incredibly diverse open world.
You are encouraged to use every tool at your disposal and organically stumble upon the various towers, challenging dungeon-like shrines, and well-hidden Korok seed collectables out in the open sandbox. The game’s stellar stamina system even makes climbing the huge cliff faces and imposing towers an exciting and rewarding challenge. The exploration is so good, it can be argued that it changed the face of open-world games going forward, having influenced a sea of critically acclaimed titles that came after it.
2 Elden Ring
When it was announced that the next game to come from the brilliant mind of Hidetaka Miyazaki was going to be open-world, it had Dark Souls fans a little worried. Fortunately, Elden Ring proved to be a spectacular success, as it offered players one of the most rewarding and detailed open worlds ever created.
There is something worthwhile to stumble across around every corner of the Lands Between, whether it be a well-guarded fortress, a sprawling cave network full of mystery, or one of the game’s notoriously difficult Legacy Dungeons. FromSoftware has done a brilliant job at maintaining player agency in its richly detailed open world, while also littering the map with the punishingly difficult enemies that fans of the Souls series have come to expect.
1 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The RPG and open-world genres have certainly evolved over the years, but hardly any game comes close to the immensely dense and deeply narrative-rich world of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. As soon as Geralt enters the Continent, he is surrounded by beautifully lush landscapes, impressively imposing castles, humble villages and large bustling city centers.
Each varied location is crafted with loving care and the sort of attention to detail that was rarely seen in games before it. You’ll meet a whole host of unique and memorable characters on your journey as you explore locales that are packed to the brim with lore and world-building. It is a spectacularly grand adventure set in one of the most breathtakingly beautiful game worlds ever created – it begs you to explore every inch.