Our picks for the best open-world games on PC
Entered into a discussion about the best Open-World games? Players are likely to find themselves in a heated debate. That’s just how this type of game tends to go. Many of them dominate enormous swathes of land and time, drawing a lot of attention. It’s like dedicating an entire room to one self-important painting.
Open-world games give players a ton of freedom, and naturally, most of the time, it’s easier to assess the quality of a game based on its size. Frankly, it’s impossible to deny that more size almost always equals more scope – but only to a point. Size tends to dominate conversations relating to open-world games, and it can certainly raise a map’s profile, but quality is its own entity. Even games like Minecraft can attest to that. There’s nothing out there quite like the following games on our list, the best open-world games in 2023.
Diablo
Blizzard initially designed the Diablo series as an experience meant to fit in a browser window. The studio eventually changed Diablo’s format from an isometric, single-screen dungeon crawl into an open-world experience with Diablo III: Reaper of Souls. It was a transformation that was not without its missteps, but it still managed to deliver an expansive world with few boundaries. Even better, the studio ensured that Sanctuary wasn’t merely a place to stop and buy armor, potions, a donkey companion, or a chicken pet. Instead, the developers filled it with innumerable demon-slaying quests and objectives, making it one of the deepest open-worlds in history.
There’s still plenty of loot to be found in Sanctuary, and players still fight enemies at every turn, but it doesn’t feel like endless grinding in a dank cave when they’re doing it in one of the biggest, most diverse video game worlds. The Diablo reinvented by Blizzard is quite simply one of the best PC Games of this century – even if it isn’t quite as accessible as players may like. Still, while an argument could be made that Dying Light 2 Stay Human deserves to be mentioned among this category’s best games, its predecessor is generally regarded as the superior game.
Diablo III is a hack-and-slash fantasy game with limited RPG elements of character customization, dominated by simple yet rewarding combat mechanics. The biggest distinction between Diablo III and its predecessor is the absence of the game’s 2D isometric viewpoint. Instead, it adopts a 3D, over-the-shoulder perspective. This was at the time quite a big change that prompted players to reevaluate the gameplay mechanics, which were also largely overhauled with the addition of an intricate skill tree and Runes.
In the early 2000s, Piranha Bytes began specializing in open-world games, serving as an AA alternative to those bigger, more beautiful games vying for all the big publishers’ attention. Since then, the small German studio has built some of the most breathtaking digital worlds, from the gloomy science fiction of Shadowlands, to the open archipelago of Sea Rogue, and the harsh, frozen landscape of Eternon reminiscent of Mad Max II.
Piranha Bytes’ fingerprints are all over the modern AAA open-world, at least to some degree. Few other games employ mechanics quite like the studio’s famously stubborn AI routines, forcing gamers to push forward through constant conflict. These mechanics, which encourage a relatively slow gameplay pace, seem to be polar opposites to the endless thirst for exploration and experimentation that makes open-world games so fun. However, somehow, painfully difficult games like Gothic and Risen manage to accommodate intrinsically worthwhile gameplay experiences.
Directed by Metal Gear Solid’s Hideo Kojima, Death Stranding envisions a post-apocalyptic world devoid of human civilization. The game is only the third open-world game from Kojima Productions, following the relatively contained landscapes of the first two Remasted God of War games. What’s interesting about this new project for the studio is the scale of it. It’s an open-world game that looks set to dwarf even that of Horizon Zero Dawn’s. In contrast to Aloy’s adventures, set in a condensed but sumptuous Scandinavian fjordland, this time, Kojima is taking players all around the globe – and, in the end, all the way to space.
