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Open-world games offer players large worlds to explore, often with a massive amount of side and optional content. While these games often overlap with the RPG genre, they can also be in other genres, like racing or stealth games. The common thread through all of the games on this list are worlds that players can explore with a large amount of freedom, often with persistent progression to build your character and tackle increasing challenges. While not every open-world game contains a large explorable world, that expiration and discovery is a key part of what makes open-world games special.
Some of the most notable games in the genre are also some of the best-selling games of all-time, like The Witcher 3 and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, touting huge worlds full of side quests, lovable characters, and new places to explore. Despite the heavy focus on exploration, these games also often feature deep narratives as well, although there are exceptions to that as well. Many of the games on this list are fairly modern, thanks to an increase in size and depth to the open-worlds due to more powerful hardware introduced with more modern consoles. Below you can see our picks for the best open-world games you can play right now. These span a variety of platforms, including PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch, and we’ve tried to lean into games that are still widely available and well worth playing in 2025.
