Sometimes, players are in the mood for something more linear. It can be nice when a game points us in the right direction and makes it super clear what we have to do. Other times, though, we're feeling much more creative than that. With the popularity of sandbox experiences, it's clear that there's a lot of appeal to being provided all manner of tools and determining just what we want to do with them.
8 Best Open-World Games Where Exploring Freely Is More Rewarding Than The Main Story
These open-world games do offer a main story campaign to complete, but their settings are so immersive that exploration almost always takes priority.
In some of the titles below, we're presented with specific problems and can dream up our own ways of solving them. In others, character creation is so impactful that we can freely dictate our own playstyles. In either case, though, the game doesn't decide how we play. The player does.
The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom
When Princess Zelda Takes The Lead, Anything Goes
By this stage in the long history of the fantastic The Legend of Zelda series, fans have come to know Link (in his various incarnations) very well. He's typically a Hylian hero in a green tunic, armed with an array of typical weaponry like bows, bombs, boomerangs, swords, and shields. When Princess Zelda got her own starring role in Echoes of Wisdom in 2024, it was a bit unclear what kind of equipment she'd collect and use along the way.
The answer, it transpired, was that she'd be able to use a huge, ridiculous range of things by means of the Tri Rod. Aided by her fairy friend Tri, Zelda can use the rod to conjure objects (known as echoes) into the world to interact with. There are over 130 different echoes in all, from a Bombfish to an Old Bed and from a Wind Cannon to a Freeze Slug. Though you're limited as to the echoes that can be active at once and the cost of summoning them, this means the different interactions you can use to solve puzzles increase dramatically as time goes on. The concept is rather like Scribblenauts, and it's a brilliantly creative way to shake up the old "save Hyrule" routine.
Elden Ring
The Tarnished Is Whoever You Wish Them To Be
In some titles, simply trying out a new build can make your next playthrough feel like a whole new game. This is part of the enduring appeal of series like Monster Hunter, in which a Light Bowgun and a Great Sword are miles apart and require dozens of hours to learn the differing intricacies of each. In the Souslborne games, players are used to a rather generic knight being the poster character, but there's an incredible amount of character customization to shake things up beyond that.
Elden Ring offers ten different classes for your Tarnished to take on, including Warrior, Samurai, Prophet, and Astrologer. The Warrior, unsurprisingly, is a potent melee attacker and a very conventional choice. The Astrologer, on the other hand, prefers to fling spells over swinging swords as a potent mage. There's enough flexibility in terms of stat growth and weapon scaling to ensure that these roles aren't too rigid, and of course, one key draw of Elden Ring is that you're free to take on the various challenges of the Lands Between in any order you decide.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim
You're Finally Awake
As the old joke goes, everyone starting a new playthrough in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will eventually accept the fate of becoming a stealthy archer, whatever their plans had been on booting the game up. Those who can resist this fate, however, can continue to revel in just how much freedom there is in Skyrim, even without any mods at all. It's quite remarkable for a title that launched back in 2011.
Skyrim: Best Mods To Use On Xbox
Xbox users may only have access to a limited number of mods, but that doesn't stop them from transforming Skyrim with some of the best mods out there.
Of course, mods give players almost-infinite levels of freedom to further enrich their experience and differentiate their playthroughs, but the vanilla game's blend of race options, impactful decisions, choices of followers, questlines to follow, and actions to take means it's possible to roleplay as you like. You can really embrace your chosen playstyle, too, because almost every action you take advances your skills in certain areas. Skyrim simply had to be represented here. Mage builds can be just as powerful.
Garry's Mod
Player Freedom Is An Understatement
Garry's Mod isn't so much a game as it is a creative toolbox. The key, really, is access to the Source engine, which provides a galaxy of assets that can become building blocks of your bizarre, wonky-physics universe. Other games that utilize the engine can also be brought into the fun (or rather, their assets can), which means building worlds, characters to inhabit them, and rules for them to operate under as you wish.
Depending on the mods you choose and the players available, Garry's Mod can be single-player, competitive, or cooperative. You can play a rather conventional game of tag or its derivatives, or something far more elaborate than that. It's partly through the power of player-created content that Garry's Mod is still finding new ways to entertain.
Hitman: World Of Assassination
All That Matters Is That The Job's Completed
When there are multiple ways to achieve a set of objectives, it does wonders for a game's replay value. The Hitman series is a perfect example of this, and though fans will all have their favorite entries and mission structures, Hitman: World of Assassination did a fantastic job of embracing the freedom of the original trilogy. Not to mention the Party Cracker.
7 Open-World Games That Mastered The Art Of Slow Exploration
There have been some truly breathtaking open-world games over the years, and these titles let you explore at your own pace.
Famously, Hitman stages are all about simply assassinating a given target or targets. They are also, however, filled with all kinds of assets you can claim for yourself and use to your own ends. You can, for instance, steal a chef's uniform and use it to poison your target's food, or adopt the persona of a barber only to unleash all the fury of Sweeney Todd on your target. The games essentially become gory, very interactive puzzles, in which players can tackle stages again and again, thinking, "I wonder if this works."
Dishonored
Wonderfully Chaotic
The Hitman games, then, are all about embracing the chaos in order to take down Agent 47's targets. Ultimately, though, those targets have to be taken down. In Arkane Studios' Dishonored series, the same is true, and stages similarly allow for multiple approaches to achieve that goal. Dishonored doesn't offer the same dress-Agent-47-up-in-a-silly-mascot-costume opportunities as the former, but it does offer the same irresistible opportunities to replay with a different approach to stages.
In Dishonored, a chaos meter is affected by just how violent Corvo Attano has been in his efforts for the Loyalists. Because this determines how the story plays out, fans will probably want to try another run using a very different approach to see the various endings. Encouraging this further is the range of special powers Corvo has access to, which are very potent and an absolute blast to experiment with in a macabre sort of way. Bend Time, for instance, lets the player temporarily stop the flow of time (for everyone else), while he can also possess other beings or call upon a swarm of rats.
Don't Starve
How You Survive Is Up To You
Survival games, broadly speaking, avoid holding the player's hand. You're unleashed in an unfamiliar, largely unfriendly newly-generated world, with essentially nothing in the way of equipment or items, and simply tasked with finding and gathering what you need. From these humble beginnings, it's a matter of trial and error, as you learn which resources to prioritize, good places to set up a camp, how to do so, and the order to build certain survival essentials. All of this is central to the experience of Klei Entertainment's Don't Starve.
Maintaining your character's Health, Sanity, and Hunger is vital, with the Wetness mechanic introduced later and the potential spoiling of food also being important. Darkness, too, will swiftly be fatal, thanks to the lingering presence of Charlie. The player is free to utilize the various sources in their procedurally generated world as they wish to deal with all these threats, and those posed by the local wildlife. As they gain experience, they'll develop strategies for handling particular seasons, with character choice being a large factor too.
Everybody plays entirely differently, with Wigfrid, for instance, being more offensively-oriented but with more limited means of abating hunger because she'll refuse food other than meat. Characters' abilities and quirks help to shape gameplay, but players can use them as they see fit to stay alive. It's all very Tim Burton-esque, and that just adds to the atmosphere.
Every Don’t Starve Character, Ranked
There are many characters to choose from in Don't Starve and Don't Starve Together but some of them are better than others.