For many open-world RPG players, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is a comfort game. Even for a game that's over ten years old, it manages to tick a lot of boxes and get quite a few things right. For one, you have total freedom to do whatever you want. It's not exactly a sandbox experience, but you start from a tabula rasa character and build them however you want. Once you're out of Helgen, nothing stops you from going wherever the road takes you. The possibilities are endless and overwhelming in all the good ways.
The Best Games To Play If You Like Skyrim
These games are must tries for those who love The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Bethesda's ambitious 2011 RPG.
Skyrim is also a game that taps into that power fantasy of being the chosen one and becoming extremely powerful fast. With the Anniversary Edition that added a bunch of Creations, this has become even easier to do. The world is basically at the mercy of the player, and at most, harder difficulties and higher levels just introduce enemies that deal more damage and are spongier. It's a safe, comfortable environment where you define everything. In contrast, these five games will challenge the default playstyle that Skyrim trains your brain to do. They all do this in different ways and for different reasons. If you're a hardcore Skyrim fan looking to expand to something different and get challenged a bit, these games are a good place to start.
Fallout: New Vegas
Choices Must Be Made, And You Won't Be The Master Of Everything
Fallout 4 could have also easily made this spot, but New Vegas goes even deeper into choices and RPG, which is why I picked it instead for this entry. In Skyrim, your stat, build, and dialogue choices tend to have very little bearing on your gameplay experience. You can become friends with almost any faction, juggling the role of Archmage at the College of Winterhold and Listener for the Dark Brotherhood. While some companions have moral compasses that make them dislike you for your actions, there are also plenty who don't care what you do. In essence, the freedom it has is so vast that the experience can feel quite diluted.
New Vegas, on the other hand, pays attention to every single choice you make, from the moment you create your character. For example, leaving your Intelligence extremely low will have lasting effects on your gameplay, with Doc Mitchell even commenting on it as soon as you make it out of character creation. Skills directly affect and even restrict dialogue and quest options, and NPCs will often comment on the choices and actions you take. It feels like a far more dynamic world, especially since you have to manage your Karma and track your position with each of the factions of the wasteland. The same goes for companions, some of whom have certain and rather specific requirements before they'll want to follow you. This means you can't actually run around doing whatever you want (I mean, yes, you can, but there are greater consequences), expecting everyone to have the same, deadpan reaction. New Vegas makes you accountable for your RPG choices, unlike Skyrim, in a way that immerses you and turns every playthrough into something unique. By specializing in one area, you sacrifice in another—and that's okay, because that's how good stories are told. You can't be friends with the NCR and the Legion, after all.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
A Tighter, Character-centric Experience That Demands Your Focus
It's widely accepted that Skyrim doesn't hold up against The Witcher 3 in its writing, and that's okay. The two games have been compared to death throughout the years, but they are fairly different experiences due to the obvious limitations the latter has. The Witcher 3 is a story about Geralt and Ciri, and everyone around them—it's not the story of a random chosen one you create from scratch. As such, much like with Fallout 4, you'll have to pay closer attention to the story and the choices you make throughout your playthrough, because it will affect where each character ends up and what endings unlock for you.
Skyrim Is Still Great, But These Games Surpass It (In One Area)
Skyrim will always be a beloved open-world RPG, but other games such as The Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition have improved on certain aspects.
There are so many more choices like these in The Witcher 3, from Keira's quest to even seemingly innocent interactions that Geralt has with Ciri, as well as the two main romance options: Triss and Yennefer. In Skyrim, you can get away with any kind of interaction with NPCs without really feeling the weight of it further down the line, but The Witcher 3 really does challenge you to weigh all your decisions and your dialogue choices carefully if you care about everyone's wellbeing at all. It doesn't shy away from locking you out of questlines in this fashion, and while this also exists to a degree in some of Skyrim's questlines, most notably the Dark Brotherhood one, where you can opt to help the Imperials destroy the Falkreath Sanctuary, the grand majority of the game is missing this aspect.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Combat Requires More Thought And Strategy
Skyrim's combat is starting to show its age. In particular, the melee combat can be pretty simplistic compared to a lot of newer titles, and one of the biggest hikes in challenge in terms of swordplay is found in the Kingdom Come: Deliverance franchise. For the sake of simplicity, we'll talk about the newest, second installment in the series, a wow-worthy experience for sure, and a labor of love that staggered a lot of gamers with how challenging its combat is. This isn't one of those games where you can just run around, pull out your sword, block every once in a while, and kill almost any enemy—like Skyrim.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's melee combat is far more intricate, with concepts like combos, ripostes, feints, and master strike being key if you want to make your way through any armed encounters in your quests. While it also utilizes stamina as your main resource in combat, there's just way more nuance and strategy involved, and the enemies you face, though all of them human and non-magical, are much more intelligent and cunning compared to the enemies in Skyrim that will block for a bit and then strike at you. The movement is more telegraphed in the latter, making melee combat approachable and powerful from the get-go, whereas Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 challenges you to learn a complex system from scratch.
Kenshi
Don't Come Here Looking For A Power Fantasy
Ah, Kenshi, the place where all dreams of a power fantasy go to die, at least in the beginning. In Skyrim, you learn pretty fast in the main quest that you're a very special person, with a very rare and special ability that could help save the world from a dragon threat. You are the chosen one, essentially, and your powers grow exponentially, trivializing some of the encounters in the game. You can be quite careless in the game and still do a great job, which is why it's the comfort zone for a lot of open-world RPG enthusiasts.
Open-World Games That Punish You for Playing on Autopilot
Get lazy and distracted or try to rush through these open-world games, and they'll swiftly send your character to the death screen.
Kenshi, however, is the opposite. It doesn't want you to be comfortable; it wants you to think and pay attention. While it shares that sandboxy freedom that Skyrim has (and, arguably, does it even better), it makes absolutely nothing easy for you from the get-go. There are no quests and NPCs to point you in a direction you should go, which means you have to think about, for the first time ever, what you really want from the world. That said, it won't be easy to acquire. In Skyrim, you can join most factions by walking to their front door and saying you want to join, and you'll prove yourself with one or two quests. In Kenshi, you're not special, and the world doesn't care about you whatsoever. Its life goes on even if you're stranded in the middle of nowhere, bleeding out after a fight gone horribly wrong. It humbles you fast, but if players embrace the challenge, it also has some of the most in-depth RPG gameplay that isn't easily found in a lot of modern titles.
Elden Ring
Unforgiving World Where Death Is Punishing
If any genre is an antithesis to the Bethesda brand of RPGs, it's any Soulslike game. That's why Elden Ring claims the top spot here, because while it ticks those open-world and RPG spots easily, and it just drops you into the world without any direction, allowing you to be exactly the kind of Tarnished you'd like to be, absolutely nothing about your journey will be epic and easy—at least, not at first. The moment you step out of the first area, you're met with the Tree Sentinel. Your first boss, which you're completely unequipped to deal with, most likely, unless you're a Soulslike veteran able to perfectly dodge. Imagine if Skyrim did this, and put you against a Legendary Dragon the moment you walk out of Helgen.
The melee combat in Elden Ring may not be as intricate as Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, but it's still miles above Skyrim's rather simple and intuitive system. You'll have to learn the special moves of new weapons, and enemies will relentlessly interrupt and stunlock you if you give them a choice. The very essence of Elden Ring is unfairness: the odds are always stacked against you. You're just a lowly Tarnished, not the savior Dragonborn riding into the sunset to restore balance to the world. It's up to you here to prove that you're worthy of challenging the demigods of the Lands Between, and no one, not even Melina, will hold your hand (well, she will, but not in that way). Worse yet, dying in Skyrim just feels like a small setback. Chances are, a Quicksave will spare you from a ton of backtracking to get to where you were. In Elden Ring, though, you can kiss goodbye to your runes if you don't manage to get back from your previous Grace to pick them up. Sometimes, it's not possible.
6 Best Medieval Open-World Games, Ranked
Often with a tinge of fantasy on the side, these medieval open-world games do the best job of delivering a fun, immersive package in one spoonful.