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@Vegeta

Red Dead Redemption 2

Not a meme pick, and I'm prepared for dramatards to harass me for this pick. It's the kind of game where I'm trying to do a certain task and then random shit steals my attention. Insane amount of detail, good size and not artificially big with pointless tasks in the way Far Cry is.

oh god we're going to be worse than 4 chan

Kenshi is the best in terms of purity.

You are literally dropped into a moon with no one telling you what to do. What you do on this land is wholly up to you.

Survive, exercise, survive some more. Start a base, make drugs, sell em. Or kidnap people, skin them, use their skin to sell flesh suits for robots.

World is reactive. Kill a city leader and that city will go into ruin or be conquered by a neighbor depending on your faction status with them.

Game is moddable so you can reduce the jank and make the game world the way you want

Just Cause 2

It's basically perfect. Almost everything you do feels fantastic, the hookshot being on its own button instead of a weapon you gotta switch to leads to loads of great movement options, and the map feels both large enough to be big, it's also small enough to be worth actually travelling there via vehicle to bring some extra firepower rather than just fast travelling. It's just fun to get in the various vehicles and run around in them too, even without the occasional challenges like flying under bridges or racing.

On that note, fast travel being a helicopter that you jump out of and parachute (or hookshot if you're good enough) to the ground rather than starting on the ground is great. Gives you loads of momentum to choose your landing spot and a good look at where you're going.

And for a 360/PS3 era game, the map was incredible:

For reference, GTA5 has a map area of about a quarter the size of Panau.

It's also better than JC3 and 4's maps, which were either too much water or too little. Panau basically hit the golden spot.

Winner: Nioh 2 for best Combat System

How exactly did you arrive at that?

I don't know if this is reddit or not (because people never bring it up in "open world" discussions) but I am going to be extremely soy and say Ocarina of time

Just because of the reactivity and continuity of basically every npc throughout the course of the game states + every side activity being iconic

Almost every modern open world game has almost no reactivity unless you count ambient dialog like NV or Skyrim and it's a shame that the worlds feel more detached from the story than a game from 1998

Oblivion

I will not defend this choice

Considering there's no immersion category, this will have to do.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 1/2

Minecraft

Elden Ring, hands down.

Honorable mentions rdr2 and tears of the kingdom (sneed more), but neither of those can beat the atmosphere of elden ring.

Best open world is easily Elden Ring. It succeeds on multiple levels, being a massive and visually interesting world from all angles you approach it from. Where most open world games end up feeling like random meaningless locations that exist for the sake of existing, barring a few actual highlights, in Elden Ring there is always some key point of interest and visual focus that keeps any general location interesting. There's numerous shortcuts, connections, and secrets across the map that reward exploration and no matter where you go, there's always various side objectives that have items of interest for whatever your build could be, which always makes exploring them worthwhile. Unlike Breath of the Wild which fills all of its objectives with filler weapons that will inevitably break, thereby forcing you to use them, Elden Ring puts unique and varied items across the entire world so you always get the novelty of finding something new that you can choose to use. This becomes even more valuable on repeat playthroughs where you can meaningfully chart a path to the items you want using all these connections to fast track the build you want with little hassle. The sheer interconnectedness of the world puts all other open world games to shame. Even just the first dungeon in the game had something like 3 or 4 secrets throughout it that lead back to other parts of the castle.

There are very few key bosses that you have to actually fight and the rest of the game is the freedom to explore and approach the world as you see fit, appropriately and consistently rewarding you for doing so. Even the DLC had this phenomenal level design; its only real failing was copy+pasting uninteresting fights and rewards like random dragons and basic weapon upgrades to fill the map. I can't think of a single open world in any game that I've played that I enjoyed more than Elden Ring.

Nioh's combat is awful you guys are r-slurred.

>better taste than Reddit

>Noih

The r in rdrama stands for Reddit and the t stands for taste

Pac-Man

I'm not sure I've put more than 5-10 hours into any open world title. Engineering games? Thousands.

Mars is pretty cool but it's hard to beat Earth

I hate open world games so I'm going to sit this one out lol

Xenoblade chronicles X

StarSector

I live to wander as a schizo Ted K Jihadi despite my massive armada of Space Warships of Fuel Haulers.

The drama surrounded the modding scene is the spice that keeps me coming back, like how the only mod that allows prisoner mechanics also allows you to r*pe them since the original prisoner mod was nuked from having a kill switch script that would wipe your saves if you had the r*pe mod side-loaded in a fit of neurodivergent meltdown.

Also Morrowind ofc

GTA games are good open world picks but I would pick either V if you want realism or San Andreas if you'll accept goofiness.

San Andreas' map may be small by modern standards but there is so much to do and so much variety. No other GTA gave us multiple cities like that, and even as condensed as they are they still feel like the cities they're inspired by and different from each other. I also appreciate the different environments; Hollywood hills, redwood forests, the cliffs around San Fran, a big desert with a Boneyard inspired air base.

GTA IV is just urban sprawl and I'm not really a New York guy so I don't need specific Boroughs recreated in digital detail or whatever. Even if it's cartoony, San Andreas still has the most interesting GTA map

But if you need it to look realistic then I'd still take GTA V over IV. There's still a big city but also desert, mountain, a big lake, a military base. Still more variety.

GTA IV is honestly a good pick.

Just Cause 2 or Mercenaries 2 had the most fun open world by far in my opinion. I hardly ever played actual missions and instead just opted to raid enemy bases and mess around with cool vehicles.