Summary
By their nature, open-world games are ambitious. It’s hard to imagine a bigger ambition than trying to simulate in as much detail as feasible the real world in an entirely digital space, and sometimes, that ambition can result in strange open worlds that bite off more than they can chew.
Yet, there’s a distinct charm to the many open-world games that strive for greatness, even if they don’t quite reach it. This list is ranked by how big the ambition was and how admirable the attempt ended up being.Note that some games here have since improved their worlds and should receive credit for that.
Coming out of the gates with a new racing game IP is always tricky, as the racing giants take up a lot of real estate. So, in 2009,Fuelhad a simple but effective sales pitch: the biggest open-world racing game ever made.
It’s true, too. The world ofFuelis truly enormous, only rivaled byThe Crewgames later in the 2010s. Unfortunately, the actual game didn’t quite take advantage of the incredible tech feat pulled off on 2009 console hardware, which left critics cold, but it should be lauded for its incredible technical efforts.
These days, gamers live in a world where billions of dollars can be poured into games, making them polished and corporate products that are certainly great, but lack a little personality. However, the further back in history gaming history goes, the more the weird, imperfect attempts stand out.
Deadly Premonitionis one of the best examples of this. The game is patently weird and often broken with a bizarre open world that barely functions, but it absolutely oozes with charm from top to bottom, earning it legions of fans. Consideringits clearTwin Peaksand David Lynch inspirations, that’s not a surprise.
Throw a pebble in the Steam store and a searching gamer will likely find piles of strange Eastern European or Russian games with poor translations, sky-high difficulty, and experimental gameplay mechanics designed to punish and push players to new places.
Pathologicis the prototypical example of this kind of game. It’s a stone-cold classic, no doubt about it,with an incredible story to boot, but its world is full of janky design and frankly strange decisions. The ambition of simulating an entire plague is laudable, and it set the foundations for its sequels that improved almost every element.
The last great shift in console power was between the PS3/Xbox 360 Generation and the PS4/Xbox One generation, with new open-world games promising to utilize unprecedented power for new gameplay mechanics, spearheaded by Ubisoft’s hacking gameWatch Dogs.
While the premise of hacking anything was compelling, it never worked out as effectively inWatch Dogsas promised, particularly after the downgrade controversy. Still, it laid the foundations for the brilliantWatch Dogs 2, showing the ambition was well placed in the concept.
These days,The Elder Scrollsgames are known for the epic RPGs set in Cyrodil, Morrowind, and Skyrim, but classic RPG fans know that the games have a long-lasting pedigree stretching into the 1990s, withDaggerfallbeing one of the single-most ambitious RPGs of that generation.
Utilizing procedural generation and algorithms,Daggerfallsought to simulate vast swathes of Tamriel’s map on hardware that was decades from pulling it off well. The world is massive but a little lacking in personality, marking a lot of experimental ambition that spoke to the success Bethesda would soon experience. However,there are a lot of great modsthat make it much more accessible in the modern day.
Most gamers are well aware of the tidal wave of controversy that engulfedCyberpunk 2077upon its release in 2020, riddled with bugs, graphical downgrades, and strange gameplay decisions. Yet, not one gamer could truly say that Night City, the game’s setting, was a let-down.
To this day, Night City stands as one of the greatest open-world settings ever made. While in the years since the game has been fixed up and filled out with a stunningly brilliant DLC inPhantom Liberty, Night City stands as a testament to CDPR’s ambition, even if the release version didn’t live up to it,full of things to do for even the most bored gamer.
2014 was a very exciting year for gamers, with every big studio promising vastly improved graphical fidelity and gameplay systems in their flagship titles, andAssassin’s Creedstood to make the most gains with its pedigree of meticulous city reconstruction and massive crowds.
Unfortunately, the result of that ambition wasAssassin’s Creed Unity,which was released in an infamously buggy state. It’s a shame, because the ambition was clear with some of the best crowd dynamics in gaming, but it didn’t quite hit the mark on release.
Ambition can be measured in many ways, but, on an objective scale, it’s hard to imagine a game developer being more ambitious than simulating billions of procedurally generated planets in a universe that will never be fully explored. That was whatNo Man’s Skydid, and the results were mixed, to say the least.
In truth, the game was a disaster. Yet, in the years since, the devs have worked tirelessly to improve every single system in the game,releasing tons of free DLC and updates, making the game genuinely brilliant to play in the modern day, and finally living up to that promised ambition from those heady 2016 days.
