10 Open-World Games That Don't Feel Like A Chore To Play

Open-world games are all the rage nowadays, but I have a confession: I really don't like a majority of them.

To me, most open-world games feel like an endless box ticker, giving you more and more locations to stumble into until you burn out and drop the game without ever really finishing it. While there are rare games that pour immense detail into every location to make it feel that the world is lived in, and that you're not chasing one quest marker to the next, they are the exception and not the rule.

What I find also makes open-world games feel like a chore is how it designs its core exploration experience. I personally loathe the downtime between walking from one area to the next. Especially in some games where you'll waste minutes trudging through empty environments filled with bullet sponge enemies who only exist to give the illusion that you're doing something fun (Looking at you, Fallout 4 and Dragon Age: Inquisition).

That's why whenever an open-world game comes my way and actually sticks with me, I treat it like the rare treasure that it is and yap about it all too much.

So if you're like me and looking to get into an open-world game you won't put down after a few days, here are 10 open-world games that don't make exploring them feel like a chore.

10 Ghost of Yōtei

A Breeze to Explore

Ghost of Yōtei was one of my favorite releases from last year, which was odd, as it's unashamed of its open-world design. In saying that, I think the developers at Sucker Punch managed to blend the story's narrative with its open-world impeccably, letting you feel the scope and weight of the terror the Yōtei Six are inflicting on the land.

Even after embarrassingly long sessions playing the game, I never found myself feeling exhausted exploring the world. While several regions are filled with side quests and random encounters, they're carefully spread out and paced so well that completing them never felt like busy work.

Ghost of Yōtei's first few hours can feel overwhelming at the start, but the game is quick to help you find a path, so you're never left chasing loose ends. Once you identify your first few targets, you'll be able to branch down into different paths which are paced like their own movie, giving you a beginning, middle and end to pace your time with the game around.

While journeying in Ezo, you’ll also get to train with different weapons masters who will take you under their wing to train. These are not only short and satisfying side quests on their own, but each weapon adds a powerful new tool into your arsenal to help expand the game's combat system to keep it feeling fresh throughout the game.

9 Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth

An Open-World Split into Parts

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth can feel like a dense game at first. But once you understand its core open-world loop, it'll feel like a free sandbox you can play in without stressing over how large the world is.

While the game is an open-world experience, it comes with an asterisk. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's open-world is broken up into several different large zones, all with their own unique biome and story arcs. The advantage of a design like this is that it allows each area to feel like its own lived-in environment, and helps let the game's pacing breathe a bit.

It also makes sure that each area feels diverse, with different Chocobos that help move around the map, thanks to their unique ability. You'll unlock these after a short time in the area as well, helping you familiarize yourself with the location and any landmarks of interest to help you get your bearings.

Exploring aside, there's also the issue of quests here. While Final Fantasy VII Rebirth does have an abundance of quests within each zone, these follow a very familiar formula for each area.

Almost every zone in the game will feature a unique side quest for your party members, helping you to build your relationship with them and gain access to new abilities. There'll also be waypoint towers you can activate to reveal nearby Lifesprings, Fiend Intel and Divine Intel without having to hunt them down yourself. You'll also be able to complete Moogle and Protorelic quests each in different zones.

Sure, this seems like a lot, but once you get going and understand this loop, it turns exploration into a relaxing routine you can choose to tackle whenever you're ready.

8 Marvel's Spider-Man 2

The Finest Movement System in Any Open World Game

Spider-Man 2 opened my eyes to why I struggle to get through certain open-worlds, and in hindsight, it's a simple answer: Movement. What makes Spider-Man 2 such a fascinating world to explore is that it may very well have the best movement out of any open-world game out there.

Is the game bloated with collectables and pointless side content? Oh, absolutely. But the game makes moving around the map so seamless and fun, you don't hate yourself the entire time you're looking for that one Spider-Bot.

What puts Marvel's Spider-Man 2 over its predecessor is the new movement abilities available to you, which make swinging from Brooklyn to New York a fast and satisfying experience instead of watching paint dry. The sequel also introduced one of the best fast travel mechanics in the game, which lets you almost instantly travel from one end of the map to another without an extensive loading screen in between.

Another feature I love is how this game drip-feeds side quests throughout the main story. It's all too easy in some open-world games to entirely forget the main story exists and burn yourself out on side content. However, the devs carefully pace how their side-content reveals itself to you, and appropriately reacts to events in the main story, making it feel like the world is changing with you.

But in all honesty, even if Spider-Man 2 didn't have its abundance of side quests, I'd still love swinging around the city to kill time, because it's just that good.

7 Elden Ring

An Open-World Far from Tarnished

Elden Ring is the culmination of FromSoft's renowned world building, opening the boundaries and letting players loose into yet another one of their oppressive worlds.

Each area in the game feels as though it was crafted with purpose, with even the most minor of caves introducing interesting lore moments. Rewards for exploring the map are also fairly lucrative, with the lure of new cookbooks, golden seeds, or smithing stones, and more making any stray unexplored beach interesting.

But if we're to be honest with ourselves, it's the thrill of a boss battle wherever we go in the game that gets us checking every area on the map just to see if there's someone we've missed.

What I love so much about Elden Ring, is that it lets players roam free in The Lands Between and go pretty much anywhere the moment you start. Once you get your trusty steed, Torrent, you're free to butt your heads up against any area, no matter how under leveled you might be. And even if you are woefully under prepared for some of the game's harsher environments, any player can overcome the challenges in the game if they're good enough.

It's for that reason that I feel like Elden Ring might just be one of the most "open" open-world games ever, but it never lets you feel overwhelmed knowing that, letting you naturally stumble into its grand scope as you keep playing.

6 Outer Wilds

An Emotional Journey with a Stellar Soundtrack

If you were to tell me that a game set in space with no combat and is exclusively about solving puzzles would eventually become one of my favourite games of all time, I'd have raised an eyebrow. If you told me that the soundtrack is almost entirely Midwest emo, then that would make sense.

Outer Wilds is one of the most special games to exist. If you haven't played it before, then you're doing yourself a disservice, as it's an experience best had going in blind.

At the core of the game is the mystery surrounding why time keeps resetting, and why your character is the only one aware that they're even in the loop. This mystery will eventually take you across the universe, gathering as much information as you can about the mysterious Nomai people, where they disappeared to, and what the technology they left behind means.

Each loop in the game will last around 22 minutes, giving you a very limited time to explore a world and reveal as many secrets as you can before the sun explodes, resetting your day. All of this information is stored on your ship's trusty computer, helping you map out these secrets, how they connect to each other, and where the next missing link may be located.

If you're looking for an open-world game to instantly dive into and lose yourself in, Outer Wilds is maybe one of the best out there.

5 Immortals Fenyx Rising

Ubisoft Streamlining Their Open World

At the time of its release, Immortals Fenyx Rising had a reputation for being a "We have Breath of the Wild at home" kind of game. While it's hard to deny that it absolutely is inspired by Nintendo's classic, Ubisoft honestly did a great job with this one, thanks to its modest scope.

Ubisoft's grand open-world design can be a bit of a mixed bag for some players. While their worlds can have activities spread far between, letting players immerse themselves in the calm of traveling from point A to point B, others can find this downtime tedious. It's mostly why I haven't been able to finish any of the last four Assassin's Creed games, as they encapsulate a lot of open-world tropes I find unfun.

Immortals Fenyx Rising proves that the studio is capable of crafting a tight, no-nonsense open world experience that won't consume your entire life. Set within a fantastical open-world based on Greek Mythology, you play as Fenyx, a mortal hero who sets out to rescue the Greek Gods and stop the titan Typhon.

Unlike other open-world experiences, Immortals Fenyx Rising will take most players around 20 hours to beat. This is due to the game's simple, easy-to-pick-up world design, with short challenges, and a modest amount of secrets and upgrades to discover.

Honestly, I'd love for Ubisoft to make more games in this vein, as their strengths really shine through in tightly crafted experiences such as this. The Greek Mythology setting doesn't hurt it either, with several fun easter eggs for those of us who made ancient mythology a special interest while growing up.

4 Valheim

A Viking-Inspired Open-World with an Impressive Variety of Locations

The open-world survival crafting genre is as bloated as me after a seafood boil. The genre is littered with gameplay loops that feel especially tedious and overly punishing should you die and need to reset your entire progress.

Yet somehow, Valheim manages to pull me in, full-knowing I'm about to waste a week of my life glued to building my humble Viking village.

Valheim is your usual survival crafting game, but I can't deny its old-fashioned art style and dreamlike setting made it click with me. You play as a simple soldier stuck in purgatory, who needs to defeat several evil bosses to earn Odin's favor and ascend to Valhalla.

But it's not only the boss fights you'll have to look out for. This game is littered with powerful mobs who will absolutely ruin your day should you stumble onto them. Nothing makes or breaks friend groups quite like finding your first troll together, carefully juggling its attention, only to stumble onto a second troll that immediately sends the party into a chaotic panic.

Your motivation to explore will be to find the resources needed to upgrade your weapons, armor and potions so you can take on the next boss without getting wiped the moment it spawns.

What makes exploring stand out in this game is that it truly does feel like you're embarking on an adventure whenever you leave your house. After the first few zones, you'll eventually have to travel over the sea to get to new areas, which turns exploring into a full-on trek, as you'll stumble into frightening new areas that you may find yourself turning around from just as fast as you arrived.

Valheim is an open-world experience that sticks with you for ages, thanks to its unrelenting difficulty and the rush of overcoming its challenges.

3 Dredge

All Aboard the Lovecraftian Fishing Trip

No game will make you feel like the life of a fisherman may just be for you, while also balancing that calling with cosmic dread.

Dredge has you play as a fisherman who sails out to sea to either fish or dredge for materials. You'll start your loop by selling these items to get more money to spend on upgrading your boat so you can sail out further and for longer stretches of time. Which you'll want to do, as some of the most valuable items in the game are only available at night, along with creeping dangers that lurk beneath the waters.

At night, you'll be accosted by several Lovecraftian sea monsters, which will go out of their way to hunt you down at sea and ensure you're not having a cozy time fishing. As you stay out, your panic meter will slowly rise, triggering hallucinations and more terrifying monsters that can wreak even more damage to you and your ship.

It's a fairly simple gameplay loop, but the game's atmosphere, along with the coziness of the actual fishing itself, makes for a surprisingly satisfying time. I know I've told myself many a time that I was only going to go out for one more haul, only to find myself landing just enough for the next upgrade, which spirals into another haul to test it, then realizing I'm close to the next upgrade, and rinse and repeat.

If you're looking for a cozy open-world game that makes exploring the world have some extra stakes to them, then Dredge is an easy recommendation.

2 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

A Fairy Tale Come to Life

The Witcher 3 was one of the hardest games for me to get into when it first came out. But years later, after the hype had calmed down and, perhaps now that I had the patience for it, I could finally meet it on its own level. What waited in store for me was one of the most intricately designed open worlds I had ever played, brimming with stories I could lose myself in.

Some of the frustrations of the game came from how unlike it is from anything that came before it. Combat is punishing and clunky, and magic and potions are vital to winning certain fights instead of nice bonuses. But its biggest drawback at the time for me was its massive open world, which would cause my brain to switch off whenever I tried to make sense of it. It's this introduction to the game that scares off most players and sees them tapping out only a few short hours into the game.

After sticking with it some more, and letting myself fully appreciate the little stories along the way, The Witcher 3's open world slowly started to click, and now I can admit I see the light.

A key part of this shift was forgetting about the open world and its markers, and fully immersing myself in the game's environments and stories. Once I did that, I could notice how organic exploration feels. It's too easy to stumble into someone's side quest just riding Roach around the world, only to stumble into someone needing help, or to stumble onto a note that will lead you to another quest you weren't expecting.

The Witcher 3 is a narrative triumph that blends open-world exploration with considerate and well-written stories, helping every small encounter feel special within its magical world.

1 Grand Theft Auto V

The GOAT for a Reason

Of course, you can't talk about any open-world game without mentioning the GOAT, Grand Theft Auto V.

Rockstar's magnum opus made its name for itself by offering players one of the largest and most satisfying sandboxes in gaming. This game has everything you could want: a hilarious and dramatic main story, immersive side missions, and several pastimes to soak up your free time if you don't feel like getting chased by the police.

Thanks to the impressively dynamic world the developers have made here, it's easy to get caught up in the average life of NPCs roaming around the city. So much so that I'm certain GTA V is the only game in existence where players will actively choose to adhere to real-life road rules at some point, just for the fun of it.

If you're not looking to overwhelm yourself with the abundance of content in the game, you can simply lock in on its main story quest, which is also one of the best in gaming.

Outside the main story, there's an endless amount of activities you can choose to spend your time doing. These can range from your standard heists and street racing that we've come to expect from the series, to leisure activities like golfing and even yoga.

It's honestly hard for any part of GTA V to feel like a chore when so much of the game revels in its absurdity, letting you live out your most chaotic fantasies. And if that's also not for you, you can easily take a break to unwind by shooting some balls in golf, or learn how to fly a plane at flight school. The world is literally your oyster, and shouldn't that be the goal of any open-world game?