10 Open-World Games That Totally Reinvent Themselves Halfway Through

There's nothing wrong with predictability. I like a good old serving of vanilla ice cream now and then. However, the most memorable dishes are those with a complex taste profile that surprises you past the first impression.

A lot of great open-world games are like that as well. The vast majority of this genre gives you tons of hours to poke your way around, but not all of them have enough to keep things interesting. Side quest this, 100% that, but it's still the same old game.

It takes a special mix of courage and talent in the design phase to reinvent a world players have grown attached to, and these ten open-world games nail that transition.

8 Final Fantasy XV

The Hangover, Part 4

The world's prime roadtrip simulator wears many masks during its 50-odd hours. You get to experience the vastness of Eos in three distinct phases, each of them just as special.

Final Fantasy XV starts pretty innocuously, just a couple of lads going on the stag party of the millennium en route to an arranged wedding. During this time, you get to discover that Eos is dangerous enough by itself, even during peacetime.

After the war breaks out again between the kingdom of Lucis and the Niflheim empire, your little peaceful roadtrip becomes a game of cat-and-mouse with imperials, forcing you to plan your moves in an increasingly hostile world that remains open.

Finally, the stretch of the game takes you into a much smaller, linear, and brutal world. You can still explore certain parts, but it is a perilous journey that is much closer to classic Final Fantasy titles in terms of scope compared to the free-roam of the first half of the game.

7 Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint

All Droned Up

Much can be said about Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a lot of it fairly negative. Ubisoft undoubtedly dropped the ball with the initial launch of the game, trying to capitalize on the success of Wildlands with a quick release that was just shy of disastrous. However, in the long run, Breakpoint became three games in one.

The first and main part of the game, Operation Greenstone, follows a somewhat nonsensical plot about special forces fighting the consequences of maladjusted tech bros and private military companies. Sometimes it's entertaining, other times terrible.

Where the game shines, however, is in the two post-launch modes. Deep State, also called Operation Checkmate, is an awesome tie-in with the Splinter Cell series. To this day, it's the closest thing to a full Sam Fisher return you can play. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier fans get their own share of fan service with Operation Red Patriot, which continues the main story.

Finally, Operation Motherland leans hard on the open structure of Breakpoint, giving you a map control game mode against a major military adversary. Ubisoft might have screwed up the launch, but it eventually cooked with the game's support.

6 Fallout 3

Hobo to Hero

I'd flirted with playing Fallout for years, but it was Fallout 3 that finally made me bite the bullet. This is a beautiful example of how to keep things interesting in a long game (up until the ending ruins everything, that is, but more on that later).

The Fallout 3 early game is easily the most brutal of the Bethesda tenure over the franchise. Even a minor navigation error takes you into areas where you'll be greeted by red scorpions of super mutants. Nothing says welcome to DC like stumbling into the radio area armed with three stimpacks and a Vault security fit.

Thanks to the virtually mandatory Broken Steel add-on, which makes the game actually not infuriating to finish, you go from a lone Vaultie to a member of the Brotherhood of Steel engaged in full-on faction warfare. This is a huge powertrip that transforms the dynamics of the game and gives you the opportunity to actually shape the wasteland with your actions.

5 Ghost of Yōtei

The Cycle of Revenge

Atsu's journey in Ghost of Yōtei is one of bloodlust. From the second you return to Ezo (modern-day Hokkaido), you are revenge incarnate. Your only goal is to punish those who wronged you, and once that's done, you can die in peace.

Halfway through the game, however, you end up going from a lonely vagabond to playing your part in something much bigger. It's a marked change in dynamics, and it adds a sense of urgency that is not there for the first 15-20 hours.

Rather than exploring freely while making some coin off of bounties, you end up charging encampments side-by-side with a large army, and getting caught in massive battles instead of just lone ronin after your head. For the first time since the night of the burning tree, Atsu has something to live for instead.

Has the Memory Gone, Are You Feeling Numb?

Peace sells, but who's buying? Kojima spent decades toying with this concept during his tenure over the Metal Gear series, and while things ended on a rather sour note, at least we got an amazing game out of it.

The Phantom Pain is clearly divided into two parts, and though the second often catches flak for being unfinished as a consequence of the Kojima-Konami divorce, it remains one of my favorite experiences.

For the first half of the game, you and your lieutenants are starting over from scratch following the Ground Zeroes incident. After that, however, the thirst for revenge poisons the Diamond Dogs' leadership, and you are stuck in a vicious and fairly pointless cycle of violence. It's a grim, but wholly necessary game to understand the realities of private armies.

3 STALKER 2

A Roadside Picnic

The rags-to-riches pipeline is a common one in any game with RPG elements, but STALKER 2 takes it to whole new levels. The Zone welcomes you with a hefty blow to the back of the head. Left with virtually nothing to your name, you have to earn the respect of a myriad of factions, none of which love you all that much.

Once you finally find your footing and have a decent arsenal to work with, the game flips things around with the SIRCAA incident. Previously friendly groups will try to blow your brains out on sight, allies will turn on you, and you get to see just how bad things get in the Zone.

Finally, after adapting to all of that mess, you enter Pripyat, and the rules of the game change once again, with much more linear, extremely difficult missions.

2 Kenshi

The Wolf of the Wasteland

Very few games make you feel completely naked like early-game Kenshi. Your goal here is to simply survive, preferably with all your limbs attached, while the world is busy punching down on you. It's a unique survival gaming experience, but one that you eventually graduate from.

Halfway into the game, you start picking some fights instead of avoiding them. You pick up some bounties, make enemies, start a base, and even explore around a little without the fear of dying. Still, this is just a stepping stone into the game's transformation into a base and faction tycoon.

Late-game Kenshi pits you against big factions and is a powerful metaphor for corporate life, where you are eventually taken away from your trade to work in management instead. Managing your base and your followers is a full-time job, but the ability to actually take the fight to major factions and become the harbinger of chaos.

1 NieR Automata

Timeless Timelines

The brilliant mind of Yoko Taro has taken narratives to places you could have only dreamed of in the past, with NieR Automata as his magnum opus.

In this beautiful, sorrowful, and occasionally nonsensical JRPG, Taro takes us through what feels like a dozen games bundled into one. NieR is an open-world RPG, a platformer, a bullet hell, and multiple storylines that are intertwined.

Funnily enough, the director's introduction to this jumbled storytelling style was out of sheer necessity: Square Enix gave the studio a limited budget during the making of Drakengaard, so Taro felt the need to change up the story in different playthroughs. The rest, as they say, is history.