10 Xbox 360 Open-World Games That Reward Exploration

By the seventh console generation, the open-world game boom was in full swing, and the Xbox 360 was the console to experience it. Nearly all the generation’s big open-world titles were available on the 360, bringing unprecedented levels of content and gameplay scope to the gaming public. It was pretty rad, all things considered, not just because we got these big worlds to tool around in, but because these worlds were densely-packed with activities, sidequests, and collectibles that made exploring them worthwhile on their own.

These particular open-world games understood that a big component of the formula, and what made the genre so attractive at the time, was giving you a world that you could well and truly lose yourself in, both for its own sake and to fuel your progression along the critical path. You could play these games in the most linear, efficient way possible if you were so inclined, but that wouldn’t feel very rewarding, nor particularly cost-effective.

10 Fable 2

A Countryside Full of Wonder

While the Fable games have never been quite as expansive and elaborate as Peter Molyneux would’ve liked you to believe, it is a fact that each one had very large fantasy worlds for you to explore, full of monsters to fight, secrets to uncover, and nifty pointy things to equip. Fable 2 was the first in the series on the Xbox 360, and was comparatively larger in scope and density than its predecessor.

While Fable 2 obviously has a critical path of quests and setpieces to follow, after you complete the initial tutorial chapters, you’re pretty much free to go where you want and do what you want. You can delve into caves and dungeons in search of fights and loot, buy up real estate both to live in and rent out, get married and start a family, and all kinds of other activities. All of these yield at least some kind of tangible benefit, whether it’s building up karma or accumulating wealth.

Fable 2 also has plenty to offer in the more literal definition of exploring, as simply nosing around the paths between cities can uncover interesting diversions like the Demon Doors, which each have their own little puzzle or challenge to solve and open.

9 Saints Row 4

It’s Your World to be Super in

The seventh console gen saw the emergence of Saints Row as one of Grand Theft Auto’s major competitors. The first game was more-or-less just a carbon copy of GTA’s aesthetics, but with each subsequent game, it leaned further and further into wacky campiness, culminating in the utterly bizarre, yet wholly unique experience that was Saints Row 4.

Despite recycling the city map from Saints Row: The Third, Saints Row 4 managed to keep things interesting through a combination of new activities and collectibles and tweaked gameplay mechanics, chief among them being your character having superpowers. Using your powers, as well as the usual vehicle and combat mechanics, you could get up to all kinds of side activities, from conducting full-scale Mayhem on the streets to everyone’s favorite ragdolling mini-game, Insurance Fraud.

The game’s increased mobility also allowed for a greater presence of collectibles, including data clusters for upgrading your powers, Zinyak Statues to smash for cash and XP, and audio logs from both major and minor characters from across the series.

8 South Park: The Stick of Truth

That Sleepy Mountain Town

It’s no secret that licensed games are usually terrible, with South Park in particular having several particularly rough releases on the N64 and PS1. That finally changed in the seventh console generation with the release of South Park: The Stick of Truth, an open-world RPG with the most coherent depiction of the titular town to date.

Nearly all of South Park proper is yours to explore in this game, plus some adjacent areas like an alien spaceship and the entirety of Canada. Just getting to freely wander around town is pretty cool, especially since it’s depicted in the same animation style as the show, but there’s also ample reason to search every nook and cranny thoroughly, especially as you unlock new traversal abilities (i.e. farts).

You can find the scattered Chinpokomon dolls, make Facebook friends with everyone in town to unlock more perks, and unlock all the miscellaneous equipment, weapons, and customization items, many of which are also references to the show. You can even visit Tom’s Rhinoplasty to get your head turned into a JPEG of David Hasselhoff’s.

7 Borderlands 2

Find, Shoot, Loot

From the moment Gary Gygax wrote the original Dungeons & Dragons module, finding cool loot has been one of the oldest and best justifications for exploring a fantastical world. Of course, said loot need not be swords and shields; guns and force fields make just as good of an impetus, as Borderlands 2 illustrates.

As a looter-shooter game, finding gear and chests is an ever-present motivator in Borderlands 2. You can and should search every single side path, cave, and janitor’s closet you come across, as any one of them could have another chest potentially containing your next great weapon. The majority of the game’s gear is randomly-generated, but some quests and locales also reward unique weapons with fixed modifiers if you want something specific to work toward.

The game’s challenge system and Badass Rank also encourage you to thoroughly explore every area, experimenting with enemy encounters and combat strategies to earn more points and reap rewards. There are even a couple of collectibles that increase your Badass Rank as well, such as Vault Symbols and Lost ECHOs if you specifically like finding miscellaneous things.

6 Assassin’s Creed 2

Before Ubisoft Got Carried Away

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed games have amassed something of a reputation for being bogged down in pointless minutiae and busywork, to the point that the “Ubisoft formula” has become an entirely separate quantifier for open-world games. The series wasn’t always like that, though; Assassin’s Creed 2 managed to meet a good middle ground of collectibles and activities with tangible benefits.

Compared to the first game, which was a little more linear and straightforward, Assassin’s Creed 2’s world has a greater concentration of side activities to get up to, including assassination contract and street races, which earned you helpful cash for upgrading your gear. You could also collect the various glyphs scattered around to unlock a secret video, as well as the feathers for Ezio’s mother which unlocked a mildly useless, but nice-looking cape.

The coolest reason to explore was the Assassin Tombs, catacombs scattered around the countryside containing a series of platforming challenges. Clearing all of these challenges and getting their seals unlocked the game’s best set of armor, which was more than worth the trouble.

5 Batman: Arkham City

Batman Goes Where he Pleases

2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum was the most ambitious Batman game to come out at the time, with a very effective combat and navigation system that, if you’ll pardon the cliché, made you really feel like Batman. However, that game was very linear, which isn’t really indicative of the full Dark Knight experience. That experience came about in the sequel, Batman: Arkham City.

Once you’re through the initial segments, Arkham City gives you near-complete rein over the titular walled-off chunk of Gotham City, complete with city streets to patrol and rooftops to jump and glide from. The sidequests make for a good incentive to grapple around, as many of them get you a chance to tangle with Batman’s wider rogues gallery.

The game’s most prominent exploration-encouragement are the many riddles and trophies scattered by Edward “The Riddler” Nygma. While finding all the trophies is a bit of a chore, I’d be lying if I said cracking all of Nygma’s riddles and rubbing his skinny face in it didn’t give me a healthy modicum of catharsis.

4 Red Dead Redemption

Tame the Wilderness

Part of what brought people westward during the age of the Wild West was the promise of unclaimed natural resources and riches. The frontier may have been long stretches of absolutely nothing, but with a little persistence, you might have just found a nugget of gold. That’s kind of what playing Red Dead Redemption is like.

Whether on carriage or horseback, you can roam the sunny, untamed wilderness of the western United States looking for unusual things to do. The game is a little too spaced-out to have traditional collectibles, but in lieu of that, you can encounter all kinds of interesting events out in the world if you just mosey around a bit, whether it’s drive-by robberies by highwaymen or attacks by vicious wild animals. Engaging with these activities can increase your honor and fame (or decrease them if you’re a baddie), which can have knock-on effects on your interactions with NPCs.

There are also more regimented activities around the west, such as gun dueling, bounty hunting, playing poker, and hunting some of those aforementioned wild animals. Rather than filling a completion percentage, it’s exploration for the sake of experiencing the world.

Here There be Dragons

Say what you will about Bethesda’s mildly-annoying habit of rereleasing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim every five minutes, you can’t deny it was a pretty excellent game when it first launched on the 360. There’s a reason people keep replaying it every time it’s ported: it’s just a great world to lose yourself in.

Skyrim is packed to the gills with distinctive questlines to get up to and interesting gear and artifacts to sniff out. Like Bethesda’s other first-person RPGs, Skyrim is full of unique, named weapons in static locations, particularly the Daedric Artifacts like the Mace of Molag-Bal, the Dawnbreaker, and everyone’s favorite, the Wabbajack.

Just wandering through the map and jumping up mountains is rewarding in itself, as not only does discovering new locations reward XP, but it helps to build out your map and potential fast-travel locations. Trust me, you’ll be glad you have so many points to quickly hop to when you’re actually going through the mainline quests.

2 Fallout: New Vegas

Scrounging through a Sand Dune

In addition to Elder Scrolls games, Bethesda also made a happy home for the Fallout games on the 360, starting with its landmark reimagining of the setting in Fallout 3. While Fallout 3 was undoubtedly a big deal, though, the post-apocalyptic game with an arguably more interesting setting to explore was Fallout: New Vegas.

Where Fallout 3’s Capital Wasteland was mildly choked with nonspecific debris and empty buildings, New Vegas’s Mojave Wasteland is much more open and explorable, thanks in large part to the large, literal desert after which it is named. What ruined buildings are still available to find, mostly around Freeside and New Vegas proper, are more likely to have interesting combat encounters and incidental quests. Heck, it was in one of those buildings that I had the life-altering experience of meeting FISTO.

New Vegas also has an extremely large catalog of unique weapons and armor scattered from one end of the wasteland to another, which more than encourages you to case the entire place and try to meet as many people as possible to get unfettered access. Get it without killing everyone in your immediate vicinity, I mean.

1 Grand Theft Auto 5

Paradise for Terrible People

While the 360 saw multiple studios and franchises take a shot at Rockstar’s open-world game crown, the release of Grand Theft Auto 5 more than proved that it still holds the scepter in this particular endeavor. This game is so densely-packed with stuff to do, Rockstar hasn’t really needed to make a new game since it came out in 2013.

The game’s central city of Los Santos is, in a word, enormous, with both sprawling cities and stretches of suburbs, plus plenty of natural spots on the outskirts. Whether on wheels or on foot, you can drive recklessly through all of it, engaging in all manner of delightful criminal shenanigans. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be criminal stuff; you can just go scuba diving or base jumping or buy up stocks on the virtual stock market. Outside the main questline, it’s your sandbox in which to engage your basest urges.

There are also some more tangible collectible collections to complete, such as the Spaceship Parts for unlocking the Space Docker, the Hidden Packages containing cash and weapons, and the Letter Scraps for solving a mysterious murder in a particular sidequest.