The Best Open World Games Where You Don’t Play a Set Character

One of my less-examined but more consistent opinions over the years is that no video game manages to be more immersive and interactive than those that combine an open world with role-playing mechanics.

It seems as if there's an inherent magic in the works that emerge from this fusion, leading to highly sensitive experiences where the ability to determine all kinds of events becomes the heart of unparalleled adventures.

I usually play a game like this once in a blue moon because I'm older and have a thousand responsibilities, but as much as I love my short, focused titles, nothing compares to completely surrendering to a fictional world where you can shape it to your will.

As a result, after years of enjoying becoming all sorts of protagonists, I feel ready to compile this list of the ten best open-world games where you don't play a set character.

10 Absolver

Post-apocalyptic Martial Arts

Despite its open-world nature being partially limited by the player's progression, Absolver is a game that allows you to shape your avatar like few others in the interactive entertainment industry.

While customization remains strictly mechanical, it's a martial arts experience where you can build your own arsenal of melee moves from hundreds of options, creating your own fighting style in the process.

Operating with a stance and stamina management system, as well as defensive mechanics like parrying and dodging, Absolver features one of the most complex, fascinating, and satisfying combat systems I can recall, allowing for great expression in its devastated world.

The game is worthwhile for the campaign alone, though if you have the opportunity to encounter other players along the way to fight or team up with, it will be difficult to deny why Absolver deserves to be on this list.

9 The Outer Worlds

Discovering Company Policy

While it may not be Obsidian's best work, nor the one where you most truly feel like you're playing on a blank canvas shaping it in your own image (or perhaps as your opposite), The Outer Worlds is a perfect fit for this list.

Certainly, it's not the studio's most accomplished work in those respects, but I dare say it's the most cohesive across the wide variety of structures it employs, allowing it to excel in nothing, to be great in everything.

If you ask me about the gunplay, melee combat, shooting, dialogue, NPCs, factions, decision-making, exploration, and everything else, I can confidently say it's a magnificent game, offering players ample opportunity to explore among the last decade's most captivating open worlds.

Thanks to the innovative Flaws, The Outer Worlds is full of charisma and moments where you feel the pressure of choosing one path or another, both in terms of gameplay and narrative, which is phenomenal.

8 Terraria

Nothing is Impossible

The great thing about this genre combination is that it allows for a wide range of completely different adventures, as Terraria exemplifies compared to most of this list's entries.

Given its sandbox nature, it's a game where mechanical limitations are practically nonexistent, giving our avatar a vast array of options to become and do anything, with significantly greater freedom than most games.

However, there are characters and classes that allow you to focus your efforts, making it much more accessible and giving you a moderately defined direction amidst countless kilometers of biomes, cosmic horrors, and the constant need to chop wood.

Considering my age, it's taking me a while to get the hang of it, but little by little, I'm becoming a fanatic of Terraria who fully appreciates the feeling it gives players of playing with their own imagination, not just a collection of pixels.

7 Monster Hunter Wilds

Be the Hunter You Want to Be

Perhaps it wasn't so obvious to me, considering it was the first game in the franchise I genuinely poured my heart and soul into, but creating a clan with friends in Monster Hunter Wilds is a truly masterful experience.

However, this list isn't about co-op, but rather the possibility of embodying an empty character in the middle of a fantastical universe, and that's precisely what you do in this game, where the story takes a backseat to prioritize one of the most wonderful gameplay systems of the generation.

The game offers 14 different weapons for you to explore its complex and branching variety of combat options, along with traps and environmental awareness to use to your advantage, letting you become a true hunter who operates on your own terms.

And, yes, Nata is an annoying kid, and the plot is completely irrelevant, but if that's what you have to put up with to enjoy hunting untamed beasts the size of skyscrapers to wear the most fashionable armor ever conceived, so be it.

6 Cyberpunk 2077

Making a Name for Yourself in Night City

There aren't many open-world games that forgo grandiose world-saving narratives to focus on letting the player create their own legacy, and that's among the dozens of reasons why Cyberpunk 2077 is incredible.

Of course, things happen, and Night City engulfs you in a story where you become a significant figure in its fiction, though the focus is always on V and the decisions they make, both regarding main and side quests, to shape their time in this open-air neon prison.

Unlike The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, where CD Projekt RED demonstrates its ability to create a protagonist like few other developers, the studio gives us the freedom in this odyssey to genuinely decide who the protagonist is and what they want to do, with a lot of narrative paths and even more gameplay options.

It wasn't always like this, but I'm proud to see how the company redeemed itself from my first experience with the game. Currently, Cyberpunk 2077 is among the best open worlds ever conceived, so not putting it here was impossible.

5 Elden Ring

Which God Should be Served?

FromSoftware is one that, among the developers, has focused most on perfecting the concept of not having a set character, but rather ensuring that its protagonists are always disposable nobodies, part of a group of disposable nobodies with millions of participants.

As such, Elden Ring best encapsulates this feeling, placing you in the position of a Tarnished, nothing more than a corpse reborn by an external force to perform acts you didn't agree to but can't refuse.

However, The Lands Between gives you greater agency than its spiritual predecessors, guaranteeing a greater number of endings that you can access depending on the missions you choose to pursue and, ultimately, the vision of the post-game world you wish to shape.

It's a truly fascinating premise because you feel its scale, as it unfolds within a decadent kingdom where demigods fight for the remaining scraps of power and divorced parents simply don't know what to do with so many family problems.

From then on, it's the same old thing but at its peak: dozens of builds, playable classes, tools to break the game's difficulty, and as many bosses as the average person can count, so Elden Ring is peak.

4 Fallout: New Vegas

Choosing the Path

There's one very specific reason why I haven't been entirely happy with the concept of factions in gaming for years, and that reason is Fallout: New Vegas.

Since playing it, it's been impossible to find an open world as well-written, with such captivating quests and contextual reasoning that truly invites reflection and makes you think twice about every word spoken and action taken.

The gunplay is there, though what truly captivates in this masterpiece is its worldbuilding and the amount of presence it gives the player in terms of interaction, knowing their actions have weight and nothing will ever be so easy that you can just navigate it by inertia.

Yet, I genuinely believe you can only truly appreciate Fallout: New Vegas if you take it seriously, and if you do, it becomes a heavy and slow game, but few experiences are more rewarding than this when you decide to engage with it as intended.

3 Dragon Age: Origins

A Blank Chosen One

Speaking of games that are mechanically precarious but whose narratives are magically glorious, Dragon Age: Origins is a clunky blessing we should all fervently love.

Just thinking about the combat, bosses, and animations makes my stomach churn, but then I recall the inexplicable depth of character customization within its universe, and I realize why I include this game on every list I can.

The way the environments, events, and dialogue change based on your decisions, the unfolding of each mission according to your will, the breadth with which the lore explains its circumstances and reflects your actions… It's simply masterful, and more powerful than any tedious combat or bland boss fight.

My weakness for medieval worlds always comes out on occasions like this, and Dragon Age: Origins' Ferelden is one of the best fantasies the video game industry has ever seen, even despite its limited scale.

2 Kenshi

Immeasurable Freedoms

Do you know that feeling of being both surprised and overwhelmed when you encounter a video game that promises so much freedom that you don't even know where to begin? If not, let me introduce you to Kenshi.

I've played all kinds of video games in my life over the past 20 years, and yet I've never felt the same sense of vastness as with this game, which truly lives up to its promise of being an open sandbox.

Nevertheless, breaking the mold of what one might expect from such a description, Kenshi not only allows for admirable paths, but also undesirable ones. You can be a warlord, or you can be a limbless slave, acknowledging not all fantasy is favorable.

Said distinction, however subtle it may seem, is what truly sets this game apart from all the others, regardless of whether that's a good or bad thing. Kenshi is the ultimate representation of freedom, and that's a much heavier burden than people are willing to admit.

The Ultimate Fantasy

I know that as the years go by, the game's age is becoming increasingly apparent, but The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an immortal epic that will only succumb to time when its successor arrives.

Until then, we'll continue to talk about its icy landscapes and fearsome dragons as the pinnacle of immersion in medieval worlds, granting you the ability to live a second life in which, no matter what happens, you'll feel wonderfully at ease.

Even without mods, you can spend hundreds of hours exploring Skyrim and still not have seen half of what it has to offer, with so many secrets, stories, and variations that it would take multiple fully leveled characters to see everything.

It doesn't have the same freedom as Kenshi or Dragon Age: Origins' customizable narrative depth, though it does have such a massive, handcrafted scale that it's difficult to believe it didn't take decades to create.

I know it's not everyone's favorite, especially because of its dated gameplay, but Bethesda's magnum opus continues to be at the top of open-world games as one of the genre's greatest representatives in its history, and I don't know when they're going to bring it down.