Best Open-World Games That Can Keep You Busy For Months

Key Takeaways

• Open-world games offer endless exploration and adventure, with rich details and immersive experiences.
• Horizon Zero Dawn offers stunning visuals, Red Dead Redemption 2 has an intense narrative, and Skyrim is vast.
• Genshin Impact has continuously updated quests, while Minecraft has an endless, procedurally generated world.

Open-world games offer a sense of freedom sometimes unavailable in other types of games, with a sense of endless exploration and adventure that throws players into another world entirely. Players love open worlds for their level of detail; these worlds are often littered with side quests and items that delve into the game’s lore. Some open-world games allow for co-op collaboration, while others are perfect for exploring at a single player’s own pace.

This list explores open-world games that can be played for months, varying in genre from fantasy and adventure to RPGs and survival simulators. Some of the games on this list take a certain number of hours to complete the main story, while others are open-ended, offering endless hours of immersion in expansive worlds.

9 Horizon Zero Dawn

Post-Apocalyptic Combat And Exploration

• Main Story Length: ~20-30 hours
• Completionist Length: ~60-70 Hours

This stunning post-apocalyptic game has a brilliant mixture of exploration, combat, and questing. Recently remastered, the visuals in Horizon Zero Dawn are truly stunning, full of vivid colors and crisp details, an environment that is sure to draw players in.

Horizon Zero Dawn follows a young woman named Aloy as she ventures out into a landscape ruled by machines. Players have the option to play with a variety of weapons in attempts to defeat these machines, including bows and arrows, tripwires, and explosive devices.

8 Valheim

Intense Viking Survival Co-Op

• Main Progression Length: ~70-100 hours
• Completionist Length: 150+ hours

This Norse-mythology-inspired survival game is based in an expansive underworld full of monsters to be defeated, the place Vikings go before they are granted access to Valhalla.

Players can craft, build, and fight in sandbox worlds, each of which features multiple fascinating biomes full of unique features. While V alheim can be explored in single-player mode, the developers suggest it’s more fun to play with friends, and the co-op mode allows for up to 10 players.

7 Red Dead Redemption 2

A Sophisticated Story About Outlaws

• Main Story Length: ~50-60 hours
• Completionist Length: ~200 hours

Fans of Red Dead Redemption 2 love it for its intense narrative, great side quests, and cinematic details from the characters to the weaponry. Players can take on high and low-honor adventures, including animal hunting, crime sprees, and bounty hunting.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in a fictionalized nineteenth-century United States, with the protagonist and outlaw Arthur Morgan. The open-world setting consists of several unique regions based on real parts of America, which are vast and leave plenty for the player to explore.

6 Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

Expansive Nordic Open-World Adventure

• Main Story Length: ~50-60 hours
• Completionist Length: 100+ hours

Like other games in the Assassin’s Creed universe, Valhalla gives players a sprawling open world to explore inspired by the countries of North-West Europe. There’s also optional mythical exploration available.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla combines sophisticated combat, the ability to develop settlements, and nautical mechanics that allow for naval raids on enemies in England. There are three playstyles illustrating the different skills players can adapt in the choice-based RPG gameplay, as well as an immersive story that involves both the main Viking adventure and the overarching modern narrative about Layla Hassan.

Loads Of Quests In A Vast Open-World

• Main Story Length: ~35 hours
• Completionist Length: 200+ hours

Skyrim is renowned for its brilliant open world, which makes it an easy game for players to sink many, many hours into. This open world has 9 worlds with varied landscape terrain and over 400 locations of all different kinds.

What’s more, players can choose how much emphasis they want to place on the main story, exploring the world at their own pace. There are also several different quests to take on, which players can spend many hours on. This includes the main story, quests for different guilds, and procedurally generated tasks as well.

4 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Great Storytelling And Deep Lore

• Main Story Length: ~50 hours
• Completionist Length: 200+ hours

The third installment in the Witcher game series, Wild Hunt offers a rich, detailed narrative alongside excellent side-quests, creating huge momentum to continue playing once the game has begun. The open-world setting here is known for its intricate details that hide key elements of the story.

The world of the Witcher games is intricately crafted, with the fantasy world designed around Eastern European folklore and culture in mind. What’s more, this game also has several great DLCs to enhance gameplay and extend the story and its details even further.

3 Genshin Impact

A Regularly-Updated World Of Quests

• No Completion: the game is updated with new content, but the current max progression sits around ~300+ hours

Genshin Impact‘s vibrant open-world landscape of Teyvat has seven regions, all drawing inspiration from real-world areas and cultures. Players can dynamically explore this world and interact with the environment to gather collectible items and interact with unique characters.

Alongside the main story, which follows a traveler searching for their long-lost sibling, there are countless additional quests, unique to each region, as well as multiple daily missions for regular players to complete. The game is regularly updated, adding new content so the game doesn’t currently have an endpoint.

2 Minecraft

Endlessly Creative Sandbox

• No Completion: dedicated players have logged more than ~1000 hours.

Most gamers will know Minecraft. It’s addictive for many reasons: it has various equally exciting creative and survival modes, can be played in single-player and co-op, and there’s the option to add endless mods. There’s also plenty to explore in terms of world seeds and other players’ designs, adding even more choice to what players can do in the game.

Not only can players explore and follow the lore of the Minecraft universe, they can disregard all rules and design whatever they want to in this infinite, procedurally generated sandbox.

1 No Man’s Sky

Perhaps The Biggest Open-World Setting Ever

• No Completion: players can log 100-500+ hours

No Man’s Sky is one of the vastest games out there, a procedurally generated galaxy with billions of planets. Every planet in the galaxy boasts unique landscapes that players can enjoy for as long as they like. There’s no definitive path to this game, with players deciding where they explore, which resources to gather, where to build bases, and how to navigate the universe.

The game receives regular free updates, with over 20 so far, which have added huge variety and detail to the universe, including multiplayer options, settlement and weather system enhancements, and new storylines.