The best open world/sandbox PC games out there?

[Janez 531]

Just bought Skyrim : ES (Legendary Edition) and Fallout 3 (GOTY edition) for 11€...thank you GmG :)

Nice but before you start Skyrim, go and download unofficial patches. Trust me, you are going to save yourself a lot of headaches. You might want to wait a week or two for version 2.1.3 (currently in beta) since it is going to be final version before Unofficial Skyrim Legendary Edition Patch which comes sometime in November.

Unofficial Skyrim Patch

Unofficial Dawnguard Patch

Unofficial Heartfire Patch

Unofficial Dragonborn Patch

Unofficial High Resolution Patch

SkyUI is also a must since vanilla UI is a nightmare. It requires SKSE.

If you plan to use more mods you should run and install them all trough Mod Organizer. It keeps all the mods in a "virtual" data folder so you can run pure vanilla game anytime. Even if you don't use mods it can be very useful. TES 5 Edit doesn't go amiss either.

Also if you don't want to play with 60ish FOV, change it before you start a new game. Navigate "My Documents\My Games\Skyrim" and edit Skyrim.ini. Add to bottom of [Display] section. Obviously, change the values to your liking. Note that fDefaultFOV means how far or close books will be when you open them for example.

// FoV settings
fDefault1stPersonFOV=90.0
fDefaultFOV=75.0
fDefaultWorldFOV=90.0

// Books open faster (you will want that)
[interface]
fBookOpenTime=400

// Optional 3rd person camera settings
[Camera]
fVanityModeMaxDist=400.0
fVanityModeMinDist=155.0
fOverShoulderCombatAddY=0.0
fOverShoulderCombatPosZ=10.0
fOverShoulderCombatPosX=0.0
fOverShoulderPosZ=10.0000
fOverShoulderPosX=20.0000
fMouseWheelZoomIncrement=0.0750
fMouseWheelZoomSpeed=1500.0
f1st3rdSwitchDelay=0.0100
fChaseCameraSpeed=8.0

Finally, if you can't be bothered with some things you can help yourself with some console commands. You can even create a file with commands you want and execute them trough console. Useful to add bunch of items, like alchemy ingredients and whatnot. You might want to check out Mfg Console as well.

Edited July 22, 2015 by Janez

[ProfTournesol 956]

Thanks a lot Janez, much appreciated :)

[mistyronin 1181]

Yeah it's really an interesting situation with the Witcher games. To get the most out of them you really have to play the slightly weird first one and you also should read the really awesome books since the games are sequels to those.

Seriously, read the books!

+1 (I have to fill the 5 chars)

[inlesco 233]

From the recent open-world games, The Witcher 3 topped all of its competitors or other open-world titles for me.

It's of exceptional quality, with players decisions reshaping the world in both small and big ways. Extreme attention to detail in TW3 is very noticeable.

Also, TW3 has definitely the mosh fleshed out sidequests in history.

At some points, I even began to think they're better than the main storyline. Trust me, they absorb you into the world so well you can't escape.

Was even late to work a couple of times due to this goddamn Witcher 3 :D It's that captivating!

[dmarkwick 261]

I really must try & get into some of this Witcher 3 stuff. I've been hearing from everyone how great it is. Currently I'm enjoying the GTA5 world, which is a superb achievement.

The main thing delaying my Witcher 3 purchase is that I'll most likely need to upgrade my video card first, which I can't afford right now. However I will say that GTA5 works perfectly well on my old GTX 280, no-one was more surprised than me :) it's a testament to the great optimisation Rockstar did to bring it to the PC IMO that I can get gameplay, draw distance and detail like I see on the Youtube examples on my old card. OK some of the shadows are a little blocky, but I don't notice when I'm actually ingame.

So my current recommendation is GTA5, if you like hugely detailed worlds that will render great on whatever equipment you have.

Other than that, Morrowind, Skyrim, ArmA series, Minecraft (check out Westeroscraft), Starmade (Minecraft but with planets in systems).

[seal 0]

1. The witcher 3

GTA V

F:New Vegas

World of Warcraft ? :D

Dayz standalone

Pac-Man

ARK S.E.

[Janez 531]

Thanks a lot Janez, much appreciated :)

 

USKP 2.1.3a (a is hotfix for 2.1.3) and sub patches has been released.

 

I forgot to mention that you should also clean Update.esm and DLC .esm files using TES5Edit. They are full of dirty edits which will cause problems. Here is a guide. Its easy, just remember, clean dawnguard two times automatically and another time manually. Its all in the guide.

If you have already started the game and did not get far you should update unofficial patches, clean masters and start again. Its a long game and its worth sacrificing couple of hours and restart.

Have fun! :)

[sanctuary 19]

If modern highres tridimensional graphics filled with bloom aren't a must have to enjoy a game for you, those games should keep you busy for a long , long time with so much to do, so much to survive , so much to build and so much to keep your character living in those procedurally generated open worlds :

 

UnrealWorld, survive into the dark age in a Finland-like world , meet interesting new people of many tribes and cultures, trade and befriend them, avoid being filled by arrows and getting axes in your skulls, hunt preys for food, get companions and eat them if you're hungry :D

http://www.unrealworld.fi/urw_whatis.html

 

Cataclysm : Dark Days Ahead, survive in a world after an apocalyptic event, while you building things, driving vehicles and shooting stuff,  just be careful of the hordes of undead-like creatures, things from beyond and other festivity found in end of the world situations, oh and try to not insult any crazed survivor that happens to have a flamethrower.

http://en.cataclysmdda.com/pages/1/display

 

Those games, while finished in the sense it's fully playable from A to Z are in continuous development with new things more or less major regularly added ( UnrealWorld exist since 1992 by example )

[TheMightyKovacs 6]

I think I've played the two 3D/FPS Fallout games the most this summer, I would spend nights playing Fallout and would not stop until 8 in the morning. I love those fuckin' games. I just wish Fallout 3 would work after upgrading to Windows 10, but I have it on Xbox so it's somewhat okay.

[Rydygier 1317]

Tried Assassin's Creed IV. Was promising, but sadly due to one trivial, but often flaw it's disqualified for me: no manual saves. One of the most incomprehensible mistake, game designers do frequently. An example: just at the beginning you have to sneak in somewhere, which is difficult for the beginner - a complex task. You try once, you fail. You try again, good progress this time, but eventually you fail again. Meanwhile you notice, gold lost previously is not restored after load. Also you can't benefit again from the chest, you found at previous try, so each failure cost you no only time and nerves, but also in-game goodies. Idiotic. You try once more - same... After fifth or sixth failed attempt, where I was unable to save partial progress and each try had to start from the scratch, repeating same steps again and again, I had enough and just stopped. I'm playing to entertain, not to annoy myself wasting such way scarce free time and precious peace of mind. Good, I bought it really cheap. I really like Hitman-like games, especially, if open world, even with some redundant arcade elements, but really, no free saves in such game? Not mentioning thing like when you try to run somewhere due to time pressure (bad thing in games for me), you suddenly find yourself climbing on something,you didn't intend to climb on, because streets are narrow and running shares same key with climbing, which may be convenient sometimes, but here becomes reason of failure. But that's notabene. Highly irritating game in summary on it's dev's own whish - it was so simple to avoid. 

 

Played also Witcher 3. Fabulous game indeed, not flawless, but for sure I'll try again some day. Not exactly due to open world aspect though. It's nice addition, but quite shallow, when you look closely - impact, players can achieve on the world's shape is minimal and rather symbolic except few preset plot choices. Best is storytelling, including side quests, and audio-visuals, music, animations, kept novel's mood - all this makes W3 one of the best games, I ever played, along with W1 and W2, still not good enough as open world sandbox...  

 

Also heard about new game, called Mad Max. Saw some video gameplay review - surprising, how they apparently avoid any innovative ideas in gameplay mechanics. According to what I saw and what was said in this review, it's nearly same, one may find in Assassin's Creed or Far Cry, including viewpoint towers (what's about these? Why they put them each time? Weird concept to me). In general verdict was like "naah" - gameplay isn't really motivating there to push further, boring/tiring fast. 

 

Glad to see, there is establishing some solid standard of sandbox games, but so far didn't saw nothing deep, innovative enough to satisfy old, blase gamer like myself. Maybe in the future...

 

If/when become cheaper, I may try Elite: Dangerous next time. Once I liked games like X3 etc. But from I saw it may become boring fast too - repeateable. Impact on the world (via trading) seems noticeable, but isn't done cheap way, for example only via numbers displayed on screen? Not sure, what else this game may offer here. 

[IndeedPete 1038]

Yes, AC in general is a really good idea, but Ubisoft manages to just mess it up with their stupid design decisions. I'm really cautious by now when it comes to new Ubisoft games. I'm not able develop any enthusiasm for their new games due to many disappointments in the past. Watch Dogs was the most recent waste of money for me. Bought it on steam sale, played it for a few hours even, but left it unfinished. It's just bad. Good ideas, a huge budget, and still poor design. And these dimwits at Ubisoft even managed to port that stupid viewpoint tower stuff to the game. A game that takes place in Chigago of the future. Where the main cahracter is a hacker. A hacker, who can literally take over every surveillance camera in the city.

 

Trading in Elite is indeed rather boring. (Not as boring as exploring though.) It's fun to do a few trade runs from time to time, but, as said before, it's more relaxing than exciting. Fighting on the other hand can be quite challanging and fun. However, it seems to be quite hard to find someone to fight with. If you want to stay legal, headhunting is the only way to go. And that means lurking around in open space until someone with a contract on his head comes by. Pirating or hunting down random ships can be costly, provided you want to keep trade as an option. Good fighting vessels also require a few millions worth of equipment. I own a middle class freighter, with all non-essential equipment thrown out and the free space used for cargo racks, to make money with. Maybe a 100.000 per trade run with three stops, which takes me roughly 30-45 minutes. And then I have a Viper, already stuffed with weapons and upgrades worth over a million, and it's still not finished yet. Motivation is still the main problem of the game. I mostly just play for a few evenings and then drop it for a few weeks or months even. They recently introduced some sort of faction system where players can join certain powers, but I don't really see the benefit or any form of entertainment in doing so.

[laverniusregalis 10]

Not saying it's the best, but I've been having a TON of fun with Metal Gear Solid 5 (Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, might as well play them both in order and import your GZ save) so far.

 

With that being said, I've heard the ending was lackluster, and something of a kick in the crotch after everything else the game led up to.

 

That, and there's a conspiracy thing about Kojima doing something on 9/11, the 1984 novel, the game itself, and a game called Blackhound!

[IndeedPete 1038]

Yes, I heard MGS should be really good. I thought about buying it but 60€ is too expensive. I'll wait until it's on sale. Is Ground Zeroes worth its money? I thought it was only one mission, some sort of preview game.

[laverniusregalis 10]

Yes, I heard MGS should be really good. I thought about buying it but 60€ is too expensive. I'll wait until it's on sale. Is Ground Zeroes worth its money? I thought it was only one mission, some sort of preview game.

On Green Man Gaming they had a 27% discount, so I picked both up for only 60. Definitely a good combination if it's 30% off. GZ is essentially an intro to TPP, and if you import your save from GZ you'll get some cool stuff in TPP as well.

 

Still waiting to see what ingsoc.org turns out to be, though.

[IndeedPete 1038]

I've found a site with discounts as well, paid 55€ for both. The prequel GZ was, well, okay but apart from the cutscenes not thrilling. I was playing like rambo, running around and killing random guards, using these AA guns to cause trouble, running and jumping in front of guards and didn't die once. In fact, I could single-handedly shake these marines off every single time. And they always return to normal, irrelevant how many of them I've murdered. oO I finished the mission by stealing a tank (which took the guards like five minutes to figure out that I'm shooting at them with a huge ass cannon) and landing the extraction helo right in the middle of the base. But the story was nice so far and the cutscenes look great.

 

Today I've installed TPP. First thing that annoys the shit out of me is that the game recognised my Thrustmaster flight stick as main input device by default and I can't find an option to switch back to mouse and keyboard. (Or did I miss anything?) Now I have to crawl under my desk again and unplug it, just to plug it back in the next time I want to fly around in Elite or Arma. I had the same issue with Life is Strange. Dear game developers: if you do these things, and pardon my French here, fuck you. I'm also not able to change the settings during the (quite long but well done) cutscenes. Again, a bad design decision in my opinion.

[IndeedPete 1038]

Addendum: Is there an option to deactivate these annoying online messages on start? If I start a game I want to be dropped into the main menu right after the engine is loaded. I don't want to click myself through game news and bug reports every time I start the game. It's singleplayer, why would I want to be logged in on some online server anyway?

[papanowel 120]

No one mention Minecraft? It's honestly a nice sandbox game and should be played once. 

[the_noob 88]

No one mention Minecraft? It's honestly a nice sandbox game and should be played once. 

 

I mentioned both, Minecraft and Lego Worlds.  :)

[papanowel 120]

I mentioned both, Minecraft and Lego Worlds.  :)

 

My bad, I should not read half of the thread. 

[negah 26]

Im playing MGS5 right now and it feels quite a lot like a mix of older MGS titles with OFP/ArmA stealth missions.

Especially it reminds me on the Dynamic Afghanistan mission for OFP (quite sad that the links for the addons are dead).

 

And its the first MGS title (not counting Ground Zeroes here) with actually good controls which dont put me into rage mode :) 

[IndeedPete 1038]

Im playing MGS5 right now and it feels quite a lot like a mix of older MGS titles with OFP/ArmA stealth missions.

Especially it reminds me on the Dynamic Afghanistan mission for OFP (quite sad that the links for the addons are dead).

 

And its the first MGS title (not counting Ground Zeroes here) with actually good controls which dont put me into rage mode :)

 

After playing for a bit more than 10 hours now I have to disagree. The game so far is solid (pun intended) but far from great. I find it quite repetetive as both the side and the main missions play exactly the same, bossmobs aside. I lost track of how many times I've enganged this stupid Afghan village in the centre and I didn't have to alter my strategy for once. The AI is pretty easy to fuck with and there is really no reason to be stealthy for me. When approaching a mission, I spare myself the annoying sneaking part and just take a position on a hill far away to deploy my sniper rifle. I can easily take down three to five enemies before they get a fix on my position. And even then I just move a few metres and they lose me again. Their mortar strikes are fairly easy to dodge, as is their rifle fire. And once I sniped or blasted away all enemies, I casually walk into the AO and do whatever I have to do there.

 

Just now I did a main mission where I had to kill three Russian generals who were going to a meeting in that exact same village I bombed to the stoneage a million times by now. I got the first one on the road to their meeting. Then I made it on the highest roof in the village (right in the occupied centre!) without being noticed and just rained down bullets from above on the other two generals (one was actually abandoned by his guards, standing in a backyard). I was right between the guards and they didn't spot me. I was able to walk out of the AO, not a scratch.

 

I don't know if it's better with a gamepad but I find the mouse and keyboard controls pretty inaccurate. I fell down ridges so many times because I couldn't get Snake to move where I wanted to. Again, that pretty much killed the stealth approaches for me. Not to mention that I have to unplug my Thrustmaster flight stick every time I play the game because the UI goes crazy and I can't manually change the controls back to mouse and keyboard. Then there's no free saving, horrible design decision. At least a quicksave would be good. And, as said, I find it repetetive regarding the gameplay. Also, after 10 hours in I feel I have seen everything in Afghanistan. It's just a boring map. Every time I take on a mission I think, "great, again it's that generic boring village I've raided 20 times already, wow". And travelling by horse is quite annoying, as these generic roadblocks are everywhere. Reminds me of Far Cry 2, where on every single roadtrip a freshly spawned patrol tries to hunt you down. It becomes boring when it's that predictable. Also, I haven't seen many soldier types yet. Only Russians soldiers, a few heavies, and these supernatural things.

 

I must say I really just play for the story, not because it's that entertaining or challenging. It also has its good sides. I like the humour, the 80s soundtrack is quite atmospheric, and the cutscenes are well done. But that is just my impression after 10 hours, maybe that'll change over time.

[cosmic10r 2331]

Hmm... interesting... 

 

I am still really curious about Mad Max... 

anyone played 10hours in or more... does  it get pretty repetitive... 

I know its an amalgam of Arkham knight style combat, AC viewpoints and far cry open world...

 

It just seems so interesting... I have to admit... I expected more from the movie...

[negah 26]

I agree with the points that MGS gets repetitive, however thats the problem of the most big open world games nowadays.

Gothic 1 and 2 and Risen were notable exceptions, but world was rather small, though done with the love for details.

I also wish there would happen more on the map, where are the mujahedeen for instance. Why dont we see random clashes between soviets and afghans. 

The idea of extracting enemies is great, but it gets ridiculous when you start fultoning whole villages including heavy weapons, crates and vehicles.

I liked how they did it in Ground Zeroes where you had to drag the person you wanted to extract all the way to the landing zone and wait for the chopper. Instead they went the fulton way again and I didnt like it in Peace Walker too.

That 3 officers you mentioned was even easier the sneaky way, ive just marked the officer on the road, then followed him to the house, sent the two guards nearby to sleep, went in and knocked the offciers out with my superior kung fu skills.

Five balloons with men dangling underneath went up in the skies over that cursed village that day.

 

EDIT:

As for roadblocks and horse, you can hide on one side of the horse while passing by a roadblock, still you should keep as much distance as possible.

Going loud also bugged a mission once for me. You are supposed to find a honey bee system somewhere in a fort. There is also an afghan prisoner who knows where it is. On my first playtrhough I raised an alarm when passing by the infamous roadblock and decided to keep going. I have found no prisoner and the honey bee was nowhere to be found either. So after half an hour of searching and fighting I decided to restart and play it silently. The prisoner was there as well as the weapon system AND the mission went a lot faster.

[Rydygier 1317]

Recently encountered this:

 

http://www.openworldpcgaming.com/open-world-games

 

A place entirely focused on the exact topic of this thread. Looks wip, but already contains suprisingly wide list of open world projects, some ready to buy, many under development. In fact, majority seem to be (pre) early access, which indicates upcoming open world/survival boom in PC gaming for next year or two. Exciting trend.

[chrisb 196]

Recently encountered this:

 

http://www.openworldpcgaming.com/open-world-games

 

A place entirely focused on the exact topic of this thread. Looks wip, but already contains suprisingly wide list of open world projects, some ready to buy, many under development. In fact, majority seem to be (pre) early access, which indicates upcoming open world/survival boom in PC gaming for next year or two. Exciting trend.

 

Surprised I didn't see Space Engineers on there. With an open world of 1,000,000,000km without having to 'fake' jump anywhere. There is jump function in the game but you don't need to use it, although that's a big space without it ;).

Soon huge planets are coming all PG, fully featured planets with various atmospheres, climates etc, plus aliens its rumoured.

 

I've played in the github dev version (old version now) and the worlds are big, very big, with seamless planetary landings. Its a big open world, well universe. Great game, I really enjoy it.