I associate the fall with coziness. There’s little better to me than a cool autumn weekend spent on the couch rewatching some of my favorite shows and movies or picking at a particularly lengthy game. The days are getting shorter and the nights are growing long again, and as we naturally begin spending less time outside due to the cooling of the temperature, why not mark the occasion with a great new adventure?
Fall is also when most big developers and publishers begin pushing their biggest releases, since it comes just ahead of a whole bunch of consumer-friendly holidays, such as Black Friday and Christmas. So maybe it’s quite natural after all that I think about big ol’ open-world games like Red Dead Redemption 2 when this time of year comes around. After all, I’m positive most of these games came out in the back half of their respective years, so my brain’s just connecting the dots. Anyways, Xbox is holding a sale on a bunch of open-world titles until September 23, so here are the absolute best of the bunch to pick up.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Everyone (and I do mean everyone) is waiting for Rockstar to provide any more news on Grand Theft Auto 6. It’s the most anticipated game in several years, which comes as little surprise given the sales numbers and acclaim for Rockstar’s last two games, 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2 and 2013’s Grand Theft Auto 5. But while most everyone has definitely played the latter, the former still feels like an acquired taste, and never took off as dramatically as the studio’s lead franchise. That feels like a shame because Red Dead Redemption 2 finally sees Rockstar in its absolute best shape.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is not only the studio’s most mature story, but it is far and away its best, too. Watching your band of thieves and crooks—who protagonist Arthur Morgan comes to know and love as family—fall apart is nothing short of tragic. As a prequel to the original Red Dead Redemption, it even successfully connects the two games and their overlapping casts, and makes more sense of John Marston’s motivations and regrets as he hunts down his former brothers-in-arms. It is also an absolutely astonishing technical marvel. It transforms the onset of metropolitan infrastructure and the downturn of the natural world into something equally beautiful and woeful. It is big, sometimes even too big, but it’s also a game whose head and heart feel in the right place most of the time, and I was shocked by how effective Red Dead Redemption 2 ultimately was. If you bear with it through the painful opening stretch, there’s a hell of a tale in Red Dead Redemption 2, which you can pick up for about $US30 on Xbox.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has the distinction of being the first AAA game I ever reviewed and it remains one of the biggest, too. To call it huge is to do it disservice, honestly. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is, for all intents and purposes, a sprawl. Spread out over various isles on the Mediterranean Sea, this game lives up to its name, sending you on a journey that can only be summed up as a Greek epic. In it you play as either Alexios or Kassandra, who embark on a quest that sends them all over the known Greek world. You become the captain of a ship, you engage in territorial battles on several warfronts, and on at least one occasion, you get shitfaced with some soldiers on the beach. Odyssey features, among other things, a Shadow of Mordor-like nemesis system that is tied to a web of conspirators, as well as romance, which results in a freewheeling exploration of the sexual fluidity of Grecian culture. As you sleep and murder your way from Athens to Crete, you even unearth the origins of several mythological creatures. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey may be intimidatingly large, and even a little bit unwieldy, but it also has the most fun of any of the formulaic Ubisoft open-world games, and it can be yours for $US12 on Xbox.
Sea of Thieves
You’ve heard it a million times before, but it bears repeating: Sea of Thieves has the best water of any game ever. As someone who really appreciates water technology in games, this is the single most important point about Sea of Thieves. There is more to it than just that, though. Sea of Thieves is bliss. Its art style is incredibly vibrant and cartoonish, which flies in the face of countless other pirate games these days that aim for a somewhat dour realism. It is also a game best played with friends, who can accompany you as you sail and help you maintain and operate your ship, doing things like loading up cannonballs, stocking up on food, and repairing cracks in the hull that threaten to capsize your crew.
Sea of Thieves is one of the games that puts the most emphasis on the “open-world” aspect, given that it doesn’t really feature anything resembling a traditional campaign or storyline outside of entirely optional DLCs that crossover with Pirates of the Caribbean and the Monkey Island games. Instead, over the years, Rare has simply built on the world, adding new locales, threats, reputations for varying factions and pirate crews, and more in order to deepen the allure of the virtual pirate life. As far as games-as-services go, it is one of the most approachable; most of its battle pass rewards were actually on the free track as of the last time I played and it has even added modes that strip PvP from the experience, in case you just want to merrily sail with your friends and animal companions. Sea of Thieves is on Game Pass, but you can also own the base game for just $US20 right now, and for that price, this pirate fantasy is worth it.
Tunic
Tunic is the most curious game included in this sale. I guess it is pretty open-ended, though I never stopped to think about whether it was so tightly designed that I considered it a true open-world game or not. Regardless, Tunic is worth the price of entry because not only is it a great game in the vein of The Legend of Zelda, but it is also one of gaming’s best mystery games. You see, Tunic is a game with some dense layers. On its face, it’s a cute, voxel-style mashup of Zelda’s exploration and Dark Souls’ difficulty, but there’s so much more happening just beneath the surface of the game’s driving action. Mechanics, as well as the nuances of its curious world, are conveyed via torn-up manual pages that can be discovered through exploration, except it’s all in a language that looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It can be translated, though, and deciphering it helps unlock so many of the tucked-away secrets within Tunic, which transforms the experience into something else entirely. Would you believe me if I said that wasn’t even Tunic’s only language that can be found and translated?
Tunic is like a Russian nesting doll of game experiences, and cracking one layer of it just to find another is a bewitchingly good time. I’ve actually not played a game quite like it, and to give away any more would be to rob you of a singular experience. Grab Tunic on Game Pass or while it’s $US15 on Xbox right now.
The Outer Worlds
At a time when most open-world RPGs were leveraging scale to entice players, The Outer Worlds did something pretty neat and went in the other direction. By comparison to some of the heavy hitters on this list, The Outer Worlds is tiny, but to me it’s just right. This satirical sci-fi RPG, which appears on its face like Obsidian trying its hand at making its own Fallout, can be completed in less than 20 hours if you just beeline it to the end. Now, that’d rob you of a lot of the side quests and exploration that games like this tend to excel at, but it’s a game that’s meant to be economical in its design, so I can’t blame anybody for treating it as such. Even when maximizing your time with this game, which has multiple story expansions, the total amount of hours spent in The Outer Worlds will likely be dwarfed by those you sink into almost any other open-world RPG like it. If you’re looking for a big game that’ll also be respectful of your time, you can’t go wrong here, and luckily it’s pretty affordable too. The Outer Worlds is available on Game Pass, but you can get the Board-Approved Bundle, which features the game and the expansion pass, for $US25.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 has a complicated reputation, to say the least, but Night City is one of the most believable worlds a game’s ever taken me to. I could get lost in its city streets for days and still turn up something or someone that was new and exciting, and that’s kind of life in the big city as I’ve always known it. Confounding in its labyrinthine depth, but always deeply rewarding to explore, Cyberpunk 2077 features a cast of characters from every walk of life too, including folks from the rough-and-tumble streets of Santo Domingo and Pacifica, where marginalized communities live in dilapidated and abandoned structures. Cyberpunk 2077’s world is rich in texture and history around every corner, and you can be a part of it by picking up the base version of the game for $US30, or the ultimate edition including the Phantom Liberty expansion for $US53.59 on Xbox.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands
I’m so surprised that Ubisoft has yet to really follow up on the incredible success of Ghost Recon Wildlands. An open-world take on the often linear genre of tactical third-person shooters, Wildlands felt like an outrageous entry into a storied franchise that typically prided itself on realism. It was the answer to a question nobody really asked: “What do you get if you smash Ghost Recon and Far Cry into one game?” It worked though, and sold millions of copies, because it turns out that just dropping four players into an open world where they can perform tactical hijinx is a winning formula.
Now, Ubisoft did follow this game up with Breakpoint, a sequel that focused far more on a story led by Jon Bernthal (The Bear, The Punisher) and survival mechanics than the explosive fun and looseness of Wildlands. The key to a great open-world game is almost never narrowing the possibilities though, making Breakpoint a bit of a misfire. A sequel that taps into the first game’s more hands-off approach would go a long way, but while Ubisoft figures out what it wants to do next with the series, you can pick up the base version of Ghost Recon Wildlands for just $US10, or the ultimate edition which includes years of DLCs for $US24 on Xbox.
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