While not quite as ubiquitous as the genre has become today,open world games enjoyed a bit of a popularity surgein the 2000s. Consoles were becoming more powerful, so developers finally had more freedom to stretch their limits, which often included a wide-open setting to mess around in.
Many of these games still hold up today, with lots of modern titles still following their lead. Others may have fallen out of regular conversation, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less worth enjoying. So what are some of the best open world games from the 2000s?
Well beforethe chaotic Saints Row serieswas known for outlandish superpowers and melee weapons that need to be blurred out, this series of open world gang-centric games straddled a precarious line between trying to be the next Grand Theft Auto and going for its own thing. Saints Row 2 is perhaps the perfect sweet spot.
Not yet at the point where a dubstep gun wouldn’t feel out of place, the second game in the series manages to find a satisfying balance between the serious and the zany. Sure, you can ragdoll around the city during the Insurance Fraud minigame all you want, but watching a fellow gang member get mercy killed hits differently than what you’d expect from later entries.
There’s a reason The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion got a shiny remaster, and it’s not to expose a new generation to the Adoring Fan. Well, it’s not the only reason, anyway. Oblivion is still a fantastic game that holds up well enough that theremaster barely needed to change anythinggameplay-wise.
While it wasn’t the first Bethesda game with a focus on player freedom, Oblivion fully embraced that idea in a way most players hadn’t experienced at the time, and is much more user-friendly than its predecessor, Morrowind. Just pick a direction and go, maybe occasionally running into an NPC who flubs her lines along the way.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is more than just a quality meme source. It’s arguably the reasonthe crime-centric seriesis so beloved today. Grand Theft Auto 3 may have paved the way into the mainstream, but the sheer amount of personality and freedom in San Andreas is still remembered fondly today.
Whether you’re failing to keep up with a certain train or repeating lines like ‘here we go again’ along with the game, odds are you’re experiencing something memorable when you fire this one up. Just be patient with the shooting controls.
Long before Rockstar decided to take its rock-solid open world formula into the old west withRed Dead Redemption, it decided to try something a little more compact with Bully. Gone are the guns and body counts of Grand Theft Auto, but you still get to enjoy plenty of mayhem as juvenile delinquent Jimmy Hopkins.
Set in a tough-as-nails New England school and the surrounding town, Bully kind of feels like Persona with less god-killing and more truancy. You get to choose how to spend Jimmy’s time from stuffing nerds into lockers to going on dates with fellow students (and maybe stuffing them in lockers too).
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Assassin’s Creed 2 is where players as a whole came together and thought ‘there’s something to this series’.The original Assassin’s Creedwas well-received enough, but between the backtracking and occasionally clunky gameplay, it needed a little ironing out.
Here, you meet the suave and cocky Ezio and watch him climb up from the worst point of his life. Not only is he endearing as a character, but the climbing and combat got some much-needed improvements, making running around the rooftops of Renaissance Italy an absolute well-dressed blast.
Far Cry 2 might almost feel like a whole different series to those who are used to its more recent entries. Unlike the typical fish-out-of-water characters you normally play as, your character in this is already a hardened mercenary, and they’ll have to be if they want to survive the malaria.
Yep, your character has malaria, and it flares up bad. You have freedom to explore the whole map just like any Far Cry game here, but it feels a lot more dangerous this time around. Between treating your illness and dealing with weapon degradation, you’re in for a rough go, but you’ll feel like a legend for surviving.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker changed up a few things, and many fans reacted with the poise and reason they’re known for. But aside from the art style (which holds up incredibly, by the way), it added an interesting new method of exploring the game’s open world.
Using your kingly boat to traverse the seas between the game’s many islands makes the whole adventure feel that much more epic. Theclassic 3D Zelda gameplayand combat you love is there, but that little change makes a lot of difference.
The Wind Waker has some classic Zelda-linearity at the start of the game, but once you’re past that, you can explore the open seas as much as you like.
In a brilliant piece of evidence for the’games as art' argument, Shadow of the Colossus offers the ideal experience for those who want to play and be sad at the same time. Don’t worry, it’s the good kind of sad. The kind of sad that comes from knowing you just played a masterpiece.
You traverse a vast yet eerily empty world in search of gigantic creatures known as Colossi, climbing them to slay them and not feeling all that great about it afterward. It beautifully makes you question the typical ‘go kill this thing’ loop in video games, but you still want to keep playing because those battles are true highlights of the medium.
Stepping out of the vaultas you begin your adventure in Fallout 3 remains one of gaming’s most iconic moments. It hit even harder when it released, because the idea of getting to freely explore a devastated yet vibrantly alive post-apocalyptic world hadn’t quite been done in this way before.
Sure, the previous isometric Fallout games had lots of freedom, arguably more in some ways. But the exploration that comes from Bethesda’s now iconic gameplay style still feels so rewarding. While subsequent games have iterated on the formula in their own ways, Fallout 3 still retains its own unmistakable identity in this way.
