Highlights
- Grand Theft Auto V created a bustling city filled with diverse NPCs, providing an immersive experience for players.
- Cyberpunk 2077 takes players into a futuristic metropolis, offering a constant sense of danger and numerous missions to keep them engaged.
- T he Witcher 3: Wild Hunt brings a uniquely bustling and realistic experience to its cities, with constant street life and intriguing NPCs to interact with.
While there are many open-world games around nowadays, the idea has become hugely popular over the last decade, not all of them make players feel integrated in a bustling world. While players can explore entire cities in many of the currently available open-world games, it is less common for players to be surrounded by NPCs throughout.
Sometimes in MMO games with open worlds, players may feel surrounded by other players who are online. However, open-world games that are more single-player-based only rarely do a superb job of making players feel surrounded by a very alive city.
7 Grand Theft Auto 5
The Grand Theft Auto games for many years have been at the forefront of creating bustling cities with some bizarre NPCs. Grand Theft Auto 5 was the absolute pinnacle of these ideas, and Los Santos created a city that is filled to the brim with a wide variety of NPCs.
Plenty of fascinating characters fill the metropolis, and strange side missions abound around every corner as players wander around the city. There are quieter sections, such as restricted areas and the countryside, but the main city of Los Santos is always well-occupied by a huge number of characters, and it is one of the best in the franchise.
6 Cyberpunk 2077
From the very beginning of its conception, Cyberpunk 2077 looked as if it would be similar in style to the Grand Theft Auto games. This more futuristic take on a massive, bustling metropolis in Night City made for an incredible experience once the initial fixes were made to the game following an unsteady first release.
Cyberpunk 2077 has improved a lot since then. There is a constant sense of danger as players traverse the city, with there always being another potential mission or distraction along the way. It makes for a fascinating style of RPG, completely different from most other busy cities that players are used to seeing, as well as being one of the very largest.
5 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Many things about The Witcher games were improved upon and perfected by The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This game managed to make huge Witcher fans out of many gamers, and part of the reason behind that is making players feel as if they were immersed in the world of the Continent.
Cities that appear throughout The Witcher 3 feel built-in uniquely bustling fashion for games set in fictional fantasy realms. There is constant street life in cities that players visit such as Novigrad, making for a much more real experience, with side quests around every corner and plenty of strange NPCs to chat away with as Geralt continues along his journey.
4 Assassin’s Creed: Unity
Many of the Assassin’s Creed games put a big focus on a faithful recreation of cities, and there are several of them that do a pretty good job at filling out those cities with characters. However, there is one that went above and beyond in this manner, Assassin’s Creed: Unity.
Set in Paris, this entry in the franchise managed to put players in a positively beautiful version of the famous French metropolis, all while filling it with enough NPCs that players feel the real bustle of activity they’d want as they run through or above the streets of such an infamous place. Giving the impression of something truly alive, Ubisoft managed to make Paris into its own character in Unity, helping turn the game into one of the best open-world stealth games ever.
3 Yakuza: Like A Dragon
The Yakuza franchise is famed for great action-adventure games, but Like A Dragon changed everything up by instead creating an open-world, turn-based RPG in which players were provided with a lot of freedom to run around the real-life city of Yokohama and create their own stories in a surprisingly mature-themed JRPG.
While the city is large and beautiful, it is separated into districts which each have a different feel to them. However, in all of them, there are a lot of people, providing players with a surreal sort of feel despite it all taking place in a faithfully recreated version of a real-world city. One of the best chances players will get to see this beautiful part of Japan, Yakuza: Like A Dragon is well worth checking out for this alone.
2 Marvel's Spider-Man
The newest Spider-Man game has had no trouble launching itself into an immediate franchise, having already spawned a spin-off with a sequel well on its way. Part of the major success of Marvel's Spider-Man was in its ability to make players feel like they were truly this street-level hero, instead of riding above it all like in Marvel’s Avengers, players were on the streets, were able to swing about a huge number of people in New York City, and go on many side adventures.
The huge number of other kinds of quests available, as well as other storylines once the DLCs had been added, allowed players the freedom to swing their way aimlessly around a filled city, solving crimes in the exact situation which most Spider-Man fans dream of placing themselves in such a game as this, and it could expand further in the sequel.
1 Watch Dogs: Legion
The Watch Dogs games have always prided themselves on bringing futuristic versions of cities to life in amazing recreations. Watch Dogs: Legion is the best example of this, turning eight of the boroughs of London into a sprawling map that players can navigate in several ways.
Whether players prefer to take the underground, travel on foot, or parkour their way through the streets, this game allows them to live out their dreams.
Seeing London in such a beautifully designed shape is unusual, particularly in a futuristic game, but feeling like there are plenty of people around and sensing the realism of the city is something that adds a lot of great world-building to the kind of story that Watch Dogs: Legion manages to tell.