The whole concept of an open-world video game is a fairly new one. It only works with a certain level of design, so it wasn't as popular in the early days, but since the inception of three-dimensional graphics and online gaming, the genre has surged in popularity.
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Fantasy and medieval settings dominate the gaming world, including the open-world section, but there are a few titles that take place in unique time periods. The late 20th century, the Age of Exploration, and alternate futures are just some examples of the strange and different places to explore in an open-world game.
7 Ghost Of Tsushima (2020)
The year is 1274, and the Mongols are invading Japan. The main character is a samurai warrior, Jin Sakai, and his goal is to protect Tsushima Island from the invading forces. He can choose honorable or nefarious means of doing so and can explore the open world during his adventures.
Players use the third-person perspective to move through this adventure game and its complex story. The game was well-received by both fans and critics for how it integrated melee combat, characters, and music, and Sony also enjoyed the financial rewards of a best-selling game.
6 Prey (2017)
Prey combines a whole bunch of motley elements into one unique game with an equally creative setting. It's the year 2035, and humanity's dystopian future includes a prison for a eusocial species of extraterrestrials. The prison is called Kletka, the Russian word for cell, because it's a joint venture between the Soviet Union and the United States.
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Without giving away too much of the story, the plot revolves around what happens to this prison when a botched assassination attempt on the American president gives the US the idea of taking total control of Kletka. The architecture used in the game has been noted for its eclectic mix of retrofuturism, art deco, and even the Brutalist styles from the Soviet era.
5 Shenmue (1999)
Welcome to the not-so-exotic time period of 1980s Yokosuka, Japan, made more exciting by Ryo Hazuki and his hunt for his father's killer. Ryo has to use his martial arts skills along with his perceptive and deductive abilities to find clues, fight hostiles, and track down the murderer to exact his own version of justice.
Shenmue isn't just an ideal game for those who like fighting and open-world games. The path that Ryo has to follow includes finding leads, talking to witnesses, and using documents like letters to find information about his father and his associates, which also makes this a mystery-solving game.
4 New World (2021)
The Age of Exploration doesn't have a specific date, but its heyday was the 17th century, and that's where the New World is set. One of the things that makes this game unique is that it's set in an altered version of the real world, one that makes the lost continent of Aeternum familiar as opposed to an exotic fantasy land.
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Part of the lore and exploration of the game is about uncovering the secrets of the hidden world, which can be as much about fighting monsters as reading through books and collecting other clues about zombies, untamable animals, and missing former settlers and residents.
3 Yakuza 0 (2015)
The Yakuza franchise includes several games, and this one is a prequel to the first, for those players that are interested in the chronological order of the franchise. It shares some traits with other others, including the crime drama and open world, and the setting is just as painfully real and mundane, which might be why it never gets used.
The exact date is never given, but the player knows it's 1988 and various crime families are operating in Tokyo. They deal in inflated real estate prices, extortion, and murder. The main character, Kiryu Kazuma, is framed for a murder and to dodge and outsmart whole clans of vicious criminals to clear his name. ​
2 Grand Theft Auto 5 (2013)
Grand Theft Auto 5
- Platform(s)
- PS5 , PS4 , PS3 , Xbox Series X , Xbox Series S , Xbox One , Xbox 360 , PC
- Genre(s)
- Open-World , Action
- Developer(s)
- Rockstar North
The game begins with an epilogue in 2004, in the fictional city of Los Santos, but the main plot ends in 2013. It's a unique setting because it takes a lot more work to make this real-world location exciting to explore in an open-world environment, but that's one of the things both critics and players liked about Grand Theft Auto V.
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It's a dramatic story of violent crimes, felonies, and violations of personal trust, and the complex storyline was another reason this game was a smash hit. More content unlocks in the open world, which is a fictional version of southern California, as the story progresses.
1 Outer Wilds (2019)
This could be the strangest and most unique setting of any game in history when it comes to time and place. The solar system, which is the open world that players can explore, is stuck in a time loop that always ends in total annihilation.
It would seem that the objective of the game is to find a way to stop the time loop, but another thing that makes this game different is the twist at the end. Something like this does happen, just not the way the player first envisioned it.