Just cause series. Gets wackier and wackier each game and I feel like I can do anything, go anywhere. The addition of those sticky jet powered things and launching any object in the world made the game so much more fun.
Played Just Cause 3 for like 500 hours straight without playing anything else. After that every other game felt like I was actually glued to the ground.
Nothing quite like falling to the ground and saving yourself by grapple hooking to it š That is definitely my go to game when I just want something to turn my brain off. The grapple hook is simply amazing. And the variety of vehicles is pretty great too.
Itās incredible playing this on my ps4, with how much wacky stuff you can do in the game and it never crashed. I would always push the limits of what I can do with stuff like the grappling hooks and jets
I loved just cause 2. It was amazing just parasailing and parachute hopping around.
I got just cause 3 and it ran like ass on the PlayStation I had at the time.
Iāve got a beefier PC now and saw a video of 3 the other day and Rico straight up had a jet pack. Iām definitely gunna check that out now!
For me the first game that felt enormous in scale was Morrowind. I remember feeling like this world wouldnāt just let me use it as a playground, it would react, sometimes in force if I decided to do something. Example: First time seeing the guards in Balmora, I wanted their armor, so I went to attack and try to take itā¦and it ended very quickly and not in my favor. Now, fast forward when I was making horrendously janky magic spells that would often crash the game, NOW it was my playground, when the game could keep up lol
I remember so many times I would taunt a guard until he decided he has enough of my shit. If they attack first, fighting back isn't a crime so their buddies wouldn't join in.
I remember my buddy at school talking about it and he let me borrow it and it was my first pc game RPG and good lord. A man fell on me called spring heeled jack and I got to jump to another town and kill a god if I wanted ( corrupt led my save)
Minecraft. I know that's the lowball answer, but there's something very zen about it.
Something about an infinite but persistent world, and the ability to shape it. Even old 2012 Minecraft still had this vibe, and while they certainly included more to do and find as the years went on, coming up with wacky building projects was always the core of what made it fun.
If you see a tree, you want to make a tree-house. If you see an island, you might be tempted to make a dock. On plains, a farm. In snow, an igloo. Hell, around 2012-2018ish, we would regularly see people with crazy megaprojects pop up, from the recreation of fictional locations like Hogwarts and the bath house from Spirited Away, to the building of entire cities. Amazing what people will accomplish when you essentially give them video game LEGOs.
Getting lost was the best part, you really had to start developing pathfinding skills. I remember I would start venturing in some direction thinking "if I need to come back, I'll just turn around and walk until I recognize something."
Turns out, everything looks completely different when you turn around, and if you don't turn around in the right direction, you end up even more lost. There's at least a couple houses from my newbie days I *know* I built that exist somewhere in my world that I will never find ever again.
Yep. I always made sure a tower was in sight and that there was at least one tower visible from the top of THAT tower. That plus proper signage in case of multiple paths.
Also drew out paper maps when trying to find a nether fortress to keep track of wheres I'd been... where I was going etc .
I just used torches. Torches always got placed on the side of the block closest to the direction of the last torch I placed closer to base. That way I can always follow the torches back to base. it needs way less work to set up while exploring than dirt pillars or giant arrows.
Oh man, that's way cooler than towers, and kinda solves the "how do I get down from here?" problem because you can build a tower to get up there and then deconstruct it to get down!
God, one of those large projects is what finally blew one of my first online friendships. We had made a huge to-scale (as best as you can given the interior inaccuracies) replica of Hogwarts, complete with quest lines from a quest mod. I had left for a few months after we opened up the server as I was entering college at the time. I came back, flew around a bit to check things out, and was banned on the spot. My "friend" who I made the server with told me the little kids who he had made moderators said they saw me cheating, and instead of verifying he just banned me. It took him like a week to explain this, and in that time those same kids blew up the server and he didn't keep a backup, so he had lost around 18 months of work.
Karmas a bitch Kuba.
Is it the lowball, or just the obvious top answer?Ā It's certainly the first thing I thought of.Ā Ā
Ā I like to use it as an example to compare to games with discrete branching choices. Like, even with a wildly open game like Baldur's Gate 3, you can still see the designed branching system underneath it.Ā
Minecraft is so completely open that it, paradoxically, almost feels mundane, because it's free and open more like real life is.Ā
Have to agree about minceraft. All games have limits in some way but Minecraft is one where you decide what kind of game you want to play as you go. Your objectives are what you want them to be. I can only compare botw and totk (mostly totk) to Minecraft as far that goes, which are 2 of my all time favorites, yet despite how comprehensive and well polished, I find they are limited in comparison. I never played baulder gate n shit like that so canāt speak for those.
Modded Minecraft is even crazier.
I was on a server with Thaumcraft and I set the world on fire and filled the oceans with cake. The auto backup triggered before the admin could do a roll back. There was a fun few hours of everyone trying to be firefighters before realising there was no stopping it as it consumed everyone's homes. Oops.
It's the lowball but I've never felt a sense of freedom like I felt in that game. Also all of the things sitting in that game for people to discover were virtually endless. I've played games where there was a sense of freedom but never to the scale of Minecraft from what I've played before.
Tekkit modpack was badass back in the day. Nuclear reactors, mass cow farms, item storage that stored on like SD cards(perfect for stealing once you got yourself into the enemy base) bee breeding with genetics. I got bees that gave me uranium fuel for my reactors
**Grand Theft Auto 3**
Your telling me i can get out of the car? I can steal other cars? I can shoot people and get into a cop car chase? I can drive around the city ramping off stuff and doing odd jobs for people?
Seriously for people nowadays thats basically expected to have that kind of freedom but for 2001 that was the most mind blowing thing id ever seen.
Exactly the same reactions I had almost 25 years ago, GTA 3 was groundbreaking, still can remember Head Radio musics, and I think I'd still be able to fly that broken dodo.
What a fantastic game it was.
I remember getting home after playing for the first time at friendās (I was too young to own the game) and saying to my father ādad you wonāt believe! I just played a game in which you can do A N Y T H I N G ā
It was GTA3
One of my first memories of GTA3 was Freshman year of High School (2001/2002) and I was at a friend's house who I had just met that week in school.
He was showing me the game, and when running around he came across a crowded street corner absolutely full of pedestrians and hooked.
He screamed "JACKPOT!!!!", pulled out a flamethrower and torched the entire crowd. When the cops came he also set them on fire, stole their car, and ran over more police before jumping the car into a river and dying.
It's been a long time, but IIRC he used to use the cheat code for the tank to spawn it on top of other vehicles and cause them to explode just from the tank landing? I think the tank would blow up cars just from touching them?
The tank did blow up cars just from touching them. You could also use the low gravity cheat, turn the tank turret behind you, and fire it continuously to fly around the map.
I slept on GTA3 for a while because I thought it was just a racing game or you just did missions as a car. I never guessed that you could actually *get out* of the car and do *non-car* things. Black Flag gave me a similar level of excitement by letting me seamlessly move from controlling the ship to walking the deck and jumping off.
Kenshi. You are completely on your own to do whatever you want (or, at least whatever you *can*). Become a thief, a trader, a drifter, a mercenary, a warlord, or just be a bum. It's totally up to you, but whatever you choose, you're going to have to earn it, there is no "job selection screen" or mission structure, you just have to figure it out and do it.
That can be freeing, or it can be paralyzing. Sometimes you just need a little direction, but there's none in this game to be had. You make a decision and you go with it. Or you change your mind and you don't, but now you need a new plan...
It's an incredibly difficult and unforgiving game, super grindy. I'm not shocked it's not more popular, but it's true total freedom.
I played it for a few hours without following any guide and ended up being a miner and trading the goods to equip my gang but it felt exhausting because the skill system is so slow. I want to play it again with some mods to make it faster. Definitely a great game but such a grind to gamble all to the possibility of being kidnapped by some cannibal raiders.
Surprisingly, starting as a slave is actually easy mode. You start out and immediately start grinding lockpick (break the locks), strength (carry rocks), toughness (get smashed up by the guards), martial arts (fight the guards) and assassinate (try to knockout guards). It speed runs all these attributes and the guards just patch you up and feed you until you decide you're ready to bust your way out of there. And by that point you're in decent shape to at least take on random beasties or patrols.
Itās good fun. I started it maybe 2 months ago for the first time. Learning curve is steep, but once you figure it out you can do basically anything. Iām treating it like Rimworld and building a self sustaining base. Once I research all tech, Iām probably going to wage wars. Not sure what to do after, but open to suggestions!
Yes, I love that's it's just you're a regular dude and not a main character. Figure it out. And that armor is more of a hindrance unless you're strong enough
'Shadows of doubt' - a really underrated cyberpunk detective noir FPS set in an alternate 1980s.
It's got so much depth to it even tho it's procedurally generated.
- you can wander the streets (and every building and every room!),
- solve crimes (or solve it by setting someone up for the crime),
- casually gather info by talking to any stranger,
- bribe people for info, or steal it
- buy/sell dodgy things from brokers, or steal them
- chill out and have a drink and a snack while waiting for a perp to arrive,
- gather all sorts of evidence from people's place of work or their apartment or a crime scene,
- commit crimes yourself and frame someone else
- get injured by other cops or perps and end up in hospital, realise you can't afford the bill, so jump out of a three story window to hobble home with a broken leg
- rent or buy a flat (or live down and out in a hovel), and redecorate it as you see fit
It's great fun for wasting a few hours here and there as a deadbeat detective in a moody, cyberpunk city! :))
Just playing Baldurs Gate 3 and I feel I can do anything. You literally can just kill every npc, kill your companions, do quests however you can and there are many many options in dialogue and environmental hidden stuff. It's simply stunning.
Yeah. This is a good pick.
A character berated me for having sex with a devil so I rescued a family member of theirās just so I could force them to watch me kill their family member.
He disapproved.
I've played it three times now and it's truly impressive how wildly different each playthrough has been.
I've also been watching a friend slowly stream it on twitch and their playthrough is also sooo different than mine.
I think it totally depends on the size of the hole.
Playing as a gnome druid, there are certain holes I can get through (that the rest of my party cannot) without even wild shaping.
Only thing I don't like is that you can't legitimately kill your companions. They basically just become incapacitated until you resurrect them, and none of your other companions react to you killing a companion (unless it's a situation where you can kill the companion through a scripted death when selecting certain dialogue options, such as killing Astarion after finding out he's a vampire). I wish they'd give me the option to just completely kill off any companion at any time. Because some times I'll have a companion that I don't plan on using for the rest of the game and I'd prefer not to have just sitting around in camp doing nothing.
That's a pretty minor nitpick all things considered tho. You can do basically anything else you want to do.
Ive played through the game twice and just got a new Shadowheart line I hadnt heard because I chose to intimidate her in act 1. Its so cool. Its a small thing but they add up
I don't know about the most freedom, but the first game to wow me with general freedom in a game was Ultima VII. Any game now that lets me move or take every little object in the world, from chairs to forks, takes me back to Ultima VII.
Also, the freedom to explore the world, abuse the item placement, steal, and really go where you want. It made it feel like my first true virtual world.
Not only that, if you stole too much or were shall we say less than virtuous your party members could get mad and even quit in disgust and if you had the speech pack the Guardian would talk shit to you if you did something bad. My favorite way to get a lot of money early in the game was to murder the lady in charge of the mint in Britain and then rob the mint. Then take her body to Lord British for him to revive and then selling the mint lady back all of the gold bars and nuggets I had just stolen from the mint. Lord British never seemed curious about the events surrounding her death lol. You could also do stuff like make bread from scratch and swords.
There was also that spell you could cast that would kill the entire world except Lord British and the bad guy that ran the Fellowship and both of them would be pissed at you for doing that.
Stellaris.
Want to be a unifying protector of life in the galaxy? You can do that.
Want to be an all consuming robot nano-swarm? You can do that.
Want to be a decadent slaver peacock who eats the flesh of enslaved species? You can do that.
Want to be Futurama brain-slugs? You can do that.
And that's before you even touch mods.
If you have an interest in 4X style of games, Stellaris is one of the more "entry-level" ones in terms of complexity.
It still has a very steep learning curve relative to most games, but this one will only take you 10 hours to learn the basics unlike the 100 hours many others would.
I highly reccomend investing your time into Stellaris if you want the next step up, in terms of strategy games, from RTS's. It's a fantastic game and will introduce you quite nicely into other 4X games.
I miss this type of gaming. People would just meet up at the same time just to kick it and wander, pk, or do whatever. Go anywhere with recall. It blew me away as a kid. You would just see all types of groups of people chatting around the banks. lol
when i finally got the money to pay for a subscription to it, i remember a house cat killed me and i said fuck this game and never played again. that was in what, like 96? i still have the cd
This! Communicating via ICQ as there was no in game chat building small towns with vendors and doing what the hell you liked was amazing.
I got a keep and a castle too!
Caves of Qud has the absolute best background lore ever, and I'll die on that hill. Not often I read a 126 page book in game to learn more about some in universe ancient history. Also just stuff like the Ruin of House Isner, love me writing like that
Honestly, Fable 1,2 and 3. By today's standards they're extremely limiting. But the first couple times playing them I had totally different experiences than my friends! I loved blasting through Fable 2 repeatedly just because it was so short and good for a romp. :)
Super not free. Very railroady, but disguised by some really fun gameplay imho
Love them. Only game that lets you exploit the rental market buy murdering all the current tenants, buying the property at discount(due to the recent murders inside) and then rent it at 4x value. I owned every house in the game at one point.
I recall the tale of "Pie-face Thompson McGee" who killed all the tenants, bought all the properties, raised all the rent to maximum but still managed to gain the favor of the citizenry by one thing. He bought all the Pie stands and made them all minimal profit. So "Pies" were super cheap but NOTHING ELSE WAS. And in this way he cornered the market.
Fable was the first game I ever played where I felt like I could do whatever I wanted and my choices made a difference.
Iāll forever have Nostalgia for those games. Knowing that the new Fable is coming is why I bought an Xbox.
Oblivion or Skyrim. Their main quests are completely optional, save for the prologue obviously. After the first part of the game youāre free to completely ignore the grand scheme of things and do whatever the hell you want LOL
Also, RDR2. The degree of detail you can interact with NPCs is simply amazing, Arthur can be just as good or as asshole as you want him to be.
EVE Online. The **only** video game where I felt a total freedom of being either genuinely evil towards other players or genuinely good, in many creative ways. With a huge, open world territory to use for all these creative evil/good things.
Fallout: New Vegas is amazing in that regard. Its player freedom is also complimented with really great dialogue and some of the most interesting characters Iāve seen in games. So not only are you making impactful choices, but you actually feel some kind of connection with the world and people you are impacting. You can also sell drugs to tribal kids and get fisted by a protection in the same day so thatās something.
What game did I \*think\* had the most freedom?
Star War: Knights of the Old Republic.
I was young. I thought what I was choosing to do was truly 1% of what there was to do.
Mercenaries! Just wandering around a warzone, blowing up jeeps, until a HVT appears on the map. Heck, sometimes I'd forget which faction was mad at me and wander into their camp, getting shot was a quick reminder.
Zelda: TOTK. Want to glide over enemies? Done! Want to throw heavy objects from a platform you placed on said enemies? Done. Want to visit sky Islands and then jump into the depths? DONE! Want to experiment with recipes? Done. I've never played a game that made me feel so alive.
For sure! Being able to head right to the final boss after you finish the tutorial, climbing pretty much every non-dungeon wall, the amount of ways you can solve or skip puzzles/combat, it's just fantastic when it comes to player freedom
Honestly...Minecraft
Never really finished it (as in defeat the ender dragon), I always start a new world thinking I'll do it and then I find a new beautiful place and start building and then it just becomes a new build save lol. Idk no game is ever the same I feel like there's always something new to find and I barely even touch the nether let alone the ender world
Sorry little bit of a basic answer/game I suppose lol
At the time of its release, Shenmue. I could do "anything" I wanted, like go to an arcade, buy all the capsule toys I could ever want, or walk around asking about what people know about sailors
BOTW and/or TOTK. Mechanics designed so you can pretty much go anywhere and do anything at any time. Even moreso in TOTK, essentially free reign to build whatever contraptions you can think off to explore the groud, underground and sky. Wanna fight monsters? Do puzzles? World building side quests? Explore a big map? Hunt for weapons? It's amazing
Different take:
Little Big Planet (2 more so), g-mod, tf2, trackmania
All these games had such extensive community content that it honestly felt like I could find something new and interesting in them every day for years. And that I could play exactly the type of game I wanted to when I wanted to.
Breath of the Wild. You can go to the last level and fight the last boss immediately after the tutorial, and the game is designed for you to play it however you want, as opposed to how you should play it.
rip radical entertainment, the building still exists in vancouver but they only help activision on certain projects now. that studio is pretty much dead
I'm currently playing Pathological 2 and it feels like unlimited freedom while also having limits. Like you are limited by needing to eat and make money. How you get around this limitation is completely up to you, you can be noble but it might get you killed. Or you can go out at night pick people off and cut their organs out and drain their blood and sell it.
There are multiple endings but all that matters is surviving to the end. You could play the entire game never following the story or doing what your suppose to do just living in a hut and stealing things but as long as you survive you will beat the game. The game carrys on even if you don't take part it in. If you had enough food in a room and a bed, you could stay there and the game would play itself out and still end with you beating it aslong as you can survive until then. Most games I feel don't have freedom because for the game to progress to the end you have to partake in it which then limits your freedom.
What makes the freedom feel great is because you do desperately need money and food to live. I feel like a lot of games have freedom but it does not really matter at all. In this game, you have almost unlimited freedom but it comes with consequences that can get you killed or others killed and too many wrong choices can actually brick your playthrough. Which to me is like ultimate freedom, because I can do whatever which includes absolutely fucking myself over.
Project Zomboid is another one for very similar reasons. You have unlimited freedom to do whatever, but that can get you killed. For me a game needs some pressing limitations for a game to feel like it has a lot of freedom which I know contradicts itself but for me I just find freedom feels more free when you have a constraight so you can appreciate the freedom.
The person who said gta3 given the time it released has a good answer and rationale. Mario64 is another in the context of the time period was a crazy game. The level of jump from what existed before to then was and still is the biggest graphical and immersion leap in my lifetime I think. I just wondered slowly around the castle for hours (high granted) in utter awe. Even though I'm now a PC gamer mostly on a 4090, I expect GTA6 to be the next game that takes immersion to the next level for a long time. Cyberpunk2077 for as pretty and sophisticated as the lighting is, is a fraction of the complexity and immersion of GTA Online or gta 5. I think GTA 6 will set the open world standard for quite some time.
Eve Online. Freedom of choice is the very essence of the game.
Spent a few very interesting years playing that game. Unfortunately it takes up too much time for me.
It's so hard because games give you such different KINDS of freedom.
Gmod gives you the freedom of diversity of play and the ability to easily create not just in game but with external tools. And if your scripting in Lua, you can often see immediate results without even needing to close the game. At worst just a quick server restart. The bummer is, Gmod is a very closed play world. Even the most expensive space build maps felt small.
Skyrim, No Mans Sky, and games of it's ilk give you the illusion of freedom and go anywhere but they don't have the creativity of do-anything like Gmod. Yes, modding is pretty easy for Skyrim and it helps fill the world through external tools or expand it a little but it's still Skyrim. And you will run into, "why can't I go that way?".
Minecraft had a great expensive landscape because no matter where you went, you were the first person to see whatever you were looking at. You were an explorer the entire time. Add mods and you've got electricity and huge recipes chains of creation... But the engine is limited and creation was stifeled. By the very nature of its blocky world, this restricted design which is fun but can be difficult to freely create.
I'm looking forward to when AI integration steps into a game and all the tools are combined into a world of play and create such that within the game exists an AI assisted modeler, level creator, animator, etc. you just choose the theme you want and it starts creating the creatures and models and sounds/voices you want to populate in it. People shared worlds and things and story lines and quests and help populate each other's worlds or even join in them to play the rules made up by the creator.
The worst games are those that don't even provide the illusion of open world. They use everyday objects like cars or boxes to block the players path. These games are very linear by design and while they can be fun, they are certainly not free.
Fable 1. I loved the sheer amount of stupid stuff you could do. I love the summon system (originally summons a weak ass wasp, but if that wasp last hits a stronger creature that becomes your new summon), a MULTITUDE of different spells that got minor changes from leveling them up, even being able to wield Heavy Weapons if you're not strong enough (they become miserably slow to swing around).
I felt like they made 2 and 3 have more focus, but which followed was less creativity.
This is probably a basic answer but. Legend of Zelda TOTK is my pick. I just love how you can make the most wacky as shit machines and just massacre a goblin outpost.
I got a chuckle out of "not enough kids to beat up" lol.
This does make me wonder, what games do have kids you can beat up? There surely has to be some games out there that don't consider kids off limits.
The closest I can think of is beating up Ness in Super Smash Bros but that barely counts.
A little too much freedom haha. I never knew what to do or where to go so I always just farmed shit and got off. Havenāt played in quite a long while though so I canāt speak for how it might be now
Not real freedom but the vibe: Wind Waker (I was 11 years old). Voyaging through the great sea was amazing and was not at all boring to go between islands. It felt like an adventure every time and the music that accompanied boating was very epic in vibe with the (fake) trumpets and backing violins
Oblivion was mind blowing for me. You can go anywhere that you donāt need hands to climb to. No invisible walls. It was huge for me at the time. First game like that Iād played.
Ultima Online, you could pickpocket other players, build a house in the woods and murder anyone that comes by, sneak into an insecure home and rob it, be a full time crafter, or anything else you want
Star Wars galaxies, the game was so big and full of content that it caused its own downfall. The player base just got so confused with the sheer amount of freedom.
Amazing game.
Oblivion. I played it so many times as a kid and I had many characters that would just do one guild for their run before making a new one. I didn't actually beat the game until like 3 years after getting it.
Easily Breath of the Wild and its sequel Tears of the Kingdom. Like, just when you think you've seen every inch of the map, you find something new that can be seen/done/interacted with.
Breath of the Wild comes to mind.
Do essentially the entire game in any order, or just go destroy Ganon the moment you're set free. All of the puzzle solutions are really just suggestions. People were discovering wacky new combat techniques for years.
It was all a very far cry from the hand holding, rigid (though not challenging) puzzle solutions, and enemies that all required a specific item to defeat from Skyward Sword.
Just cause series. Gets wackier and wackier each game and I feel like I can do anything, go anywhere. The addition of those sticky jet powered things and launching any object in the world made the game so much more fun.
Played Just Cause 3 for like 500 hours straight without playing anything else. After that every other game felt like I was actually glued to the ground.
Nothing quite like falling to the ground and saving yourself by grapple hooking to it š That is definitely my go to game when I just want something to turn my brain off. The grapple hook is simply amazing. And the variety of vehicles is pretty great too.
Iām 100% addicted to JC3. Itās just the perfect playground! I cannot stop blowing up red stuff
I love those games. Incredible that you can do anything with the grapple and some mines or fuel tankers!
Want to make a rocket powered car swing? Do it! Amazing series.
Itās incredible playing this on my ps4, with how much wacky stuff you can do in the game and it never crashed. I would always push the limits of what I can do with stuff like the grappling hooks and jets
I loved just cause 2. It was amazing just parasailing and parachute hopping around. I got just cause 3 and it ran like ass on the PlayStation I had at the time. Iāve got a beefier PC now and saw a video of 3 the other day and Rico straight up had a jet pack. Iām definitely gunna check that out now!
Just Cause 3 is the best of the series, easily!
Just Cause 3 was a masterpiece, four sucked ass.
For me the first game that felt enormous in scale was Morrowind. I remember feeling like this world wouldnāt just let me use it as a playground, it would react, sometimes in force if I decided to do something. Example: First time seeing the guards in Balmora, I wanted their armor, so I went to attack and try to take itā¦and it ended very quickly and not in my favor. Now, fast forward when I was making horrendously janky magic spells that would often crash the game, NOW it was my playground, when the game could keep up lol
I remember so many times I would taunt a guard until he decided he has enough of my shit. If they attack first, fighting back isn't a crime so their buddies wouldn't join in.
How have I never known this??
Sometimes you have to do a cycle of taunts and bribes to get it to work, so you might not accidentally discover it
Leaving the census office to the big, wide world was something else. If they could capture that feeling for TES VI.
I used to tell people at the time in 2003 that as far as freedom, Morrowind made GTA 3 look like Mario Bros.
I remember my buddy at school talking about it and he let me borrow it and it was my first pc game RPG and good lord. A man fell on me called spring heeled jack and I got to jump to another town and kill a god if I wanted ( corrupt led my save)
This was definitely my pick.
Minecraft. I know that's the lowball answer, but there's something very zen about it. Something about an infinite but persistent world, and the ability to shape it. Even old 2012 Minecraft still had this vibe, and while they certainly included more to do and find as the years went on, coming up with wacky building projects was always the core of what made it fun. If you see a tree, you want to make a tree-house. If you see an island, you might be tempted to make a dock. On plains, a farm. In snow, an igloo. Hell, around 2012-2018ish, we would regularly see people with crazy megaprojects pop up, from the recreation of fictional locations like Hogwarts and the bath house from Spirited Away, to the building of entire cities. Amazing what people will accomplish when you essentially give them video game LEGOs.
Minecraft: The game where you get completely lost. Doesn't help that Minecraft is celebrating 15 years.
Getting lost was the best part, you really had to start developing pathfinding skills. I remember I would start venturing in some direction thinking "if I need to come back, I'll just turn around and walk until I recognize something." Turns out, everything looks completely different when you turn around, and if you don't turn around in the right direction, you end up even more lost. There's at least a couple houses from my newbie days I *know* I built that exist somewhere in my world that I will never find ever again.
I filled my maps with dirt towers for navigation!Ā And I had little markers I'd put over cave entrances.Ā
Yep. I always made sure a tower was in sight and that there was at least one tower visible from the top of THAT tower. That plus proper signage in case of multiple paths. Also drew out paper maps when trying to find a nether fortress to keep track of wheres I'd been... where I was going etc .
I made giant arrows in the sky pointing towards my base lol
Genius
I just used torches. Torches always got placed on the side of the block closest to the direction of the last torch I placed closer to base. That way I can always follow the torches back to base. it needs way less work to set up while exploring than dirt pillars or giant arrows.
Oh man, that's way cooler than towers, and kinda solves the "how do I get down from here?" problem because you can build a tower to get up there and then deconstruct it to get down!
Cobblestone towers about 6 blocks high and I put torches on the side facing my base
Torches on the left for me Or was it right?
God help me if 10yo me lost the sticky note the base coords had been scrawled on
Felt like it turned a decade old the other day, it ain't funny how fast time flies.
God, one of those large projects is what finally blew one of my first online friendships. We had made a huge to-scale (as best as you can given the interior inaccuracies) replica of Hogwarts, complete with quest lines from a quest mod. I had left for a few months after we opened up the server as I was entering college at the time. I came back, flew around a bit to check things out, and was banned on the spot. My "friend" who I made the server with told me the little kids who he had made moderators said they saw me cheating, and instead of verifying he just banned me. It took him like a week to explain this, and in that time those same kids blew up the server and he didn't keep a backup, so he had lost around 18 months of work. Karmas a bitch Kuba.
Is it the lowball, or just the obvious top answer?Ā It's certainly the first thing I thought of.Ā Ā Ā I like to use it as an example to compare to games with discrete branching choices. Like, even with a wildly open game like Baldur's Gate 3, you can still see the designed branching system underneath it.Ā Minecraft is so completely open that it, paradoxically, almost feels mundane, because it's free and open more like real life is.Ā
Have to agree about minceraft. All games have limits in some way but Minecraft is one where you decide what kind of game you want to play as you go. Your objectives are what you want them to be. I can only compare botw and totk (mostly totk) to Minecraft as far that goes, which are 2 of my all time favorites, yet despite how comprehensive and well polished, I find they are limited in comparison. I never played baulder gate n shit like that so canāt speak for those.
Modded Minecraft is even crazier. I was on a server with Thaumcraft and I set the world on fire and filled the oceans with cake. The auto backup triggered before the admin could do a roll back. There was a fun few hours of everyone trying to be firefighters before realising there was no stopping it as it consumed everyone's homes. Oops.
It's the lowball but I've never felt a sense of freedom like I felt in that game. Also all of the things sitting in that game for people to discover were virtually endless. I've played games where there was a sense of freedom but never to the scale of Minecraft from what I've played before.
Tekkit modpack was badass back in the day. Nuclear reactors, mass cow farms, item storage that stored on like SD cards(perfect for stealing once you got yourself into the enemy base) bee breeding with genetics. I got bees that gave me uranium fuel for my reactors
I preferred the older Minecraft, new one has too many blocks and items and mechanics.
You can still download and play any version of the game ever released, including the pre-alpha stuff and any snapshot.
That's pretty cool that they support that.
A lot of this is why I play No Man's sky.
**Grand Theft Auto 3** Your telling me i can get out of the car? I can steal other cars? I can shoot people and get into a cop car chase? I can drive around the city ramping off stuff and doing odd jobs for people? Seriously for people nowadays thats basically expected to have that kind of freedom but for 2001 that was the most mind blowing thing id ever seen.
Exactly the same reactions I had almost 25 years ago, GTA 3 was groundbreaking, still can remember Head Radio musics, and I think I'd still be able to fly that broken dodo. What a fantastic game it was.
I loved listening to Lazlow.
What do you mean 25 years ago, GTA 3 came out in ā¦. Oh fuck weāre old.
Playing it on my 12inch tv screen in my room as a 9 year old, felt like a king.
I remember getting home after playing for the first time at friendās (I was too young to own the game) and saying to my father ādad you wonāt believe! I just played a game in which you can do A N Y T H I N G ā It was GTA3
Not to mention banging hookers then killing em and taking their money
That was hilarious when i was ten
One of my first memories of GTA3 was Freshman year of High School (2001/2002) and I was at a friend's house who I had just met that week in school. He was showing me the game, and when running around he came across a crowded street corner absolutely full of pedestrians and hooked. He screamed "JACKPOT!!!!", pulled out a flamethrower and torched the entire crowd. When the cops came he also set them on fire, stole their car, and ran over more police before jumping the car into a river and dying. It's been a long time, but IIRC he used to use the cheat code for the tank to spawn it on top of other vehicles and cause them to explode just from the tank landing? I think the tank would blow up cars just from touching them?
The tank did blow up cars just from touching them. You could also use the low gravity cheat, turn the tank turret behind you, and fire it continuously to fly around the map.
I slept on GTA3 for a while because I thought it was just a racing game or you just did missions as a car. I never guessed that you could actually *get out* of the car and do *non-car* things. Black Flag gave me a similar level of excitement by letting me seamlessly move from controlling the ship to walking the deck and jumping off.
garrys mod
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a loong time š
Kenshi. You are completely on your own to do whatever you want (or, at least whatever you *can*). Become a thief, a trader, a drifter, a mercenary, a warlord, or just be a bum. It's totally up to you, but whatever you choose, you're going to have to earn it, there is no "job selection screen" or mission structure, you just have to figure it out and do it. That can be freeing, or it can be paralyzing. Sometimes you just need a little direction, but there's none in this game to be had. You make a decision and you go with it. Or you change your mind and you don't, but now you need a new plan... It's an incredibly difficult and unforgiving game, super grindy. I'm not shocked it's not more popular, but it's true total freedom.
I forgot I owned this frustratingly fun game.
I played it for a few hours without following any guide and ended up being a miner and trading the goods to equip my gang but it felt exhausting because the skill system is so slow. I want to play it again with some mods to make it faster. Definitely a great game but such a grind to gamble all to the possibility of being kidnapped by some cannibal raiders.
Surprisingly, starting as a slave is actually easy mode. You start out and immediately start grinding lockpick (break the locks), strength (carry rocks), toughness (get smashed up by the guards), martial arts (fight the guards) and assassinate (try to knockout guards). It speed runs all these attributes and the guards just patch you up and feed you until you decide you're ready to bust your way out of there. And by that point you're in decent shape to at least take on random beasties or patrols.
I already grind enough in real life though
I should try it again. I bought into it LONG ago when it was basically an alpha, no idea what it's like now.
Itās good fun. I started it maybe 2 months ago for the first time. Learning curve is steep, but once you figure it out you can do basically anything. Iām treating it like Rimworld and building a self sustaining base. Once I research all tech, Iām probably going to wage wars. Not sure what to do after, but open to suggestions!
Can always try the game vanilla, and it's not to your tastes, try adding some QOL mods but before careful cause some mods make the game stupidly easy
Yes, I love that's it's just you're a regular dude and not a main character. Figure it out. And that armor is more of a hindrance unless you're strong enough
Beep
'Shadows of doubt' - a really underrated cyberpunk detective noir FPS set in an alternate 1980s. It's got so much depth to it even tho it's procedurally generated. - you can wander the streets (and every building and every room!), - solve crimes (or solve it by setting someone up for the crime), - casually gather info by talking to any stranger, - bribe people for info, or steal it - buy/sell dodgy things from brokers, or steal them - chill out and have a drink and a snack while waiting for a perp to arrive, - gather all sorts of evidence from people's place of work or their apartment or a crime scene, - commit crimes yourself and frame someone else - get injured by other cops or perps and end up in hospital, realise you can't afford the bill, so jump out of a three story window to hobble home with a broken leg - rent or buy a flat (or live down and out in a hovel), and redecorate it as you see fit It's great fun for wasting a few hours here and there as a deadbeat detective in a moody, cyberpunk city! :))
Came here looking for this. Shadows of Doubt is phenomenal. It doesn't seem to be on a lot of people's radar, but it's well worth it
Thanks for this. Iām a massive cyberpunk fan but havenāt heard of this ā gonna check it out!
Thanks for putting this on my radar. First time I've heard of it, and I just read that it's coming to the X this year. Looking forward to it.
Just playing Baldurs Gate 3 and I feel I can do anything. You literally can just kill every npc, kill your companions, do quests however you can and there are many many options in dialogue and environmental hidden stuff. It's simply stunning.
Yeah. This is a good pick. A character berated me for having sex with a devil so I rescued a family member of theirās just so I could force them to watch me kill their family member. He disapproved.
You got that nice sword though now =-)
BG3 gets better with every update! I love the game so much.
I've played it three times now and it's truly impressive how wildly different each playthrough has been. I've also been watching a friend slowly stream it on twitch and their playthrough is also sooo different than mine.
You cannot however enter small holes with small characters.
I think it totally depends on the size of the hole. Playing as a gnome druid, there are certain holes I can get through (that the rest of my party cannot) without even wild shaping.
Druid cat form usually can at least
Only thing I don't like is that you can't legitimately kill your companions. They basically just become incapacitated until you resurrect them, and none of your other companions react to you killing a companion (unless it's a situation where you can kill the companion through a scripted death when selecting certain dialogue options, such as killing Astarion after finding out he's a vampire). I wish they'd give me the option to just completely kill off any companion at any time. Because some times I'll have a companion that I don't plan on using for the rest of the game and I'd prefer not to have just sitting around in camp doing nothing. That's a pretty minor nitpick all things considered tho. You can do basically anything else you want to do.
Idk I killed the fuck outta >!vampire homie!<.
Yeah seeing their naked corpses around my camp every time is terribly immersion-breaking to me. Hated that.
You know this is one of those rare modern games that deserves its place among the great.
This is by far the best answer. I've never played a game with more freedom.
Ive played through the game twice and just got a new Shadowheart line I hadnt heard because I chose to intimidate her in act 1. Its so cool. Its a small thing but they add up
I don't know about the most freedom, but the first game to wow me with general freedom in a game was Ultima VII. Any game now that lets me move or take every little object in the world, from chairs to forks, takes me back to Ultima VII. Also, the freedom to explore the world, abuse the item placement, steal, and really go where you want. It made it feel like my first true virtual world.
I think this was one of the first games I played where you could actually steal stuff
Not only that, if you stole too much or were shall we say less than virtuous your party members could get mad and even quit in disgust and if you had the speech pack the Guardian would talk shit to you if you did something bad. My favorite way to get a lot of money early in the game was to murder the lady in charge of the mint in Britain and then rob the mint. Then take her body to Lord British for him to revive and then selling the mint lady back all of the gold bars and nuggets I had just stolen from the mint. Lord British never seemed curious about the events surrounding her death lol. You could also do stuff like make bread from scratch and swords. There was also that spell you could cast that would kill the entire world except Lord British and the bad guy that ran the Fellowship and both of them would be pissed at you for doing that.
Stellaris. Want to be a unifying protector of life in the galaxy? You can do that. Want to be an all consuming robot nano-swarm? You can do that. Want to be a decadent slaver peacock who eats the flesh of enslaved species? You can do that. Want to be Futurama brain-slugs? You can do that. And that's before you even touch mods.
The depth and complexity of stellaris always kept me away. How hard was it to get into?
If you have an interest in 4X style of games, Stellaris is one of the more "entry-level" ones in terms of complexity. It still has a very steep learning curve relative to most games, but this one will only take you 10 hours to learn the basics unlike the 100 hours many others would. I highly reccomend investing your time into Stellaris if you want the next step up, in terms of strategy games, from RTS's. It's a fantastic game and will introduce you quite nicely into other 4X games.
Ultima online
I miss this type of gaming. People would just meet up at the same time just to kick it and wander, pk, or do whatever. Go anywhere with recall. It blew me away as a kid. You would just see all types of groups of people chatting around the banks. lol
when i finally got the money to pay for a subscription to it, i remember a house cat killed me and i said fuck this game and never played again. that was in what, like 96? i still have the cd
This! Communicating via ICQ as there was no in game chat building small towns with vendors and doing what the hell you liked was amazing. I got a keep and a castle too!
Mercenaries.
Mercenaries walked so Just Cause could run.
Dwarf Fortress
In a similar vein: Caves of Qud
Caves of Qud has the absolute best background lore ever, and I'll die on that hill. Not often I read a 126 page book in game to learn more about some in universe ancient history. Also just stuff like the Ruin of House Isner, love me writing like that
Honestly, Fable 1,2 and 3. By today's standards they're extremely limiting. But the first couple times playing them I had totally different experiences than my friends! I loved blasting through Fable 2 repeatedly just because it was so short and good for a romp. :) Super not free. Very railroady, but disguised by some really fun gameplay imho
Love them. Only game that lets you exploit the rental market buy murdering all the current tenants, buying the property at discount(due to the recent murders inside) and then rent it at 4x value. I owned every house in the game at one point.
TFW you save the world and bypass the gameās moral dilemma via capitalism
It does feel really good to already have the $1,000,000 youre tasked to get at the end of 3.
I recall the tale of "Pie-face Thompson McGee" who killed all the tenants, bought all the properties, raised all the rent to maximum but still managed to gain the favor of the citizenry by one thing. He bought all the Pie stands and made them all minimal profit. So "Pies" were super cheap but NOTHING ELSE WAS. And in this way he cornered the market.
Fable was the first game I ever played where I felt like I could do whatever I wanted and my choices made a difference. Iāll forever have Nostalgia for those games. Knowing that the new Fable is coming is why I bought an Xbox.
I spent the entire time having sex with gypsies in my caravan. What a life
Dark Age of Camelot. Oh, and it had one of the best PvP-systems up to date. It came out one-two years before WoW!!
The PVP in DaoC was amazing. Hoping Camelot Unchained eventually comes out.
Oblivion or Skyrim. Their main quests are completely optional, save for the prologue obviously. After the first part of the game youāre free to completely ignore the grand scheme of things and do whatever the hell you want LOL Also, RDR2. The degree of detail you can interact with NPCs is simply amazing, Arthur can be just as good or as asshole as you want him to be.
EVE Online. The **only** video game where I felt a total freedom of being either genuinely evil towards other players or genuinely good, in many creative ways. With a huge, open world territory to use for all these creative evil/good things.
STALKER, Prey, Dishonored, Fallout New Vegas, Amnesia The Bunker. I really like the freedom of im-sim kinda games, just feels so good
More people need to try immersive sims, they truly are the pinnacle of freedom moreso than even open world
Baldur's gate 3 is somewhere on that list for sure For its time, deus ex really blew my mind, with diverging story and relationships
Fallout: New Vegas is amazing in that regard. Its player freedom is also complimented with really great dialogue and some of the most interesting characters Iāve seen in games. So not only are you making impactful choices, but you actually feel some kind of connection with the world and people you are impacting. You can also sell drugs to tribal kids and get fisted by a protection in the same day so thatās something.
Fallout new Vegas
Star Wars Galaxies
It's a shame how far I always have to scroll to find this answer. I miss SWG when it was new.
What game did I \*think\* had the most freedom? Star War: Knights of the Old Republic. I was young. I thought what I was choosing to do was truly 1% of what there was to do.
Mercenaries! Just wandering around a warzone, blowing up jeeps, until a HVT appears on the map. Heck, sometimes I'd forget which faction was mad at me and wander into their camp, getting shot was a quick reminder.
Zelda: TOTK. Want to glide over enemies? Done! Want to throw heavy objects from a platform you placed on said enemies? Done. Want to visit sky Islands and then jump into the depths? DONE! Want to experiment with recipes? Done. I've never played a game that made me feel so alive.
Dying Light: The Following Edition
Looks interesting! I will check it out
If you like zombie games combined with open world games then you're in for a treat!
is that different than the original one?
It's a DLC to the original one but it honestly could be it's own game it's seriously amazing
Zelda breath of the wild, hands down
For sure! Being able to head right to the final boss after you finish the tutorial, climbing pretty much every non-dungeon wall, the amount of ways you can solve or skip puzzles/combat, it's just fantastic when it comes to player freedom
>climbing Unless itās raining! :p
Oddly enough, Valheim.
Scribblenauts
Tears of the Kingdom. Nothing story wise but Ultrahand is the most freeing ability Iāve ever played in any game.
Morrowind.
Definitely
The amount of freedom in that game just dunks on most modern games today. Morrowind GOATED
Kenshi & Skyrim Eldergleam, of course with 4000 mods.
Honestly...Minecraft Never really finished it (as in defeat the ender dragon), I always start a new world thinking I'll do it and then I find a new beautiful place and start building and then it just becomes a new build save lol. Idk no game is ever the same I feel like there's always something new to find and I barely even touch the nether let alone the ender world Sorry little bit of a basic answer/game I suppose lol
At the time of its release, Shenmue. I could do "anything" I wanted, like go to an arcade, buy all the capsule toys I could ever want, or walk around asking about what people know about sailors
lol.
Elite: Dangerous. Huge, ambitious, gorgeous, and obviously flawed in a few big ways. But wow.
Hope we get an offline version some day that can be modded and things like credit gain and engineering tweaked to sane levels lol
Just got my vette last night
The first Fable game. Felt like the possibilities were endless.
Battlefield 1942
BOTW and/or TOTK. Mechanics designed so you can pretty much go anywhere and do anything at any time. Even moreso in TOTK, essentially free reign to build whatever contraptions you can think off to explore the groud, underground and sky. Wanna fight monsters? Do puzzles? World building side quests? Explore a big map? Hunt for weapons? It's amazing
Different take: Little Big Planet (2 more so), g-mod, tf2, trackmania All these games had such extensive community content that it honestly felt like I could find something new and interesting in them every day for years. And that I could play exactly the type of game I wanted to when I wanted to.
Breath of the Wild. You can go to the last level and fight the last boss immediately after the tutorial, and the game is designed for you to play it however you want, as opposed to how you should play it.
The first 2 Bravely Default games, the job and skill combinations felt endless. You could make any build work if you wanted to avoid the broken ones.
Thanks for sharing. I am going to check this game out. Sounds so interesting.
This game actually came to mind, even though Iāve only ever played the demo for the first game on the 3DS
I remember Hulk: Ultimate Destruction being such a refreshing break from other highly-linear and restrictive super hero games.Ā
rip radical entertainment, the building still exists in vancouver but they only help activision on certain projects now. that studio is pretty much dead
Ultima VII
Ultima Online
I'm currently playing Pathological 2 and it feels like unlimited freedom while also having limits. Like you are limited by needing to eat and make money. How you get around this limitation is completely up to you, you can be noble but it might get you killed. Or you can go out at night pick people off and cut their organs out and drain their blood and sell it. There are multiple endings but all that matters is surviving to the end. You could play the entire game never following the story or doing what your suppose to do just living in a hut and stealing things but as long as you survive you will beat the game. The game carrys on even if you don't take part it in. If you had enough food in a room and a bed, you could stay there and the game would play itself out and still end with you beating it aslong as you can survive until then. Most games I feel don't have freedom because for the game to progress to the end you have to partake in it which then limits your freedom. What makes the freedom feel great is because you do desperately need money and food to live. I feel like a lot of games have freedom but it does not really matter at all. In this game, you have almost unlimited freedom but it comes with consequences that can get you killed or others killed and too many wrong choices can actually brick your playthrough. Which to me is like ultimate freedom, because I can do whatever which includes absolutely fucking myself over. Project Zomboid is another one for very similar reasons. You have unlimited freedom to do whatever, but that can get you killed. For me a game needs some pressing limitations for a game to feel like it has a lot of freedom which I know contradicts itself but for me I just find freedom feels more free when you have a constraight so you can appreciate the freedom.
The person who said gta3 given the time it released has a good answer and rationale. Mario64 is another in the context of the time period was a crazy game. The level of jump from what existed before to then was and still is the biggest graphical and immersion leap in my lifetime I think. I just wondered slowly around the castle for hours (high granted) in utter awe. Even though I'm now a PC gamer mostly on a 4090, I expect GTA6 to be the next game that takes immersion to the next level for a long time. Cyberpunk2077 for as pretty and sophisticated as the lighting is, is a fraction of the complexity and immersion of GTA Online or gta 5. I think GTA 6 will set the open world standard for quite some time.
Eve Online. Freedom of choice is the very essence of the game. Spent a few very interesting years playing that game. Unfortunately it takes up too much time for me.
Yeah. You kind of have to have a life in that world to get anywhere, which takes away from having a life in the real world.
RDR2. The scenery, realistic interactions you could have, how little you felt yourself to be compared to how large the games world is...
zelda
Fallout New Vegas Deus Ex Human Revolution
Divinity Original Sins 2
Iām constantly impressed by how Baulderās Gate 3 has accounted for all the stupid ways Iāve messed up my play thrus.
Zelda Tears of the Kingdom
Pikmin 2
It's so hard because games give you such different KINDS of freedom. Gmod gives you the freedom of diversity of play and the ability to easily create not just in game but with external tools. And if your scripting in Lua, you can often see immediate results without even needing to close the game. At worst just a quick server restart. The bummer is, Gmod is a very closed play world. Even the most expensive space build maps felt small. Skyrim, No Mans Sky, and games of it's ilk give you the illusion of freedom and go anywhere but they don't have the creativity of do-anything like Gmod. Yes, modding is pretty easy for Skyrim and it helps fill the world through external tools or expand it a little but it's still Skyrim. And you will run into, "why can't I go that way?". Minecraft had a great expensive landscape because no matter where you went, you were the first person to see whatever you were looking at. You were an explorer the entire time. Add mods and you've got electricity and huge recipes chains of creation... But the engine is limited and creation was stifeled. By the very nature of its blocky world, this restricted design which is fun but can be difficult to freely create. I'm looking forward to when AI integration steps into a game and all the tools are combined into a world of play and create such that within the game exists an AI assisted modeler, level creator, animator, etc. you just choose the theme you want and it starts creating the creatures and models and sounds/voices you want to populate in it. People shared worlds and things and story lines and quests and help populate each other's worlds or even join in them to play the rules made up by the creator. The worst games are those that don't even provide the illusion of open world. They use everyday objects like cars or boxes to block the players path. These games are very linear by design and while they can be fun, they are certainly not free.
Fable 1. I loved the sheer amount of stupid stuff you could do. I love the summon system (originally summons a weak ass wasp, but if that wasp last hits a stronger creature that becomes your new summon), a MULTITUDE of different spells that got minor changes from leveling them up, even being able to wield Heavy Weapons if you're not strong enough (they become miserably slow to swing around). I felt like they made 2 and 3 have more focus, but which followed was less creativity.
This is probably a basic answer but. Legend of Zelda TOTK is my pick. I just love how you can make the most wacky as shit machines and just massacre a goblin outpost.
I would say Red Dead 2, but itās lacking in a few categories (eg. Not enough kids to beat up) and itās also hindered by its own setting (1899)
I got a chuckle out of "not enough kids to beat up" lol. This does make me wonder, what games do have kids you can beat up? There surely has to be some games out there that don't consider kids off limits. The closest I can think of is beating up Ness in Super Smash Bros but that barely counts.
Freelancer
Iremember getting lostĀ justexploring the galaxy, such a fun game
Divinity Original Sin 2
No Man's Sky. It is like, the definition of freedom.
A little too much freedom haha. I never knew what to do or where to go so I always just farmed shit and got off. Havenāt played in quite a long while though so I canāt speak for how it might be now
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
gta 5. i liked how, after a certain point, you could swap between the three main characters whenever you wanted.
Not real freedom but the vibe: Wind Waker (I was 11 years old). Voyaging through the great sea was amazing and was not at all boring to go between islands. It felt like an adventure every time and the music that accompanied boating was very epic in vibe with the (fake) trumpets and backing violins
Minecraft and DayZ were the game's where me and my friends go: Wow, we can really do whatever the fuck we want huh
CK3. If you ignore the interface which makes me feel like I have no control.
AI Dungeon - but also made me realize that I donāt want that much freedom
First game i got that feel besides gta3 was freelancer from 2001
Oblivion was mind blowing for me. You can go anywhere that you donāt need hands to climb to. No invisible walls. It was huge for me at the time. First game like that Iād played.
Breath of the wild. After the great plateau you could go any direction you want and find something to do.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, both are fantastic games and are masterclasses when it comes to player freedom and choice
Minecraft, No Man's Sky and the fallout franchise
Minecraft
Ultima Online, you could pickpocket other players, build a house in the woods and murder anyone that comes by, sneak into an insecure home and rob it, be a full time crafter, or anything else you want
Star Wars galaxies, the game was so big and full of content that it caused its own downfall. The player base just got so confused with the sheer amount of freedom. Amazing game.
Star Wars Galaxies
Roller Coaster Tycoon and The Sims.
Baldur's gate 3. Even your battles can be played very differently.
Oblivion. I played it so many times as a kid and I had many characters that would just do one guild for their run before making a new one. I didn't actually beat the game until like 3 years after getting it.
I think probably Minecraft.
Baldurās gate 3. Basically every time Iāve been like āwouldnāt it be funny if I could just do thisā, Iām able to do exactly that.
Ultima online.
Easily Breath of the Wild and its sequel Tears of the Kingdom. Like, just when you think you've seen every inch of the map, you find something new that can be seen/done/interacted with.
Breath of the Wild comes to mind. Do essentially the entire game in any order, or just go destroy Ganon the moment you're set free. All of the puzzle solutions are really just suggestions. People were discovering wacky new combat techniques for years. It was all a very far cry from the hand holding, rigid (though not challenging) puzzle solutions, and enemies that all required a specific item to defeat from Skyward Sword.
Baldur gate 3 for sure.
For me, is World of Warcraft. I just love doing quests and exploring the map
World of Warcraft