THE BEST OPEN WORLD GAMES ON PS5

I finished Ghost of Tsushima for the second time last month and realized I'd spent close to fifteen minutes just watching the wind push through a field of pampas grass. Not because the game told me to. Not because there was a collectible nearby. I just liked being there. That's the thing about the best open world games on PS5. The good ones make you want to exist in their spaces. The bad ones make you wish you had a checklist so you could get through the checklist faster.

The PS5 has an absurd number of open world games at this point. Some are genuine masterpieces, some are competent but forgettable, and a few are coasting on a formula that felt fresh in 2015 and feels mechanical now. Here's what's actually worth your time in 2026, starting with the games that do something genuinely interesting with the format.

Elden Ring

I keep coming back to this one. Elden Ring is the open world game that trusts you the most. There's no quest log. No minimap dotted with icons. No NPC with an exclamation mark standing at the edge of a town telling you where to go next. You get on your horse and you ride, and whatever you find is yours to deal with or run away from.

FromSoftware understood something that most open world developers don't: mystery is a resource, and most games spend it all in the first hour. Elden Ring is still surprising me on my third playthrough. A hidden wall, an elevator that goes way further down than it should, a boss tucked behind a waterfall in a corner of the map I somehow missed twice. The Lands Between is dense in ways that reward curiosity rather than completionism, and it's one of the reasons it keeps showing up near the top of any best open world RPGs conversation.

The combat is FromSoftware at their most accessible without losing what makes their games work. It's still hard. You're still going to die to a field boss you stumbled into unprepared. But the open world means you can always leave, go somewhere else, come back stronger. That loop of discovery, defeat, retreat, and return is what makes the whole thing sing. If you only play one open world game on PS5, make it this one.

Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut

This is the open world game I recommend to people who are tired of open world games. Sucker Punch made a smart decision early on: replace the standard UI clutter with the wind. You swipe on the touchpad, the wind blows toward your objective, and you follow it. No minimap. No dotted line on the ground. Just you and the landscape and the direction you're heading.

The combat is where it really earns its keep. Switching between stances to deal with different enemy types gives every encounter a rhythm, and the standoff mechanic, where you face down a group and try to kill the first attacker in a single strike, never stops feeling cool. The Iki Island expansion adds enough new content and emotional depth to justify the Director's Cut price, and the multiplayer Legends mode is a surprisingly great co-op experience that I don't think gets enough credit.

Visually, this is one of the best-looking games on PS5. The art direction leans into color and contrast in ways that make every screenshot look like a painting. I've never used a photo mode more than I have in Tsushima, and I'm not someone who usually cares about photo modes.

Cyberpunk 2077

Night City is the single most impressive environment I've ever walked through in a video game. That's not hyperbole. The density of detail, the verticality, the way neon light bleeds through rain and smog at street level while the corporate towers glow clean above you. CD Projekt Red built a city that communicates its themes through architecture alone.

The launch was a disaster, yes. Everyone knows. But the game as it exists in 2026, post-2.0 update, post-Phantom Liberty, is a completely different product. The skill trees were rebuilt, the police system actually works, the AI behaves like it belongs in a modern game. Phantom Liberty's spy thriller storyline is some of the best writing in any RPG, and Idris Elba's performance is magnetic in a way that game voice acting rarely manages.

The builds are genuinely varied too. My first playthrough was a netrunner who barely fired a gun, hacking enemies through walls and cameras. My second was a katana-wielding chrome maniac who solved every problem by running directly at it. Both felt like completely different games. Night City accommodates all of it.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2

Insomniac figured out the most important thing about an open world game: getting around has to be fun. Web-swinging in Spider-Man 2 is the best traversal in any open world game, period. The web wings add gliding, the slingshot launches add speed, and switching between Peter and Miles gives you two slightly different flavors of movement through the same city. I've fast-traveled maybe three times total across two playthroughs. Why would I? Moving through this world is the whole point.

The story is surprisingly strong for a superhero game. The Venom arc goes places I didn't expect, and the pacing between Peter's and Miles's sections keeps things from dragging. The villain roster is handled well, with Kraven as a genuinely threatening presence rather than a cartoon bad guy.

My one complaint is that the open world activities are still pretty standard. Stop a crime, clear a base, find a collectible. Insomniac polishes these to a mirror shine, but they're still the same activities you've been doing in open world games for a decade. The moment-to-moment gameplay is so good that I didn't mind, but I'd love to see them do something weirder with the side content next time.

Horizon Forbidden West

Guerrilla Games built one of the most visually stunning open worlds on PS5 and filled it with robot dinosaurs. That pitch alone does a lot of work. The machine designs are consistently creative, with each new type requiring different tactics to take down, and the combat system of tearing off components, setting traps, and exploiting elemental weaknesses has a depth that I think gets overlooked because the game looks like it could be a Far Cry title at a glance.

Aloy is a good protagonist. Not everyone agrees with me on this, and I get it. She talks to herself a lot, and the game has a habit of telling you the solution to a puzzle approximately two seconds before you would have figured it out on your own. That stuff is annoying. But the actual writing of her character, the stubbornness, the gradual willingness to trust people, the way she carries the weight of literally saving the world without it becoming melodramatic, all of that works for me.

The Burning Shores DLC is worth playing for the final boss alone. I won't spoil it, but it's one of the most spectacular encounters on PS5.

Baldur's Gate 3

This one stretches the definition of "open world" and I'm including it anyway. Baldur's Gate 3 isn't open in the way Elden Ring or Horizon is. You're not riding across a seamless map. But each act gives you a large area to roam freely, and the game's real openness is in its systems. Almost every problem has multiple solutions. You can talk your way through, fight your way through, sneak around, or do something so unexpected that the game has to improvise a response. And somehow, it usually has one.

Larian built something that respects player creativity more than any game I've played. Want to stack a bunch of crates to reach an area you're not supposed to access yet? Go ahead. Want to shove the main villain off a ledge during a cutscene? You can try. The D&D foundation means dice rolls inject genuine randomness into everything, so your perfectly planned approach might fail because you rolled a 2, and your desperate last resort might work because you rolled a 20. That unpredictability creates stories that scripted games simply cannot produce.

The co-op is the best way to play it, too. Four friends, each controlling a character, each making decisions that affect everyone. It's chaotic and occasionally infuriating and I can't recommend it enough.

Hogwarts Legacy

I went into Hogwarts Legacy expecting nostalgia bait and got a genuinely solid open world RPG instead. The castle is the star. Hogwarts itself is one of the best-designed hub areas in any open world game, full of hidden passages, moving staircases, and rooms that only appear at certain times. I spent hours just wandering the corridors, finding things that had nothing to do with any quest.

The open world outside the castle is less interesting. The hamlets all blend together, the enemy camps are repetitive, and the gear system is filler that the game didn't need. But the core loop of attending classes, learning new spells, and using those spells to solve environmental puzzles keeps things moving. The Room of Requirement is a great progression hook, and the spell combat is flashy and satisfying once you unlock enough variety to start combining elements.

It's a good game that could have been a great game with a tighter open world. The Hogwarts stuff is A-tier. Everything outside the castle walls is B-tier at best. Still worth playing, especially if you grew up with the books.

Final Fantasy XVI

This one is semi-open at best, and I think that's the right call. Square Enix didn't try to make a massive explorable world and instead built a series of large, authored zones connected by a world map. The Eikon battles, where you control kaiju-sized summons fighting each other, are some of the most spectacular set pieces on PS5. The first time Ifrit and Garuda clash, your jaw will be on the floor.

The combat system, designed by the guy behind Devil May Cry 5, is the best real-time combat in any Final Fantasy game. It's fast, it's stylish, and the Eikon abilities you unlock throughout the story keep expanding your options in satisfying ways. Clive is a strong protagonist with an actual arc, which puts him ahead of most Final Fantasy leads in my book.

The RPG elements are thin, though. Gear is mostly stat sticks with no interesting choices, and the side quests in the first half are fetch-quest padding that the game doesn't need. The back half improves dramatically. If you can push through the slow start, there's a great action game here with a story that takes real swings.

GTA V

I know. It's been out since 2013. It's older than some of the people playing it. But GTA V on PS5 is still one of the best open world games available, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The writing in the single-player campaign is sharp, the three-protagonist structure keeps things varied, and Los Santos remains one of the most convincing game cities ever built. The texture of it, the radio stations, the pedestrian conversations, the way different neighborhoods feel genuinely different, all of that still holds up.

GTA Online is a separate conversation. It's a bloated, microtransaction-driven mess that also happens to be incredibly fun with friends. I've had some of my best multiplayer gaming moments in GTA Online heists, and I've also spent way too much time grinding for a car I didn't need. That's the Rockstar formula working exactly as intended.

We're all waiting for GTA VI. Until it shows up, GTA V is still here, still running well on PS5, still worth playing if you somehow haven't.

Astro Bot

Including Astro Bot in an open world roundup is a stretch, and I'm doing it because the game is too good to leave out of any PS5 recommendation list. It's not open world in any traditional sense. The levels are linear platforming stages. But the hub world has exploration elements, the levels themselves are full of hidden paths and secrets, and the sense of discovery, of finding something unexpected around every corner, captures the feeling of a great open world better than most actual open world games manage.

Team Asobi built one of the purest, most joyful games on PS5. Every level introduces a new idea, uses it brilliantly for a few minutes, and moves on before it gets stale. The DualSense integration is the best on the platform. If you own a PS5 and haven't played Astro Bot, fix that before you play anything else on this list.

The state of open worlds in 2026

Here's the thing I keep thinking about. A lot of open world games in 2026 are still using the template that Ubisoft established with the first Assassin's Creed. Towers that reveal map sections. Icons scattered across the map representing activities. Collectibles. Bandit camps. Side quests that send you to the other side of the world for a fetch errand. That formula worked in 2007 because it was new. It's not new anymore, and games that follow it without adding something of their own feel stale almost immediately.

The games on this list that really stand out are the ones that break from that template. Elden Ring removes the UI entirely and trusts you to find things. Ghost of Tsushima replaces the minimap with wind. Baldur's Gate 3 makes the world reactive to your choices rather than just big. Spider-Man 2 makes traversal so good that the open world becomes a playground rather than a commute.

The ones that struggle are the ones that fill massive maps with content that doesn't justify the space. I like Horizon Forbidden West a lot, but there are stretches where you're just running between markers on a map, and the world stops feeling like a place and starts feeling like a to-do list. Hogwarts Legacy has the same problem outside the castle. Even GTA V, brilliant as it is, has whole sections of the map that exist to be big rather than to be interesting.

I think we're at a turning point with open world games. Players are getting tired of the formula, and developers are starting to notice. The next wave of open world games needs to justify its size with density, reactivity, or systems that make exploration inherently rewarding. The map can't just be big. It has to be worth being in. The games that figured that out are the ones I keep going back to, and the ones that didn't are the ones gathering dust on my shelf.