Open-world games are easily some of the most expansive on the market. Allowing players to do whatever they want in whatever order they want, open-world games give a degree of freedom to players that few other games allow.
This freedom and ability to explore things at their own pace often means players will spend more time in open-world games than any other genre. The best of the best in the genre are designed to be so expansive that players can spend literally hundreds of hours in the world if they want to. HowLongToBeat.com is a site dedicated to cataloging how long players, on average, spend playing a game, with the time to just rush through the main story at the low end and the time it takes to 100% the game on the high end.
Updated on October 12, 2021, by Ryan Woodrow: With the new generation of consoles fully underway, open worlds in games are continuing to grow ever bigger, and ever denser. Companies are able to produce an astounding amount of content to stuff into a single world that will see players spoilt for choice as to what to do, no matter where in the world they stand.
This means that completion times climb ever higher, and players who want their 100% completion stats and/or Platinum Trophies will need to spend an extensive amount of time on their games.
15 Fallout: New Vegas: 27 - 128 Hours
One of the most popular games in the Fallout franchise, Fallout: New Vegas has no shortage of side quests and secrets to keep players coming back for hours past the end of the main story. With a massive skill tree to fill out and all kinds of weapons and items to collect, New Vegas has something for just about every kind of Fallout player.
Additionally, Fallout: New Vegas has multiple DLCs that fans herald as some of the best in the franchise, pushing the post-game potential even further in the stratosphere for players who never want to level the comfort of the wasteland.
14 Kingdom Come: Deliverance: 41 - 128 Hours
A game that prides itself on its ultra-realism, there's a lot to explore in Kingdom Come; seeing all the game has to offer can take some dedication. The learning curve for the game's systems is a bit steep, especially early on, and many of the "realistic" features can make regular exploration move quite slowly.
That said, when stories and side-quest do rear their heads, there's plenty of engaging content to be explored, especially for people with an interest in the history of Europe in the Middle Ages. A warning to those seeking 100% completion, though: this is a game that does not let the player continue playing after the final mission and credits, so everything must be done before finishing the main story.
13 Valheim: 69 - 133 Hours
As the out-of-nowhere hit of 2021, Valheim took the internet by storm at the start of the year and continues to grow with an active player base to this day. What's most impressive about Valheim is that it's still in Early Access, and yet there are reams and reams of content.
As a sandbox game with crafting and construction, players can theoretically play for as long as they want without ever running out of content. However, the game does have bosses and a generally accepted route of progression. The more players build up their equipment and bases, the more there is to do, and future updates promise to push their options even higher in the future.
12 Assassin's Creed Odyssey: 43 - 136 Hours
One of the longest-running open-world franchises, Assassin's Creed has some long games under its belt, but Odyssey just out inched Valhalla by a small handful of hours. The map of Odyssey is the largest in the franchise due to a lot of it being the seas that separate Greece's many islands.
Dotted around Ancient Greece are a massive number of varied locations that can keep playing exploring for ages. Be they viewpoints, towns, encampments, or tombs and foes to fight, exploring the open world can lead to all sorts of incredible rewards for the players who put the effort in.
11 Satisfactory: 90 -158 Hours
Another Early Access game, to see why this game is so expansive, players need only look at the ridiculous size of the factories some players have put together. Tracing its routes back to the technological mods of Minecraft like Tekkit or Feed The Beast, Satisfactory is all about building things to make more things, to make more things, and so on forever.
It has a bit of Civilization-syndrome, where players can lose hours to it without truly realizing how much time has passed, which is part of what pushes this game's playtime so high. To reach the heights of the late-game, players must expand their production line to incredible proportions, making hundreds upon thousands of every machine part the game has to offer, which is going to take a hell of a long time.
10 Red Dead Redemption 2: 48 - 167 Hours
Given how long-awaited (and very expensive) Red Dead Redemption 2 was, the resulting game needed to be worth the wait, not to mention enough to satisfy players for another decade-long gap between games. On that front, it most certainly delivered.
Widely regarded as one of the best-looking games of its generation, Red Dead Redemption 2 had miles upon miles of expansive and beautiful terrain to explore and fall off your horse in. Exploring the world also yields plenty of distractions and side quests for players that will see them make a real impact on the frontier.
9 The Long Dark: 20 - 171 Hours
A survival/crafting experience that challenges players to survive as long as they possibly can is going to have a lot of content on offer because sandbox games like this put the onus on the player to make their own fun past a certain point.
The game's story can be completed in relatively short order, but the game's real length comes from the overall survival experience of making shelter, exploring the unforgiving world, and making the necessary plans and sacrifices to survive out in the wild.
8 The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild: 55 - 188 Hours
One of the most interesting details revealed in the build-up to Breath Of The Wild's release was the fact that players could go to Hyrule Castle and challenge the final boss of the game from more or less the very beginning of the game.
However, that meant the opposite was also true, that players could explore the entire world and do everything there is to do before even sniffing in Calamity Ganon's Direction. Be it the 120 Shrines, the 4 Diving Beasts, hundreds of recipes, or 900 Korok Seeds, players have a near endless checklist of tasks to complete if they so choose.
7 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: 55 - 190 Hours
While the world of The Witcher 3 may not be among the biggest, it is most certainly one of the most jam-packed. While the main story features an epic tale of grand proportions, what makes the world of The Witcher 3 so engaging in the level of sheer detail on display.
Almost every side quest goes so much deeper than just "go here, kill thing". Players can absolutely play it like that if they want, but such a huge amount of joy comes from exploring the "why" of each quest, information which is the game is all too happy to give to players who go looking for it.
6 Fallout 4: 31 - 218 Hours
Pushing the boundaries with almost another 100 hours on top of the next longest game, Fallout 4 has the most content of any Fallout game. With by far the biggest map, it's no surprise that the developers were able to stuff this game with more content than any of its predecessors.
Wandering around the wasteland for even a short amount of time will let players discover an interesting location with its own story behind how it reached the state it's in today (other than the nukes). Many of these locations aren't even marked as official locations on the map, meaning even the most experienced Fallout players may not have seen everything there is to see.
5 The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim: 33 - 230 Hours
Fallout is the only Bethesda franchise that is stuffed with content to the point of bursting. The world of The Elder Scrolls is just as, if not more, filled with content and deep lore for players to explore and learn about.
Skyrim is one of the biggest games in the franchise in this aspect. While the world may not be staggeringly large by modern standards, it is one of the most detailed. Dungeons of all shapes and sizes litter the landscape to the point where players will practically be falling over them as they explore. What makes each of these dungeons great is that they all have their own lore associated with them. Even some insignificant bandit camps have notes and journals that tell the long and winding backstories of how they got there and what they plan to do...before the player chops their heads off.
4 Xenoblade Chronicles X: 68 - 274 Hours
The Xenoblade Chronicles series is one known for its lengthy gameplay, with both its predecessor and its sequel having hefty playtime of their own. The longest of the bunch is the Wii U exclusive Xenoblade Chronicles X, which is a bit of a different game from the rest in the franchise.
The game's world borrows names from the real world but injects the architecture and lore established in the franchise into them, making a world that is a more intriguing one to explore. With the game split across five different continents, the world is not only huge in terms of size but variety.
3 Kenshi: 76 - 302 Hours
Kenshi is a game that decided to be as hands-off with the player as it can possibly be. Once players go through the character creator, they are let out into the game world and are given no real indication of what to do.
While this can be frustrating for players who are used to games giving them quest markers, this approach allows Kenshi to be one of the most wonderfully open-ended games ever made, where players really can do whatever they want. They can become a master thief, or a wandering trader, or a mighty warrior, or all of the above if they want, and it lets the player create the narrative themselves. With a huge and densely-packed world, reaching the bottom of the barrel with this game is something that will probably never happen for most players.
2 Sea of Thieves: 116 - 322 Hours
In a game with such a vast open ocean to explore and a seemingly endless amount of treasure to be found, there's always more to be done. One of the best games for screwing around in an open world with friends, Sea of Thieves ensures there's always something for players to do.
The game has been online in active development since 2018, with major content being added several times a year. With development promising to continue for a good while yet, it won't be long before Sea of Thieves becomes the most content-rich open-world game in existence, rivaled only by traditional MMOs, which boast thousands of hours of content.
1 The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind: 44 - 330 Hours
Bethesda's reputation for deep and expansive games didn't come around by accident, and one of the clearest signs that this philosophy would be taken into all of their main RPG titles was the release of Morrowind. This was the first title in The Elder Scrolls franchise to truly resemble what fans know it as today, and it was one of the most packed games of all time.
While every game in The Elder Scrolls franchise gives the player the freedom to explore the world almost immediately, the more modern games are often a bit more hand-holding in how they do it. The games don't force players in a specific direction, but the quests vaguely push them towards areas of the world. While Morrowind has a bit of this, it's far vaguer than in modern iterations, with no quest markers, just verbal or written directions for players to find their way around the massive world.