10 Open World Games That Reinvented The Genre Without Getting Enough Credit

Every once in a while, you’ll see great open-world games crowned as “genre changers.” However, more often than not, small titles reinvent something or come up with really interesting new ideas. But if they don’t sell enough and/or their marketing doesn’t work, their success remains unknown.

The games below did the awkward, hard work of proving that some new ideas could work, while later titles took the credit. Here are the games that I believe deserve your second look.

10

Shenmue 1

The City That Lived Without You

Before GTA III made open worlds an object of interest for millions of players, Shenmue had created a living Japanese city where NPCs have their daily routines, shops open and close during the day, and the weather changes constantly. It’s a real town with a life of its own, whether you’ve been looking at it or not.

This idea of ​​a world that moves by itself, regardless of who you are, the player, later became popular and became the backbone of games like Yakuza and Red Dead Redemption 2. The commercial failure of Shenmue has overshadowed its influence, but the whole open-world genre kept its blueprint.

9

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Traversal Reinvented

This Spider-Man 2 game was remembered as one of the best movie games, but its main attraction was the newly introduced physics-based traversal system, which allows you to feel like a real Spider-Man while navigating the open world. Web surfing itself required you to have real drive, and I can honestly say that mastering it felt better than completing the many tasks in the game’s story.

This web-transformer, developed by Jamie Fristrom, has influenced the physics in recent releases such as Just Cause and Sunset Overdrive, as well as in the new Spider-Man games. The game is rarely remembered for this fact, which is more important than we believe.

8

Just because 2

Real Physics Playground

Jumping into Just Cause 2 is essentially jumping into a James Bond-like action movie that gives you tons of opportunities to destroy enemies and their bases in the style of your favorite movie star. What I love about the game is that it just drops you on a big open world island without any beaten path to follow or tons of icons on your mini map. You get a grappling hook, a parachute, some weapons, and crazy physics to throw yourself and generate fun in any way you like.

This type of thinking changed in the early 2010s, when the game was released and introduced exploration as its focus, a concept later adopted by games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Just Cause 2 rarely enters the conversation when discussing this system, despite proving over the years that empty space and great movement tools beat a map full of busy work. No wonder the game is among the top PS3 open world games.

7

Far Cry 2

The Land That Fought For

Even though Far Cry 2 was not popular with the players when it was released, mainly because of its punishing realities, the game brought other programs that were years ahead of the genre. For example, a fire could literally spread across the lawn and burn nearby trees or cars. Another interesting thing the game introduced was the weapon destruction system, where your weapons will wear out over time and fill up, forcing you to pick up new ones regularly. Also, the game’s graphics were among the best of the era.

In addition, enemies react dynamically to you and memorize your presence through the shadow system, which makes them fear you as your shadow increases. All of these ideas were a great foundation for the latest Far Cry entry which received much praise and attention.

6

Cracking

Practice Jumping to Jump Up

Crackdown’s orb-collecting and rooftop-jumping structure seems simplistic now, but at the time, it tackled a problem open-world games had yet to fully solve: making travel itself a progression system. For example, to run faster and jump higher, you need to collect glowing orbs that you reach by running and jumping. A rating system that feels very natural but is unusual for this genre.

Later games, like InFamous and Prototype, used the same logic: you need to explore to be strong, and you need to be strong to explore more. However, this loop was started by Crackdown but remained forgotten because the franchise later disappointed the players and pulled the original release down with it.

Testing Without the Hand You Can Hold

When Morrowind came out, what united my friends and I was that it didn’t offer compass arrows, or quest markers, or any other help other than written directions and open landmarks. It demanded our attention and memory in a way that no other game had at the time, meaning that it somehow turned exploration into problem-solving tasks.

The Elder Scrolls sequels came after abandoning this quest system, but the entire “no waypoint” game subgenre has become popular in recent years, with titles like Elden Ring, The Last of Us, and Outer Wilds using it successfully. This is one of the reasons why the game is still worth playing in the mid-2020s.

4

The Mafia

Building Before Chaos

The original Mafia game was released very closely to GTA 3, but took a different approach to the entire genre. Instead of giving you the chaos of a sandbox, it gave you a tightly constructed world, the first open story where the city existed to fill the mafia narrative. Part of the test was reserved for a different Free Ride mode.

I liked the realism, like the police chasing you for speeding, running red lights, or the fact that you’re physically injured in a car accident. All that was missing in GTA 3. As I see it, this narrative-first approach to open-world design is what inspired recent hits like Red Dead Redemption and the new GTA games. And even though Mafia didn’t get the praise it deserved, there are still plenty of players who remember how it all started.

3

Xenoblade Chronicles

Scale as a Design Philosophy

What’s surprising about Xenoblade Chronicles is that the game offered multiple explorable ecosystems that were fully loadable on the Nintendo Wii console, a system that wasn’t designed to offer so much. Still, the game has given you beautiful world locations with physical landmarks that you can walk to and visit without loading screens in between, giving you a great sense of scale.

This sense of landscape as a spectacle was then popularized in games like Horizon Zero Dawn, where you once again encounter beautiful, almost endless landscapes whose views just draw you in. That same effect was produced by Xenoblade Chronicles, but it missed the glory that came with it.

2

Death Stranding

Making the Trip Perfect Game?

Death Stranding reinvented the whole open-world genre with one thing: carrying things somewhere difficult. I don’t see the place of this game as just a place to pass, but as a main obstacle that forces you to plan routes, balance loads, and feel every hill like a real builder would.

It has asynchronous multiplayer, which means that while you won’t meet other players, you will see and be able to use their structures, such as bridges, zip lines, shelters, and stairs. To me, this toy is quietly reviving the open-world single-player experience, even if it was derided as a “walking simulator” at first.

1

Mercenaries: A playground of destruction

Destroy Everything In Your Path

Interestingly, Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction has given you a playground for destruction, where you can destroy various buildings in its open world by calling in airstrikes or artillery, or by hitting them with your tank. This meant that the game treated destruction as a basic gameplay element, something you had to do as part of exploration.

This pioneering concept of an open world defined by what you can blow up rather than what you can fit into later releases such as Battlefield: Bad Company and Teardown. However, Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction is rarely cited as a game that brought anything new.