Best Open-World Games to Play Before GTA 6

November 19, 2026. That is the date. And between now and then there are seven months of open-world gaming to fill. The good news is that the genre has never been in better shape — the last decade has produced some of the most ambitious, expansive, and well-crafted open worlds in gaming history, each one a different argument for what an open world can be and do.

Some of these games will prepare you for GTA 6 by giving you a point of comparison. Some will fill the specific itch — crime, chaos, city life — that GTA 6 is going to scratch. Some are just excellent games that deserve your time before the most anticipated release in the history of the medium arrives and rearranges everyone's schedule.

Here are the ones worth your time.

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Red Dead Redemption 2

Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC

If you want to understand what GTA 6 is likely trying to do, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the closest existing point of reference. Made by the same studio, it represents Rockstar's last major statement on what an open world can feel like when simulation depth is prioritised over moment-to-moment spectacle.

RDR2 is a game that slows down. Arthur Morgan eats, sleeps, bathes, and greets strangers. The world has weather patterns that affect NPC schedules. Shopkeepers remember if you robbed them. Your horse develops a bond with you over time. None of this is mandatory content — it is the texture of the world itself, the quality of ambient reality that makes Rockstar's open worlds feel distinct from everyone else's.

The leaks around GTA 6's NPC simulation, relationship systems, and world reactivity all trace back to what RDR2 established. Understanding that game's design philosophy going into GTA 6 means you'll notice the evolutions rather than taking them for granted. It's also simply one of the best games ever made. If you haven't played it, this is not a suggestion — it's a requirement.

Time commitment: 60–80 hours for the story, significantly more if you explore fully.

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Cyberpunk 2077 (with Phantom Liberty)

Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC

Cyberpunk 2077 had a launch that everyone remembers, and a redemption arc that not enough people have witnessed. The current version of the game — patched through 2.x updates and expanded by the Phantom Liberty DLC — is a genuinely excellent open-world RPG that gets better the more you give it.

Night City is the most densely realised urban environment in any game outside of Rockstar's own work, and in some respects it surpasses even Los Santos. The vertical layering of the city, the distinct personality of each district, the way corporate architecture towers over street-level chaos — it is a city that feels designed by people who thought carefully about how cities actually work rather than just filling space with things to do.

The connection to GTA 6 is direct: GTA 6's Vice City is supposed to be the most detailed and interactive urban environment Rockstar has ever built. Playing Night City first gives you a calibration point for what ambitious city design looks like in 2025. It also gives you one of gaming's better recent stories, particularly in Phantom Liberty, which is a genuine spy thriller with real stakes.

Time commitment: 50–60 hours for the base game, an additional 15–20 for Phantom Liberty.

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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Nintendo Switch

The gold standard for open-world storytelling still holds up over a decade later, and the Complete Edition with both expansions — Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone — offers more quality content than most full-price games released this year.

What The Witcher 3 did that no open-world game had quite managed before was make side quests feel like they mattered. The main quest is excellent. The side quests are sometimes better. Quests like The Ladies of the Wood, or A Matter of Life and Death, are as narratively sophisticated as anything in the main campaign, with their own internal logic, consequences, and emotional weight. The game treats exploration as reward rather than obligation.

For GTA 6 specifically, The Witcher 3 is useful preparation for the expectations around narrative depth and side content. If GTA 6 delivers on its promise of a story that takes Jason and Lucia seriously, Witcher 3 is the benchmark it will be compared to. Understanding that benchmark from experience is more interesting than understanding it secondhand.

Time commitment: 70–100 hours for the base game and both DLC expansions.

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Elden Ring

Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC

The counterargument to almost everything else on this list. Where most open-world games guide you through their content with markers, questlines, and waypoints, Elden Ring gives you a horse, points you at the horizon, and lets you find your own relationship with a world that is dense with secrets and entirely unhelpful about revealing them.

The Lands Between is one of the most genuinely impressive pieces of environmental worldbuilding in recent gaming history. Everywhere you ride looks like it means something. Ruins suggest history. The positioning of enemies implies narrative. The world tells its story through geography and detail rather than through dialogue or cutscenes, and the result is exploration that feels like discovery rather than completion.

Playing Elden Ring before GTA 6 is useful as a palate cleanser and a perspective reset. GTA 6's Vice City will be full of markers and missions and things to do and ways to get from A to B. Elden Ring's Lands Between refuses all of that, and spending time in a world that demands active interpretation rather than passive consumption sharpens your appreciation for both approaches.

Time commitment: 60–100 hours depending on how thoroughly you explore.

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Assassin's Creed Shadows

Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC

The most recent entry on this list and, for many players' money, the best open-world game released in 2025. Assassin's Creed Shadows finally gave the franchise the Japan setting fans had requested for years, and the result is visually extraordinary — feudal Japan rendered with a level of environmental detail and seasonal dynamism that rivals anything in the genre.

The game's dual-protagonist system — switching between the shinobi Naoe and the samurai Yasuke — adds mechanical variety that earlier AC entries lacked, and the world design has evolved considerably from the bloated, checklist-heavy approach of Odyssey and Valhalla. Shadows is a more focused game that rewards exploration rather than simply cataloguing it.

Given that GTA 6 is also built around dual protagonists with distinct skill sets, playing Shadows offers a useful recent example of how that design choice can enrich an open-world experience. The comparison is not direct — one is feudal Japan, the other is modern Vice City — but the structural logic overlaps, and the contrast will be interesting.

Time commitment: 40–60 hours for the main story and primary side content.

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Sleeping Dogs

Platforms: PC (via Steam), PS3/PS4 (original release)

The criminally underrated one. Sleeping Dogs came out in 2012, was commercially overshadowed by the GTA franchise it was implicitly competing with, and has spent the years since quietly building a devoted following among players who discovered it late and couldn't believe they had missed it.

Set in Hong Kong, you play Wei Shen — an undercover cop embedded in the Triads — in a story that handles the tension between duty and loyalty considerably better than most open-world crime narratives attempt. The combat system, built around martial arts rather than gunplay, is viscerally satisfying in ways that GTA's combat rarely is. The city is dense, textured, and full of personality despite being smaller than most of its contemporaries.

Sleeping Dogs matters on this list not just as a great game but as a reminder of what a crime open-world looks like when the criminal world is treated seriously and the protagonist's moral conflict is genuine rather than incidental. GTA 6, with its Jason and Lucia story, is at least gesturing toward that kind of storytelling. Sleeping Dogs did it years ago, at a smaller scale, and largely got away with it.

Time commitment: 15–20 hours for the main story, 25–30 for completion.

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Hogwarts Legacy

Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC

An argument for the value of a well-realised setting over mechanical ambition. Hogwarts Legacy is not the deepest open-world game on this list. The combat becomes repetitive, the narrative stakes are modest, and the open-world activities follow familiar patterns. But the world itself — the school, its grounds, the surrounding Scottish highlands — is realised with a level of environmental detail and coherent sense of place that most open-world games never achieve.

Walking through Hogwarts feels like being somewhere. The staircases move. The portraits react. The Great Hall changes with the time of day. The attention paid to making the space feel inhabited is the kind of craft that goes unnoticed until you are in a game where it is absent and the world feels empty by comparison.

For GTA 6's Vice City — which is promising over 700 enterable interiors, NPCs with schedules, and a world that responds to context — Hogwarts Legacy is a useful reminder of what it means for a detailed environment to feel like a place. The scale is different but the underlying design ambition rhymes.

Time commitment: 30–40 hours for the main story and key side content.

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Watch Dogs 2

Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC

The one that got away. Watch Dogs 2 launched in 2016 to a warm but not rapturous reception, and has been undersold ever since relative to how good it actually is. Set in a loving recreation of the San Francisco Bay Area, it follows Marcus Holloway and the DedSec hacker crew taking on a surveillance capitalist oligarchy with drones, hacking, and a sense of anarchic fun that the more grounded first Watch Dogs entirely lacked.

The hacking mechanic — which lets you manipulate virtually every piece of connected infrastructure in the city — gives Watch Dogs 2 a toolbox unlike any other open-world game. Cars can be stolen remotely. Security systems can be turned against their owners. Enemies can be manipulated into killing each other. The city is a system to be subverted rather than just navigated.

GTA 6 is set in a satirical recreation of contemporary social media culture, with TikTok-style content creation built into the world. Watch Dogs 2 arrived at that satirical target earlier and hit it well. Playing it before GTA 6 lands gives you a genuinely enjoyable game and sets up a very interesting comparison about how two different open worlds handle the same cultural moment.

Time commitment: 20–25 hours for the main story, more with side content.

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A Note on GTA 5 Itself

The obvious answer to "best open-world game before GTA 6" is, of course, GTA 5 — and if you haven't played it, play it. But if you have played it, the more interesting option is GTA 5 with mods, which we've covered in depth separately. The modded version of GTA 5 is, in many respects, a different and considerably richer experience than the vanilla game, and it is the version worth returning to before November.

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What to Expect When November Arrives

Every game on this list represents a different answer to the question of what an open world is for. RDR2 says it is for simulated reality. Cyberpunk says it is for dense urban storytelling. Witcher 3 says it is for meaningful side content. Elden Ring says it is for discovery. Shadows says it is for environmental beauty. Sleeping Dogs says it is for moral tension. Hogwarts says it is for a sense of place. Watch Dogs 2 says it is for systemic play.

GTA 6 is going to make its own argument — probably several arguments simultaneously, given the scale and ambition of what Rockstar has been building. Seven months is enough time to spend quality hours with all of the above, sharpen your palate, and arrive at Vice City with a better sense of what you're measuring it against.

The wait is almost over. Use it well.

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GTA 6 releases November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. All games listed are available on current-generation platforms unless noted otherwise.