The 20 Most Spectacular Game Worlds

Beautiful or desolate, intricate or vast, these are the game worlds everyone should explore.

- Samuel Roberts

1. THE WITCHER 3

Between the northern European landscapes of Wild Hunt and the Mediterranean charms of Blood & Wine, CD Projekt Red provides a gorgeous and complete representation of the Witcher universe. It’s not just the bleakly beautiful vistas that make regions like the Skellige archipelago so extraordinary to explore, it’s that the developers clearly thought about how genuine wild places feel when creating them. Also, Toussaint is the closest games have come to offering a fantasy holiday destination you’d actually want to visit.

2. ARMA 3

Bohemia is the king of beautiful and sprawling environments. The 270km 2 island of Altis in Arma 3 is one hell of an achievement, and thanks to the heavy emphasis on simulation in the Arma games, it feels extremely realistic. I still count the day I spent wandering around there with the rest of the PCG team—while Andy Kelly played with the weather and mission conditions in Arma 3’s Zeus Mode—as one of the most thrilling I’ve had in an open world. In the Apex expansion, Tanoa offers an arguably more compelling jungle setting to enjoy.

3. GRAND THEFT AUTO V

I love that GTA V’s Los Santos understands the appeal of Los Angeles as a vast urban sprawl, with both beautiful and rough areas. All my favorite places are represented in Rockstar’s open-world crime capital, despite it being a fraction of the size of the real thing. And the way it captures the city’s flat, pounding heat is a step beyond what we once expected from visual effects in games. This is better than the real world. At Christmas, Rockstar covers the city in snow in GTA Online. This year I’ve planned my holidays around it.