A purple dildo bat, a wrestling match and a gang that owns a city; GTA as pure comedy.
A walled prison district as an open world; the best superhero game.
Vvardenfell, giant mushrooms and a world that explains nothing; the Elder Scrolls at its strangest.
The Zone around the reactor, anomalies and artefacts; the Ukrainian shooter from Roadside Picnic.
Vaas explains insanity and a tourist becomes a warrior on a tropical island.
Cyrodiil, the Dark Brotherhood questline and Oblivion gates opening in a world that levels with you; Bethesda's 2006 breakthrough.
John Marston hunts his old gang across the dying West; the best game of 2010.
Kiryu and Majima in 1988 Kamurocho, with karaoke and disco; the entry point to the series.
Close the rifts, run the Inquisition; the biggest Dragon Age.
The blacklist of fifteen racers and a BMW M3 GTR; the Need for Speed people remember.
CJ across a whole state; three cities, a countryside and a jetpack.
The 1997 top-down original: Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas as three flat maps.
Liberty City in 2001: the first open-world 3D city, and the reason the genre exists.
Breath of the Wild plus sky islands, the Depths and a build-anything Ultrahand.
Anywhere City, three gangs to play against each other and a respect meter.
Miami in 1986, Tommy Vercetti, and the best licensed radio ever put in a game.
The swinging-sixties expansion; driving on the left, in the only GTA set outside America.
The free follow-up pack, the same London eight years earlier.
Niko Bellic arrives in a grimy Liberty City looking for the American dream and a man to kill.
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