So before we dive into this list, please consider a few of the rules we used to help determine our selections and their rankings: The one thing that tends to matter most in open-world games is whether or not they offer a world you simply want to lose yourself in. While that has sometimes been the case, there are some older or smaller open-world titles that showcase the ways a singular creative vision can often feel bigger than even the technically biggest open worlds. Conventional wisdom once told us that open-world games would only get better as technology improved and the size of those worlds grew. “Variations” is certainly a word worth keeping in mind when you’re thinking about the history of open-world games and what separates the good ones from the bad ones and great ones. Now, you find variations of that concept in many of the best modern blockbuster titles. The idea of being left to your own devices in a massive digital world where nearly anything was possible was one of those things we used to only be able to dream about. But of course, as said above, you are experiencing only a fraction of those in your playthrough, depending on your choices, which is why you are missing huge portions of the game with just one run.Even during the open-world genre’s earliest days when developers were forced to rely on smoke and mirrors to make their visions come to life, the very concept of open-world gaming always felt like the future of the medium. Baldur’s Gate 3 has 174 hours of cinematics, which they note is double the length of Game of Thrones’ entire run. For context, the first Harry Potter book was about 76,000 words long. The Baldur’s Gate 3 script is 2 million words long. So if you want to see it all (which you probably never will anyway) that’s another 75-100 hours each time. It’s not a Renegade/Paragon playthrough situation.

But since the choices are not binary, and they all kind of snowball off each other, you can end up with wildly different outcomes. There are so, so many decisions in Baldur’s Gate 3, both big and small, that affect the larger scope of the game, your character and your party members.

Then of course there are multiple playthroughs.A fight that takes one player ten minutes might take another two hours of attempts for another player to try to logic their way past (it’s me, I’m the other player) Your skill at the game’s combat encounters feed into playtime, or your difficulty settings overall.Expansive exploration trying to find every secret piece of loot and sidequest buried around the map would dramatically increase time spent.However, there are many, many considerations here that can extend the length of Baldur’s Gate 3:

Games with big gameplay time