If you enjoy driving games, I’d suggest Forza Horizon 5. Beyond the racing, you can just drive around in different cars and enjoy the scenic views. Plus they have a Hot Wheels dlc that’s a lot of fun.
In the vein of driving, I’ll throw out Snowrunner as well. I think it’s the best of the three (I think) games of that series. Sure, you can dive into the missions, but I thoroughly enjoy just driving around. I also enjoy the missions.
Older games, sure, but I like to mess around with games that had tons of customization. Examples include Guitar Hero World Tour (using the Definitive Edition overhaul mod), Need for Speed games (I like MW '05 and Carbon), and many others I can’t name off the top of my head. I know, older games for me, but I certainly know how that goes for the most part (I tend to play older games).
If you haven’t done GTA 5, that’s the one you really need to get.
RDR2 is a very good game, but it’s a slower pace that’s not for everyone.
GTA 5 is a masterpiece for dicking around. I’ve spent entire evenings just stealing a waverunner and racing through the canals, or the scuba boat and scuba diving, or stealing a bike and biking up and down the mountain, or taking a helicopter up to interesting places and jumping out and parachuting.
In particular, you’re going to want to check out “Director’s Mode.”
This is a mode where you can toggle things like turning off police reactions or giving access to guns or having a super-jump that lets you fly through the air to the roofs of buildings with one leap.
You can really enjoy some of the finer details in this mode, like shooting up cars to see the deformation physics and how the tires get flat or the specific gas tank locations for different cars where they start leaking and shooting the gas trail to blow it up.
Infinite ammo for the mini gun is also quite worth it.
Teleporting around the map is extremely convenient too for things like getting back to the top of the mountain to bike down it over and over.
And oh man — controlling the weather and time of day, and being able to freeze the time of day to exactly when you want? Keeping it at nighttime and rain for an entire play session? Hit the golden hour with an overcast sky and keep it there? Makes a huge difference too.
(The only negative of Director’s Mode is you can’t explore stealth mechanics and certain types of special NPCs like the mime don’t show up.)
There’s so much detail to the world. Get into the military base and see if you can find where one of the landing strip lights is on the fritz because the drain next to it is overflowing. Or some of the graffiti in the tunnels underneath the city.
For your specific ask, I really can’t think of a better game in existence.
(I’ve also spent hundreds of hours messing around in Cyberpunk 2077, which is an outstanding game and open world, but not quite at the level of polish and variability as GTA 5.)
Just Cause 3 is great for shenanigans. The bases are fun to blow up, but you can just shoot a couple of bad guys, anywhere, and the AI will fairly quickly start sending helicopters & tanks, which you can just grapple & steal for even more mayhem. JC4 adds a bunch of powers to the grappler and mines that seem like they’d make for fun adventures, but I could never get into it…maybe the pacing of skirmishes was wrong for me or something - it just wasn’t as fun as JC3
Saint’s Row - SR 4 adds superpowers which are just the right combination (for me) of ridiculous & overpowered. And the ‘store vehicle’ system basically lets you respawn any vehicle you’ve ever stolen at will. SR3 is more conventional but still fun.
Sunset Overdrive is a fun little game to mess around. Very silly and has some laughs. There is a zipline and other movement options. I forget if you can drive cars tho. I want to say no but I don’t remember. Get it on sale and its a fun little 30 hours or so. I think about replaying it but haven’t yet.
To answer part of your question: Cyberpunk is a pretty good game for just wandering around aimlessly, but because of the balance, from my recollection, you can’t really just steal planes and blow everything up. You can make some fun builds to tear through enemies, and the world is gorgeous to drive around in, but there are some limits on your ability to cause total mass destruction.
Saints Row 2-3-4 are great for this. 2 is the GOAT, but 3 and 4 are arguably better at providing the “screwing around” experience.
Sleeping Dogs is underrated and regularly goes on sale for like $5. There is not as much sandbox-ey stuff to do compared to GTA/Just Cause/Saints Row, but I loved jacking a nice car and cruising the freeway at night, or going on a murder spree and playing survival against waves of cops.
Elder Scrolls isn’t necessarily as wacky of an experience out of the box, but between mods and the sheer amount of freedom you have in the game, there is plenty of dumb random stuff you can get up to.
If you have Elden Ring on PS4/5 and know your way around the game, invasions have a ton of potential for shenanigans. Probably not what you’re after, and I imagine multiplayer activity is down since Nightreign came out, but it’s worth mentioning as such a unique experience.
Honourable indie mention: Mars First Logistics is a game where you build vehicles and use them to transport objects from point A to point B. The challenges are largely physics-based, with the objects often having unusual shapes or odd properties, and your vehicle needs to be able to self-load them in addition to bearing them across varying distances and terrains. It’s not really what you’re asking for, but I feel like it scratched the same sort of itch for me in terms of open-ended low-stakes gameplay.
Anything Elder Scrolls kept me busy much longer than the main story, most notably Morrowind. Also, I replayed GTA IV (+ stories) last week, was heaps of fun, especially compared to GTA V which I played a few months back. Read Dead Redemption 2 is a good one for this list as well, I enjoyed that one immensely, but I mainly focused on the main quest during that run-through, so this is a good reminder to myself to pick this up again soon (sadly I fell back into the pull of Satisfactory so it might be some weeks/months/… before I get to it)
bin.pol.social
Aktywne