These two indie games, both set in a nature park, are more about enjoying their worlds than actually completing quests. With no quest tracker or map, you’re free to roam around and talk to characters. Or just pick up sticks and swing them.
I guess it depends on how you want to screw around. In A Short Hike, you can go fishing, which has no gameplay function. Or gliding around in air currents.
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.
The saints row series is pretty good. It was kind of a GTA knockoff but was much sillier and let you actually keep and upgrade/paint cars. It really lets you make the game yours. In… Number 3 or 4 the player gets movement abilities that make using a car actually slower so that really killed the vibe, but the ridiculousness was higher than ever so it kind of balanced. I’d recommend playing them in order or at least watching YouTube videos because the story is sort of linear.
Someone else said morrowind which really is the ultimate “do whatever you want” game. You’re basically never locked out of anything by not doing the main quest, and nearly every npc is killable, even essential ones (though the game will tell you if you do this so you can reload a save). There’s no vehicles really so I don’t know if that’s the vibe you’re going for, but it really is a blast if you can accept the painfully outdated graphics and mediocre combat system.
Valheim is a survival crafter exploration game that can be surprisingly cozy, and sailing around is fun. Also not the vibe I think you’re looking for but I love it so I shill it when I can.
Cyberpunk is actually a damn decent game now, and the world has SO MUCH crammed into it you can just wander and do whatever activity you run into for ages without getting bored. Even the smallest side story has lore that illustrates a tiny piece of night city and I find that really cool.
I think saints row probably best matches what you’re looking for without being a sequel to a game you already mentioned. Cyberpunk too, probably.
I just recently got Spider-Man on sale and I’ve not once used fast travel except in the tutorial because it’s too much fun swinging around the city. And there’s like 50 types of collectibles/ side missions to do while you’re fucking around.
Also you should definitely try Grand theft Auto v if you had that much fun in San Andreas
Yeah, I said in another reply I didn’t even think of Spiderman, but I actually have been playing the remaster of the first modern one, and I agree fully. It totally matches this vibe and it’s pretty great!
I wish I could get into it as so many says that it is.
The animations they’ve chosen feels like input lag for me and I just can’t get passed it. I expect my character to move forward when I press forward, not half a second afterwards. That together with the horrible keybinds and optimisations when using kbm made me leave ship shortly after reaching the second chapter.
If I could handle playing shooters with a controller it might’ve worked for me even with the slow ass character animations but with both those two negatives I couldn’t get into it at all.
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)
There was a time between the Mordor you remember from the movies where it was inhabited by people from Gondor and was a thriving area while Sauron was away for centuries in the far east. Now, the whole spirit of Celebrimbor is a hot new take (also one I didnt mind) but they did a good job of staying true to what Mordor was probably like during the time.
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