Best Open World Multiplayer PS5 Games in 2026

I started a No Man's Sky session with one friend intending to spend an hour looking around. Four hours later we had a shared base on an irradiated planet, a fleet of freighters between us, and a standing argument about whether to colonise the next system or stay and finish the base. That kind of session does not happen in a game that is just going through the motions. The world here is genuinely infinite, the co-op builds naturally into everything you do, and Hello Games has kept expanding it for years without charging for updates. The PS5 version is polished enough that it no longer feels like an apology for the launch. It earned the top spot.

Los Santos is still one of the best multiplayer sandboxes ever made, and I say that as someone who has been playing GTA since the PS2 era. The sheer density of what you can do in this city, heists, businesses, races, random encounters, just driving around causing problems with friends, is hard to match. The PS5 upgrade gives it a sharper look and faster load times, which matters more than it sounds when you are jumping between jobs. The honest caveat is that the grind has only deepened over the years. Earning serious money without spending real money takes patience. If you can get past that, there is more content here than most games ship with in their entire lifecycle.

Sea of Thieves does something I have not seen any other game pull off as consistently: it creates stories that nobody planned. You set out to find buried treasure, another crew spots your ship on the horizon, and twenty minutes later you are fleeing a sinking galleon in a rowboat with a chest and your dignity barely intact. That kind of emergent chaos is what makes the multiplayer here feel inseparable from the world rather than layered on top of it. The progression system is slower than some players would like, and the early hours before you get your sea legs can feel a bit directionless. But the moment the world clicks, it really clicks.

At our LAN parties Minecraft still comes up as a reliable fallback when we want something everyone can join without a two-hour onboarding session. It runs on anything, the rules are obvious within minutes, and within an hour someone has already built something impressive and someone else has already died in lava. On PS5 the experience is smoother than most people expect from a game this old, though it does not have the visual identity of newer titles on the platform. What keeps it this high on the list is that the ceiling for what a group can build and explore together is effectively unlimited. I have never seen a session end because everyone ran out of things to do.

Tamriel at MMO scale is a different thing from Tamriel in a single-player Elder Scrolls game, and I mean that in mostly a good way. The world is enormous, there are public dungeons you can wander into with strangers, world events that pull multiple players together organically, and enough questlines that you will not run dry for months. I gravitate toward the solo-friendly aspects of it because I do not always have a group free at the same time, and ESO handles that better than most MMOs. The combat feels a bit weightless compared to an action RPG, which is the main thing that keeps me from spending more time in it. But for PS5 players who want a proper fantasy MMO world to inhabit, this is the obvious answer.

Final Fantasy XIV is probably the most story-driven game on this list, which makes it unusual for a multiplayer recommendation but also explains why its player retention is remarkable. People stay because the world and characters earn the investment, not just because there is always another gear tier to chase. I picked this up partly out of curiosity about whether an MMO with that much narrative weight could work on PS5 with a controller, and it does, more naturally than I expected. The open zones are not the most freeform sandbox environments on this list, which is why it sits at six rather than higher. If you want the most freedom to roam and improvise, look up. If you want a living world with genuine social depth, this is worth the subscription.

Once Human landed on PS5 and I was not sure what to expect from a game built around a contaminated post-apocalyptic world where the threats are genuinely strange. After a few sessions it became clear this is a game that rewards the kind of group play where you divide responsibilities without being told to. Someone gathers, someone builds, someone scouts the next zone, and the world is large enough that there is always a reason to push further out. The PS5 version is not as polished as the top entries on this list, and the seasonal reset structure means your progress wipes periodically, which will put some players off entirely. Worth knowing before you invest dozens of hours.

ARK is the game I describe to people as a commitment rather than a hobby. Taming a high-level dinosaur takes real time, building a proper base takes longer, and doing either of those things while also fending off other players on a PvP server is genuinely exhausting in a way that can feel rewarding or punishing depending on the day. The Unreal Engine 5 rebuild gives Survival Ascended a visual upgrade that looks genuinely impressive on a QD-OLED, but the performance can be inconsistent in ways the old version also suffered from. If you have a dedicated tribe of three or four people who are ready to commit to a server, this is one of the deepest open-world co-op loops on PS5. Solo play is a different conversation entirely.

Rust is not a game I recommend lightly. The first time I spawned on a console server I was naked on a beach, had gathered roughly four rocks, and was killed by someone with a hunting bow before I found a tree. That is the game. The world is persistent, other players are the main threat, and trust is earned slowly if at all. What keeps it on this list is that the moment-to-moment tension of surviving, building, and eventually raiding or defending in a shared world is unlike anything else on PS5. The console version lags behind the PC original in terms of updates and polish, which is a real gap. But the core loop of that shared open world is intact, and for the right kind of player it is addictive.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has one of the most beautiful open worlds I have played on PS5, and that beauty carries over into the online mode even if Rockstar largely stopped caring about it after 2021. I spent time with my posse doing hunting contracts and free-roaming across the frontier, and the atmosphere is still unmatched on the platform. The problem is that the lack of updates is now impossible to ignore. There is no new content pipeline, seasonal events are minimal, and the community has been slowly thinning. The world is still worth riding across. Whether you want to make it your regular multiplayer home is a harder question, and I think for most people the answer is probably no.