The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Fantasy is my favourite genre across every book, show, and console I own, and The Witcher 3 still sets a bar that even Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 have to reach for. Geralt's Continent is dense with quests that would be main missions in lesser games, buried as side content nobody asks you to do. I replayed the Bloody Baron questline recently just to check if it held up. It does. The only reason this sits outside the top 10 is that this list already carries three or four sprawling RPGs, and something had to give. If you've never played it, that's the gap to fill first.

I read the books, watched the series, and have put more hours into this world than I can honestly account for. The Witcher 3 sits at number one because nothing else on this list combines quest writing, world design, and sheer replay density at this level. Side quests here are better than the main campaigns of most other games. The Bloody Baron questline alone is worth the price of entry. The Complete Edition with all DLC is the version to get, and it runs on everything now. One caveat: the first few hours before the open world fully opens are slower than the rest of the game. Push through them.

There is a side quest in The Witcher 3 about a haunted well that is better written than the main storylines of most games. That is what makes it special. Not the combat, which is fine. Not the build system, which is decent but not the deepest on this list. The writing. Every village in this world has a reason to exist and something happening in it that connects to something else. I replayed chunks of this after the next-gen update and it genuinely looked extraordinary on my QD-OLED, particularly the Skellige coastline. Over a decade old and still the recommendation I give most confidently to anyone who asks where to start with open-world RPGs. The two expansions, Blood and Wine especially, are worth the extra time.

I put about 80 hours into The Witcher 3 and I am fairly sure I missed a third of it. The side quests are not filler content padded out to extend playtime. They are actual stories with actual consequences, some of them better written than the main arc. The Complete Edition with both expansions included is a ludicrous amount of content for the current price. What holds it from ranking higher is that the world itself, technically impressive in 2015, now shows its age compared to the exploration leaders above it. But for story-rich open-world roaming, nothing has genuinely surpassed it in a decade. That is a remarkable thing to be able to say about any game from 2015.

The Witcher 3 side quests are better than most games' main quests. That is not hyperbole. A Piece of Advice, The Bloody Baron, Cabaret, the list goes on. Each one is a self-contained story with actual consequences, and on Deck you can do one or two in a sitting and feel like you spent your evening well. The newer update is more demanding than the original, so expect to tune settings rather than run everything maxed out, but 30 FPS on medium settings is a very comfortable place to play this. Drop to the next game on the list if you want zero friction. Come here if you want the richest fantasy world on this entire ranking.