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Top 10 NEW Open World Games of 2020

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2020 was shaping up as the last great open-world showcase before next-gen consoles took over.

Gameranx dropped its “Top 10 NEW Open World Games of 2020” countdown in January, and host Jake Baldino laid out a lineup that spanned every current-gen platform — PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch — before the PS5 and Xbox Series X arrived to reset the conversation. The video skipped anything unannounced at the time, so there’s no Assassin’s Creed Valhalla here; instead it’s built entirely around titles studios had already confirmed for the year. That gives the list a grounded, verifiable shape rather than a wish list.

• Cyberpunk 2077 tops the countdown as CD Projekt Red’s Night City RPG and the year’s most prominent open-world release.
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons is singled out for its March 2020 launch window and its player-driven island-building sandbox.
• The roster also spans Dying Light 2, No More Heroes 3, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Ghost of Tsushima, Watch Dogs: Legion, and Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.

Night City Leads the Pack

Baldino frames Cyberpunk 2077 as the anchor of the entire countdown — CD Projekt Red’s sci-fi RPG dropping players into Night City with the kind of scale and tech ambition that made it the year’s most-watched open-world project heading into 2020. Fans wanting the deeper walkthroughs can check out the hour-long open world gameplay walkthrough that circulated around the same period.

Parkour, Turn-Based Combat, and Travis Touchdown’s Return

Techland’s Dying Light 2 gets a slot for its first-person parkour and survival mechanics layered over an infected metropolis where narrative choices reshape the map — a game covered in detail in the official gameplay trailer breakdown. Grasshopper Manufacture’s No More Heroes 3 makes the cut too, bringing Travis Touchdown back into a genuine explorable open world on Switch for the first time. Sega’s entry, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, represents a bigger structural swing for the franchise — Baldino notes the Yokohama setting pairs an expansive city district with a full switch to turn-based RPG combat, a departure from the series’ usual brawler roots.

2020 marks a transition period for open worlds because of the impending arrival of next-gen consoles.

Islands, Feudal Japan, and a Hacker Uprising

Animal Crossing: New Horizons earns its spot for reasons that have nothing to do with combat — its sandbox is built around outdoor exploration and letting players shape their own island at their own pace, with Nintendo targeting a March 2020 release. Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima brings feudal Japan into the mix, a title Baldino’s list treats as one of the year’s marquee current-gen sendoffs — more on its story beats is covered in the rundown of what players couldn’t wait to try. Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs: Legion rounds out the roster with its near-future hacker premise, discussed further in the broader look at Ubisoft’s 2020 and 2021 slate.

A Medieval Sandbox Closes the List

TaleWorlds’ Mount & Bannerlord — the long-in-development sandbox medieval RPG — closes out the countdown as the genre’s most traditional entry, offering the kind of open battlefield and kingdom-management freedom that the franchise has been building toward for years. Baldino’s larger point across the video is that 2020 was effectively the last full cycle for current-gen open worlds before next-gen hardware forced a reset, which is why the list leans so heavily on games designed to squeeze everything possible out of PS4, Xbox One, and Switch before that changeover.

Cyberpunk 2077 was still the game every other title on this list got measured against in January 2020, and Baldino’s countdown treats it that way — first slot, most screen time, the clearest sense that CD Projekt Red was building something meant to define the console generation on its way out the door.