Open-world shooters are the holy grail of games when done right. They can combine the scale of fantastic worlds or even galaxies with memorable characters, extensive gun customization, and combined arms warfare. They can also just be great places to mess around with friends for hundreds of hours. In this list, we're going to find a unique list of open-world shooters for players who like massive battles and PvP, players who want to survive the apocalypse with friends, and players that enjoy getting pulled into a vast single-player world. This list covers games on consoles including Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PS5, PC, and even game streaming platforms such as Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Our first stop will be the competitive scene, where we'll look at the reigning king of massive battles and combined arms: PlanetSide 2. We'll then have a look at a game that holds several Guinness World Records and is recognized as one of the first MMOFPS titles with WWII Online. We'll look at a game for the mil-sim crowd with Arma Reforger, a testbed for Arma 4. Then we'll check in on the game forever in development that is Star Citizen, which has been slowly adding ground combat at a galactic scale. For the cooperative crowd, we're examining the wild and dangerous Far Cry 6, pure Ubisoft formula Ghost Recon Wildlands, and the often overlooked but excellent zombie survival game State Of Decay 2. For the crowd that loves single-player experiences, we have worlds you can lose yourself in, like Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, and Red Dead Redemption 2. Let's go.