The 5 Best Open-World Games With Timeless Graphics (2024)

Open-world games are designed to keep players looking across the landscape in search of new places to explore. To do that, developers must fill their world maps with interesting locations, landmarks, people, enemies, and waypoints. But it’s not enough to simply have a lot of stuff, they need to make that stuff look good.

There are plenty of open-world games out there with brilliant storylines and mechanics. However, their dated graphics make them hard to look at, which makes them hard to revisit unless it’s purely for the nostalgia factor. However, some open-world games know how to tailor their visual style to stand the test of time, which keeps players coming back.

5 Borderlands 2

A Comic-Book Style Apocalypse

It takes serious skill to make the apocalypse look good. When the world itself looks like a grenade went off in a dumpster, and all the survivors vary from unfriendly to hostile, the art team needs to pull out all the stops to show there’s still beauty in the world. Some games, like The Last of Us or Horizon Zero Dawn, go the route of showing nature reclaiming the wreckage of human civilization.

Then there’s Borderlands 2, which intentionally leans into that dumpster fire aesthetic. Instead of using realistic graphics (which can get real dated, real fast), Borderlands 2 uses a choppy, cel-shaded, comic book-style art design that looks like if Mad Max was animated into a Gorillaz music video. The end result perfectly reflects the game’s vibrant, comedic chaos. Characters have unique cartoony designs, the colors pop like Tiny Tina’s explosives, and even after more than a decade has passed since its release, the world is still as fun to look at as it is to explore.

4 Terraria

Spritework Always Works

As indie gaming grows more popular, many smaller game developers look for inspiration from retro gaming for their graphics. 2D graphics tend to be a lot easier to design than fully-rendered 3D worlds. Spritework inspired by the classic SNES days has also become increasingly popular. Games like Stardew Valley and Undertale both used the power of pixels in modern engines to create timeless visuals, but it was Terraria that brought the style into the open-world genre.

This charming sandbox adventure game is like if Minecraft went 2D. Players explore a procedurally-generated world that combines beautifully detailed spritework with lovely shades of earthy brown and green. Dig down to mine for resources, then build up, up, up to create a home base.

3 Slime Rancher

Like A Children’s Book In 3D

Slime Rancher makes space exploration look cute and cozy! In this popular sim, players explore a remote asteroid in deep space, but instead of harrowing survival, they’re met with a cute and bubbly home away from home. The world of Slime Rancher perfectly mirrors the slimes themselves; all soft edges and round shapes. The player never feels truly endangered while they explore and take it all in, even when the Tarrs come out.

The minimalist art design also means the game holds up very well visually. With the entire landscape constructed out of big, blocky shapes and a sparse population, there’s not really much to bog down the engine, making everything silky smooth. The vibrant painted textures and cel-shading also add to the game’s timelessness. This world of soft pinks, purples, and blues is a feast for the eyes, and it’ll stay that way long, long into the future.

2 The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild

Cel-Shading Keeps Hyrule Looking Fresh

The long-running Legend of Zelda franchise has seen its fair share of art style changes. With each new console generation comes something new. The N64 saw an epic introduction to a 3D Hyrule. Skyward Sword gave Link an acrylic painting-style makeover. But when it came time to bring the series into the open-world genre, Nintendo decided to combine their inspirations from several previous games to fantastic effect.

Breath of the Wild has all the semi-realistic character designs of other recent 3D entries, like Skyward Sword or Twilight Princess, but with all the cel-shaded charm of Wind Waker. The end result is a work of genius. Even after the Great Calamity, Hyrule hasn’t looked this good in years. Link and Zelda have fresh new designs that still look amazing after seven years and counting. Even its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, only needed to tweak a few visual things in this gorgeous engine.

1 Minecraft

A Pioneer Of Literal Building Blocks

It’s been well over a decade since Minecraft was first released, and it still shows no signs of slowing down. This epicenter of open-world gaming has to have the most iconic and timeless visual design of any video game: blocks. After all the changes, updates, and new versionsMinecraft has seen over the years, its ingeniously-simple graphics are still mostly untouched. There’s nothing quite as simple as squares, is there?

This simple design is also the reason Minecraft is one of the most easily-modded games out there. Even a newbie to the modding community can easily learn to replace Minecraft’s default textures with their own. There are countless skins and other aesthetic mods for players to try out, which means that there’s no shortage of ways to shake up the game’s graphics. Minecraft is just one of those games that will never get old.