Open world games with exploration as vast as no man's sky

One of the best exploration, base building and freedom games, No Man's Sky is a title that turned a rocky start through years of determination and hard work. Now it's a very immersive and complete experience, perfect for players who love to fly through space or build their perfect planetary bases while progressing through small quests and tech trees.

If you played No Man's Sky for a while, you might want to spice up the experience a bit. You might want to try something similar, imagining a large world just begging to be explored that has the same sense of massive scale. No Man's Sky has one of the biggest worlds so it's hard to find something that fully matches its scope, but there are a few games like Valheim, Elite Dangerousand even as an RPG Star field which can scratch the same itch.

Valheim

A huge world of Vikings and monsters

Although Valheim it features a finite world, its procedural generation, and the size of it still feels extremely satisfying from an exploration perspective. An open-world survival game with a deep Viking flavor, it features multiple biomes, each with their own respective boss to progress through, along with all the bells and whistles of a classic crafting game. You build your base, collect resources, build your Viking's skills and survive the world's dangers. Each new biome is slightly harder than the previous one, so unlike similar games MinecraftYou always face new challenges to unlock more resources and move forward.

You can also craft a ship and explore the waters, so while it's not a sci-fi title like No Man's Skystill provides an unmatched sense of wonder as you wander through the magical setting of medieval fantasy and wilderness. The variety of locations is truly commendable, from high mountains to misty swamps and dense forests. Pair this with vibrant retro-style graphics and you have a truly special experience that you can immerse yourself in for hours and hours.

Bethesda's Old School RPG was surprisingly massive

Enough talk about the last three The Elder Scrolls games, it's time to discuss it Daggerallsecond in the franchise. It's a very old game and in modern times it's crunchy to play, but if you can look past that and find that part of the magic, you're in for an unforgettable time. In addition to some pretty awesome character building and customization, you have an absolutely massive world full of dungeons. It also uses procedural generation to keep things dynamic and interesting. Given the sheer scale, you're unlikely to experience every single detail the world has to offer, and that's okay.

The main purpose is to dwarf you, fully immersing you in a fantasy world where you are an adventurer and explore to your heart's content. The fans praised Daggerfall precisely for this reason, as the world feels like an entity separate from the player, rather than something that revolves around you, the chosen one. For all old-school RPG lovers or die-hard RPG fans who aren't afraid to dive into one of the genre's core games, Daggerfall is a great next step if you take your exploration and immersion seriously and love a lot of dungeon crawling. The vastness of his world will not disappoint you.

Elite Dangerous

An incredibly ambitious survey

What could be more expansive than an almost one-to-one recreation of the Milky Way? That's exactly it Elite Dangerous delivers, in stunning depth, with countless procedurally generated star systems. It's a scale that's pretty difficult for any of us to fathom, let alone produce in video game format, but here we are. Because things are scaled, it also takes a very long time to travel between locations. It is a game where you can move from one place to another for several days. And yes, those are real-time-like days, not some mysterious sped-up game time.

If you were charmed by how No Man's Sky has managed to create a similar sense of vastness and infinity in its own world, which feels like the most natural progression in terms of what to play next. It's hard sci-fi and space flight simulation at its best, diving a few steps deeper into the process No Man's Skyand absolutely perfect for players who wanted something even deeper and more realistic. Admittedly, the game is rough and a little difficult to master with all the information and systems crammed into it, but that comes with the territory of something as massive as this.

Star field

Massive planets for bases and resource gathering

Star field it's not a great RPG, but it's fantastic as an open world sandbox. You can design and build your own spaceships, fly around countless systems, engage in space dogfights and explore all the planets in the game. Each planet is huge in size and creates a huge chunk of land every time you land your spaceship, so exploring the entire surface of the world is downright impossible. Sure, you'll definitely see repeated POIs since it's a procedurally generated world, but if you zoom in Star field with the mentality of building bases, crafting ships, and just exploring different biospheres and locations, it's a very satisfying game.

Your companions can also run bases for you on distant planets, so you really end up feeling like you're running an entire organization with different people in your crew and some looking after your buildings across star systems. Of course, this is ultimately an RPG, so you'll also find minor sidequests and larger faction quests throughout the world, and to be honest, Star field the main quest isn't too bad either. It's great to experience once, move on from it and spend time building your own cosmic foundations – just like in No Man's Sky.

Minecraft

Research doesn't get any better than this

Although Minecraft doesn't take place in space (unless you can find the right mods for it, in which case it sure can) it's a must for fans No Man's Sky's exploration because of how big his world is. It's basically endless procedural generation of dozens of biomes. You can travel thousands of blocks in the game with no end in sight, although depending on the platform you're playing on there may be some restrictions on the size of the world. Or you may experience performance issues if you travel extremely far and load a lot of chunks. Either way, the truth still remains: it's a world that has no end, and it also comes with two other dimensions, the Nether and the End, which also endlessly generate terrain.

A robust sandbox game where you can choose to enter creative mode or survival mode, similar to No Man's Sky. In creative mode you have infinite resources and you can fly and do whatever you want, while in survival mode you will have to regularly take care of your hunger, watch out for enemies that come at you at night or in dark areas, and you will also have to collect all your resources from scratch. The same sense of accomplishment you can get from a game like this No Man's Sky it's what you get out of it Minecraftwhere over time you build your base, explore more, unlock more resources, more crafting recipes and so on. As always, mods are a thing, so if you're really after a more sci-fi experience, there's probably the perfect mod to expand your Minecraft in that direction.