Best Open-World Games With Real-Life Locations

The past few years haven’t been a great time for traveling. The more serious, global incidents aside, the cost of living is too high and earnings are too low to go anywhere beyond one’s home city. Even then, the biggest places can lose their charm to their locals, let alone people stuck in glorified suburbs or tiny villages. This is where virtual tourism comes in handy.

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Through games and apps, literally VR or otherwise, people have found ways to explore exotic Locations without leaving their homes. It’s not quite the same as being there in person, but they’re immersive enough to give people a taste of its sights, sounds, and culture. Open-world games are especially good at doing this, with these games being the best of the bunch.

8 Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre

Okay, this one is really stretching the definition of the term “video game”, let alone “open-world”. Yet the Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre was made for interactive entertainment (well, edutainment), and 3DS owners can use it to plan out their own routes through the famous French gallery or roam it freely however they like. Still, it wasn’t exactly handheld Saints Row.

Released in 2012, it was originally meant to be used with the Louvre’s own rental 3DS. But it eventually saw a digital release on the 3DS eShop for people who wanted to see just where the Mona Lisa and other famous works were within the gallery. The shop has since closed, but there are physical copies out there. However, they’re very pricey and rare as they’re Europe-only (but not region-locked!), and haven’t received fresh stock in years.

7 Euro Truck Simulator Games

Simulation games are practically the progenitors to virtual tourism. Getting a taste of, say, accurately flying a real plane was intriguing enough. But getting to see realistic renders of cities from the sky could be quite stunning. Then they started branching out, leading to more curious territory (recreating Thomas the Tank Engine in Trainz 3D) before producing parodies of themselves (Goat Simulator).

Then there are the Euro Truck Simulator games. On paper, recreating the trucker’s experience of driving from, say, London to Bern sounds dry at best. In practice, it was quite engaging as it accurately modeled the roads across the continent. While the aim of the game was to get deliveries to one place on time, players could pick their own routes and see more of the continent. Only two games were made, with Euro Truck Simulator 2 being the best of the two.

6 Sleeping Dogs

Still, when people think of virtual tourism in open-world games, they’re not picturing truck cabs or 3DS apps. They’re thinking third-person perspective of a human protagonist wandering one city or another. Like Cole McGrath leaping around New Marais (fake New Orleans) in InFamous 2, or Tommy Vercetti riding around a Miami-like town in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

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Or Wei Shen tracking down Triads in Sleeping Dogs. When players aren’t following the story missions, they can explore what Hong Kong (specifically Hong Kong Island) has to offer. It’s a scaled-down take on the real place, so it’s not 1:1 accurate. But it’s unmistakably the Pearl of the Orient. Between checking out the sights, players can also sing karaoke and play mahjong like another Asian crime game.

5 Watch Dogs 2

They say that there’s only one chance to give a good first impression, and the Watch Dogs series kind of blew it. The first game suffered from the debacle over its graphics downgrade, and a lame story that made lead Aiden Pearce far less “iconic” than Ubisoft and their baseball cap stock hoped for. Yet its stealth & hacking game was fun and its Chicago setting, while squished, was surprisingly accurate.

So, Watch Dogs 2 went with a new lead and a new setting, with Marcus Holloway trying to bring down the ctOS system in San Francisco. The hacking was still fun, though what really impressed some critics was its recreation of the Bay Area, with EGM calling it “a beautiful immersion”. The streets, landmarks, and map are more accurate than Sleeping Dogs’ Hong Kong but, like its Chinese counterpart, it’s condensed to make traveling quicker and easier.

4 L.A Noire

The same goes for its fellow Californian metropolis in Los Angeles. The city’s inspired many close copycats, like GTA5’s Los Santos. But Team Bondi and Rockstar went further in trying to recreate the city as it was back in the 1940s for L.A Noire, right down to the old street names. Albeit with condensing concessions for the sake of gameplay. Not that it did the Bondi staff many favors.

It’s a solid step back in the past that really feels like it’s taking players into an old film noir (especially with the black-and-white filter turned on). Sadly, there isn’t much to do in the city outside the main missions and chasing perps. Though if players just want to ride around and see the old sights, there are plenty on offer from La Brea Tar Pits and the Brown Derby to Grauman’s Chinese Theater and Macarthur Park.

3 Marvel’s Spider-Man

If New York City isn’t the most replicated city in video games, it has to be up there. GTA3 & 4’s Liberty City, InFamous’ Empire City, Sonic Unleashed’s identically named Empire City, and Street Fighter 6’s Metro City are basically NYC under different names. That’s putting aside games actually set in the Big Apple like Max Payne, Prototype, Tom Clancy’s The Division, and Metal Gear Solid 2. One of the best for virtual tourism is Marvel’s Spider-Man.

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The game encourages players to crawl over every wall in Manhattan to find hidden goodies or take photos of famous landmarks both real (Flatiron Building, Statue of Liberty) and fictional (Avengers’ Building, Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum). Sharp-eyed players could even find the Ghostbusters’ firehouse and Hamilton’s Grave. It’s enough to make players forget about the plot and just explore for the heck of it.

2 Yakuza/Like A Dragon series

Technically, the locales in Yakuza/Like a Dragon are all fictional. Yet they’re so closely based on real places that tourists could use them as a map. For example, Kamurochō’s basis Kabukichō in Tokyo (marked out by its big red sign) really does have a square of cinemas in its northwest sector, and a tight district of alleyways filled with dive bars in the east. It’s just called the “Golden Gai” (“Golden Street”) instead of the Champion District.

RGG Studio got so good at replicating real places that Japanese fans wanted to see their own cities in the games too. Yakuza 5 went all-out by adding Fukuoka, Sapporo, and Nagoya, while Yakuza 6 brought in the humbler town of Onomichi. Each had their own sights, activities, and minigames to play as well. Here’s hoping they continue the trend with their first international setting with Waikiki, Hawaii in Like a Dragon 8: Infinite Wealth.

1 Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

It’s one thing to visit virtual recreations of currently existing places, and another to replicate ones long since gone. People can visit the Coliseum in Rome, the Acropolis in Athens, or the Egyptian Pyramids, but as impressive as they are, they’re ruins of what they once were. Outside of records and drawings, no one has experienced what those sights were like in their prime since antiquity.

But some games have come close, like the Assassin’s Creed series. Based on historical description and on-site studies, they really went out of their way to bring locations from the past back to life. While Origins and Odyssey have their fans with their Egyptian and Greek locations, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is arguably the best entry. It was the second of three games set in Renaissance Italy, recreating Rome, Siena, Florence, Venice, and more.

More: The Best Open-World Games With the Most Immersive Historical Settings