Best open world games (includes games with certain unique qualities)

• Gothic 2
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Metal Gear Solid V
• Saints Row: The Third
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas/Ballad of Gay Tony/ GTA V
• Yakuza games: Their simple melee combat system with lots of combos and environmental interaction by having items like bikes, trash cans, etc. be picked up and used in combat. They have a lot of indoor environments, and the newer games do this all without any loading screens.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Interesting mechanics/systems

• Saints Row 4: A lesser game than SR3 but with super powers renders most other superhero games useless in fun and destructive factor.

• Sleeping Dogs: A GTA clone set in Hong Kong with far better control and melee combat system. There are some decent missions here, the combat is a different take on the Arkham game style combat.

• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag : I'm not finding this game great, and feel it's a tad overrated. It takes the ship battles of Assassin's Creed III and makes it a game necessity. The grind to upgrade your ship is ridiculous but the open seas and rather unrestricted nature of ship exploration and its unorthodox combat is very satisfying. Underwater exploration for treasure, capturing of forts and whaling all add to it. In general, this game has a far better usage of its large bodies of water than almost any other open world game does.

• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor/War: A mixture of Assassin's Creed in playstyle and Arkham in combat, but the Nemesis System elevates what would be a by the numbers mediocre game to a very addicting title. Shadow of War expands the nemesis system with a good amount of twists. It also sadly adds more rpg level grinding and scaling.

• The Saboteur: A WW2 open world game with a focus on stealth disguises and exploiting bombs. It is authentic in my guess of its portrayal of France, and does have some Assassin's Creed style climbing.

• Red Faction: Guerilla: Fully destructible environments on Mars. It is fun to be unrestricted, other than that, it's pretty much a generic open world game.

• Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain: The best and most interactive stealth action open world you'll find with great mechanics. You can ride horses and hide on either side of the horse while moving, drive jeeps, trucks, APCs or tanks. It has 5 different movement speeds while standing or crouching and three different movement speeds while prone. First person or 3rd person shooting for better accuracy. Peeking from cover, switching look direction, whistling or hitting the wall to lure guards. Interrogation while grabbing, holding up enemies and ordering them, best map that shows multiple topography and allows up to 5 markers at once and can make markers in the world without the map. Finally an open world that facilitates all of this consistently. There's more and very few games can manage this level of interaction, mechanics and systems.

• Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen: Highly flawed game with little enemy variety, generic world and MMO design but quite easily the best action rpg combat system you can find. It's a mix of devil may cry, monster hunter and shadow of the colossus, and while it doesn't surpass any of them, it carved its own identity and created quite a fun combat system and general high level of environmental and enemy interaction.

For example: A chimera is a beast in thre game and has three heads: A goat, lion and snake. They have a full health bar but each has their own attack and they work in tandem. Snake head spews poison and bites, goat head casts fire and ice spells while lion head bites, leaps and claws at his opponents. All three are on one body but have different weaknesses and reactions. You can cut the snake off and remove its chance to poison, grapple into the top of the chimera and defeat it removing the spells or you can attack the lion who has the most health. Lion is very weak to fire so burning him makes him constantly run around scared or fall on the ground. You can throw one of allie at the chimera to attack it.

The griffon is another great one. It's a bird and can conjure lightning so it's resistant to it but for to having so many feathers, it's weak to fire and easily burns and crashes if hit by fireballs. If you or your allies grapple into it, you weigh it making it impossible for the Griffon to carry the weight and fly too high.

The way enemies react to player attacks is the real highlight to the big feature battles and the animations for the magical spells are some of the best you'll find in gaming. As great as the sorcerer is, it isn't even the best vocation. The bow wielding, dual daggers, double jump and evading assassin is like a light dmc character in its own.

Things such as world traversing is handled really easily.