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6 Amazing, Open World Sandbox Games That Aren’t Grand Theft Auto

Do you remember the way you felt when you first started playing Grand Theft Auto 3? It was as if, suddenly, any insane fantasy you ever had about how a game could play out was suddenly coming true. Suddenly, I didn't HAVE to go in any direction I didn't want to. Suddenly, I wasn't forced, as a gamer, to make the game play out the way the programmers MADE ME with other games. For the first time, I was free to play a game ANY WAY I wanted to.

Fallout 3

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The reason this game is on the list and not Skyrim is because Skyrim was just way too glitchy. As fun as it was when it worked, I encountered too many bugs in that game (literally and metaphorically) that I can’t recommend it.

Trust me, lose a character you have worked on for fifty hours to a f**king glitch, and that will make sense to you. And though Fallout 3 had its fair share of glitches (though none I encountered as game breaking as Skyrim‘s), Fallout 3 was just a massive world, a massive amount of gore, a massive amount of humor, and a massive amount of fun. And I mentioned it was massive, right?

What worked so well in Fallout’s favor was just how wonderfully fleshed out every idea was. From literally being born, to being someone who has the power to end the world or save it, you really do evolve as a character in this game, with your morals and wits being tested as much as your trigger finger is. Plus, anytime I can play (or watch) a post apocalyptic world, I will. I love that genre, for some reason.

For many, when we heard about “Oblivion with guns”, we weren’t very excited, but once we saw that intro and started walking around the vault, the game sunk its claws into us. And for me, Fallout 3 was the most time I ever put into a game. 150 hours. Almost an entire year of gaming, spent on one game.

And though New Vegas was great, it just lost some of the appeal of Fallout 3. Plus, it was glitchy. Cannot wait to see if during the next generation, Bethesda will finally release games that aren’t broken.