Can you folks recommend a game like Fallout 3 or Skyrim?

A couple of games with a modern setting:

Just Cause 2 is a wide-open world (and island, actually, but it’s huge). Gameplay is a bit arcade-y, but it’s a whole lotta fun. You get bonuses for destroying gov’t property, so you can just run around and go nuts blowing things up.

I also greatly enjoyed Prototype and Prototype 2. Both are set in New York City, and you get cool, disgusting mutant powers. Really bloody, both of them.

Lots of fun blowing things up while using a trainer set for unlimited health. You can still die from drowning or a direct missile hit, though.

I can’t think of new suggestions, so I’ll comment upon the suggestions of others. I’m a fan of both Skyrim and Fallout 3.

I picked up Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning cheap a while ago. Big game, fairly linear (monsters acted as zone blocks), bad aesthetic. Suggestion: pass. There are heaps of areas to explore, though, and a ton of side quests.

I got into Witcher 2 recently-- this was my second pass at the game, the tutorial put me off the first time around. A medium-sized game masquerading as a big one, linear with meaningful choices, story-heavy (and cut scene heavy, but luckily mostly skippable), fun combat, good looking (although I got sick of seeing the hero’s back). There’s plenty of exploration to be had. However, everything you find is there for a quest. So if you stumble over some interesting ruins or a cave, you know you’re either coming back for a quest or about to trigger one. Suggestion: play, and if the tutorial tells you to play on Easy, take its advice. You can always turn it up later. Also, yes, there are mods, but they don’t look interesting-- the usual tweaks, cheats, and nudes.

Borderlands I/II, Torchlight I/II, and Far Cry 3 are all fine games, IMO, and listed in order of preference (I “paused” FC3 about halfway through, thinking I’d pick it up again; that was almost six months ago now). They aren’t RPGs the way I think of them, though, but shooters with level systems or Diablo-likes. However, they all have plenty of side exploration and room to do it in. Actually, with FC3, if you go off the path too often I think you’d be over-level for the main quest-- not that you couldn’t complete it, just that you’d blow through it.

Of the Dragon Age games, I played Origins, which is supposed to be the best of the series. I got sick of it. The NPCs remind me of KoA:R-- similar looking, standing around like they have roots, with just a barge load of stupid flavor text inside them that they’ll spew on you if you get too close. Combat was interesting, but I also found it frustrating and quit at a spike. I didn’t try getting over the spike for long. I don’t remember a lot of exploration. Actually, I think the game had a timer of sorts, where an invasion or spreading map stain was intended to hurry you along or at least keep the player from circling back.

The Mass Effect series is just plain cool. Linear with meaningful choices-- here decisions from the first game carry over into the second, lots of blah blah, fun combat with a small squad. The player class system was varied enough to tempt me into a replay. The only major minuses were stupid mini-games (driving in the first, mineral exploration in the second, haven’t played the third but I assume they added a bad mini-game for tradition’s sake). So there was exploration, they just wrapped it in annoyance. I can remember finding a few interesting spots here and there.

I did mention New Vegas right in my original post.

Playing Origins now, have played the first two. Quite nice, but nothing like Skyrim/Fallout 3.

Typed “games like skyrim” into Google, found several lists, and checked three. Many of the games mentioned in this thread appeared, of course, but there were exceptions. Red Dead Redemption showed up on all three, Torchlight and Borderlands on none. Go figure. The modern Fallouts were there, naturally.

I tried to put together a short-ish combined list of those we haven’t mentioned, although I haven’t checked each title to be sure.

Dark Souls
Dragon’s Dogma
Fable Series
Darksiders II
Two Worlds 2
Dishonored
Ravensword: Shadowlands
Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines
The Lord of the Rings: War in the North
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
Neverwinter Nights

http://gameslikeskyrim.com/
10 Other Games Like Skyrim | PCMag (slideshow)

Fable: Sort of, but not very open.
Dishonored: Completely linear, and RPG-lite at best.
Vampire: Heard really great things about this game, played it for a couple of hours, but couldn’t get into it because it was so dated.
War in the North: No, nothing open about it at all. Action hack-n-slash, RPG lite. Still an orc-bashing blast, though!

I don’t think Divinity 2 has been mentioned yet, but it’s an excellent under-the-radar RPG with a mostly open world, lots of side quests, and much better combat than TES.

Saints Row 3 and 4 are both a lot of fun too. There is a main quest but also lots of side quests and side things to do. Funny too.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 are basically an old-school version of Mass Effect, using D&D rules instead of first-person-shooting. A lot of fun and exploration, and freedom to do quests in different orders.


If you’re not limited to first-person games:

Dragon Age 1 & 2
Neverwinter 1 & 2

They’re more like 2.5D games… not first person, a 3D rotatable camera with optional 3rd person following.


If you don’t mind ONE flat game like Fallout 1, you should try Planescape Torment. It is IMO the best game ever written, and especially if you like quests and storylines rather than combat. So much to explore and see and learn and feel… I think PST is as close to art as games ever got.


What about MMOs? Most of them have a lot of side quests. They’re all very grindy, sadly, but if you like exploration in particular I would recommend The Secret World. The Elder Scrolls online is another contender, but it’s pretty bland and basically WOW in Tamriel, with dodging.

To all you guys who mentioned Far Cry 3, thank you! I didn’t know it was an open-world game and just assumed it was a linear shooter like FC1 & 2. It’s on sale right now for $10 and I just picked it up. Can’t wait to try it!

The obvious ones such as Borderlands, Far Cry, and STALKER have already been mentioned, so let me suggest some more offbeat options.

The Avernum and Avadon games are very open and exploration heavy. They’re recent games, but very much old school, top down, 2D RPGs. Good, but definitely an acquired taste.

A bit of a longshot, but the OP might find State of Decay interesting. It’s a third person zombie game where you basically have to go around exploring and scavenging for supplies. There are some RPG elements and you’re pretty much free to wander around where you want. It’s open world, but the constant need to gather supplies to survive rather than the relaxed feel of Fallout and Skyrim probably isn’t quite what the OP wants.

The OP might find Terraria and Starbound interesting. They’re more 2D platformers than RPGs, but they’re much more about wandering around randomly generated 2D worlds rather than following a set path.

I’m going to have to vote for “Farcry 3.”

It is a fast-twitch first person shooter, but it also includes plenty of RPG elements such as experience points, branching skill paths, inventory management, crafting, etc. There are lots of NPCs with side missions, minigames, etc. The world is not as vast as Skyrim, but it is still a huge place and there are lots of different vehicles to help you get around. The best part for me was that, unlike “Farcry 2,” when you eliminate an enemy camp it is shut down permanently and the entire region becomes safer to traverse. It is a fantastic game.

It’s like they’re monitoring this thread: Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity & Divinity 2 are on sale, $6 for the bundle (and it comes with 3 Age of Wonders games too). Part (or all) of the profits go to charity – your choice – as is custom with these Humble Bundles. I won’t keep posting these; check that site all week if you’re interested.

FYI There’s a huge sale on games at amazon for the next week.

Playing “Dishonored” right now. It is a superb game.

Which one? Bloodlines? It’s 2004, the exact same era as Half-life 2, you philistine! :slight_smile: I don’t consider games 10+ years older to be dated enough to be graphically dated, and even then the only thing that reduces my enjoyment is a dated control scheme.

A term the OP should look into is sandbox. Many don’t quite fit the RPG part of the OP (e.g. GTA series, although many of them have RPG-like elements) Red Dead is another one of these; well really many Rockstar games.

Bloodlines is not a sandbox, but it isn’t completely linear. It is more in the System Shock/Deus Ex vein where you might have a central hub/elevator that you can choose where to go next. Not as open geographically, but they make up for it with important story-type choices (also see: the Witcher). Although I would recommend these. SS1 is one I couldn’t get into due to the controls, but even SS2 has downloadable graphics packs to upgrade them.
Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption is a dungeon crawl/Diablo-esque. Not as good as the first one. Both have decent plots, although Bloodlines goes the customizable, silent protagonist direction and the earlier one has a fixed protagonist.

Planescape: not strictly fitting, but yes if you like plot-driven RPGs you should play it. The setting is really weird, beyond your dragons-and-elves setting.

It’s the newer one I tried. The graphics were fine but the controls were annoying – had to scroll through a list of abilities with the mousewheel to choose the one I wanted, instead of just clicking a hotkey. Mouse acceleration was also kinda clunky. But maybe I should give it another try someday.

Hard to believe HL2 was that long ago :slight_smile:

Same era? Try same engine. Bloodlines was the first game to license the Source engine. Apparently weren’t happy with it, either. IIRC, there’s an email in one of the computers in the game that’s a pretty blatant dig at Valve.

The F-keys are your hotkeys. IIRC you hit “K” to set them. Some clans are better in this respect than others, e.g. whether a discipline has 5 separate abilities and hotkeys or whether it upgrades as you improve it, keeping one ability. The latter is easier to deal with.
For a game that’s not inherently moddable, some members of the VTM:B community have gone out of their way to support it, even today. There’s a big schism between the two biggest unofficial mods. One makes bigger changes and the other is more “purist,” but the creator of the former seems nice and the latter seems kind of a tool, so I went with the first. Otherwise, both fix bugs. There are quite a few, but it’s part of the charm.

Spectacular voice acting, too. Bender as a profane ex-pirate biker vampire for one.

What else does era mean; I didn’t mean geologic! IIRC the release of VTM:B was hampered because they had to make it contingent on HL2. I think they wanted HL2 to be the “flagship” product so it had to come out first, with others soon after. I doubt they were happy. A good part of the bugs were due to the rush.

Man, Bloodlines was a fun game. I wish someone would make a new game in that universe.

I’ve been playing the Mass Effect trilogy for the past month. Incidentally, the two games I had played prior to having started it were Skyrim (which I played from October until January) and New Vegas (which I played from January until April). I love both of those games, but I think I like Mass Effect even more (although I haven’t finished ME2 quite yet). To me, learning about the Mass Effect universe and interacting with its characters is a lot more gratifying than in the Bethesda games, because there appear to be unexpected consequences for your choices. (In Skyrim and Fallout, it seemed like you had to kiss everyone’s ass you met out of fear that a quest wouldn’t be activated otherwise.)

I actually kind of like these “mini-games,” but that just might be because when I began these games I had accepted that I would do every little side-quest they told me to and invest however much time it took. Especially in ME2, scanning the planets and trying to stockpile as much platinum as possible has become strangely addictive. :slight_smile:

Gothic Series
S.T.A.L.K.E.R Series
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Risen Series
Dragon Age II
Mass Effect Series
Dark Souls
Two Worlds II
Borderlands 2
Source: Games Like Skyrim, Games Like Fallout 3