Please Give Me Some Alternatives to Genshin Impact and Spider-Man (PS4) on PC/Android
I realized that I like these two games a lot and their common feature is the open world side quest things.
When I play Spider-Man instead of teleporting to the main quest, I swing to the general direction and probably clear most of everything I encounter (Photography, Random Crimes, enemy hideouts, etc.) that I find myself spending most of my time doing the world quests rather than the main story quests.
Same thing with Genshin, I remember my first 10 or so hours of playing it was just looking for chests throughout the map, opening waypoints, looking for those anemoculus, etc.
Bad thing with Genshin though is that it has Gacha so I thought to look for Alternatives.
Yes, I could just continue playing Spider-Man instead but I don’t normally have access to a PS4/PS5. (I can play on PC, but I’d rather just finish it on the ps4 instead of paying for it twice).
I guess in summary, please recommend games that has these amazing world quests (BOTW is another one, but I already plan to play that).
A couple of my favourites :
- Days Gone
- Metro Exodus (I would recommend you play the 2 previous games before to understand the story. They are linear, so if you do not like that, simply watch a playthrough of both of them. BUT. I highly recommend you play and experience the atmosphere of the first 2 games, just my opinion)
- Older Assassin’s creeds (BF, Unity, Creed, Brotherhood, etc)
- Witcher 3
- FFXV
- No Man’s Sky
- Need for Speed Unbound/Heat (which ever one is cheaper, I prefer unbound, but they are pretty similar.)
And, if you have a good computer that can emulate switch games, I would highly recommend BOTW and TOTK as you’ve mentioned in the post. The best open world games there are.
For Spider-Man, I guess the easy answer would be Miles Morales, huh? :P
But I know what you meant, its a game with ridiculously fun mobility though its hard to find a good equivalent. There’s few things that feel as good as webslinging. So on that front (Open world + Mobility) I’m going to suggest the Just Cause series. 2 is generally the one people are the most fond of, though I vastly preferred 3. 4 is a mix of both but it didn’t gel well with me. You are not quite Spider-man, but a grappling hook and wingsuit go a long way of providing a similar experience.
For Genshin, the one game with open-world and exploration I’ve swapped around with it before is Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Large world, fair number of sidequests (I’ve actually never finished the game from how big it is) and a lot of climbing - with no stamina bars. The loot quality feeds the same endorphins as a good gacha roll, and its free.
Morrowind! Besides the wealth of non-story quests, the modding community is HUGE and lets you add EVEN MORE CONTENT. (To be fair, the modding communities for all TES games are massive.)
Well, not all. It really started with Morrowind.
There are some mods for Daggerfall, but not what I’d call a massive community. Arena is mostly ignored, and it’s like Battlespire and Redguard were erased from history altogether.
You’re totally right, haha. I was just so excited while posting that, in my hasty attempt to include the later games’ communities, I just blanket-statemented the whole series! Thanks for catching that 😅
It’s understandable 😁, Morrowind is definitely when the series started to get more mainstream audience, and the older ones are not talked about a lot. I had never even heard of them before trying Morrowind, I rediscovered them later mainly because I can’t let a game drop a “3” on me without wondering what came before.
Doesn’t help that there was a big design shift between Daggerfall and Morrowind (more than anything between TES 3-4-5), and they’re very different games.
Daggerfall did have a bit of modding though. Most quests were procedurally generated using quest templates, like “[type of NPC] sends you to [type of dungeon] to find [McGuffin] for [reward]”. I remember a mod that added lots of new quest types for more diversity.
What’s better than going to the main inspiration of Spider games? Insomniac already said that a huge inspiration of their games is the Batman Arkham Series. They play very similarly but with Arkham being more focused on stealth and puzzles. The first one, Arkham Asylum is more of a metroidvania than an open world, so I think you could start with Arkham City (the second one). As for Zelda, you could try one of its copycats, Genshin is one of them, the other one would be Fenyx Rising, a Ubisoft game. I have never played, but from what Ive read, it’s pretty good.
I found Saints Row 4 a fun super hero video game and the powers of super speed and flight made traveling fun over conventional means. The side quests were something I enjoyed too.
SR3 and SR4 were both great. I think SR3 only had the super power stuff from a dlc though? They both have some unique quests that I really enjoyed.
SR2 was the peak. Everything after that felt like a lazy copy paste exercise.
Sr3 was the Skyrim to Sr2’s Morrowind. Shinier but simplified. A good entry game to get to Sr2 imo.
(Personally I wasnt a fan of Sr4 because it felt like it was just a really expensive dlc. Didn’t really add anything to Sr3 imo, but since there is evidence of people liking it here, I’m not going to come after it too hard. It might be a great entry title for getting to Sr3 to get to Sr2 eventually, and imo that’s good enough for me to be happy about it getting mentioned)
Yeah, Saint Row 3 had the super powers only in the DLC. That is my favorite Saints Row. Although I’ve only played 3 and 4. The Genki side missions were my favorite in 3.
The genki side missions were great. I just remember going into SR3 not expecting a lot and then ended up finishing the game (rare for me) and actually enjoyed it a lot.
I don’t think I ever finished one of the GTA games, I usually got bored fairly quickly.
I second No Man’s Sky.
Maybe Subnautica. I love just swimming around with my stereo system blasting all the alien ocean creature sounds.No Man Sky definitely has that open world sandbox itch. There’s a lot of stuff to do it. Also go and pirate tears of the kingdom lol, it’s super fuckin good.
Perhaps not quite as quest driven, but if you like open world combat, check out the Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War games. Don’t take the story too seriously, but they are a fantastic good time.
Enemies that see how to approach them, and if you are too same-y they’ll adapt. Focus too much on stealth kills? Enemies have stealth pierceing guards. Tend to go direct melee combat? Big bruiser show up that force you to respect them and dodge. They are not perfect games, and they’re a bit older these days, but nothing beats the hunter turn hunted experience of that first play through. I’ve beaten it years ago, but once in a while I just let my castle fall and go on an orc hunting spree to mastermind a take over once again.
How much do you care about the actual combat?
There are an absolute ton of games on Steam that cover the exploring and doing quests vibe and the amount of combat in them varies from none to some but not the main focus of the game. Here’s a few I’ve tried:
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1307550/Craftopia/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1401590/Disney_Dreamlight_Valley/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/361420/ASTRONEER/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/648800/Raft/
Also practically anything in the survival and MMORPG genres are full of just chilling in the world content too.
Oh man Astroneer is so good — but I don’t think it’s up OP’s alley. There’s no quests to speak of, or even goals really, besides the 1. tutorial stuff, and 2. overall “reach the end” — besides that, it’s up to you to be self-directed.
Context: my breath-of-the-wild loving partners didn’t much get into Astroneer, unless I specifically set them goals and they didn’t have to figure anything out for themselves. :P (Well, one of them, at least …)
I think the “map marker check mark” dopamine game is a whole different thing from ‘true’ open-world … well, that’d unnecessarily exclusionary. Neither one is truer than the other. But they’re definitely extremely different.
Anyway, OP, my suggestion in that vibe would definitely be the Fallout or Assassin’s Creed serieses. Or Horizon: Zero Dawn! Great sidequest-driven, exploration-heavy, gigaaaaaantic games, all of them!
