Best Games to Play While Waiting for GTA 6 (2026)

If you want to understand what GTA 6 is supposed to feel like the ambition, the detail, the density of a living world play Red Dead Redemption 2 first. It is, without exaggeration, one of the greatest games ever made. Arthur Morgan's story as a senior member of the Van der Linde gang in the dying days of the American frontier is one of the most emotionally powerful narratives in gaming history. Not gaming history for open-world games. All of gaming history, full stop.

The world itself is staggering. Every town has a culture. Every NPC has a schedule. Animals behave with biological accuracy. Weather changes affect gameplay. You can get genuinely lost for hours doing nothing but exploring stumbling into stranger missions, hunting, gambling, fishing and never feel like you're wasting time. This is what Rockstar can do when they're given a full development cycle and the freedom to make something extraordinary. It also serves as the best possible primer for what GTA 6's world-building ambitions might deliver.

Few games have had a more dramatic arc than Cyberpunk 2077. It launched in 2020 as one of the most notoriously broken AAA games in history and then CD Projekt Red spent three years rebuilding it from the ground up. The 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion transformed it into one of the best open-world games ever made, and the version you can buy today bears almost no resemblance to what launched.

Night City is extraordinary a dense, vertical, neon-drenched megacity that feels genuinely alive in every direction. V's story is compelling, the side quests are among the best-written in any game ever made, and the Phantom Liberty expansion adds a spy thriller storyline that rivals the main campaign. If GTA 6's Vice City setting captures even half the atmosphere that Night City delivers, it will be a landmark achievement. Play this to recalibrate what an open-world city can feel like.

The most obvious answer is still the right one. GTA V came out in 2013. It has sold over 200 million copies across four console generations. GTA Online its multiplayer component still has millions of active daily players in 2026. The fact that a 13-year-old game is on this list and genuinely belongs here says everything about how high Rockstar set the bar and how few games have cleared it since.

If you've never played the full story campaign, do it now before GTA 6 arrives the three-protagonist structure, Los Santos, the satire of American culture, and the writing are all still excellent. And if you have played it, GTA Online has had years of updates: nightclubs, businesses, heists, and an entire criminal empire to build. It'll hold you over.

If GTA gives you the playground and lets you find the story, Mafia: Definitive Edition locks you into one of the finest crime narratives ever put in a game and refuses to let you go. Tommy Angelo's rise through the Salieri crime family in the fictional 1930s city of Lost Heaven is tightly written, emotionally resonant, and genuinely cinematic in a way that most games can only gesture toward.

The 2020 remake rebuilt the entire game from scratch with modernised graphics, expanded dialogue, and a fully re-recorded score and it's stunning. It's shorter than most open-world games on this list by design, but that's a feature. It's a Godfather-quality crime story with a controller in your hand. If you want to arrive at GTA 6 appreciating what great criminal storytelling looks like, play this first.

Not a crime game. Not a city sandbox. But The Witcher 3 belongs on this list because it represents the ceiling of what open-world design can achieve and anyone waiting for GTA 6 to justify a decade of anticipation should understand that ceiling intimately. This game came out in 2015, and nothing has matched the quality of its world-building, side quests, or writing since.

Geralt of Rivia's search for his adopted daughter Ciri across a war-ravaged fantasy continent is a masterpiece at every level. The side quests are better than the main quests in most games. The two expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are each individually better than many full games. If you haven't played it, you're about to lose 200 hours. If you have, the next-gen update gives you a legitimate reason to go back.

Ask any hardcore gamer what the most underrated open-world crime game ever made is and they will say Sleeping Dogs. An undercover cop named Wei Shen goes deep inside Hong Kong's Triad criminal underworld and the tension between who he's supposed to be and who he's becoming drives one of the most compelling narratives in the genre. It's closer to The Departed in tone than it is to GTA, which makes it stand out completely.

The hand-to-hand combat system is exceptional heavily inspired by the Batman Arkham games but with a Kung Fu flair that makes every fight feel satisfying. The open-world Hong Kong is dense, vertical, and alive. It's not the biggest map or the longest game, but it earns every hour you put into it. And it's almost always available for under 5, which makes it the highest value game on this list by a wide margin.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon is unlike anything else on this list and that's precisely why it's here. Ichiban Kasuga is an ex-yakuza low-level grunt who emerges from eighteen years in prison to find his entire world upended. The game plays like a JRPG (turn-based combat, Dragon Quest references intentional) wrapped around a crime drama with some of the best character writing in any game released in the last decade.

The streets of Yokohama are crammed with side content hostess clubs, business management, karaoke, go-karting, a full Dragon Kart racing mini-game and none of it feels like filler because the game treats every activity with genuine love and absurdist creativity. Ichiban's crew are compelling companions who grow through the story in ways that genuinely affect you. It's a completely different flavour to GTA, but the crime-story DNA runs deep.

Watch Dogs: Legion's central hook is genuinely brilliant: every single NPC in the open-world near-future London can be recruited into your resistance. A retired hitwoman who lives above a kebab shop. A barrister with a shady past. A disgruntled drone delivery worker. Any of them, at any time, can become your operative bringing their unique skills, backstory, and voice acting to your team.

London is beautifully recreated with enough creative licence to make it feel both familiar and dystopian facial recognition systems everywhere, private military contractors on the streets, DedSec hacking its way through a surveillance state. It's not as narratively deep as Cyberpunk or as mechanically rich as GTA V, but the "play as anyone" sandbox is endlessly entertaining and it scratches the urban open-world itch in its own distinct way.

GTA Online's heist missions are some of the best content in that game and Payday 3 is essentially an entire game built around that experience. Four players plan, coordinate, and execute increasingly complex bank robberies, jewellery store heists, and art gallery thefts with a level of tactical depth that rewards communication and punishes chaos while also being completely hilarious when things go wrong, which they will.

It had a rocky launch but patches and updates have improved it significantly through 2025. The stealth system is genuinely deep when your crew plays it properly, and the assault phase when everything goes loud delivers that specific brand of controlled pandemonium that scratches the GTA heist itch perfectly. Best played with friends on voice chat. Significantly less fun alone.

Let's be honest: Saints Row 2022 is not a great game. It launched with serious bugs, the writing misses the anarchic tone of the series' peak entries (SR2 and SR3), and the open world of Santo Ileso lacks the density of its competition. But there's a specific mood it fills when you don't want narrative depth or emotional investment and just want to drive a car off a bridge, attach yourself to a helicopter with a wingsuit, and start a criminal empire for fun that nothing else on this list provides quite as freely.

The character customisation is among the best in open-world gaming. Co-op is genuinely fun. And if you go in with calibrated expectations rather than hoping for GTA V, you'll find a perfectly enjoyable 25-30 hours of loud, colourful, guilt-free sandbox chaos. Sometimes that's all you need.