Top Open-World Games on Xbox Game Pass in January 2025

It could be said that open-world games encapsulate gaming's best attributes and push them to their logical extremes — they offer fully fleshed-out alternate realities for the player to explore as they wish, generally affording them unprecedented levels of agency and freedom in determining their path through it. An open-world game has the potential to, almost literally, become a second life for the player to disappear into.

So it should come as no surprise that some of the gaming industry's most prolific titles manifest as open-world games. As luck would have it, a generous number of titles are at players' fingertips if they happen to have an active Xbox Game Pass subscription. But which world should someone dive into next? What are the best open-world games on Xbox Game Pass?

Updated on January 9, 2025 by Mark Sammut: To celebrate the start of the new year and the hope it brings, a section dedicated to upcoming open-world Game Pass games has been added.

A game's quality is not the only deciding factor in its ranking. For instance, if a major open-world game has just been added to Game Pass, it will be listed at the top initially.

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1. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Welcome To The Zone

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