5 Best Open-World Games That Balance Humor & Drama

Many gravitate toward open-world games for the prospect of putting their features to the test, and to see how the map’s inhabitants will react. While some games will roll with the punches, proving to be less alive than many of their contemporaries, others will react in kind and may even have systems in place to deal with player shenanigans, like wanted levels.

In the same breath, these game worlds are often accompanied by stories with mature and consequential themes that will force a player to slow down and assess what is really going on. This tonal shift between humor and drama is at the core of some of the best open-world games out there.

5 Fable 2

Become The Town Hero, Or The Town Zero

• Begins the game in tragic fashion.
• Allows players to goof around alot.

The Fable series has never taken itself too seriously, but that isn’t to say that bad things don’t happen in Albion. For instance, in Fable 2, the game starts with the player’s sister being murdered right in front of them, before being left for dead on the city streets themselves.

Despite the daring quests that follow, though, players still have ample opportunity to goof off in the game’s open-world. That’s because the immersive world of Fable allows players to be exactly who they want to be, and if that person happens to want to annoy NPC’s by farting in their faces, so be it.

A Ful-Ton Of Fun

• Fun and useful gameplay features.
• Some of the most intense missions in gaming.

As fully featured and tight as The Phantom Pain‘s gameplay is, it’s also some of the most goofy. This is seen especially in one of the most widely-used tools in the game: the fulton. It allows Snake to attach a balloon to anything in the game, from artillery weapons to horses, and launch them into the sky, somehow sending them to the player’s base of operations for later use.

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Similar in tone to this gameplay are a great deal of over-the-top characters and an extremely convoluted story. All of this resides snugly alongside missions like “Shining Lights, Even In Death,” which forces players to stop the spread of a deadly virus in their FOB by putting down a fraction of their men. Moments like these prove that even the silliest games have the power to bring players to their knees.

3 Fallout Series

A Game Full Of Messed Up Quirks

• Makes a dire world feel inviting.
• Expertly mixes the disturbing with the humorous.

The premise of the Fallout games is enough to make any person’s skin crawl, especially within our present day global climate. Despite this, the games manage to find a way to make the nuclear apocalypse inviting, filling it with a multitude of marvelously mangled and mutated oddities.

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For every disturbing vault experiment, like Vault 11’s forced sacrifices, there’s another with a more darkly humorous edge, like the mad “Gaaaary” clones of Vault 108. The rest of these rich and rewarding adventures have players befriending all manner of quirky robots or uncharacteristically kind super-mutants, all adding up to some of the most wicked fun players will ever have in a derelict wasteland.

2 Marvel’s Spider-Man Series

A Game That’s Faithful To These Iconically-Quippy Characters

• Full of tough situations for the Spider-Men.
• Their hilarious personalities carry over from the comics.

No matter how bad things get in Sony’s Spider-Man games, their stories’ focus remains on the personal struggles of main characters Miles Morales and Peter Parker. That is to say, the games have moments of genuine emotion, like in the first Spider-Man game when Miles loses his father at the hands of Mr. Negative, or in Spider-Man 2 when Peter first begins to lose himself to the Venom Symbiote.

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Thankfully, the fast-talking, smart-mouthed nature of both Spider-Men is excellently represented in these games as well, and it’s ever present during main-quests, side-quests, and odd-jobs alike, making sure that there is never a dull or unfunny moment from beginning to end.

1 Red Dead Redemption 2

Wrangle Up Some Fun And Emotion

• Work toward the survivability of Arthur’s comrades.
• Break away to get into a heap of unrelated trouble.

The wild west was a time of downright lawlessness, with cowboys and cowgirls doing just about anything to bring in money for themselves or their crew. It’s a lifestyle that players get to experience first-hand in Red Dead Redemption 2 as they play through the games’ story about a band of ruffians just trying to make it to their next big score.

To keep things lively in the midst of the ever-brewing drama between main character Aurthur Morgan and his fellow band of misfits, players get to freely explore the world and get into a heap of unrelated trouble. Whether they’re getting tossed around by a legendary albino crocodile, partaking in a random brawl on the street, or playing a game of cops and robbers online, RDR2 is full of moments that can go horribly wrong in terribly hilarious ways.

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5 Best RPGs That Balance Humor & Drama

These RPGs don’t always focus exclusively on high-stakes drama, and will often blend satirical or absurdist humor into their narratives.