All Open-World Games Revealed At Gamescom 2025

Summary

• Gamescom 2025 showed several ambitious open-world games across genres and scopes.
• Highlights: Of Peaks & Tides’ physics world; CrisisX’s 1,200 km map.
• ZA/UM teased spy CRPG Zero Parades and LEGO Batman returns with Arkham-style open-world gameplay.

Another summer of gaming events has come and gone, and with the conclusion of Gamescom 2025, we can now look forward to the Fall gaming season and even further down the road to 2025’s Game Awards in December. There were a lot of announcements during this years Gamescom, spread between Opening Night Live and the Future Games Show, and a handful of them were some brand-new open-world games.

Some of these games are a long way off, while others are set to be released sometime next year (although none have a solid release date as of this writing). Still, the best thing about shows like this is getting excited for all the games that are coming down the road. With that in mind, let’s take a look at all the open-world games announced at Gamescom 2025.

Of Peaks And Tides

Stunning Visuals And A Reactive World

The trend of Chinese developers producing visually stunning video games continues with Of Peaks and Tides. This open-world survival action RPG is immediately enticing for its visuals, but those are just the tip of the iceberg. Of Peaks and Tides is selling itself on a deeply reactive and physics-based open world.

Players will have to watch the skies for changes in weather, and craft their fires carefully lest they spread and consume the surrounding wilderness. Mounts also seem to be a major element, and there is a wide variety on offer. Some are the standard horse-like mounts most players are used to, while others are smaller mounts that can fly. The real standouts are the large mounts, some of which are big enough that players can build entire settlements on their backs.

Cinder City

Like The Division 3, But Bigger

While technically announced previously as “Project LLL,” NCSoft officially unveiled the title for their upcoming third-person shooter MMO at Gamescom: Cinder City. Very much inspired by The Division 2, Cinder City takes place in a large open-world hub where many players can interact before delving into more linear dungeons found scattered throughout the map.

Two things set Cinder City apart based on its gameplay trailer. For one, there are vehicles that players can use to get around the map, as one player is seen cruising through the streets on a motorcycle. Second, the trailer ends with a massive battle scene where dozens of players are fighting against a giant, multi-story-tall mech right in the middle of the open world. There are also horror elements (one soldier gets his head chomped/grabbed by a creature with a hand for a head), which all suggest that Cinder City will have a lot going on, and as such, a lot to offer its players. It is currently set to release sometime in 2026 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S.

CrisisX

Open-World Survival In The 90s

CrisisX is another open-world survival action game where players must battle against zombies, not unlike DayZ. The differences here are that a) the game will be free-to-play at launch on both PC and mobile platforms, and b) CrisisX boasts an absolutely massive map and an equally massive supported player count.

Set in the mid-1990s, players are sent to a location in the Midwestern US that has been struck by a deadly infection after an experiment gone awry. The game’s map is said to be a whopping 1,200 square kilometers, and to populate all that space, the devs claim that their servers can support up to 5,000 concurrent players. That makes both the survival and combat elements a lot more interesting, as there will be a lot to keep track of on the PvP side of things.

Gods, Death & Reapers

This is another game that was technically announced previously as “Project Pantheon,” but was officially revealed at Gamescom 2025 as Gods, Death & Reapers. Dubbed by the developers as an “ExtrAction RPG,” the game pulls heavily from ARPGs like Diablo and Path of Exile for both its aesthetic and combat design, although there is a notable twist.

Players start in their fortress, where they can upgrade and prepare their loadout, before venturing into a procedurally generated open world to hunt for loot and tackle ever-changing quests. However, if they die, they’ll lose everything. Instead, they must constantly weight the benefits of journeying further versus extracting with the valuables they’ve gained to that point. It’s an interesting spin on the genre’s formula, and with a successful playtest that ran just last week, Gods, Death & Reapers looks to be well on its way to its planned 2026 launch.

Zero Parades

Not So Disco

Arguably one of the most unexpected announcements from Gamescom Opening Night Live was a brief look at the next game from developer ZA/UM, the makers of Disco Elysium. This new title is called Zero Parades, and it looks to be doing everything in its power to draw comparisons to ZA/UM’s previous smash hit, despite all the controversy surrounding the departures of many of that game’s creative leads.

Very little is known about Zero Parades at this point. All the trailer said was that it’s an espionage CRPG where players are an “operant,” who must “pick up the pieces of a broken network.” That all sounds very Disco Elysium, but with an interesting spy-story element to it. Given that Disco Elysium was open world, we’re kind of assuming that Zero Parades will be as well, but based on the brief gameplay elements showcased in the trailer, it’s not that big of a stretch.

LEGO Batman: Legacy Of The Dark Knight

The Sum Of Its Bricks

With the deluge of LEGO games of late, it’s fair if some fans were less than enthused by the reveal of LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live. However, after some playtests and previews have made the rounds, this seems much more like a love letter to all things Batman, and not just another LEGO retelling of a classic Batman movie.

For one, the world is a loving blend of everything from Michael Keaton’s 1990s Batman films (as seen with the Axis Chemicals building where Jack Nicholson’s Joker fell into some goo) to the recent The Batman, with this game’s Jim Gordon being a cut-and-dry homage to Jeffrey Wright. Meanwhile, combat and exploration are clearly inspired by the Batman Arkham games, with stealth takedowns, free-flow melee attacks, and a wide-open world to explore between missions. It will likely be a simpler iteration of the elements seen in those games, but given how disappointing the Batman gaming sphere has been in recent years, a return to the glory days, even in LEGO form, might turn out to be a breath of fresh air.