What to Play Before GTA 6: Six Open World Games to Fill the Wait

So you’ve watched the trailer forty times. Same.

Here’s the cold truth. GTA 6 launches on 19 November 2026 for PS5 and Xbox Series, single-player first, and there’s still no PC date confirmed. We’re heading back to Leonida and a modern Vice City with two protagonists, Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, and from everything we’ve seen it looks like the most ambitious open world Rockstar has ever attempted. That’s the good news. The bad news is that as I write this, it’s still months away, and refreshing the announcement page does not make time move faster. Believe me, I’ve tested it thoroughly.

So instead of climbing the walls, let’s fill the wait properly. Here are six open world games on the channel that scratch the GTA itch, ordered closest first.

Start with the obvious one: GTA 5. Yes, you’ve probably played it. Play it again. A decade on, GTA 5 still holds up as one of the best open worlds ever built, and if you’ve only ever touched Online, the three-hander story campaign is well worth a proper run. It’s the cleanest way to remind your brain what a Rockstar city actually feels like before the new one arrives.

Then the other Rockstar epic: Red Dead Redemption 2. If GTA 6 is the headline act, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the masterpiece sitting quietly in the same building. Slower, sadder, and stuffed with the kind of small systemic detail that GTA 6 is clearly building on. If you want a sense of where Rockstar’s heads are at right now, this is the closest map you’ll get. It’s also just a genuinely brilliant game, so no hardship there.

For a modern city sandbox, try Watch Dogs. The newest entry, Watch Dogs: Legion, drops you into a near-future London where you can recruit and play as basically anyone you tap on the shoulder. It’s not Rockstar, and the writing knows it, but the dense urban playground and the hacking toys give you that same “what trouble can I cause on this street corner” feeling that GTA does so well.

When you want pure chaos, reach for Just Cause. No grounded crime drama here, just a grappling hook, a parachute, a wingsuit, and an island begging to be dismantled. Just Cause 4 is the answer for evenings when you don’t want a story, you just want to attach a fuel tanker to a helicopter and see what physics has to say about it.

For open world mayhem with a bit more shape, there’s Far Cry. Far Cry 6 hands you a sprawling map, a stack of outposts and a villain who genuinely chews the scenery. It’s the comfort-food version of an open world: liberate, loot, repeat, and it goes down very easily across a long weekend.

And if you want something more grounded, Mafia is your crime story. Tighter and more linear than the others, the Mafia series trades open-ended sandbox for a focused, character-led tale of organised crime. When you’re craving the narrative side of GTA rather than the playground, it lands beautifully.

A quick word on the wait itself. Don’t let the rumour mill wind you up. A November date is a long runway, and plenty of “leaks” between now and then will be nonsense. I keep the confirmed stuff separate from the noise over in our everything we know about GTA 6 single-player report, and the wider GTA 6 HQ is where I’ll log anything official as it drops. If you fancy poring over the actual footage with me, I went frame by frame in I TOOK A LOOK AT THE NEW TRAILER AND SCREENSHOTS in GTA 6.

Still hungry for more after that lot? The full games hub has the rest of the back catalogue waiting. Pick one, sink in, and let me do the refreshing for you.

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