Best Open-World Games Where You Can Swim

Ever since the first open-world games with 3D graphics, swimming has been a rare feature in the genre, often avoided by developers due to technical challenges. Following popular open-world games like Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City, open water was often associated with instant death for the protagonist, a common practice to control the player’s movement through the world. Even today, despite featuring large explorable maps, not every open-world game offers unrestricted swimming for players, at times avoiding water traversal entirely or relying on vehicles and other means, such as in Red Dead Redemption 2, rather than character swimming.