The 10 Most Ambitious Video Games Ever Made

Published Aug 8, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Because bigger can be so much better The 10 most ambitious games of all time Sign in to your Polygon.com account Not every game needs to reinvent the wheel or swing for the fences. But some gaming companies go for it anyway. Though many games follow established structures and formats, studios come along with plans so bold, so outrageously ambitious, that they completely shift the paradigm. Critical and financial success isn’t always guaranteed, of course, but it often goes hand in hand. Once it’s finally released, Rockstar’s open-world crime epic Grand Theft Auto 6 will probably take the crown, seeing as it’s shaping up to be the most ambitious game ever made (based on, well, everything we know about it). But it’s far from the only staggeringly ambitious game in history. Here are the 10 most ambitious games of all time. 10 Shenmue (1999) Sega AM2, d3t/Sega Available on: Dreamcast The big promise driving Shenmue was that it would introduce a world with NPCs who lived their own lives in the same world the protagonist occupied, sort of like the townsfolk in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Too many games of the time featured characters who would stand around town from dusk to dawn, just waiting to impart some wisdom about spider eggs that needed to be crushed, or a gate key hidden somewhere unlikely. To support that level of detail, the game also featured an extended story requiring multiple games to unfold completely. Unfortunately, it launched on Dreamcast and didn’t get a chance to execute that vision. Years after the first two installments arrived, Shenmue 3 was crowdfunded and continued the story, but it stopped short of the resolution. Frankly, we may never get there. Still, the first few installments left a lot of us hungry for more. One poll even named it the most influential game of all time. That ambition didn’t completely go to waste. 9 Fable (2004) Image: Lionhead Studios/Microsoft Game Studios Available on: Windows PC, Xbox Developer Peter Molyneux, once of Bullfrog and Lionhead, has been responsible for a lot of great games over the years, from Populous to Dungeon Keeper. He also created Fable, which he discussed freely with members of the press ahead of its release. He promised a great deal of things, but in the end, many of them had fallen by the wayside like so many acorns. For instance, players were supposed to be able to have children who would carry on their grand adventures in their absence. That didn’t happen. He pictured a reactive world that responded to individual actions, but the final game limited that to an alignment system that assigned good and evil status and cluttered the protagonist’s headspace with horns or a halo. In short, he had a lot of intriguing ideas and was in a position to push for many of them to happen, but developmental realities meant he had to settle for producing one of the finest action-RPGs of its era. 8 Daikatana (2000) Image: Ion Storm/Kemco Available on: Nintendo 64, Windows PC When a lot of creators start putting together a story, they consider the usual things like characters and pacing. One of those considerations is the setting, which consists not only of the places where the events unfold, but the time. Choosing between the possibilities can prove quite the task, and it’s one John Romero largely eschewed as he put together his concept for Daikatana. In the game, players hop through time and locations using the Daikatana, a sword. They’ll battle through destinations like ancient Greece, a future version of San Francisco, and an even more modern Japan. The overall mandate seems to have been to make everything bigger and better, with more enemies, more polygons, and more of everything else than reality made convenient. Development was plagued by departures of key staff, negative press coverage, and delays. The game finally released, but the end result fell far short of what its creators must have envisioned. Daikatana is remembered today as the sort of blunder that can kill a studio. And it might have done just that, if Ion Storm hadn’t followed it up with the considerably more successful Deus Ex. 7 No Man’s Sky (2016) Image: Hello Games Available on: Windows PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox One, Xbox Series X When developer Hello Games released No Man’s Sky, it was known only for its Joe Danger games. Though well loved, that other series focused on the world of motorbike stunts. For its next project, the team broadened the scope, launching No Man’s Sky with an entire universe to explore. Coming from such a tiny crew, the massive scale was ambitious. Players and critics alike were underwhelmed at launch, feeling that the game didn’t live up to the hype because of missing features that had once been promised. Fortunately, the development team heard those concerns and responded with extensive updates that have since improved the experience significantly, so that it more closely matches what they expected. 6 L.A. Noire (2011) Image: Team Bondi/Rockstar Games Available on: PS3, Xbox 360 Games today feature amazing character models capable of displaying a variety of expressions to communicate conflicting emotions. It’s delicate work, avoiding the uncanny valley that can tear apart an entire scene – or project – because an eyebrow is out of place or a smile seems fake. L.A. Noire, which began development in 2004, didn’t run from such challenges. Rather, it embraced them wholeheartedly. The expensive result pushed boundaries by making the game’s characters feel more human than ever before. Other design elements fared similarly well, including the painstakingly-created Los Angeles setting, but the incredible attention to face models and character emotions set new standards in an industry that thrives on the stories it tells. 5 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo Available on: Switch, Switch 2, Wii U By the time Breath of the Wild arrived in 2017, many Zelda fans who grew up playing Ocarina of Time and its successors had forgotten the series began as an open-world adventure. Nintendo hadn’t lost sight of the fact, though, and went to work producing a vibrant, expansive world for Link to inhabit. If you could see a mountain, you could visit it, scaling its face or exploring its caves. When you shook a tree and knocked loose apples, you might follow up by cooking them over an open fire. You could hunt the local wildlife, swim in shallow pools, hike the high plateau. And an in-depth physics system ensured that when you encountered a puzzle, there was probably more than one way to solve it. Nintendo’s wizards accomplished all of that on hardware much weaker than the competition, producing one of the finest and most ambitious pieces of entertainment ever created. 4 Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) Image: Larian Studios Available on: PS5, Windows PC, Xbox Series X The beautiful thing about role-playing is that a group of friends can get together, commit to a variety of helpful rules, and live through an adventure where the only other limit is their own imagination. Games have tried to capture that dynamic for years, stepping in to round out the player party for solo adventurers, with varying degrees of success. They often run into a limitation: everything players encounter rests on building blocks the developers must fashion. A fetid swamp isn’t really fetid unless an artist created it. An ogre’s betrayal doesn’t hit as hard when it’s just pixels on a screen, divorced of emotional involvement on the part of players. Baldur’s Gate 3 addressed those limitations with surprising success by building a world where choices truly matter. There are still rigid plot points you’ll experience along the way, as if prompted by a persistent dungeon master. But there’s a lot of freedom to go with it. Characters can be romanced, killed, or ignored and the virtual world doesn’t stop. It keeps right on going, but with changes. Developers must often have similar ambitions when building role-playing games, but they don’t typically execute them so fully, with the unwavering commitment to everything that makes role-playing so compelling. 3 EVE Online (2003) Image: CCP Games via RonUSMC Available on: Mac, Windows PC Players have been talking about and enjoying EVE Online for more than two decades, thanks to the freedom the game allows and encourages. In the vast reaches of outer space, players participate in standard sci-fi practices such as shipping freight across the expanse. There are alliances and factions, piracy and enforcement. Many aspects feel much as they do in other games. But EVE Online is notable both for its scale and for the virtual lack of restrictions. If you want to rob another player, you can. Similarly, other players can rob you. Dirty dealing occurs with no repercussions whatsoever. Space battles might include thousands of players at once, which sometimes creates problems for the very real people involved. A persistent, dynamic online universe is an intoxicating notion, which explains why so many people are still playing. 2 Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) Image: Asobo Studio/Xbox Game Studios Available on: Windows PC, Xbox Series X The Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise predates even Windows, but none of its early releases are as ambitious as Microsoft Flight Simulator, released in 2020. The newer game, developed by Asobo Studio, pulls data from Bing Maps to present landscapes that represent real-world regions, while also considering weather patterns and physics. In some simulation games, your play area is an interesting place somewhere in the world. In Microsoft Flight Simulator, it is the entire world. 1 Star Citizen (TBA) Image: Cloud Imperium Games Available on: Windows PC Star Citizen, a sprawling space trading and combat simulator helmed by Chris Roberts (Wing Commander), is so ambitious that it hasn’t officially released more than a decade after its Kickstarter campaign concluded in 2012. Since then, between crowdfunding and microtransaction fees collected from fans playing in early access, the developers at Cloud Imperium Games have generated more than $1 billion in revenue to pay hundreds of employees to keep toiling on its multi-genre project. The game is currently offered in starter pack form, and sometimes made available to try as part of free limited events. But the earliest players with less invested in the title should expect to play it is 2027 or 2028, if not later. For a game that promises to give each and every player their own individual journey, perhaps the biggest journey of all is the one toward official release.