7 Open-World Games With The Best Town Management Systems

Open-world games live and die by the breadth and scale of their settings. Whether it’s handcrafted or procedurally generated, many players are drawn to a vast, sprawling map with numerous opportunities for exploration, discovery, and adventure.

But many fans want something more from their open worlds. Some players see the wide open countryside presented by an open-world game and yearn to leave their mark on it, through large monuments or successful, sprawling cities. Here are ten of the best open-world games that will let players create and maintain their own populated town.

7 Don’t Starve: Hamlet (DLC)

Life Among the Pigs

The Don’t Starve games are infamous for offering a brutal survival experience that exposes players to the most unforgiving challenges its monster-infested woods can offer. While the series is traditionally focused on natural environments, the original game’s Hamlet DLC changed things. This expansion brings fans to a city populated by pig people and tasks them with exploring ancient ruins as well.

By unlocking the Key to the City, players can take their interactions with this new environment even further and construct a pig city of their very own. The City Planning tab offers access to a variety of buildings that can be arranged however the player would like. With the benefit of a passive income and access to shops and amenities, the prospect of surviving Don’t Starve‘s hostile world begins to look a lot more pleasant.

6 No Man’s Sky

Populating the Cosmos

No Man’s Sky has had a somewhat difficult history, but in the years since its launch, it has thrived through post-release content. The Frontiers update for No Man’s Sky is one of the most prominent content updates in recent years. This patch lets players discover alien settlements throughout the galaxy, procedurally generated and populated with a host of NPCs.

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By gaining the community’s trust, a player can become its overseer, unlocking a breadth of interactions to help the town thrive. Players can name their town, authorize building projects, commission festivals, and resolve disputes between citizens. As overseer, the player will also be tasked with defending their town from hostile Sentinels. By taking over a city, players can truly make an impact on this vast, never-ending universe.

5 Conan: Exiles

Taming the Savage Wilds

Conan the Barbarian has left an indelible mark on popular culture and forever influenced people’s perception of what a barbarian even is. In the licensed open-world survival game Conan: Exiles, players can step into the brutal, violent world of the iconic warrior and eke out a living for themselves after being banished from their tribe.

One major boon to a player’s survival attempts is a city to call their own. In Conan: Exiles, players can build settlements and populate them with thralls to provide services and aid in combat. Since Conan: Exiles is a multiplayer game, players can even attack each others’ cities, laying waste to other settlements with siege weaponry and pillaging their treasures.

4 Fallout 4

Life After The End

One of the most prominent things setting Fallout 4 apart from other installments in the iconic post-apocalyptic RPG franchise is settlement building. The Commonwealth of Fallout 4 is studded with locations that players can freely take over and build out to their liking. These locations range from fairly nondescript patches of land to gas stations, lighthouses, and even an entire island.

Almost any building site can be converted into a city using a recruitment beacon. This special radio tower will attract settlers from throughout the waste, and as long as they’re kept alive with food, shelter, and adequate security, they can work as farmers, guards, merchants, or even barbers and surgeons. By connecting trade routes throughout the map, Fallout 4 players can effectively take over the Commonwealth and rule a small empire of connected loyal settlements.

3 Kenshi

An Open-Ended Exploration

Kenshi is a somewhat unconventional game, pairing squad-based RPG combat with open-ended sandbox survival. It’s a notoriously unforgiving game. Unlike titles like Mass Effect, where a player’s squad is composed of memorable characters with their own storylines, Kenshi offers fully customizable squadmates who can die or become captured if a struggle goes wrong.

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Also unlike Mass Effect, Kenshi features a robust city-building mechanic, allowing players to construct elaborate bases across the map. Players can build a variety of structures and fortify their settlements against procedurally generated dangers from the outside world. The size of a player’s settlement, and the variety of buildings and goods it produces, determines its status, from minor outposts to major cities. This in turn determines how NPCs will react to the player and the community they lead, which will alter the course of the game’s emergent story moments. With a larger city, players can exert more influence over the world around them, and influence the regional economy to boot.

2 Medieval Dynasty

Protecting the Bloodline

Open-world survival games are very easy to come by, but Medieval Dynasty stands out through its own devotion to the setting. As the name suggests, it takes place in the Middle Ages, starring a player character who starts out as a humble farmer and grows over time into a respected town leader. By exploring the open world and slowly upgrading their home, players can make a name for themselves in an unforgiving world.

Communities in Medieval Dynasty develop along a progression path determined by the number of buildings present. Players can guide their community from a humble camp to a proper city, and along the way, they can earn progressively more taxes from their citizens. As the community grows, players will have to closely manage their populations, assigning different villagers to different jobs in order to help their burgeoning medieval township thrive.

1 Dragon Quest Builders 2

A Fantastical Building Quest

The Dragon Quest Builders spinoff series was received with some skepticism when it was announced, but the iconic JRPG franchise turned out to work quite well as a sandbox-building game. Dragon Quest Builders 2 iterates on its predecessor in a number of ways, offering a variety of new building options and structures, but it’s especially impressive for its city-building mechanics.

In Dragon Quest Builders 2, constructing and reinforcing cities and towns is essential to defeating the villainous Children of Hargon. Players can construct their towns however they’d like, and recruit villagers to help with a variety of services like tending crops, mining ore, and fending off monsters. Players can even hire bartenders and dancers to keep other citizens happy and ensure that their cities run smoothly.

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