We play games for many reasons and to satisfy different urges. Sometimes, nothing hits the mark like a hard-as-nails RPG that makes every battle feel like life or death, and a single false move forces a restart. Other times, we want to act as the harbinger of death, becoming god-like beings who eviscerate those foolish enough to stand in our way. These open-world RPGs let you be that person.
The beauty of open-world RPGs is that many of them provide the tools for players to craft their own legacies, often allowing for multiple ways to craft supremely powerful characters. You can become a mage who puts Dumbledore to shame, a warrior who destroys armies with a single swing, or something a bit more unusual. Overpowered gods take many forms.
- Only games that are 100% open-world AND RPGs will be considered. That’s why something like Prototype doesn’t appear.
- I’m going to aim for a bit of variety, either in builds or gameplay.
- To qualify, a game needs to make it pretty easy to become OP. That’s why something like Elden Ring will not be included, as you need to put in a lot of work to walk with the divine.
- We aren’t talking about games that literally cast you as a god.
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Cyberpunk 2077 Lets You Become Night City’s Death God
The Power Of Cyberware
- OP God Build/s: Netrunner, Katana Sandevistan, and many others.
- Difficulty: While not guaranteed to become OP, many build roots end up that way. Quite easy overall.
Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t present its protagonist, V, as supremely powerful. In fact, they start life at the bottom of the social ladder, essentially being little more than rats to be used and discarded by Night City’s corporations and underground. Regardless of the RPG choices a player makes, V will grow stronger throughout the campaign, even if the story doesn’t always acknowledge his rise (although his reputation begins to precede him by the end of the story).
While other versions are powerful, C2077 has two routes that are truly synonymous with “OP” creations: Sandevistan cyberware (+ Katana) and Pure Netrunner. These two builds work very differently from each other, with the former effectively turning V into a time-warping samurai ninja who air-dashes through a room of Scavs, slicing off their heads along the way. Pure Netrunner is the closest thing C2077 has to magic, letting you wipe out fortresses by hacking their security systems, forcing enemies to turn on themselves, and chaining explosions.
Post 2.0 and “Phantom Liberty,” CD Projekt Red reworked C2077‘s perk and cyberware systems to lean further into power fantasy, letting players become even bigger nightmares for Night City’s criminal underbelly and all-controlling megacorps. The Edgerunner perk, in particular, accommodates power trips, as it lets you push past your limits to become a terrifying god on the brink of cyberpsychosis.
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Two Worlds 2 Lets You Create God Magic
You Become A True DEMON
- OP God Build/s: Magic / Mage
- Difficulty: Fairly easy thanks to the magic creation/combination system.
Now that we’ve covered one of the biggest open-world RPGs ever, let’s shift focus to somewhat of a forgotten title from the early 2010s. Two Worlds 2 has plenty of issues that hold it back from greatness, but its best mechanic makes the RPG worth trying, especially if you want to become a god wizard. Yes, I am talking about the DEMONS magic system, which lets you craft spell cards by combining three elements: Carriers, Elements, and Modifiers.
- Carriers – How a spell moves (missile, AoE, summoning, enchant, trap, and altar)
- Elements – Self-explanatory (air, fire, water, earth, and necromancy)
- Modifiers – Modify behavior or stats (damage, protection, time, homing, spray, and bounce)
The most important thing to know is that spell cards multiply off each other, either using Modifiers, upgrading Magic Skills, or using multi-slot Amulets. You can create a homing missile that rains 20 anvils on the heads of enemies, or stack ricocheting missiles onto elemental damage to bounce off enemies and destroy their health bars. Heck, you could even summon an army of undead to fight for you.
This system’s concept is all-around fantastic for player freedom, and I wish more games would adopt a version of it. However, the execution isn’t perfect and becomes tedious since you need 10 duplicate copies of the same card to maximize its power. Magic is so overpowered that it makes melee or ranger builds feel comparatively useless, even though they aren’t actually that bad in a vacuum.
Click on the game with the higher OpenCritic rating.
The Fateless One Has No Challengers
- OP God Build: Honestly, you start OP and remain like that.
- Difficulty: Automatic
Of all the games in this article, Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning makes you feel the most powerful, simply due to its hack-and-slash combat that feels like an RPG version of something like God of War. Right from the very start, the Fateless One will find themselves tossing enemies in the air, unleashing flurries, and ending with an impressive slam. As the campaign is quite easy, players will rarely be challenged, although they need to remain just attentive enough to demolish enemies.
Still, if you want to become overpowered by even Kingdoms of Amalur‘s standards, there are ways to accomplish that. The game encourages players to mix and match class skills, abilities, and weapons, allowing the creation of OP combinations like a sorcerer who wears heavy armor and wields a massive hammer.
Rather than finding it, players need to craft the strongest gear, which can be done by maximizing their blacksmith abilities. You can put together some absolutely broken items early in the campaign. Meanwhile, sagecrafting lets you implement powerful Gems into your gear.
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Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Gives You Pure Isometric Omnipotence
Gods Don’t Wait For Cooldowns
- OP God Build/s: High Elf Pyromancer / BFG Seraphim (and many more).
- Difficulty: Easy, as long as you understand the mechanics.
Let’s go with an isometric open-world RPG for the next one, and arguably one of the genre’s peaks. Sacred 2: Fallen Angel hasn’t aged flawlessly, nor have its revival attempts been 100% successful, but the cult classic can still be a lot of fun for those who know what they are getting into. Although it can be played as a relatively basic hack and slash, Sacred 2 comes to life when somebody really dives into its mechanics, particularly Combat Arts and Regeneration.
With the right build, players can create characters who use ranged skills that circumvent cooldowns and can destroy scores of enemies from a safe distance. You could have a High Elf who rains fire at a moment’s notice, incinerating anything within its line of sight before they can really get close. You could have a warrior with a permanent Shadow Veil buff, letting them be constantly invisible, or a Seraphim who summons a massive energy rifle thanks to the BeeEffGee buff.
These builds aren’t particularly difficult to get, but they require a solid understanding of the tools at your disposal.
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Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen Is The Ultimate Power Fantasy
A God-Slaying God
- OP God Build/s: Sorcerer / Magick Archer / Mystic Knight
- Difficulty: Pretty easy since you only really need to do a lot of side quests to become OP in the base game. The endgame expansion does level the playing field, though.
I went back and forth on whether to pick the first or second game in Capcom’s series, but I opted for Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen since the sequel’s complete version has yet to be released. In the vanilla content, Dragon’s Dogma starts very difficult, with even casual ambushes wiping out the player’s party. However, by the final act of the game, you will almost certainly be so powerful that enemies present almost no threat, especially if you don’t just speedrun the main story and complete most of the side quests.
While all the Advanced Vocations are strong, especially Sorcerer, Dragon’s Dogma’s real powerhouses tend to be hybrids like Mystic Knight or Magick Archer. These builds let you become the ultimate power fantasy monster: an elemental deity that brings giant monsters to their knees. Skills like Ricochet Hunter (Magick Archer) and Great Cannon (Mystic Knight) might as well be auto-win moves, at least in the base content.
The expansion’s Bitterblack Isle offers far more of a threat, and most players will likely struggle way more. However, you still feel like an incredibly powerful god, albeit one going up against other gods rather than scrubs.
