Far Cry 3

Ubisoft Montreal's 2012 shooter is where the modern Far Cry formula was assembled, for better and worse. You are a rich tourist stranded on a Pacific island run by pirates, and the island is a checklist: radio towers that reveal map sections, outposts to clear, animals to skin into larger ammo pouches. Every open-world Ubisoft game for the next decade used this structure. What made it work here was the sandbox underneath. The systemic fire propagation, the wildlife that wanders into your firefights, and the ability to approach an outpost with a bow, a rock, a caged tiger or a flamethrower produced more genuine emergent comedy than the scripted plot managed. Vaas, played by Michael Mando, became the template for the series' talkative antagonist and is still its best. The story's handling of its own premise has aged poorly and was criticised at the time, but the outpost loop is so well tuned that people still replay it purely for that.