Best Co-Op Games For Exploring A Large World Together

Some games are built for glory, some are built for mayhem, and then there are those that feel tailor-made for gathering one’s crew, venturing out into the unknown, and discovering something strange, beautiful, or downright terrifying in a sprawling world. Co-op exploration is more than just traveling together.

It’s about navigating dynamic environments, improvising in the face of chaos, and experiencing awe with someone else, often while one of said players is accidentally setting everything on fire. Here’s a look at some of the best co-op video game worlds that are large, layered, and always better when shared.

Valheim

If Vikings Had GPS, It Would Ruin The Whole Vibe

Every time a group of players sets sail in Valheim, there’s a 70 percent chance it will end in a shipwreck, wolf attacks, or someone forgetting their pants. And yet, that’s what makes exploration in this world so satisfying. Inspired by Norse mythology and built with semi-procedural terrain, Valheim offers a surprisingly vast landscape comprising various biomes, each with its own unique threats, resources, and boss battles. Players must work together not just to survive, but to make the unknown feel habitable.

What starts as chopping trees around a meadow’s base eventually leads to scouting swamps, hunting across mountains, and braving misty lands that hide things no one is ready for. Longboats become lifelines, and building outposts on distant shores starts to feel like colonizing a myth. Exploration isn’t passive; it’s something players prepare for with food buffs, mead, and a collective plan that always goes sideways. And when it does, it’s all the better for it. Because Valheim’s world feels hand-crafted by the gods, only teamwork makes it feel conquerable.

Conan Exiles

Teamwork Makes The Barbarism Dream Work

The Exiled Lands are massive, hostile, and extremely weird. In Conan Exiles, players start nearly naked and alone in the desert, but once a few allies join the server, that lonely survival grind turns into an expedition of bloody conquest and base-building on a scale that puts most MMOs to shame. The map is loaded with temples, ruins, dungeons, and twisted landmarks from the Hyborian Age, each hiding rare materials or monsters with names that sound like they crawled out of a Lovecraft notebook.

Co-op isn’t just useful here; it’s survival. One person handles construction, another scouts for thralls, and a third gets into an accidental fight with a sandstorm god. The real joy of exploring Conan Exiles together is how much autonomy it gives each player to specialize while still encouraging massive group efforts. Whether it’s building a fortress on a cliffside or sailing upriver to find ancient vaults, the world is unforgiving, but it opens up like a scroll when tackled with the right squad.

Ghost Recon Wildlands

Bolivia Never Stood A Chance

When Ubisoft decided to set Ghost Recon Wildlands in an open-world version of Bolivia, they weren’t kidding about scale. It’s one of the largest maps Ubisoft has ever made, stitched together with deserts, jungles, salt flats, mountains, and narco-controlled outposts that stretch across every biome. It’s also one of the best examples of tactical co-op fused with freeform exploration, where a squad of four can spend hours sneaking, driving, parachuting, and sometimes just crashing helicopters in spectacularly dumb ways.

What makes Wildlands work as a co-op explorer is how reactive and non-linear everything is. Players can approach any mission from any angle, scout enemy bases with drones, or simply drive into the chaos while someone blares music from the car speakers. Between the cartel intel pickups and hidden weapon caches scattered across the country, there’s always a reason to take the long way around. And when someone calls in a chopper and somehow lands it on top of a burning gas station, no one asks why. It’s Wildlands. That’s just how the world rolls.

No Man’s Sky

A Universe Shared Is A Universe That Feels Less Lonely

Back when No Man’s Sky launched, many people joked that it was an empty universe. But now, years later, it might be one of the most content-rich co-op exploration games ever made. Every planet, star system, and derelict freighter is procedurally generated, and thanks to full multiplayer integration, players can experience all of it together. That means landing on a planet with floating jellyfish trees and acid rain and immediately arguing over whether to build a base or keep moving.

Exploration is not just vertical and horizontal. It’s dimensional. Players can fly from atmosphere to orbit in real-time, jump between galaxies, and even dock at mysterious space anomalies that act like hubs for dozens of other gamers. It’s the kind of game where one person becomes obsessed with collecting alien pets, while another builds a trade empire across three systems. Co-op makes it feel more grounded and more purposeful, especially when the team is scanning wildlife together or escaping a sentinel ambush by the skin of their spaceship’s teeth.

Sea Of Thieves

The Open Sea Was Never This Hilarious Or This Dangerous

There are moments in Sea of Thieves when everything goes quiet. The sea is calm, the sky is red with the sunset, and the crew is singing while someone checks the map. Then, five minutes later, that same crew will be set on fire, screaming, taking on water, being chased by a megalodon, and realizing that no one dropped anchor. That’s the beauty of it. Sea of Thieves offers a wide open sea filled with shipwrecks, skeleton forts, ancient shrines, and floating bottles that lead to cursed treasure, but it’s the unpredictability that makes co-op exploration unforgettable.

The map is massive but entirely unmarked. There are no waypoints or dotted lines; there are just islands, riddles, and the hope that someone can read a compass. Having a full crew onboard transforms navigation into an orchestral performance of shouting and laughter, especially during storms or when cannonballs start flying from behind a rock. And because every other ship on the ocean is another group of real players, exploration always comes with the potential for betrayal, alliance, or pure chaos. The open world is big, but the shared moments are always the biggest part of it.

Deep Rock Galactic

Leave No Dwarf Behind, Unless They’re The Ones Who Called The Swarm

Exploration doesn’t always mean beauty and wonder. Sometimes, it’s about carving through pitch-black rock tunnels while fighting off a horde of alien bugs and yelling at one’s engineer to place the zipline already. Deep Rock Galactic throws players into procedurally generated cave networks on Hoxxes 4, where the minerals are valuable, the danger is high, and the only things keeping the team alive are good communication and a decent flamethrower.

What makes Deep Rock Galactic special isn’t just the variety in its underground world but how tightly the co-op systems are designed around exploration itself. Each class is built to support mobility and discovery, whether it’s the driller opening new routes or the scout lighting up giant caverns with flare guns. No two expeditions feel the same, and players are constantly navigating terrain that shifts from crystalline beauty to panic-inducing darkness. It’s one of the few games where exploration feels like a job, and that’s said with complete love.

Minecraft

The World Is Only As Big As One’s Imagination Is Loud

What starts as punching a tree in Minecraft quickly becomes an expedition that never ends. This game isn’t just a big sandbox; it’s an endless canvas where every direction holds something unpredictable. Biomes stretch out for literal miles and are dotted with villages, strongholds, ocean monuments, and the occasional ill-fated lava pool that can claim someone who lagged behind. Whether playing on survival or creative mode, exploring in co-op isn’t just helpful; it’s how stories are made. One person digs straight down, another finds a pink sheep, and someone else gets lost in a cave system and re-emerges three real-life hours later.

There’s no set goal, which means that everything is dictated by group ambition. Those who want to raid an End City can get geared up and march across The End together. Want to build a rail system connecting ten continents? That’s also been done. Exploration is made even richer through mods and servers that add biomes, mechanics, and even quests, turning Minecraft into a proper open-world RPG if that’s the vibe gamers want. It’s not about how big the world is. It’s about what four sleep-deprived people do when they find a desert temple and forget how to share loot.