Star Wars Battlefront II modernized theft, does that count?

Otherwise, I would say the Soulsborne series modernized third person adventure, and Breath of the Wild modernized Zelda (its own genre now).

I´d say Zelda BOTW is a breath of fresh air compared to the typical open world experience.

Postal 2 was Duke Nukem on steroids.

Love all three of those games.

For me Breathe of The Wild's revolution in massive open world design is all about the flow.

Been replaying Skyrim on the Switch now and the "get quest. go to marker on map. kill bad guys. grab items" feels more check list like than whats offered in BOTW, where I'll climb up a  mountain, visually spot a shrine in the distance, glide over to it, discover a korok, wack about baddies with the satisfying physics. 

Also compared to Skyrim BOTW over arching goal feels more dire as I was constantly reminded of how far I've come just from the visuals (i.e. laser beams aiming at Ganons Castle).

Really is all the tiny details that make exploration fun in BOTW.

Of course, all three of these games do approach open world through 3 very different lenses and they all got things to learn from each other.

They could all learn bout making the Menu UI less  thick though!

^What pizzanuggs said.In short, it makes exploring the world actually fun.You can go anywhere and climb anything, even the tallest mountain.It also works in a way that doesn´t really feel like a checklist to do, with a huge number of icons/question marks cluttering the map.

Definitely Breath of the Wild.

I hate myself for what Im about to say but destiny changed the way expansions and dlc should be made.
While I do detest the type of game destiny is is, them actually adding story content twice a year for like $20 if im correct is just awsome.

Main reason is cuz I belive yearly iteration of games makes games worse. games like sport sim and racers and the like are basicly the same year after year, hopefuffy they embrace that in the future. Forza would not be doing so poorly if they embraced this.

That stuff has literally been done many times.

I think you could make a plausible case that Skyrim modernized RPGs in the sense that it really brought about the open world revolution in RPGs. Ofcourse Skyrim wasn't the first open world RPG, but I don't think I'm exagerating when I say that Skyrim is the reason we have sooooo many open world games now.

Kapi, I was only 11 when Skyrim came out, how do you expect me to remember this :-3