Some video games feature truly massive open-world games, and they are often packed with things to do such as story quests to complete, hidden areas to discover, items to find, enemies to defeat, and much, much more. Elden Ring, released in 2022 by Japanese developer FromSoftware is one such game with lots of content, as is The Elder Scrolls series by Bethesda, the latest game for which, The Elder Scrolls 6, was recently confirmed to be in early development. Both are fantasy games with huge open worlds, yet neither are amongst the top few games in terms of the sizes of their open worlds.
Here is a list of eight games with the largest open worlds, with some of them being very well-known and popular while others are lesser known. The usual suspects, such as Grand Theft Auto 5, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt don’t make it to this list despite their size, which should be an indication of just how gigantic these eight open worlds are.
8. Xenoblade Chronicles X – 154 Square Miles
The Xenoblade Chronicles series releases on Nintendo platforms, which are not known to be the most powerful in terms of their hardware as they’re usually handheld consoles. So it’s quite impressive that WiiU was able to feature Xenoblade Chronicle X’s world at all, let alone one full of secrets to discover, challenging bosses to right, and a main quest that takes the player all over the map.
7. True Crime: Streets Of LA – 240 Square Miles
Not a very well-known game today, True Crime: Streets of LA has always felt very similar to the Grand Theft Auto games, and not always in a good way. In fact, many people wrote it off as a GTA knockoff. But it does feature a massive recreation of Los Angeles with iconic locations. Despite that, though, the open world does feel comparatively empty and without life, especially when viewed against the more popular GTA games.
6. Just Cause 3 – 386 Square Miles
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Just pipping its sequel by a little bit, Just Cause 3 is one of those open-world games that players can traverse with great speed and freedom. It’s also a world where several things explode, arguably more so than any other game on this list, in very unique ways with a large variety of possible methods.
5. Ghost Recon Breakpoint – 781 Square Miles
A military shooter through and through, Ghost Recon Breakpoint needed a massive open world for several reasons, among them to recreate realistic weapon use and also offer players a large amount of freedom when it came to completing its campaign missions. It features one large island with many smaller ones, and diverse landscapes such as jungles, mountains, and more.
4. The Crew 2 – 1,900 Square Miles
A car game set in the United States, The Crew 2 features a scaled-down of the country which can be traversed by driving some of the fastest cars ever. Every major city is present, as are several landmarks and wide open areas, with traveling from one end of the map to the other taking anywhere between twenty to thirty minutes on average.
3. Fuel – 5,560 Square Miles
Fuel is set in a post-apocalyptic America, with a lot of empty spaces and not much to do in terms of content, outside of some specific activities and races. Not even using the entire map of the USA in-game, it is nevertheless a massive game with a full lap taking eight hours in the real world.
2. The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall – 80,823 Square Miles
A procedurally generated world in its entirety, The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall is nonetheless an outstanding achievement for its time given that it came out way back in 1996. However, it does come with the caveat of there not being much to do and not much variety in what there is to look at, especially when compared to more modern games.
1. Minecraft – 2,500,000+ Square Miles
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At the top of our list is Minecraft, which is less a video and more a cultural phenomenon by this point. Allowing players to create anything they can imagine in a stupendously big world, this map is almost as large as Australia! It would a long, long time to fully explore a Minecraft map. Though some games set in outer space might still be larger, Minecraft is unrivaled when it comes to a single map.
Source: NationMaster, Gamerant
