10 Biggest Open World Maps In Video Games

While there’s an argument to be made that bigger isn’t always better, today we’re mostly concerned with just getting into the biggest of the big. Open world maps, that is.

Whether you’re zipping across the landscape in a driving game or trekking for miles atop your horse in a western adventure, there’s plenty of reasons for video game maps to get particularly huge.

While things are set to get a little muddy once we start talking about games that use procedural generation, we’ve done our best to get these out in order.

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10: Test Drive Unlimited 2 - 618 Square Miles

An early honourable mention to Just Cause 3 and Death Stranding because though those worlds are definitely big, we’re starting out big, big.

Eden Games crafted the absolutely massive open world racing game Test Drive Unlimited 2 on the Havok engine. It takes place across a pile of roads strewn across the island of Oahu, which returns from the original game, as well as Ibiza. Both locations were modelled using satellite data and the entirety of the roads in the game tipped upwards of 1,860 miles across 618 square miles of map. The game which was originally released in 2011 still offers players a world far larger to race around in than almost anything that has been released since.

If you’re going to put ‘Unlimited’ in the name, you’d better deliver, and it’s safe to say they did.

Impressively, despite being over ten years old, the map for Test Drive Unlimited 2 is still 30 times bigger than that of Forza Horizon 4, for instance. Of course, it’s not nearly as pretty, but that’s an awful lot of map.

9: Final Fantasy 15 - 700 Square Miles

Final Fantasy 15 is a game with gigantic swords and a boss who measures almost 800 feet across so it stands to reason it’d have a pretty darn big map, and it does!

Square Enix’s 2016 entry into the long-running franchise offers up the biggest explorable world in the series so far. The game takes place within the world of Eos which is divided up into four nations on two continents. You can make your way through the game on foot or atop a handsome Chocobo if you like, but you’ll probably want to opt for your sweet ride, the Regalia. Admittedly, some areas on the map are made impassable by mountainous terrain, and the game received some flak for the sparsity of some of the traversable areas.

While including the non-traversable regions has the game world stretch to about 750 square miles, factoring those out brings us closer to 700 square miles.

Unlike some of the other games on this list that mostly focus on one mechanic and build a giant emptier world around that because the genre allows for it, FF15 also needed to build meaningful narrative elements, compelling relationships between its characters, and a nuanced RPG and combat system. With all that considered, the size of the game world is extra impressive.

The game world also consists of a bunch of different ecosystems to explore and you could do a lot worse for your fantasy road trip simulator.

8: Asheron’s Call - 500 - 800 Square Miles

There’s some disagreement over exactly how big the high fantasy MMORPG world of Asheron’s Call is but either way it’s big enough to get a spot on our list. The game was created by Turbine Entertainment Software back in 1999 and is set in Dereth, an enormous island continent. There are also archipelagos around the primary landmass if for some insane reason you feel like the central area just isn’t big enough for you.

Though the servers for the fan favourite MMO were sadly shut off in late 2016, in its heyday they hosted thousands of players at once.

The seamless multiplayer virtual world was an anomaly for its sheer size, but its success in offering intriguing RPG and narrative elements kept players coming back as long as they were able.

7: Ghost Recon: Breakpoint - 781.9 Square Miles

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint is the eleventh Ghost Recon game in Ubisoft’s classic shooter franchise.

It also happens to have a ridiculously huge map, but, and you’re going to see this pattern forming here, this is another case where bigger may not have meant better. The map covers the fictional island of Auroa in the South Pacific and sits at approximately 781.9 square miles of traversable terrain including forestland, swamps, mountainous regions, and deserts.

Interestingly, the game was designed for the player to use the map in order to find mission locations, so you’ll have to compare a mission description to the regions instead of chasing objective markers. With a lot of ground to cover there’s also a lot for you to do like harvest resources, set up shelters, and craft items as there is a far bigger emphasis on the survival gameplay aspects this time around.

Also, shooting, you’ll still be doing a lot of shooting.

6: The Crew – 1900 Square Miles

We have back to back Ubisoft entries here as The Crew not only delivers with our second biggest racing game map, it’s a scaled-down recreation of the entire United States.

Before its release in 2014, The Crew’s enormous game world coming in at just under 2000 square miles was a massive selling point for the driving game. Of course, when you’re covering ground at the speed of a souped up vehicle, you need an awfully big game world to play around in. Included in its sprawling traversable world are seven major cities, over 1,000 real-world landmarks, and approximately 10,000 kilometres of roads. Reportedly driving from New York to LA in a super speedy car will take you about 45 minutes. The free roam gameplay and multiplayer elements were big draws for players who wanted to speed around with their mates.

The map size of 2018’s The Crew 2 is very close to its predecessor but you can travel by plane this time around so it doesn’t feel as big.

5: Fuel - 5600 Square Miles

The Crew may be massive but there is one more racing game on this list that tops it in the size stakes and that’s Asobo Studio’s 2009 racer, Fuel.

If Asobo Studio is setting off bells for you in the realm of enormous open world games it should be and we’ll get to that a little further down this list.

For now, though, let’s talk Fuel. This one takes place on an open-world map that was unfathomably big at the time it was made, and still hasn’t been topped in the racing genre. It covers approximately 5,600 square miles in a true exercise of ensuring quantity and hoping quality would follow. If it succeeded at that or not is in the eye of the beholder, but what cannot be debated is that Asobo managed an incredible feat in providing a world this big with no loading screens. Players will encounter all kinds of crazy weather conditions, it is the post apocalypse after all, as well as a day/night cycle that passes as they play.

It’s worth mentioning that Fuel is procedurally generated so the map size can vary, but there’s still 10,000 miles of road for you to speed down so it’s going to keep you pretty busy.

4: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall – 62,000 Square Miles

It totally makes sense for a massively multiplayer game or one featuring super fast vehicles to need a gigantic map, which makes it all the more impressive that one of the biggest maps on this list is for a single player RPG.

And not just any single player RPG, a single player RPG from 1996. And it’s still one of the biggest video game maps ever.

If anyone was going to pull this off it would be Bethesda and that’s just what they did with their procedurally-generated map for Daggerfall, the second game in the Elder Scrolls series. This one is far larger than any other game in the series, coming in at 62,000 square miles. While main quest locations were hand-crafted, as were many elements that made up the sprawling regions of High Rock and Hammerfell in Tamriel, procedural generation allowed the world to really feel like an expansive fantasy place primed for exploration. And it’s a world worth exploring with critically acclaimed RPG mechanics and deep questing pathways that revolutionised the genre.

You’ll be able to come across around 15,000 towns and 750,000 NPCs. I mean, you probably won’t be able to get to them all, but you could.

3: Microsoft Flight Simulator – 196 Million Square Miles

I’m going to be honest, from here on out there’s probably going to be some disagreement over what classifies as an open world game map. In this case, the open world game is the entire 196 million square mile planet Earth, so, yeah, this is a big one.

Microsoft Flight Simulator was released in 2020 by Asobo Studio. Yes, that Asobo Studio, the ones who made Fuel 11 years earlier.

As the name implies, Microsoft Flight Simulator will have you piloting planes around the globe, between any number of its 37,000 airports, all of which actually exist. The game uses pretty clever technology to create its game world by simulating real satellite data and even weather data to reflect real time weather in the actual world translated to your little digital version. Real world air traffic is also simulated. To put it plainly, this game was a slam dunk with critics and fans, in no small part due to the incredible effort put into its enormous map.

And, yes, because this is a simulation of the Earth, you can totally fly to your house.

2: Minecraft – 1.5 Billion Square Miles

While Minecraft doesn’t cover the whole entire planet, it is vastly bigger than Microsoft Flight Simulator because of our old friend procedural generation.

While it’s tricky to determine the game’s precise size due to the way the map is created, it’s safe to just go with ‘freaking enormous’ and call it a day. The environment is generated as you move and generated maps are unique so your newly created world won’t be a carbon copy of anybody else's. Everything may be made out of blocks but there are blocks for snow, for rainforests, stone, and just about every other environment you can imagine.

Minecraft is a sandbox playground dream so it makes sense that you won’t be hitting any limits on how much you can build and explore.

1: The Final Frontier (Elite Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, Space Games In General) - Millions Of Cubic Light Years

And finally, the games that are just way bigger than any other kind of game is ever going to be or be able to be: space games. Especially procedurally-generated space games.

Now, while these games absolutely deserve their time in the sun, it’s worth pointing out that were we to give them all an entry no other game would get a look in, because these things are huge.

How huge? I hear you ask. You just covered Minecraft and that was like one billion miles of game map. Well, in the case of space we have to start talking volume. And we’re talking about game areas big enough to be traversed by space crafts travelling at light speed. Chris Roberts said Star Citizen’s playable area is one million by one million kilometres by 200 kilometres high. Meanwhile Elite Dangerous is estimated to be about 13.8 cubic light years of traversable space, and the procedurally-generated universes of Spore and No Man’s Sky are pretty much immeasurably gargantuan. Almost all of these games require enormous maps to cater to the design of the game and massively multiplayer elements and its telling that the vast majority of them are beloved by fans and critics alike.

There is the argument over how much of these space maps are made up of empty space or repetitive filler environments, but if we’re looking at the raw numbers, the space games have it.