Elden Ring is packed with enough content to keep players coming back for well upwards of 50 hours. It may then surprise players to know that, in the grand scheme of things, the open world isn't all that big. At 30.5 square miles, or 79 square kilometers, it is bigger than the map of some classic open-world games like Skyrim, but it still falls short of plenty of others.
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The advantage Elden Ring has over many of those games is how densely packed with stuff it is. Players can explore a single area of Elden Ring's map and find a cornucopia of new things even after tens of hours of wandering around. That said, the numbers don't lie, and there are plenty of games that are much bigger.
Updated on June 17, 2023 by Ritwik Mitra: Elden Ring is a game that continues to make waves, with the combination of FromSoftware's open-world design, George R. R. Martin's mainstream appeal, and the much-beloved Soulsborne combat doing a great job of marketing this game. The game shattered records, with this single game selling more than the entirety of the Dark Souls series! It's a truly gargantuan achievement that shows just how far FromSoftware and Hidetaka Miyazaki have come from their humble roots.
Speaking of gargantuan things, one aspect of Elden Ring that is wildly impressive even now is how huge and fun to explore the open world of this game really is. The game takes the world design present in the original Dark Souls and cranks it up all the way to eleven, with each and every corner of The Lands Between housing amazing secrets, unique enemy encounters, and pulse-pounding boss encounters that push players to their limits as they try to overcome these massive threats. There aren't many open-world games that feature bigger maps than that of Elden Ring, which is a testament to how much work went into the development of this amazing title.
The release of Grand Theft Auto 5 was easily one of the biggest moments in the video game industry, with this long-running open-world series showing just how much Rockstar had perfected the art of video game design. Not only did the title look gorgeous, but Grand Theft Auto 5 was larger than any game in the series... even San Andreas!
If the massive open world wasn't enough of a selling point, then players were also blown away by the fact that players could control more than one protagonist in a first for the GTA series. Players could switch around at any point in the story, and many missions used character switching in a cinematic manner to make firefights and other similar set-pieces even more awe-inspiring!
As expected from a modern open-world RPG, to say The Witcher 3's world is big would be an understatement. What's more, it is arguably as dense as Elden Ring's world too. While it might not be as full of dungeons or massive bosses, there are still plenty of reasons to explore as much as possible.
The Witcher 3 has always had a very alive-feeling world thanks to how the player can get involved with just about everyone's lives. Even the smallest of villages has a story to tell, and there is quite the expanse for players to find them in.
Starting life as a mod for Arma 2, the original DayZ mod used the same map as that game, which was extremely expansive in its own right. DayZ looked to fill that map with lots of survival elements for players to hoard and battle over, not to mention the hoards of zombies everywhere.
The standalone mod used much the same map, altering a few elements, but mostly holding true to the mod. As a survival game, it is a tad more sparse than most maps, but that just adds to the feeling of a desolate world, where there is little life, and most of the remaining life wants to kill everything in sight.
Containing an entire country, made up of many Mediterranean islands was naturally going to be a difficult feat, but the team at Ubisoft pulled it off to an impressive scale. From the highest mountains to the deepest seas, Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the franchise's biggest world to date and is the perfect setting for such a grand adventure, stuffed with secrets.
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Housing all the usual trappings of an Assassin's Creed game, the world also had to house a war between the Spartans and the Athenians. Each area would be aligned to one of the sides, and players could engage troops there to destabilize and change that side's allegiance. Add the great sailing gameplay onto that, and it's a massive and varied world that players will never stop exploring.
The Arma games are famous for being one of the best realistic military games out there, and one of the biggest contributors to that is the careful world design. Despite creating fictional locations, the developers need terrain and distances to be spot-on.
Their largest map to date is the island of Altis in Arma 3, which sits at 104 Square Miles. In it, there's everything from plains, to swamps, to towns. Whatever operations players are looking to carry out, the island is sure to constantly be throwing new things their way.
The Xenoblade franchise has always been full of massive games. Their worlds are full of wide-open areas that are incredibly visually impressive and push the boundaries of the hardware they're on. Xenoblade Chronicles X was one of the most impressive in this regard, pushing the WiiU to its absolute limits to create this massive world.
Full of distractions and areas that contribute to the franchise's notorious long playtimes, the player's quest will take them all over, and give them the opportunity to explore every little corner of it. In there, secrets abound will keep them occupied, with challenging battles and super-bosses that will take all their cunning.
Many people wrote off True Crime as nothing more than a pale imitation of the Grand Theft Auto series, and this was an understandable comparison to make given how much they felt like imitations of Rockstar's most popular franchise. However, these games had some fun things going for it, with True Crime: Streets of LA being a great example of the same.
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Streets of LA features one of the biggest open worlds in gaming history, featuring a massive recreation of Los Angeles with its fair share of iconic hotspots. However, the scale of this world may be massive, but the open world feels rather barren and lifeless compared to GTA. Regardless, players who want to experience a classic open-world title that has been forgotten for the most part may actually like what Streets of LA brings to the table.
When the whole point of most things in an open world is to be blown up, there better be a lot of stuff. The Just Cause franchise has always understood this, building gigantic open-worlds as early as the second installment in the franchise.
Every game is stuffed to the brim with things for Rico Rodriquez to bow up, and a whole host of creative ways in which to do it. Both Just Cause 3 & 4 are comparable in size, but number 3 just slips by as the bigger game, especially with the extra areas added by the DLC.
Taking a leaf from Arma's playbook, it was clear that if Ghost Recon Breakpoint was going to be the engaging, long-lasting military experience it was supposed to be, the map was going to have to be absolutely huge. Things like realistic distances for weaponry needed to be accounted for, not to mention the many different ways in which players can tackle a mission in the game.
The map is one gigantic island, with several smaller ones to the north and south. In amongst it all is jungle terrain, mountainous peaks, and stunning valleys, all of which players can use to their advantage when taking down a target.
The USA is a big place, so even a scaled-down version of it is going to be absolutely massive. With every major city having some presence on the game map, as well as landmarks and open space to mess around in, there are plenty of details most players will never even see.
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Blasting through it with the game's fastest cars will take the average player between 20 and 30 minutes to get from coast to coast, but that'd be missing all the densely-packed details that are stuffed in there. As players can navigate it with loads of different vehicle types, there really isn't anywhere out-of-bounds.
Fuel's map is several times larger than just about any constructed open-world map in recent years, and the game is over a decade old. It's an extremely impressive feat, but it does cheat a little, as the world is mostly empty, save for places where players can start instanced events and races.
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic version of the USA, and yet it doesn't even use the entire country as its map. Instead, it is oriented with the Pacific Ocean in the northeast and the Grand Canyon in the southwest. Doing a full lap of it takes 8 real-world hours, although there isn't a lot to see during that drive.
At a glance, Daggerfall's open world may seem too good to be true. The world is so massive that players can walk for hours upon hours with no end in sight! However, this number looks way more impressive than it is, with the world of Daggerfall being fairly cut-and-dry with barely any visual variety for hours on end.
The entire world has been procedurally generated and is a chore to navigate at times. It's easy to see why Morrowind ended up being a breakout hit, with the open-world of that game being hand-crafted, massive, and revolutionary for its time!
Minecraft took the world by storm when it first arrived back in 2011. More than a decade later, it remains just as popular as ever, with almost a quarter of a billion copies having sold during that time. One of the biggest appeals of the game is the ability to craft and create just about anything that one can imagine, and the ridiculously large open world that the game provides players with serves as the perfect sandbox in which to do so.
It would take players multiple lifetimes to fully explore a Minecraft world, which clocks in at more than two and a half million square miles in size. This not only makes it larger than the Earth, but every single planet in the solar system combined. There are a few space-themed games that boast larger maps, but, when it comes to single landmasses, few video games can compete with Minecraft, let alone beat it.
Elden Ring is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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