When it comes to game worlds, bigger isn’t always better, but that doesn’t make these 10 titles any less impressive.
To preface this list, we only included playable game area, not the theoretical size of the game’s world. Additionally, we chose not to include any procedurally generated worlds such as The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (which features an incredible 62,394 square miles of terrain!) or Minecraft (whose game world is only limited by your computer specs).
Finally, we decided to only include landmasses in these figures. Otherwise, just the area around a planet in EVE Online would blow every other entry on this list out of the water. Space is mad big yo.
10. Star Wars Galaxies
~90 sq mi
Star Wars Galaxies gets a little bit gypped on this list, as a majority of the explorable space is well, space. Even discounting those areas though, it’s still a massive game. All together, the original 10 planets it launched with have around 86 square miles of traversable terrain. Two additional planets were later added, although these were much smaller, and much of the environment was inaccessible to players.
Sadly, Galaxies was shutdown in 2011, although fans have been working to preserve the game through emulators ever since.
9. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
107 sq mi
Operation Flashpoint is a painfully realistic military shooter/simulator, set on the real-world island of Kiska. In a commitment to providing the most life-like tactical environment possible, the developers decided against procedurally generating the world, and instead recreated the location’s 107 square miles of terrain by hand.
8. Burnout Paradise
~200 sq mi
Burnout Paradise‘s fictional Paradise City features almost 200 square miles of raceable terrain. This isn’t just limited to a bunch of tracks either, every street can become a race event by simply stopping your vehicle at any of the city’s 120 traffic signals.
7. True Crime: Streets of LA
240 sq mi
This installment of the True Crime series recreated an impressive 240 square miles of Los Angeles, including most of Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. The developers worked to keep everything as accurate as possible, from famous landmarks down to individual street names.
5 & 6. Just Cause 1 & 2
~400 sq mi
Just Cause 2 is an open world action game that takes place on a dystopian island nation in Southeast Asia, an island that features about 400 square miles of explorable territory. Just about all of it can be traversed on foot, on the road, or even in the air with an assortment of aircraft.
The original Just Cause,which takes on a Caribbean island, isn’t too far behind, weighing in at around 396 square miles.
4. Asheron’s Call
~500 sq mi
Asheron’s Call is an MMO that’s still going strong over 15 years after its release. Through a decade and a half of updates, the game’s world has expanded to over 500 square miles. That number gets a heck of a lot crazier when you consider that unlike most other online RPG’s, Asheron’s Call does not have any loading zones. That means you could potentially start at one end of the map, and walk the full 500 miles uninterrupted.
3. Test Drive Unlimited
618 sq mi
Set on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu, Test Drive Unlimited features 618 square miles of territory and 125 unique cars. Even more impressive is the fact that in that space, over 1,000 miles of roads and highways are drivable. That is a lot of digital asphalt.
2. Fuel
5,560 sq mi
Fuel is an open world racing game set in a post-apocalyptic world, with players contending with both the harsh, desolate landscape, and extreme weather like tornadoes and sandstorms.
In 2009, Guinness World Records officially recognized it as having the “largest playable area in a console game.” In total, players can explore 5,560 square miles of game world without load time interruptions. That’s roughly the size of the state of Connecticut.
1. World War II Online
20,077 sq mi
Outside of the console space, World War II Online sounds like it has a pretty solid grip on the title of “biggest game world.”
The game is a massively multiplayer FPS that uses a 1/2 scale map of Western Europe as its battleground. To put that into a number, that’s a jaw-dropping 20,077 square miles of modeled terrain, created using satellite data to be as accurate as possible.
