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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 May 18, 2022, by Tom Bowen: Rarely does a game live up to the hype quite as effectively as Elden Ring. With near-perfect scores from both players and critics, it seems safe to call the game an overwhelming success. A lot of different elements contributed to this, though most would probably agree that the Lands Between played a pivotal role. This densely-packed playground is full to the brim with exciting encounters and sneakily-hidden secrets that are just waiting to be discovered by players. However, when compared with some of its peers, the size of Elden Ring’s world is actually relatively small. Of course, as the old adage goes, size isn’t everything, though, for those who enjoy exploring huge open worlds, these other great games may be of some interest.
12 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - 84 Square Miles
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.
11 DayZ - 86 Square Miles
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.
10 Assassin’s Creed Odyssey - 90 Square Miles
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.
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.
9 Arma 3 - 104 Square Miles
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.
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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.
8 Xenoblade Chronicles X - 154 Square Miles
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.
7 Death Stranding - 230 Square Miles
As the size of open worlds has grown larger over the past few decades, many developers have struggled to figure out ways to effectively fill their ridiculously large maps. Legendary Japanese developer Hideo Kojima took a somewhat different approach, however, instead opting to use the baron and empty nature of the game’s world to evoke feelings of isolation and loneliness within players.
Death Stranding goes against the grain in this regard, with most other open-world games full of the same generic copy-paste nonsense like guard towers, lookout points, and collectibles. The result is a world that perfectly captures the core themes of the game’s narrative, while also managing to provide plenty of picturesque moments in the process. Its vast emptiness is arguably its biggest strength though and makes the game’s limited multiplayer components all the more effective.
6 Just Cause 3 - 400 Square Miles
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.
5 Final Fantasy 15 - 700 Square Miles
Final Fantasy 15 is an interesting case, because there is an absolutely massive open-world area in the game, and several other big areas players will ride through. However, it mixes open-world, and linear level formats. The first half of the game sees players exploring a big open world area, which is loads of fun and filled with loads of creatures to battle and sights to behold.
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However, come the second half of the narrative, things become a lot more linear. Things are very character-driven, and the gameplay reflects that. Players will be making their way through constructed levels rather than areas in the open world, so how big the “open” portion of the map actually is, is up for debate. That said, it’s still a big and beautiful world that players could easily get lost in for hours on end.
4 Ghost Recon Breakpoint - 781 Square Miles
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.
3 The Crew 2 - 1,900 Square Miles
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.
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.
2 Fuel - 5,560 Square Miles
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.
1 Minecraft - 2,500,000 + Square Miles
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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