Size matters, or at least if you want to entice a player base fixated on scope. Nobody wants to spend too much money on a game that falls short of expectations, but some developers take it literally and end up with video game worlds that are the exact size of galaxies — or even larger.
Let’s take a look at the games with the most unbelievably large play area in video game history.
10. Guild Wars Nightfall (a little over 15,000 square miles)
To put things into perspective, some games famous for their large maps, like Red Dead Redemption 2, Skyrim, and GTAV, wouldn’t make this list — even if you combined the three into a weirdly marvelous Viking Cowboy crime story. 2006’s Guild Wars Nightfall might feature the smallest map on this list, but it remains much, much larger than most of the “big open world map” games out there.
9. The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall ( Between 80,000 and 90,000 square miles)
While it’s hard to pinpoint just how large this game is, most sources agree that the map of Daggerfall covers an area of at least 81k square miles, which is the size of Great Britain — the whole thing, not just England. For comparison’s sake, Skyrim‘s map sits at around 16 square miles. Though huge, Daggerfall lacks the number of unique activities and quests you’d find in Skyrim due to how most of Daggerfall’s map came about through procedural generation.
8. WWII Online (200,000 square miles)
If Britain isn’t large enough for you and you’re fine with the idea of conquering a bigger area in a realistic war theater, I’ll just get out of your way and recommend you consider picking up WWII Online. Despite average reviews, this war sim title features an imposing 1:2 reproduction of Western Europe.
7. The Elder Scrolls: Arena (3,000,000 square miles)
It’s fun to look at Daggerfall’s already absurd map size and realize that you’re actually witnessing old Bethesda toning it down. Arena is over thirty times larger than Daggerfall. If you want to go all out, you can even add thirty times the size of Skyrim, Morrowind, and Oblivion, and that still wouldn’t be enough to cover an area larger than that of Arena‘s largely empty mega continent.
6. Microsoft Flight Simulator (197,000,000 square miles)
The previous game by Asobo Studio, the people behind the newest iteration of Flight Simulator, was Fuel. That’s the racing game that boasts the biggest map in racing game history, but that was still not enough for this team. So, they set out to make a game that’s 197,000,000 square miles large, AKA the size of the globe’s surface — or the flat Earth, if that’s your thing.
5. Minecraft (Over 1.3 billion square miles, or over an actual planet)
Minecraft doesn’t even feature a flat map as a play area. It has a depth of 265 blocks from the ground to the sky, but we don’t even need to count its verticality to have a play area larger than even Neptune. And that’s without counting the Far Lands, a broken part of the game you’d originally enter after leaving the intended play area in the game’s earlier versions.
4. Star Citizen (a size comparable to that of the sun)
This is when things begin to get weird because we’re no longer dealing with just square miles. Also, I have bad news if you don’t care about space games, because the remainder of this list has no space for games that aren’t about space.
Whereas Minecraft‘s map has a lot of verticality, most high-profile space games are in a completely different league. Even though it’s not out and we still don’t know when (or if) it’ll be, Star Citizen’s map is a remarkable achievement that needs noting. Star Citizen’s playable area is around 0.6 million by 0.6 million miles by 150 miles high, meaning that the only thing bigger than it in our solar system is, well, the sun.
3. EVE Online (7,800 star systems)
In layman’s terms, EVE’s map is a larger version of Star Citizen’s. Sure, a large part of EVE Online, the most famous or infamous space-faring MMO, is dead space where no actual gameplay will ever take place. Still, you’re free to station anywhere across hundreds of millions of cubic miles, so that must count for something.
2. Elite Dangerous (the size of our galaxy)
Interestingly, the game with the second-largest map on this list is the easiest one to explain. The play area in Elite Dangerous is a 1:1 reproduction of our galaxy, so just perform the easy task of picturing the entire galaxy and then you’ll have a very accurate idea of the size of this game.
1. No Man’s Sky: 18 quintillion planets (that’s the number 18, then 18 zeroes, and then the space between them, if you still care to count)
Numbers and even measurement units fail to give the human brain a good picture of how much larger than our galaxy the map in No Man’s Sky is. So, try picturing Neptune, a planet far larger than Earth, next to our Sun. The Sun is No Man’s Sky, and the comparatively puny Neptune is our galaxy.
