Video Game Worlds Bigger Than Elden Ring

Highlights

• Elden Ring offers a dense world with hours of exploration, despite being smaller than other open-world games.
• The game’s packed map ensures players always find something new to discover even after hours of playtime.
• While Elden Ring’s world may not be the largest, the sheer amount of content makes it worth exploring fully.

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.

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 March 31, 2024 by Ritwik Mitra: Elden Ring is one of the biggest open-world games ever made. From Software went all out in the development of a massive landscape where players could get lost for hours on end. The world design of From Software games merged pretty well with a sandbox that relied on visual indicators to keep players interested. The sheer amount of time players can spend traversing the Lands Between is immense, with each and every corner of this game world packed with amazing secrets to uncover. While Elden Ring may boast a massive world for players to explore, there are many other games with worlds that are even bigger, making them worth checking out as long as the sandbox isn’t massive just for the sake of it. A few more of those games have been added in this update, in case players have run out of massive worlds to explore.

18 Grand Theft Auto 5

49 Square Miles

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!

17 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

52 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 an expanse that Geralt can explore to his heart’s content.

16 The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom

53 Square Miles

The Legend of Zelda games on the Nintendo Switch have revolutionized open-world gaming for the better. No one expected this franchise to have such a smooth transition into the genre, but history has proven time and time again that underestimating Nintendo is foolish when it comes to video game development.

Breath of the Wild was already a massive achievement in its own right, and what made Tears of the Kingdom even more impressive was that it expanded upon the first game in ways that no one could’ve imagined. The Sky Islands, the Depths, and the land of Hyrule itself make for a truly massive environment that players can explore as much as they want.

15 DayZ

87 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 mostly 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.

14 Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag

90 Square Miles

There are many people who still talk about Black Flag with a ton of passion, considering it to be one of the best games in the series. Edward Kenway is a fairly likable protagonist, and the manner in which he becomes an Assassin is certainly quite interesting. It helps that the refreshing addition of naval combat and traversal made the game so much more engaging!

Since the game is set in the Caribbean and promotes ship traversal, players can have a great time forming the best pirate crew, roaming the world on a strong, sturdy vessel, and uncovering the many secrets in the game. Sure, a lot of the world may consist of water, but that actually lends a sense of scale to the world and keeps things fresh.

13 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 to that, and it’s a massive and varied world that players will never stop exploring.

12 Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

107 Square Miles

• Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
• Release Date: October 6, 2009
• Developer: Codemasters

A tactical shooter that a lot of people don’t know about, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is a fun game for players to get into. The gameplay is about as tense as one would expect, but what really throws players for a loop is the massive open world of this game. In a bid to be as authentic as possible, the entire real-life island of Kiska is replicated in the game world.

While some people may argue that this insistence on quantity over quality led to the open world feeling pretty bland, the tense gameplay moments of Dragon Rising more than make up for these faults. Players must rely on their squad members every step of the way, with a single misstep leading to the player’s demise more often than not.

11 Arma 3

112 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.

Their largest map to date is the island of Altis in Arma 3, which sits at 112 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.

10 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. Trying to find the game’s many secrets will keep them occupied, with challenging battles and super-bosses that will take all their cunning.

9 True Crime: Streets Of LA

240 Square Miles

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 them, with True Crime: Streets of LA being a great example of the same.

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 it 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.

8 Just Cause 4

395 Square Miles

The Just Cause games are known for featuring massive sandboxes where players can get lost as they cause untold destruction in the game world. The explosive goodness of these games is what a lot of people love, even if some people felt that Just Cause 4 didn’t really do much to move the series in a new and interesting direction.

Still, if there’s one thing about this game that can be commended, it’s the massive scale of the open world. The wingsuit is downright necessary in this game, since trying to get from point A to point B in a vehicle can be one of the longest and most boring drives players could subject themselves to. As long as they don’t mind the dated gameplay mechanics, Just Cause 4 will be a blast to play through, quite literally.

7 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 blow 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.

6 Ghost Recon: Breakpoint

782 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.

5 The Crew

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 Crew’s 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.

4 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.

80,823 Square Miles

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!

2 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.

1 Microsoft Flight Simulator

197,000,000 Square Miles

There’s no denying that Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most gorgeous video games on the market if players want to sit back and enjoy a laidback sim game that allows dozens relaxing moments. At least, once players get past the initial learning curve. The fact that this game simulates real-life environments through a mix of pre-cached and cloud data is impressive, letting players go wherever they want in a simulated depiction of Earth itself.

Suffice it to say, this means that Microsoft Flight Simulator has the biggest open-world in any video game to date. Sure, fans of Elden Ring may find this title’s gameplay to be wildly different, but Microsoft Flight Simulator can prove to be wildly engaging in its own way.