A Size Comparison of Massive Open World Video Game Maps

The WoW map you have included is only the original game content.

The Burning Crusade and Lich King Expansions have added quite a bit more.

Daggerfall was an Elder Scrolls game that came and it was open world. It played much the same as Oblivion tough there was far less direction and hand holding involved. It’s a pretty classic first person RPG. You can download a full version courtesy of Bethesda on the Daggerfall Wiki: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Daggerfall but it was a DOS game and would probably be a headache to get running.

@MacGuyver1138: I remember feeling overwhelmed at the size of the game world so it might be an accurate assessment. It may have been easier to create such a massive world back then because repetition wasn’t as noticeable and the NPCs were sprites. It’s also possible Bethesda didn’t know any better and just set out to create as massive a world as possible.

Daggerfall was suppose to be bigger than the actual sized Britan, and be so large it would be almost impossible to visit in a single day. So i think the estimate is about right. for Oblivion add in the entirity and Shivering Isles, then the mod content.

Oh, think about Everquest too! with 15 expansions, its gotta be huge.

@Derick

The reason maps don’t seem the way they are is because of how it’s traveled. I don’t play WoW but tell me, do you walk? Is there any form of movement other than walking?

It feels longer and bigger because you walk from point a to point b. It takes longer. In Burnout, you’re zooming from place to place so you don’t realize the scale. And yeah, roads are going to be 2x larger because it’s a racing game, not a mmorpg.

@Chres and @Anakrusix

If you look at the Burnout map at the bottom by “Harbor Town” ther are a couple of ships when you hold the cursor over it it take about two magnifine glasses to cover it. Now when you go to the GTA San Andreas map there is a aircraft carrier that you can cover with one magnifine glass.

On the WOW map the capital citys only take up a couple of cursors. So according to this an entire city in WOW is equal to a couple of buildings in burnout.

Some of these maps might be close but I am just saying that I think the Burnout map off, and that the WOW map is smaller than it should be.

@Anakrusix
You can fly. The flight speed is about 300% faster than running.

Part 2:
http://i.imgur.com/xJU7Q.jpg

i wonder if they actually put out a “per ft” scale on maps in most games. As the google maps reference came out, there are some that use a similar system to map those games.

and i love what Marsu posted, even MORE maps to size.

maybe the poster on this website could investigate futher into exact scale?

You have forgotten the largest of them all “EVE Online”

“magnifine”?

noway.

to be honest i believe daggerfall, i remember trying to cross the gameworld from one side to another and it was like impossible,i read somewhere that it takes 2 weeks realtime in order to cross from one side to the other,i also remember people playing the game for years on end,just spending there time in one tiny portion of the game. i wonder if someone was to do a elite comparison to these games how it would look ?

To help you all understand how Daggerfall manages to be so huge, know that the majority of it is procedurally generated when you start a new game. It is different every time so it is not possible to get an accurate map. Only areas where key plot elements and certain other places are hand crafted, the rest are done by a mathematical equation ran at the start of the game.

the thing is that burnout is a cars game, of course is big, world at warcfrat is online of course is big, oblivion is not that big but is not empty games like just cause most of the things that you see are part of the background… in oblivion everything you see everywere you can go with a lot of dungeons that are bigger inside than in the outside

Your forgetting world of Warcraft. It is much bigger then Just Cause 2.

This comparison is way way way way way WAY WAY off…

I can take the entire first island from GTA 3 (Liberty city) And fit it into 1 city block on that Burnout paradise map… which means this map comparison is way off. Heck I can take the entire Liberty city map, all 3 islands, and all the open water, and fit it into a couple of city blocks of that burnout map.

So if anyone wondering if this is accurate, hell no. It’s not even close. I’m assuming its taking what developers “claim” their game is. But we all know that just by comparing the GTA map to the Burnout Paradise one that this is completely bogus.

Yes, Daggerfall is definitely that big, takes real life days to walk across but thankfully you can fast travel between the thousands of locations straight away without having to find them first.

And no, its not randomly generated every time you play, everyone plays the same world.

Elder Scroll (Any of them):

Size is not everything, otherwise people would still be playing daggerfall all the time.

Personally if you upped the graphics and interactions, I would take daggerfall over any game on your list. It was truely open ended, like Morrow Wind you could even kill people that were part of the main story line. It trumps any game out there for choices, vast number of skills and directions to take your character, and the number of spells available in the game even.

The simple fact that it was made almost 2 decades ago, and no game has ever come close to such a feat since, I consider it a legendary game. The newer games (outside of Bethesda) seem to getting more narrow, even Skyrim seems to be somewhat narrow when it comes to dungeons, it is one directional. Though you have open ended exploration still available. Games are getting simpler (Content wise) not more open, and personally I dislike it, I want to pick my own story, otherwise I would read a book. No game should be completable in less than a week of straight fanatical play, and even if you can complete it, you should have other options, choices, ways to do things. So far Bethesda appears to be the only company holding up such great standards in game design with Fallout and Elder Scroll.
Soap box, what soap box?

Far Cry 2 Map is incorrect, it only shows half the map.

Oh, so daggerfall is randomly generated. My bad. Sorry. Waste of comment.

The Test drive unlimited map is larger than the Just Cause 2 map, and too many people were saying that Just Cause 2 is the biggest.
That one comment above saying that all of GTA 3 could fit in a few city blocks of burnout paradise, Thanks for saying that. I wouldn’t have thought of it. It’s definitely not that big.

To clear up about Daggerfall. It was really that big. I was trying to see how much it takes to reach from one pixel on the map to the next running with the horse and iirc it took me 10 minutes! I have heard that someone from the dev or testing team said they tried to walk from one side of the map to the other and it took 2 weeks.

But of course the outside was procedurally generated as other people said and I want to add it was weak (but fair for the times). You were seeing a slightly elevated heightmap with polygons, lost in fog. Sometimes if you reached parts of the map where there are supposed to be mountains, the elevation was more rough, texture change to something rocky, but you couldn’t go up and look back and stare the world. There was fog. So there was the same heightmap polygon renderer with fog changing elevation. So, yes you could walk for days on this to reach another far point but it was plain and boring. Unlike Oblivion or Skyrim where the open world is designed at most parts by level designers (only the enemies/loot might be a bit more random) so you have a smaller world than daggerfall but something you would like to walk on foot or on your horse instead of travelling directly from map.

Still Daggerfall felt like a huge world. You clicked on the map, you ticked/unticked cities/dungeons/graveyards/villages and you saw for each of them hundreds of little dots. Hundreds of villages, dungeons, sacred places. I am not sure if dungeons where generated, the enemies were random but there were 5-6 or more prototype dungeons or rooms you would feel like a deja vu, some dungeons where like others with some rooms removed/changed, so there was a procedural mixed of several dungeon with elements taken from those 5-6 prototype dungeons.

Daggerfall was impressive. There was this huge world in 1996 with day/night changes, huge worlds, you went into the town and every person had his own name (procedural and you found the same name randomly in another place), you asked him for directions to an inn and there were 6 inns in the city, the dark dragon, the lost beef, the blue gem, etc. In your typical rpg, there is one armory, one weapon maker, one inn, but in daggerfall you saw a big city with maybe 200 buildings and you had to check different weaponsmiths to see who is cheaper or has what you want. Insane! Interesting is that all these parallels in scenario like going to the dark brotherhood, joining the thiefs guild, bitten by werewolf, joining guilds, the strange cult, reading books, buying a house, doing side quests, etc, all complex stuff you see in Oblivion and Skyrim gameplay were always there on Daggerfall (and some were there in Arena too with it’s improved wolfenstein 3d style engine). Pitty the game was full of bugs 😛

I am wondering now how big Arena was and why we don’t have info about this..