Open worlds have grown from modest sandboxes into digital landmasses that rival countries, planets, and even galaxies. For players who love to roam, open-world games with the largest maps promise hundreds of hours of exploration, experimentation, and quiet wandering between missions.
Measuring the largest open world game maps is not simple. Developers use different engines, projections, and tricks. Communities walk across maps, overlay them on Google Earth, and crunch estimates in square miles or square kilometres. Some games simulate entire planets. Others generate universes that no one will ever fully see.
This guide brings those efforts together. It looks at 20 huge open-world games with the largest maps ever made, from near-infinite procedural sandboxes to carefully designed RPG continents. Exact numbers vary, but each game here offers a world so large that most players will never reach every corner.
How We Looked at Open-world Games with the Largest Maps
Why do map size figures vary
Before comparing the largest open-world game maps, it helps to accept that the numbers are approximate.
Some figures come directly from developers or promotional material that quote square miles or kilometres. Other numbers come from fans who measure walking time, count tiles, or overlay game maps on real-world grids. Different methods often produce slightly different results, especially when a game mixes land, sea, and vertical layers.
There is also the question of what counts as “playable area”. In some games, large bodies of water or sky technically belong to the map but contain little to do. In others, dungeon instances or instanced islands sit outside the measured overworld. Those choices can push estimates up or down by a surprising margin.
What counts as “open world” in this list
For this article, an open world is a space where you can travel freely across a large continuous area, with minimal loading screens and few hard boundaries. That definition comfortably fits sprawling RPGs, MMOs, survival sandboxes, racing games, and tactical simulations.
It also covers more unusual cases. A flight simulator that lets you fly anywhere on Earth is, in practice, one of the largest open-world maps ever made, even if its core gameplay differs from a story-driven RPG. Space games that simulate galaxies go further, treating the “map” as astronomical space rather than a fixed continent.
With those caveats in mind, here are 20 open-world games with the largest maps ever made.
Galaxy-Scale & “Infinite” Open-World Games With the Largest Maps
These games stretch the idea of a map to the edge of imagination. Their universes are so large that terms like square miles stop being useful.
No Man’s Sky – a near-infinite procedural universe
No Man’s Sky is often the first game mentioned when people talk about the biggest open-world maps. Its universe uses procedural generation to create around 18 quintillion planets. That number is so large that, even if players visited planets continuously, the majority of the universe would remain untouched.
The map is not measured in traditional area but in combinations of biomes, atmospheres, and orbits. Travel times between systems rely on warp drives and black holes rather than fast travel menus. In practice, every player’s personal slice of the universe feels unique, even though it all comes from the same underlying rules.
No Man’s Sky shows one extreme of open-world design: a focus on boundlessness rather than density.
Elite Dangerous – a 1:1 Milky Way sandbox
Elite Dangerous takes a similar approach but grounds itself more firmly in astronomy. Its map models the Milky Way at a 1:1 scale, with roughly 400 billion star systems. Players start in a small corner of human space, then fan out along the galactic arms on long-haul expeditions that can last weeks of real time.
Here, “map size” reflects real distances. Crossing the bubble of settled space alone can take dozens of jumps. Crossing the galaxy, even with efficient routes, becomes a major personal project. Explorers gather data for the in-game cartography database, and their names appear on systems they discover first.
Elite Dangerous reminds us that the largest open-world game maps do not always rely on landmass. Space itself can serve as the open world.
Minecraft – a blocky world bigger than Earth
Minecraft looks simple, but its world size is absurd. A standard Java world uses a square “world border” about 60 million blocks across, with the border sitting roughly 30 million blocks from the centre in each direction. When you convert that grid into real-world surface area, you get an effective world size of roughly 3.6 billion km², around seven times the surface area of Earth.
In practice, no player travels that far without technical tricks. Long before the border, terrain glitches, coordinate precision issues, and performance become challenges. But from the player’s perspective, the overworld feels effectively infinite. You can walk in one direction for hours and still find new biomes, villages, and structures.
Minecraft proves that a stylised world can still belong in any conversation about open-world games with the largest maps.
Planet-Sized Simulation Maps
Some games do not just approximate a large region. They simulate the real planet.
Microsoft Flight Simulator – the Earth as an open world
Modern versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator treat Earth itself as the map. The game combines global elevation data, satellite imagery, and procedural generation to recreate continents, oceans, and cities at a 1:1 scale. Articles on the game often describe the map as covering around 196 million square miles of terrain.
Players can take off from remote airstrips, land at major hubs, or hand-fly around their own neighbourhoods. The entire planet is flyable, from polar caps to dense metropolitan skylines. Cloud streaming and AI help fill in building details where raw imagery is limited.
Flight Simulator demonstrates another side of the largest open world maps ever made. It trades dense micro-detail at ground level for breadth, altitude, and realism at flight scale.
7Classic RPGs and MMOs With Colossal Maps
These games stick closer to traditional character-driven exploration but still push map scale far beyond most story-driven titles.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall – the biggest classic RPG map
Long before modern open worlds, Daggerfall set an enduring benchmark. Guinness World Records cites its playable area at around 188,000 square miles, while fan calculations often land near 161,600 km². Either way, it’s a version of High Rock and Hammerfell that dwarfs later Elder Scrolls games.
The world mixes handcrafted locations, like towns and main dungeons, with procedurally generated wilderness. Villages, crypts, and keeps scatter across the map, and travel carriage menus help you cross huge distances. The result feels more like a digital province map than a tightly curated world.
Daggerfall shows how much scale developers extracted from modest hardware, and it still stands as one of the largest open-world game maps in a single-player RPG.
Atlas – a sprawling pirate atlas of seas and islands
Atlas focuses on seafaring survival rather than a linear story, but its world is huge. The ocean is laid out on a grid of square regions. Community and blog estimates, based on grid size and in-game distances, often place the full map at around 45,000 km².
Much of that surface is water, but that fits the theme. Islands host resources, bases, and creatures, while the sea itself holds storms, ship battles, and trade routes. The feeling of scale comes from long ocean crossings and the knowledge that dozens of islands remain unexplored beyond the horizon.
Atlas stands out as one of the biggest nautical sandboxes, where open water is the open world.
Black Desert Online – a dense, continent-spanning MMO
Black Desert Online often appears in discussions about the biggest open world maps. Some analysis pieces quote a figure close to 398,858 km² when counting its landmass and seas. That number is debated, but no-one disputes that the map is enormous.
What makes Black Desert interesting is its density. Cities, farms, outposts, and grind spots fill the world at short intervals. Instead of crossing empty terrain, you move through a chain of points of interest. Long caravan routes and horse travel emphasise distance, but the game rarely leaves you without something to do along the way.
It is a reminder that “largest” can mean both total area and how much it asks you to cross.
Guild Wars Nightfall – the vast continent of Elona
When people list huge open-world games, Guild Wars Nightfall quietly appears near the top. Several map-comparison articles put its continent of Elona at around 15,000 square miles. The game divides that space into explorable regions separated by outposts and loading, but the combined playable area is striking for its time.
Elona is also varied. Deserts give way to coasts, savannahs, and jungle regions, with mission hubs woven through the landscape. Quests and co-op missions take you back and forth across the continent rather than funnel you down a single route.
Nightfall shows how older MMOs used size to support co-op play and replayability.
World of Warcraft – Azeroth after years of expansions
World of Warcraft has changed so much over its lifetime that no single map figure tells the whole story. Measurements of Azeroth’s explorable land usually range from just over 100 km² to several times that when multiple continents and later expansions are included.
What matters most is how that space grew. New continents, revamps, and side realms added zones over many years. Flight, portals, and later faster mounts helped the game keep travel tolerable across a larger and larger world.
WoW demonstrates a different path to becoming one of the largest open-world maps ever made: steady, incremental expansion.
Xenoblade Chronicles X – a vast JRPG wilderness
Xenoblade Chronicles X occupies a special niche. Guinness records and media coverage cite a playable area of about 154 square miles, or roughly 400 km², on the planet Mira. For a single JRPG, that is huge.
The game layers this space vertically, with towering cliffs, floating islands, and deep valleys. Later, the Skell mechs let players fly, turning previously distant vistas into reachable places. That shift in mobility makes the world feel even larger because you revisit familiar spaces from new angles.
Xenoblade Chronicles X proves that JRPGs can compete with Western RPGs and MMOs on raw map size.
Tactical and Survival Worlds Built for Distance
Military and tactical games often need large maps so vehicles, combined-arms battles, and long sightlines can work properly.
Arma 3 (Altis) – a 270 km² military sandbox
Altis, Arma 3’s main terrain, is consistently described in documentation and community analysis as covering about 268–270 km². It represents a scaled version of a Mediterranean island, complete with towns, airfields, and rugged hills.
What sets Altis apart is its intent. Every kilometre exists to support combined-arms operations. Small squads can fight in villages while jets and artillery operate kilometres away. Long drives across the island are common. For mission editors, that space is a playground for everything from small raids to persistent war campaigns.
Altis shows how a large open-world map can underpin simulation rather than story progression.
Ghost Recon Wildlands – Bolivia scaled into a huge tactical map
Ghost Recon Wildlands transplants its tactical stealth-action into a fictionalised version of Bolivia. Map analysis and developer commentary place the map at around 400 km², sliced into 21 provinces with their own cartel bosses.
The world mixes farmland, jungle, salt flats, and mountain passes. Helicopters and off-road vehicles make the scale manageable, but players soon realise how far they travel between targets. Long flights across the map highlight just how big the space is, especially when you spot old mission sites from the air.
Wildlands balances size with systemic stealth gameplay, proving that tactical shooters can belong in any list of huge open-world games.
Racing Across the Biggest Open World Game Maps
For driving games, the map size directly affects how long a road trip feels.
Fuel – record-breaking console racing wasteland
Fuel is one of the clearest cases where a figure speaks for itself. Articles and Guinness references credit its open world with an area of about 14,400 km², or roughly 5,560 square miles. For a console racer, that is staggering.
The world represents a post-apocalyptic slice of the United States, stitched together into deserts, forests, and mountains. You can drive for long stretches without hitting a loading screen, and the day-night cycle and weather add variety. Critics argued that the world sometimes felt empty, but as an engineering feat, it remains remarkable.
Fuel stands as a pure expression of the “bigger is better” philosophy in racing design.
The Crew and The Crew 2 – a compressed United States
Ubisoft’s The Crew series compresses the continental United States into a drivable playground. Analyses of its map size often land in the 5,000–7,000 km² range, which translates to roughly 1,900–2,700 square miles.
Major cities sit at realistic positions, linked by highways, back roads, and off-road tracks. A coast-to-coast drive can take close to an hour in real time, depending on route, car, and driving style. That single journey gives a clear sense of just how large the world is.
The Crew shows how you can build one of the largest open-world game maps without relying on procedural galaxies.
Blockbuster Open-World Games With Surprisingly Large Maps
These are the names most players know. They combine high production values with maps big enough to count among the genre’s giants.
Just Cause 3 – roughly 400 square miles of chaos
Just Cause 3’s Mediterranean nation of Medici is frequently quoted at about 400 square miles. Much of that space is water, but the game makes use of it with naval bases, bridges, and island outposts.
What makes the map feel huge is the traversal. Rico’s wingsuit, grappling hook, and parachute let you glide across mountains, dive into valleys, and zip between villages at speed. Explosions and chaos follow you, but there are also quiet moments crossing the countryside at sunset.
Just Cause 3 uses size not for subtlety, but for spectacular stunts.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – a 90.7 square mile Greek playground
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey offers one of the biggest open-world maps in the series. Analyses place its world at around 90.7 square miles, or roughly 235 km², including sea. On the surface, that is a compressed version of ancient Greece, but in practice, it feels enormous.
Islands, peninsulas, and open water ensure constant vistas. Naval travel matters as much as land exploration. The main story, side quests, mercenaries, and conquest battles send you criss-crossing the Aegean. Fast travel helps, but many players still spend long sessions sailing between objectives.
Odyssey illustrates how sea and land together can make an open world feel even larger.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – an 88 square mile fantasy realm
The Witcher 3 rarely gets introduced as a “map size” game, yet combined estimates for its regions often land around 88 square miles. That includes the swamps and war-torn villages of Velen, the city of Novigrad, the Skellige Isles, and side areas.
What matters here is not just the area but how much story density the world packs in. Witcher contracts, regional plotlines, and character-driven quests ensure that long rides between locations rarely feel like filler. You remember journeys because of what happens along the way, not just how far you travel.
Witcher 3 proves that a game can belong in a list of the largest open-world maps ever made while still prioritising narrative and choice.
Grand Theft Auto V – Los Santos, sea, and desert
Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos region continues to anchor many comparisons. Map projects commonly quote around 31 square miles of land, with more area if you include the surrounding sea. That makes it smaller than some entries above, but large for a city-focused open world.
GTA V’s trick is density and variety. Urban sprawl, mountain ranges, desert, and shoreline blend into a seamless space. Highways link every corner, and you can cross the entire map in a single stolen car, but side activities and random events stretch those journeys out.
The result is an open world that feels both large and lived-in.
Red Dead Redemption 2 – a frontier the size of a small country
Estimates of Red Dead Redemption 2’s map usually fall between 29 and roughly 37.5 square miles, depending on how boundaries are drawn. On paper, that is smaller than some MMOs or racers here. In practice, the slower pace and density of detail make it feel much larger.
RDR2’s American frontier mixes mountains, plains, swamps, and frontier towns. Horses, not cars, set the default travel speed. Wildlife, dynamic encounters, and random events fill the gaps between scripted missions. Long rides at dusk become part of the experience rather than dead time.
The game shows how perceived size can exceed whatever number you put on a map.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – sprawling Hyrule
Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule is often measured at around 23.5 square miles. That makes it smaller than some of the largest open-world game maps, yet it still deserves a place in this discussion.
The reason is how it uses space. Every hill, ridge, and ruin invites climbing. Shrines, Korok puzzles, and enemy camps pepper the landscape, giving you a reason to stop every few minutes. The game hands you climbing, gliding, and chemistry-based systems early, then trusts you to decide where to go.
Breath of the Wild exemplifies a key lesson of open-world design: size matters, but how you fill it matters more.
Conclusion: What “Biggest” Really Means in Open-World Games
Looking across these 20 open-world games with the largest maps, one message stands out: scale has many faces.
Procedural games like No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous chase near-infinite breadth. Planet-scale simulations such as Microsoft Flight Simulator turn the real Earth into a navigable playground. Classic RPGs and MMOs, from Daggerfall to Black Desert Online, stretch continents into huge exploration spaces. Tactical sims, racers, and blockbuster action games blend large worlds with specific traversal fantasies.
Raw map size, expressed in square miles or kilometres, is only part of the story. Travel speed, verticality, density of content, and how often a game asks you to cross its world all shape how “big” it feels. A dense 30-square-mile frontier in Red Dead Redemption 2 can feel larger than a sparse 400-square-mile island. A well-designed 90-square-mile Greek archipelago can deliver more memorable journeys than an abstract galaxy.
