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« Last post by Cyartog959 on October 21, 2025, 03:01:21 am »
Mappers of the VGMaps community, I got a good challenge in mind about keeping track of open world games' maps' sizes and comparing them, from smallest to the biggest maps yet.
In open-world games, mainly 3D, they comprise of singular, vast landscapes that are sort of like playgrounds, mere sandboxes for people to roam about and explore, but they provide loads of missions, secrets, and loads and loads of optional tasks to take on.
What people take in charting their maps, they calculate by square miles, or alternatively, square kilometers, and they center on how far they've explored, and how far can anyone go.
As far as many know, we had not many open world games, because many games were platformers, and others different, but we also had hardware that limited scope, size, and scale of said maps, mainly is that to those working on games, they didn't had much RAM memory and strong CPUs to work with. Time went on and we were able to have it. The question is, how would people utilize all the increased RAM and CPU processing power to create more massive maps in open world games?
The more prominent game series that propelled the open world genre to elevation is the Grand Theft Auto series, likely GTA III. Mature as they are, they do provide vast landscapes for freedom of exploration, though they do have stories to progress through in order to unlock particular methods of traveling, and later abilities to reach other places.
Later games gave out more bigger maps to explore and more missions to undertake, but other than that, people do have their fun ideas on experimenting with traveling to heights normally deemed impossible by normal means of playing these games. I also think others like to see how long their playable characters can fall from extreme heights before they go splat out of boredom.
Of course, there are many other games that follow the open world blueprint, including others that had the maturity toned down to broaden to slightly younger people, but how they make their maps' sizes can be less than those, but there are those trying to come close to matching them, or even surpassing them, even if its not a GTA game.
On top of all that, so far, there's no patch update and DLC that expands any existing open world game's maps by adding extra land mass outside of regular borders. I don't know of any game that did it, but until there's one, I don't think I can count them. Of course, it would be interesting to see any open world game to do it...
So, I simply issue our challenge to keep a collective track of any open-world game that have the biggest maps yet.
I do have a couple inputs in mind, in order from biggest to smallest...
1. - Grand Theft Auto V (75.84 sq km/29.28 sq miles)
2. - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (38.2 sq km/14.75 sq miles)
3. - Grand Theft Auto IV (16.14 sq km/6.23 sq miles)
4. - Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (9.11 sq km/3.52 sq miles)
5. - Grand Theft Auto III (8.12 sq km/3.14 sq miles)
I can't place in GTA VI's map size, but I can say it's going to be bigger than GTA V's.
The many 3D Spider-Man games, on the other hand, all do tend to take place in New York, but how their differing sizes between them besides them sharing New York's layout is puzzling me.
If anyone has their own input, please go ahead. I welcome the effort. Show us what you can find as the biggest open world map yet.
ADVISORY: Flight simulations, sandbox only games, life simulation games, MMOs and such, cannot count to this.
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