Game worlds have grown a whole lot, this image proves it

Remember when Grand Theft Auto III came out and we were all amazed by how huge the city was? Now it looks like the kind of thing a girl couldn't help but laugh at if it was whipped out in front of her.

[Sunny_D]

Holy crap! But wait, are they just looking at the maps themselves or is the distance much larger than before?

[Christopher]

Interesting graphic, though I wouldn't include driving games since they don't utilize the whole map like the other games listed.

[ProjectVulcan]

I believe they are classing them as the claims of distances and thus area, but distance as measured by the game or spoken by the developer. I dont think its inch perfect accurate to be honest but it does seem reasonably representative.

The size of the map is surely relative to the speed a player is capable of crossing it i suppose, oblivion for example you have to walk or ride everywhere until you have discovered the locations before you can fast travel, which makes the game much like fallout 3, proportionately larger than some GTA games which employ aircraft which can traverse the entire map span inside two minutes or so.

Burnout for me also seemed a little smaller than some of these large games because again you seem able to cross the map pretty quickly. Its no surprise to me however about just cause 2. Even in a jet fighter, it can take four or five minutes to cross the game world! Attack helicopters feel slow, such is the scale....

[FarEastOrient]

I remember when gaming maps could fit on a sheet of paper while I was playing them. Now games like Fallout 3, GTA IV, and Far Cry are so big I'm always happy to buy the guide just so I can stare at a map.

[hay]

Funny, title says that game worlds have grown but still biggest game mentioned is the oldest...

[ThaOutKast]

The biggest map on there is from Just Cause 2 which came a couple of months ago. How is that the oldest game on there?

*EDIT*
Never mind I didn't notice the list of other games on the side of the pic, I apologize.

[xc7x]

and it was online with up to 200 players

[mrv321]

Star Control 2... has a really large map. It's actually really scary when you zoom out.

http://www.abandonia.com/fi...

Fuel apparently had a large map also.

[Brewski007]

Love just cause , its just soooo huge. Sometimes though i find its too big. But its not a complaint, i think its just generally being lazy on my part, thankfully i can use the extraction command they give lol.

[Government Cheese]

I agree... without the extraction feature, JC2 would take forever to beat lol.

[STK026]

but, if the elder scrolls 2 is the biggest one listed, doesn't that actually mean that games are not bigger than they used to be?

[kaveti6616]

Elder Scrolls 2 was a bigger land area, but it didn't have as much content. Large open spaces and not enough NPCs.

[Kratos Spartan]

It's the biggest land size by far. Which is what this article is about. Not really sure what your point is about content kaveti.

[Kratos Spartan]

or the ones mentioned in the corner were just too big for this representation. I mean, over 60,000 square miles for Elder Scrolls? All the other maps would just be too small to even see in a graphic like this, if they spread that map out to show.

[kaveti6616]

It's not hard to render large open spaces and call your map the biggest game map there is. Obviously if the people who made this graphic were aiming to show the largest game maps without regard to content, then they would have shown Elder Scrolls 2's map in the picture instead of just mentioning it on the bottom right corner.

So my point is, the people who made the graphic are probably concerned about the amount of content, not just the map area.

[SuperStrokey1123]

What about sins? lol

[asdf12]

I wonder where RDR would fit on there........

[bjornbear]

judge for yourself....

looks pretty damn big to me...

[Sunny_D]

Holy Sh!t!

[Ghost_Sparta]

YES, amazing!

[drdistracto707]

keep in mind that that's only a third of the map too

[BannedForNineYears]

Seems like the scale is off.......
Compare Burnout Paradise with WoW....Driving up the part to the right only takes about 45 seconds with boost...
But if you take that same distances (in pixels on your screen) and compare it with WoW......You'd see Burnout being longer......But is that section really longer than in WoW? -_-

[NCAzrael]

Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this article was thrown together without any real thought or research (which seems to be the case for most articles on gaming sites). Basing the size on the dimensions given by the developers is not a reliable way to compare the size of multiple game worlds. The scale of the maps used to show size is all wrong.