A relative size comparison of game world maps - fascinating!

" Nice. Too bad so many of those huge game worlds are so bland, though. "

Nifty-cool.

Where would red dead redemption fall? Its supposed to be 3 times the size of Vice city. 

Anyone guess where to put Hyrule from Twilight Princess in these charts?

" DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN. "

I love stuff like this.

I thought GTA SA has a large ass map .
Now I know I'm wrong.

" I thought GTA SA has a large ass map . Now I know I'm wrong. "

Now change your avatar back :(  "

That's pretty insane. Cool post, man. Thanks for sharing.

I doubt this comparison is complete- once I built a Quake map that was as long as the technical limit would allow. There wasn't anything in it, but you could fall for hours before hitting the ground. Where's that on this list?

Seeing how big some of these game worlds are is absolutely amazing. But truth is, the size of the landscape isn't what matters; what you can do in it is.

Woah that is damn big, i underestimated the size of Daggerfall.

" @Kazona:  Just Cause 2 wins again. "

Fallout 3?  I imagine it's half the size of Just Cuz 2.

How big is the elder scrolls arena supposed to be? It covers all of Tamriel and at the back of the box it says 8 million km2.
Also don't forget games like frontier: elite 2 which covers a full galaxy, although i think this might be a comparison of only landmasses.

Here's two things I want to add:
 
First thing is the Burnout Paradise situation. I actually compared Burnout Paradise and the San Andreas and this is what I found: When viewing the image, I used the cursor for the magnifying glass as a scale. It perfectly matches the Wildcats Stadium, so I used the Wildcats Stadium as a scale as well. When I put the cursor over San Andreas, some 4 blocks of street covered that area. In Burnout, it takes literally 3 seconds to go across the Wildcats Stadium, even at slow speed. That must mean that the Burnout Paradise map isn't as big as people think it is. That, or the cars in Burnout are the equivalent of 20 CJs standing in a line. Burnout can't be that big, it must be at least half the size seen in that comparison.
 
Second thing is a PS2 game called Road Trip Adventure, produced in 2001 by a tiny developer called E-Game. The game map is huge for its time, however I never got around

Damn, I want an answer

Man, this stuff is pretty crazy, good post :)

Cool maps, makes me want to play Just Cause 2 even though I didn't like the demo :P

Shame that any town or village you visit, you are shot on sight.

" How big is the elder scrolls arena supposed to be? It covers all of Tamriel and at the back of the box it says 8 million km2. Also don't forget games like frontier: elite 2 which covers a full galaxy, although i think this might be a comparison of only landmasses. "

Man, I don't remember Nightfall being that big. How big was Morrowind in comparison?

The only place where this is discussed, and I still don't get a reply.... :S

" The only place where this is discussed, and I still don't get a reply.... :S "

Well the guy from Reddit who made it got it off a website, but there still should be a method. I've honestly been waiting for years to do this, and I've got pretty much everything ready although I don't know the method for performing it. Thanks for forwarding it though!

No response. Well does anybody know a website or person that knows how to realistically measure game maps.

Hmm. It seems the biggest challenge would be getting a basic scale for the world. If you have a speedometer in-game and a watch with a second hand, that'd be imprecise but a good place to start. Some games provide a waypoint with a distance indicator. JC2 does during missions, so it's possible to use that as a method of coming up with a decent scale. For games without an in-game metric, I think you'd just have to take a guess. I guess I'd start with a small distance estimate using something like the height of a human character (5-6', right?) and try to use that to guess the size of increasingly large landmarks until I could get something like the magnifying glass estimate mentioned above. All of these are super imprecise, but it should at least give you the order of magnitude, which is enough to make some comparisons. It's just about finding something inside of the world that can be accurately measured and build off of that to make larger assertions.

Or these crazy game artists could put a gosh darned scale on their maps.

I'm shocked at how small San Andreas is. 

I laughed at how small WoW is

Holy shit those are huge ass maps.

Pretty amazing. Unfortunately, those maps need to be filled, and they aren't usually filled very well. Quality > Quantity in this case.

I remember being bored as shit whilst driving in the San Andreas desert because it was "huge". Apparently it was minuscule. I think developers need to realize that we yearn for quality, not quantity.

" I'm shocked at how small San Andreas is.  "

" @one_2nd said:

" I'm shocked at how small San Andreas is.  "

I'm shocked at how big Just Cause 2 is. I haven't played it but damn. "

" @zAMERICANLIONz said:

" @one_2nd said:

" I'm shocked at how small San Andreas is.  "

I'm shocked at how big Just Cause 2 is. I haven't played it but damn. "

I'm not because I played it, but I played San Andreas and I remember it took about 5 minutes to get from one side of the map, to the other in a plane. I just figured it was a lot bigger.  "

Its crazy that a game from 1996 (elder scrolls 2) is the largest ever gamespace.

Not when you see how utterly lifeless the "world" is.

yeah daggerfalls world is so empty its not even funny. 
 
that said i don't believe nightfall the guildwars map is bigger then just cause 2... 
 
i mean like 70% of the map you can not walk on and is not even rendered. its not an open world map so.. seems kinda weird.

It doesn't seem correct that Burnout Paradise is larger than WoW. If you're taking RELATIVE size. It takes effin AGES to cross the WoW map on a ground mount but it barely takes 10 minutes to cruise across the Paradise map, surely.  It doesn't really make sense to compare the size if you don't take into account the means of transport at your disposal.

So much for san andreas feeling huge! lol.

Wait...shouldn't eve have the biggest map?

What about Minecraft? I know it's a little different to 'real' game worlds but Minecraft's map is almost endless.

@thebenultimatum: Visit this: http://htwins.net/scale2/

Scroll out until you see the earth and then scroll one further. There you can see the minecraft map :)