Why The Regular Game Map Comparison No Longer Makes Any Sense

Video game map sizes! How much do they really matter? What we've prepared for you over the next couple of sections is a game map comparison like you haven't seen before: combining facts and subjective takes (sourced from the community and from the games' actual content) to come up with a concrete idea of whether video game maps have finally reached the point where game world size isn't the be-all-end-all that it once was.

We did betray the gist of the article in the title; we'll give you that. The simple fact of the matter is that the biggest open-world games aren't necessarily the greatest open-world games nowadays, though. As we throw our proverbial hat into the ring of open-world game discussions, however, we believe you'll find our point fairly compelling, too.

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The Most Important Feature of Open-World Games

Open-world games bank much of their appeal on their game world. Featuring rich, expansive overworlds, beautiful day and night cycles, and (preferably) an open-world gameplay loop satisfying enough to keep players entertained, any given open-world game needs to juggle a fair bit of features at any given time.

It doesn't always pan out, of course.

For every Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, there's a poorly executed title to match—or, rather, several of those. When the creation of big, sprawling open-world games became relatively cheap, the race to create the biggest game maps reached its absolute apex. As we now know, however, map size isn't the only thing that matters.

Video Game Levels Became Video Game Worlds

The gaming industry has come a very long way from the days of small-scale gaming experiences. Note that we're not against linear games. Quite the opposite, as we've posited the boons of small, contained video games many times over the past few years. They serve a different purpose, however.

Specifically, depending on the given game, the purpose of a level might be entirely different. Whereas open-world maps are supposed to let players loose to explore and revel in emergent gameplay, a fixed and linear level is instead supposed to funnel the player into a specifically produced and designed experience.

There's a clear distinction between the two takes on game design, then. Open-world games often let players make their own fun however they see fit, while linear games deliver a more curated experience. These two can sometimes coexist as part of a single game, but it's usually better if devs focus on one over the other. Usually.

Grand Theft Auto Popularized the Concept, Others Followed Suit

One might argue that, even though open-world games weren't much of a novel concept at the time, it wasn't until Rockstar Games pushed ahead with Grand Theft Auto 3 and beyond that the size of a game's map became a key selling point.

It did take a while for the concept to... well, take. Partially because developing open-world tech took a long while for it to become mainstream, but also partially because creating an open-world game took a prohibitively long time back in the day. By the time we were in the mid-2010s, though, it certainly felt like every other new AAA release was - you've guessed it - open-world.

By the 2020s, a huge number of modern games are still open-world ordeals, though there's been a bit of a shift around the gamers' thoughts on them. Notably, whereas it once would've been downright unthinkable to say that a game was too big, this is now a common complaint about Ubisoft's seminal ARPGs. The obvious conclusion is that gamers want something manageable, and that's where the video game industry's chase after the biggest game maps finally fell flat on its face.

Why A Game Map Comparison No Longer Makes Sense

One thing worth pointing out is that one of Bethesda Game Studios' oldest open-world games, Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, is one of the biggest games ever. Even today, yes, and even if we consider all the advances in map size rendering the video game industry has made since. Don't believe us? Daggerfall is so much bigger than Skyrim that it's not even funny! Yet, it doesn't take a genius to conclude which of the two titles is the superior game.

From Daggerfall we went over to Grand Theft Auto games, then off to chase the map-size carrot for literal years, and now we're back to focusing on game features and sheer quality, rather than just making bigger and bigger and bigger game world instances.

As Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall had shown decades ago, the size of a given open-world map isn't even nearly as important as the quality of its execution. Even though Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is absolutely immense, other open-world games do some things better than it did, and purely because their open-world map was smaller and therefore easier to carve into something special.

Video Game Maps Reflect Key Design Choices

There's an extra layer of complexity to consider when discussing the video game industry's obsession with open-world maps. Specifically, the given open-world environment needs to make sense in the context of the given game. There's no point in developing massive maps roughly the size of a whole country for a simple ARPG, like Final Fantasy for example. Or for a game like Metal Gear Solid, for that matter.

For something like the Microsoft Flight Simulator or - heavens - No Man's Sky, the only way to make these games make sense in the first place is to overbuild their explorable areas. Or, heck, emulate them 1:1 with the real world. The important takeaway is that your average Grand Theft Auto or other games dealing with similar topics do not need such large map-size instances. There's simply no need! As long as the developer (and the gamers themselves!) can identify where the need for such an immense open-world map exists, they can produce a stellar video game that doesn't overstep its own boundaries.

Space Exploration Games vs Local Exploration Games

Finally, though we did touch upon the absolutely incredible extreme in the video game industry that is No Man's Sky, which emulates an entire universe, there's a more nuanced example to consider, too.

Starfield's 1,000 explorable planets are where it's at. We've truly come full circle from the likes of Bethesda's Daggerfall, and the only thing left to see is what the studio has learned since 1996. This will be a truly immense video game that goes beyond what any single map size could encompass, with planets upon planets to explore over and over again.

The big question, of course, is whether we'll be sorting Starfield into the ole 'too big' bin, or if it'll have earned its rightful place next to Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and - yes - the Microsoft Flight Simulator, justifying the size of its world. Come September, we'll find out for ourselves!

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