Assassin’s Creed maps have been getting larger ever since the franchise shifted toward open-world RPGs following the release of Origins. It's been previously reported that Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey weighed in at a whopping 230 km², but Ubisoft’s own developers have confirmed that the most recent addition to the series, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, is even larger.
Players can and have estimated map sizes when developers don’t advertise the exact dimensions. One of the most common ways is by assuming the height of a player model and seeing how long it takes to walk from one end of the map to the other. A bit of simple algebra later, and you’ve got a map’s approximate dimensions. Read on to explore some of the gaming world’s largest creations.
Updated on July 11, 2022 by Ritwik Mitra: Assassin's Creed has gone through a drastic overhaul after the release of Syndicate. Ubisoft realized that the series needed to freshen up to be more accessible in modern times, and the success of The Witcher 3 prompted the studio to emulate what made CD Project Red's game so successful while combining it with the familiar and beloved Assassin's Creed gameplay. This resulted in the studio forming some truly massive maps for their games, with Valhalla boasting the biggest size of the lot. Here are some other games that are bigger than the latest chapter in the Assassin's Creed series.
15 The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall
The second game in The Elder Scrolls series was a massive step in the right direction. Featuring better controls, a cohesive story, and one of the biggest open worlds in gaming history, Daggerfall is a game that set the foundations for games like Morrowind and Skyrim to be a massive success across the board.
Daggerfall's world is a whopping 209,331 km², but there's a catch here. The map was actually procedurally generated in several places, leading to vast stretches of empty and boring landscapes that are a chore to travel through.
14 Final Fantasy 15
Final Fantasy 15 needed a few more years in the oven to finally be complete, but the product that was released was pretty great in its own right. A big part of what sold Final Fantasy 15 was its vast and beautiful open world.
That being said, a lot of Final Fantasy 15's landscapes don't really feature a lot to do aside from hunting down monsters and finding campsites. This leads to a ton of wasted potential when it comes to the massive 1800 km² map.
13 Burnout Paradise
Racing games that adopt an open-world format are bound to have massive worlds. This is imperative to ensure that players can explore to their heart's content without feeling limited by the confines of this game world.
Burnout Paradise is one of the most beloved racing games of all time, with its vast open world contributing to this notion. Speeding around and wrecking cars in this massive sandbox is a blast every single time.
12 Xenoblade Chronicles X
Xenoblade Chronicles X is one of the best games in a series that has absolutely taken off since its advent on the Switch. This prequel fleshes out the world and lore quite a bit, with a story that will captivate any fan of great JRPGs.
Xenoblade Chronicles X features a massive map that will take players eons to explore. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that this game is easily the biggest single-player game on the Switch in terms of sheer landmass.
11 The Crew
Another racing game makes its way on the list in the form of The Crew. Ubisoft's attempt at a sandbox open-world game has proven to be quite successful, with many fans absolutely loving what The Crew brings to the table.
With a map of almost 1900 km², it's easy to see why The Crew is such a fun game to explore. Using high-speed cars to roam the map of the US is a blast every single time.
10 Ghost Recon: Wildlands
Tom Clancy’sGhost Recon: Wildlands takes place in a fictional Bolivia during the near future. Ruled by drug cartels, players can team up in 3-person co-op to bring some semblance of justice to Wildlands’ lawless landscape.
The game world itself is massive by any open-world standards: at 273 km² it’s larger even than its successor Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. A sandbox game with loads to do, Wildlands feels like a lived-in world thanks to its massive map size, but its hordes of narco enemies ensure players are always occupied. And if players ever do get bored of this enormous world, there are tons of great mods out there, too.
9 The Lord Of The Rings Online
One does not simply walk into Mordor — unless of course, you’re playing The Lord of the Rings Online. Released in 2007, this LOTR MMO might look and feel a little dated (so much so that developers considered a facelift for the game in 2020), but its faithfully recreated version of Middle-Earth feels alive and brimming with locations that never made it into Peter Jackson’s trilogies.
Conservative estimates place the LOTRO game world at somewhere around 410 km² (larger than World of Warcraft), although the game has seen several updates since that figure was calculated. There are more regions to visit besides the traditional path of the Fellowship, too. In 2019, a Hobbit named Lil of Laurelin walked for 14 hours straight, journeying from the Ice Bay of Forochel in the far north down to Gondor, before turning north-east and walking all the way past Mirkwood, Lothlorien, and Erebor.
8 True Crime: Streets Of LA
Released nearly 20 years ago in 2003, True Crime: Streets of LA features the real-life city of Los Angeles as a playable area. The map stretches from the Pacific Coast Highway in the west all the way to the LA River in the east. Players can drive through iconic neighborhoods like Venice, Hollywood, Koreatown, and Los Feliz as they embark on a crusade against LA’s organized crime.
LA is a massive place in real life, and the game — as old as it is — recreates a huge part of it, even including the neighboring city of Santa Monica. At 622 km², this version of the City of Angels even beats out GTA 5’s Southern San Andreas map.
7 Just Cause 3
Set on the sunny Mediterranean island of Medici, Just Cause 3 features one of the largest land-based game worlds in existence. Weighing in at an astounding 2,000 km², it makes Skyrim look like a child’s plaything. To the doubters, keep in mind that Just Cause features drivable vehicles, giving players the sensation that they’re in a much smaller location than they truly are.
With all this space comes a lot to do: players — making use of an array of high-tech gadgets and weapons of mass destruction — can partake in the game’s riveting story, or they can simply embrace the action-adventure genre and start blowing stuff up.
6 Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
Back with a vengeance, Microsoft Flight Simulator is about as real as it gets for everyday flight enthusiasts. Featuring a 1:1 replica of the Earth, the game world in Flight Simulator matches the real world’s surface area: 510 million km². With loads of different aircraft to try out, players can experience the world of flying in countless ways.
And thanks to the powers of photogrammetry — the same technology DICE used to make photorealistic environmental assets for Star Wars: Battlefront — Flight Simulator actually mirrors reality. Real-world buildings in some of the planet's most iconic cities are rendered in exactly the same places as they are in real-life, making Flight Simulator’s game world not just large, but accurate and detailed.
5 Minecraft
Sure, the blocky, low-poly world of Minecraft doesn’t look like much to the uninitiated. But try walking in one direction for any significant amount of time, and you’ll be amazed at the fact that you still can’t see the edge of the world. Minecraft measures 900 million km², and that doesn’t even take into account the fact that players can tunnel and build in three dimensions. In case you missed it, that’s larger than the surface area of the Earth!
Despite its simplicity, the game continues to offer a massive sandbox environment for just about anything. It’s no wonder even universities are turning to Minecraft to host student events.
4 Star Citizen
And just like that, we leave the bounds of dry land behind, venturing into that final frontier: space. Star Citizen, despite entering early access in 2013, is yet to be finished. But despite the lengthy development time, it can’t be denied that the universe of Star Citizen is and will be massive, even if only a handful of planets and space stations are actually highly detailed.
Thanks to next-generation procedural landscaping tools, Star Citizen’s planets are fully explorable, even if they feel a little desolate. Claiming to have at least 100 planetary systems in the works, the space sim already has a linear distance of 52 million km between just two planets.
3 EVE Online
An MMO unlike any other, EVE Online continues to attract players to this day. Its hardcore playerbase, combined with its intricate economy and massive explorable universe, makes it stand out in the crowded realm of space games. With 8,000 star systems out there, it’s no surprise that EVE also holds a Guinness World Record for the costliest battle in a video game: in one 24-hour period, $378,012 worth of ships were destroyed during the Massacre at M2-XFE.
With a total area of 11,126,487.6 Astronomical Units² (AU) — or in other words, 249 sextillion km² — the playable universe of EVE Online earns its place in the halls of greatness when it comes to sheer size. EVE’s community seems to also have a heart as big as the game’s galaxies: players have contributed the equivalent of 330 years’ worth of COVID-19 research during the pandemic.
2 Elite Dangerous
With 400 billion star systems to discover, Elite Dangerous has hands down one of the largest game worlds ever created. Somewhat unsurprisingly, according to the developers, only 0.028% of the game’s star systems have been discovered. Boasting an immersive in-game economy, crafting system, and a diverse range of starships, Elite Dangerous is large in so many more ways than its playable space alone.
Spun off from the original Elite video game from 1984, Dangerous has courageously continued to iterate upon already-thrilling gameplay. Its most recent paid update, Odyssey, features a huge shift from the original game’s ship-only gameplay to boots-on-the-ground action.
1 No Man’s Sky
It’s hard to beat Elite Dangerous when it comes to sheer scale, but No Man’s Sky manages to do just that. Barely edging out its space exploration competitor, No Man’s Sky features 255 galaxies to explore, each of which contains hundreds of star systems, which then contain multiple planets. Fancy a trip to each and every planet in the game? Good luck, completionists, because it will take you roughly 600 billion years on a good day.
Like its other space-themed rivals, No Man’s Sky makes prolific use of procedural generation to make the monumental task of building an entire universe even remotely possible as an indie studio. With work ongoing for future free expansions, the universe can only get bigger. It sure seems that for No Man’s Sky, the horizons are limitless.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.