Game worlds are getting big. Like really, really big. Have you played Just Cause 2? That island is massive. In game world sizes it's practically a continent. Don't believe me? Well, I'll let someone else's photoshopping skills in the image below prove my point that I only made in the first place because I saw the image below.
courageousrobot over at Reddit got to thinking (possibly while attempting to run across Just Cause 2's entire map) and decided to compare some of gaming's biggest worlds by placing them over one another. As you can see game worlds have grown a bit, and by "a bit" I mean a very, very, very, very large amount.
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.
LAUNCH GALLERY (1 IMAGES)
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Contest:
10:00 PM on 05.08.2010 | 
And Arena, Elder Scrolls 1 is even bigger than that again.
But then there's Minecraft. When it's done and all is said the map will be 8 times the size of the earth or bigger depending on your computer.
THAT'S. WHAT SHE SAID.
Anyway game worlds that huge (like daggerfall) isn't a good thing, it just means more and more copy paste, Just Cause 2 was about the limit for me, and even that had some copy paste (the military bases)
I want a Superman game with loads of space to fly around in and good controls to do it with (and Supergirl or Power Girl or both as an unlock).
Size means little without a good sense of scope and design to go with it, though.
What bothers me is to get RPGs of a proper size and scope, I actually have to turn to the upcoming Wii RPGs, not the PS3 or 360 ones. Even Obliviou is smaller than Morrowind when all is said and done. The genre is waiting for HD to stop being a burden and start being an asset, it seems.
If Sony would give up lameshit policies like "uncompressed data" such games might be realized. Compression isn't a bad thing, but no compression seems good for marketing to morona.
I still look to San Andreas as the best example of how to do large map areas the right way. Sure, it may only be a fraction of the size of Just Cause 2's world, but every single nook and cranny of San Andreas felt like it was designed with a purpose. In Just Cause 2, there's maybe eight or nine "landmark" areas, and the rest is just copy-pasted filler with no real purpose, which means I have no absolutely no motivation to explore. With San Andreas, on the other hand, every single area I went to felt like it was a landmark, no matter how insignificant it actually was. I could spend time fucking around in the backyards of houses and it kept me engaged because no two backyards were the same.
I really don't like the sandbox environment much, it always turns out to be 25 percent content ad 75 percent filler or side-quest relted. For every city with things to do, there is some pointless 2500 collectable quest or a series of fetch quests to drag it down. Then I'm stuck wandering through this whole world wondering for basically no reason. Cool?
You have to take into account movement speed of your character, general scale of world objects, so on so forth. Even though Just Cause 2's city is bigger than Azeroth, I'd take a gander in saying that on foot it takes much longer to get from one tip of the island to another in WoW than it does in JC2. Also, take into consideration that JC2 is just one city on an island, whereas WoW is THREE FUCKING CONTINENTS AND ANOTHER PLANE OF EXISTENCE.
Also, what king kong five said.
Yeah, sorta. You never actually did anything but fast travel between locations, but it was technically that big. You could if you wanted to, manually walk everywhere. Obviously it would take forever though. And because the whole world sans landmark locations like towns, special dungions, etc was completely procedurally generated, there wasn't ever anything interesting if you chose to walk everywhere.
Awesome map.
its listed to the right under "even bigger"... that's where it is.
and gameplay did not look back at me
only emptiness
also burnout paradise shouldn't even count, 90% of the map wasn't explorable.
Your looking at someone who traversed the entire landscape of NYC for 200 landmark collectables and 75 hint collectables in Prototype. A few I got withvideo help but most was parkour fun.
Also I got all 300 plus blast shards in inFamous without any video help literally with a map of the city scratching off sections by section.
The real irony? I still haven't platinumed either game. Open world games are the ultimate punishment in tedium.
- For some great world maps see the Godfather and GUN
So there, supposing the scale is the same and that your Tauren shaman walks at the same speed as a real life human, walking from the Crystal Summit Observatory to the Wildcats Baseball Stadium would take you much more than 3 hours (because those cars in Burnout are way faster than a jeep)
maybe CONSOLE game worlds are getting slightly bigger.
Plus all the internal, underground, and portal worlds of Oblivion...
In fact, if you actually read the text on that image you will see that the largest game, Daggerfall, which was released in 1996 has the largest world with clocks in at 62,394 square miles. If I only use data from 10-20 games it would be extremely easy to show a trend of decreasing video game world sizes.
To also say that Just Cause 2's world is almost the size of a continent is beyond ignorant. Maybe you should do a little research first. Australia (the smallest continent on Earth) has a square mileage of 2,967,892. Ok, what number is smaller? 400 or 2,967,892.
I hate to sound like such a prick because I actually think this image is really cool when I saw it a few days ago. It just rubs me the wrong way when somebody as retarded as you makes a post and says some of the dumbest shit that I have heard all week.