5 Largest Video Game Environments

Sandbox games require the player to navigate an environment without having to move through it level by level. The “open world” often connotes a non-linear approach to objectives and allows for free roaming, encouraging exploration. As processors get better and better, a game world may become larger and larger, moving away from text based narratives (which were technically open world permitting many actions in a world entirely within the players imagination), towards a more expansive, sprawling setting.

For the purposes of this article, the use of “largest” does not refers to simple physical sized but to the worlds I found to be organic, in which every inch breaths and feels alive with spontaneous events and believable characters.

5. Minecraft

Although theoretically the largest map on this list, I have placed this entry fifth because “infinitely generating” is cheating. Still, with an infinitely customizable environment with its trademark pixelated graphics, Minecraft allows you to explore, create and discover in ways entirely open to any player of any degree of computing skill.

If you want a survival game then dig in and survive the creepers that emerge at night. Or you can create a roller coaster and soar through he sky. With any number of mods at your disposal you can face dragons or build structures from the deepest recesses of your mind, or simply carve out another Helm’s Deep.

4. GTA

As far as sandbox games go, the first mainstream example that comes to mind is usually Grand Theft Auto, and for good reason. It’s colorful environments across a series of games that faithfully recreate the great American city’s to act as your playground continuously deliver, with original events and reactions from NPC’s to events that, while repetitive, still feelright for the circumstances.

With GTA V soon to be released, boasting a map size larger than IV and San Andreas combined the space available for a rampage or mission progression should prove to be entertaining.

3. Far Cry 3

The CryEngine is very good t doing what it was designed to do – creating large immersive free roaming islands populated with all variety of enemies and creatures. The Far Cry and Crysis series both deserve applause for producing tactile environments that leave multiple options open to players with opportunities for snipers, close encounters and destructible huts and buildings for explosive entrances.

2. Arkham City

With a story as entrenched and engrained in the history of Gotham city, it can only be expected that to produce this world in a way that both provides good gameplay and appeases the fans many aspects will have to be downsized. Although there was some dispute over the fact that the Monarch Theater was situated only a stones throw away from ACE Chemicals, it fastened the canon of the narrative firmly in the DC universe.

With the combination of a large setting and an excellent method of navigating, Arkham City’s veins flow with different factions of criminal, all vying for prestige and manages to create a perfectly Gothic skyline.

1. Elder Scrolls

I don’t believe it’s actually possible to write any list of games without including, or indeed closing with Bestheda’s Elder Scrolls series. The prelapsarian landscape of Tamriel is explorable throughout the different installments of the series and for the sheer scope of the possibilities for character progression, introductions to NPC’s who live their own lives with their own personalities. Fallout, the sister series to The Elder Scrolls also features a fully interactable environment but at times the sparse nature of the wasteland made me feel isolated.

While parts of Morrowind felt replicated, the formula was almost perfected in Skyrim which featured constantly striking examples of forests, snowy dunes and city ports.