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Biggest game world?


engraverwilliam

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What is it you want to know? Km's are a unit of distance, you can go infinitely far in KSP (or close enough before the floating point error kraken eats you). Area is not really applicable in a 3 dimensional game, though you could calculate the surface area of all bodies using their radius and 4*pi*r^2. And space wise it is again infinite.

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For static game area I'd definitely put Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters up there, granted I believe their universes were all procedurally generated but up to a certain point at least they were static and actually based on real life stars / systems. Even if you discount the distances traveled during Hyperspace you still have a good 10AU or more per system of distance to fly between exiting hyperspace and reaching a planet or station, as old as those games were I sure do remember them being so very massive :).

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Even games without traditional zone lines are still loaded in localized chunks, basically allowing any game to have an infinite world given enough time to create it by hand. Disqualifying procedurally generated games is simply removing games that bypass this limitation. Beyond that, few game worlds today are created and shaped entirely by hand, with many developers using a procedural system even if it isn't built directly into the game.

However, it is a silly question to begin with. It's all relative. The only constant is time, in particular the time it takes to navigate the game universe. Whether it's walking, driving, flying or teleporting the size of the world is only truly measured by how quickly you can move across it, and every game world is made smaller by anything that decreases the time factor. If you limit yourself to 1x time and walking then yes the area of Kerbin alone dwarfs that available in most other games. However, at 100,000x time every point of interest in the Kerbal system is accessible in under an hour.

Just as games have features to reduce time-sinks, they also have features that artificially inflate time. A town may take a player 30 seconds to sprint through. Add a horde of zombies, lootable buildings and debris and suddenly that 30 seconds is 15 minutes. Remove teleports/gates/fast travel from a game, and what should have been a near instantaneous trip suddenly takes an hour.

There is more to the bigness of a game than the area the game world occupies.

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Fuel's "Reset Button" currently holds the Guinness world record for the largest [finite] game environment ever.

This is the answer to the question that you have been looking for.

Fuel is console. The largest playable area in an open-world pc game is 1,035 km² (400 miles²), held by the island of Panau in Just Cause 2 (Avalanche, 2010).

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Minecraft is the biggest finite world in a video games. Minecraft is around 7000 times larger than Jool or Earth, so if the largest planet doesn't compare, the others probably won't make any difference. Even if we count Kerbol.

But, if we are talking about volume of the Kerbal universe, it's infinity, so I don't think it counts.

Then again, Minecraft is procedurally generated, so maybe it doesn't count; unless, say, someone opened a map maker, zoomed out to the largest view, and flattened and scribbled on it.

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EVE Online MMO is the biggest game world as it uses real measurements of distance ( a standard battlefield can be 100's of KM across ). it has 7,699 solar systems where players can go and the whole star cluster is many MANY light year accross.

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