Reality Check - What is the Biggest Game in the World?

The three absolute go-to games that I just cant delete off my system:
Civilization

Minecraft
Titan Quest Immortal Throne
- - - One word, mods

Past games that used to be huge time sinks were:
Doom (just to far back, but deserves respect for changing gaming forever)

Diablo 2 (would still play if I could get it to work on my i7... but no patch seems to do it)

Great games come and go, and they really are awesome, but those keep me coming back for just one more round.

There are quite an obscure handful of games that have huge gameworlds the size of daggerfall (not saying bigger, just on the same league), im quite sure one of those was a sandbox game that was covered in a gamespot article in early 2014, crucify me but i cant remember the name for the life of me.

But then again like he says, if you change the parameters, would player spawned instances count? then minecraft must definitely win.

Well based on popularity aspects, thankfully some of the games are actually great.

For me? X3:Terran Conflict, both in playtime and possibly in total size if you fiddle with the definitions enough. That's one amazing game. Skyrim is certainly in the top 5, though (and also one of the most "screenshotted" games).

Well, from my point of view - the biggest game (in terms of space) I was ever playing was TES: Daggerfall. (Well if we don't take a Minecraft into account).

In terms of playtime it is... Terraria! I don't know how much exactly I've played this game but after its release 3 years ago - I'm still playing! Amazing! Isn't it?

And largest game by feel for me was definitely Fuel - you could drive for hours like in real world!

The largest(square area) game I've played is either Fuel or Freelancer. Both of them took immense amounts of time to travel through. I drove for 2 hours in one direction on Fuel and was only about 1/4 of the way across the map. Likewise in college I set up waypoints in a circle around a star system in Freelancer, went to class and two hours later when I returned my ship had only traveled about 3/4 of the distance.

In terms of amount of play time on a single save file, Mass Effect, Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3 all take the cake for me with around 200 hours spent on each.

Just Cause 2 was not mentioned, I'm dissapointed.

wouldn't (in terms of size) Halo series take the crown since the preservers left their home galaxy and set up shop in another.

And my top game At the moment would have to be STAR TREK ONLINE sailed four years of it into it cause of its UGC tools

I think the biggest game should be based on two combined elements. Sales and historical time actually played.

LMA Manager swallowed huge chunks of my life in the late 90s, not sure if that counts?

Way to go Cam. Thanks for covering all your bases and making an interesting show like usual.

The biggest game in the world is obviously Soccer, with 250million people currently playing, and billions of soccer balls sold since the invention of the game. The biggest game for me is clearly Watch Dog, since it's taking up nearly 30Gigs of my harddrive.

For the "biggest" game for me it would probably be SimCity 4... so many cities, so many nuclear fallouts...

Argh! I demand a straight answer!

The beautiful thing about Skyrim is that its size doesn't bring it down. Yeah games like GTA 5, WoW and Eve are huge but how much of those square meters actually contain something interesting? In Skyrim, there's no such thing as walking for ages without discovering something interesting, the game's packed with little nuggets of fun.

Never show someone failing in Tetris without warning again! Now i got that mixture of sadness, anger and frustration without even getting to play the fun part of the game first :/

The "Biggest" Games Are The One's That Are Most Fun.

The size of the map doesn't matter. It' how densely populated with fun it is.

NHL 14 and the NHL series. It's fun all the time whether you play for 30 minutes or for many hours straight.

And then the Saints Row Series.

How do you measure these distances? Do you use a character as a yardstick? E.g. Skyrim is 16m^2 assuming that Kevin VanNord is about 1.8m tall? Maybe there's some built in measure.

What about minecraft? 1 block = 1 metre?

I think "biggest" needs to refer to content. Eve may be vast in terms of the virtual space it represents, but the vast majority of space has nothing in it (by definition in fact).

I'm impressed if somebody has calculated the height of Olympus Mons to the nearest metre. There must be some degree of inaccuracy there

Wasn't morrowind world bigger than skyrim? (And i'm not even considering Bloodmoon...) Obviously it was far less detailed and rich, still it was reaaaaaally big.

My biggest game is Skyrim as well, considering gameplay and messing around with new mods i've 650 hours of playtime, more or less. I don't remember how much I played Morrowind, but it must have been 300 hours at least.
But that's for the single player ones... I've played WOW for 7 months in a row, playing ONLY that, and never less than 5 hours a day.... I really don't want to do the math xD

Easily Mass Effect.

I have to go with Kingdom Hearts.

my hat goes to eve after 11 years of playing eve there are still places iv never been and would like to visit one day !!!

Hasn't Star Trek Online the biggest world? You can warp through muliple galaxies, right?

Angry birds is the highest selling franchise of all time and World of Warcraft is by far the most profitable game ever.

I like to think in replayability, not just in the size of the world or the copies it sold.

So for me, the biggest game in the world would be Tetris. Millions of copies sold, millions of people played it, and it never gets boring. It's such a simple yet golden game, that has become something more than the average videogame. It's become a part of the gaming culture, a symbol of globalization, and a prime example of something retro (30 years old!) that's still played and loved today.

biggest can also mean longest to complete, most amount of content, size in gb or size of the box

how about the biggest in gigabytes? ooor, the most expensive?

i think Gothic 3 is bigger... bigger than skyrim and gta 4 in terms of land... it's HUGE without even ONE loading screen.

This episode was really interesting, but if I had to go for "biggest", I would probably choose something along the lines of "largest rendered area", which contrasts the size of your character(s) with the size of the explorable area to give you a massive sense of scale. This rules out space games, which can be huge because they can have massive areas with few textures.

Along those lines, the biggest game that I have played outside WoW would be Xenoblade Chronicles for the Wii. The size of the world and the magnitude of the explorable areas and view distances, especially once you start traveling between the two titans, is staggering. I haven't played Just Cause though.

When you showed Tetris, I instantly though, "LIIIIINNNNE PIECE!!" "YOU ARE A CRUEL, AND ANGRY GOD!!!!"

When it comes to bundled games then Minesweeper or Solitaire would be the winner. They've been sold as part of Windows for a gazillion years so I think it counts :)

Gauntlet. It is said that it has 100 levels, I played it on PS1 as part of an arcade collection to 150 and never got an ending. And its big for being 100-500 kilobytes. If its a game that never ends, is infinity big?

In that case, any arcade game can have no end if played till it ultimately die off (i.e Pacman) are also infinity big. The game is not truly over until the score stops counting up.

Another stipulation is it big for the container that holds it. If that is the case games like Wizardry, Might and Magic, Bard's tale, Times or Lore and Ect are extremely large games for their file sizes.

For EVE can you explore entire planets every LY or so or do you just drift endlessly in space, Colony Wars already does that.

I have spent a lot of time playing FFVIII combined since launch! Beat it like 10 - 12 times and spend atleast a 100hour per beat.. For p.c i think for me is the original sims by maxis

@Cam, great episode. You are fast becoming one of my favourite presenters on Gamespot. You + Danny + Seb = Epic Win.

Love your work, keep it up!

PS Tribes Ascend, well over 1000 hours. Nothing like a long range blue plate at 300 km per hour.

Wouldn't No-man's Sky be the biggest game once finished?

I've logged most time in Oblivion, but I do love Skyrim. I don't think either is better as Skyrim adds things that are amazing, but looses a lot of stuff I liked about Oblivion.

After that may absolute fav has to be Freelancer, easy. Not sure if i've logged more time in other games though.

Then Minecraft.

2000 Hours on Battlefield 2. Couple different accounts. Havent played in years though

worst piece of journalism i ever saw. The biggest games in terms of size, story and gameplay are always rpgs and mmorpgs for obvious reasons. The biggest selling game and franchise is ofc GTA no doubt about that, its a fact.Go get your facts straight man.

Awesome vid Cam! Really liked this one. what was that little song playing towards the end.