“It turned out roughly two times as large as I thought it was going to originally,” he says. (Admittedly, Pretzel didn’t contribute much to this conversation directly.) Did Oldshoes always know what a massive project this was going to become? I sat down with Oldshoes, Broville’s key creator, and his cat Pretzel, to talk about how the project came together. It’s an astonishing piece of work, not just because it’s big, beautiful and busy with brilliantly realised details, but because it so nicely fits the game it’s in - acknowledging Minecraft’s own terrain generation, simulation and scale, rather than flattening everything out to a blank canvas. Last week, version 11 - which by itself took a team of more than 60 contributors four and half years to build - was announced as complete and sent out to fend for itself on the wild internets. This city build been with us in various forms since the early alpha, growing in ambition with every version release. No Man’s Sky and Minecraft are theoretically infinite in size, but that’s because the worlds are entirely determined by complex algorithms rather than manual design work.Broville is something of a Minecraft institution. Note, we’re not counting procedurally generated worlds here. We’ve put this list together of the biggest open world games to see the limits of what video games can offer at the moment.

Still, there’s a great thrill of standing at the top of a mountain, looking out at the unending vista before you, and knowing that you can explore every inch of it. Games like Elden Ring, The Witcher 3, and Breath of the Wild aren’t big enough to even scratch the bottom end of this list, despite being some of the best sandbox games ever made. Of course, bigger doesn’t always mean better. While open-world games aren’t the be-all and end-all of modern triple-A video games anymore, there’s still something great about a massive world that you can explore to your heart’s content, full of activities, challenges, and random encounters to keep you busy for hours on end.

Minecraft small city map