It is too big when the density of reasons to go there and explore becomes to little.

Personally, I don't really care for games that have huge maps just to pass through while traveling around. There needs to be a reason in the story for every place to be there.

Every village, town or city needs to be filled with quests and stories, and the space between them as well to a lesser extend. They serve as immersive distractions. They need to be alive.

The map is too big if it cannot be filled with enough stuff to explore and experience. And I don't mean climbing yet another tower, or doing yet another variation of the same puzzle.

TBH, I am not much of a sandbox game player and the JC 2 and 3 maps looked nice, but didn't really invite me to stay and explore a single area for a while, because the areas didn't have much depth. I prefer a much higher density of things to do. Each village should have a couple of hours of content, exploring it and the neighboring area. And larger towns or cities even more.

I want to minimize the 'just cruising through' parts of maps.

Cyberpunk as well had too much dead space when it comes to stuff to do in many parts of the city. Some parts of course act as just the background for other parts, which is fine. But other parts where beautifully handcrafted and interesting, but there is not much to interact with or people to talk to there.

To me it is important to have enough content and depth that the player learns to get to know their way around a place, and gets to know characters and develop relationship with each place.

Hot take, but the open world nature of Elden Ring drove me crazy. Coming from a series grounded by its tightly knit and highly curated environments, I never understood why Elden Ring is so unanimously considered the "peak" of the series.

I enjoyed my time with it, but I couldn't help but wonder what the game could have been without the open world inclusion. So for me it's not necessarily "how big is too big", but whether or not the gameplay necessitates an open world.

I don't think there's a too big for a simulation type game world, go all the way. But for more directed game styles that are narrative driven or more carnival ride than simulation don't make it boring use techniques from past games; the keeping distant landmarks in view outside like in New Vegas, or hilly landscapes to obscure stuff to discover like in Zelda or Skyrim. Bad examples would be like traveling between towns in daggerfall or those monuments in the middle of nowhere in starfield.

Depends on a lot of factors like what the actual game is.

A sandbox game, bigger is better. Like Minecraft. If the goal is exploration and resource gathering you can plop me into an infinitely generated map and I will be happy.

Outside of that, narrative games can be too big if there's nothing to do in between points of interests. I don't mean like side-quests, but more like random encounters or crafting/gathering stuff. There has to be something there I can either get distracted with or to "on the way" to the next location.

I think a lot of games want their cake and eat it too. It's not an open world game, but Final Fantasy XIV promoted the Heavensward expansion with the zones being like 5 times bigger than the base game...

...but there were only 6 of them and between already being able to teleport to each zone there wasn't any difficulty navigating the zones and they added flying which made them seem smaller than the base zones.

1.0 XIV had impressively sized zones that were unfortunately very copy pasted and between the rushed release and the engine limitations enemies were very spread out.

Again, depends on the game.

Was that 30GB RAM Harry Potter game real or were my friends messing with me? 'Cause my answer would be that.

I prefer smaller open worlds, like in the Yakuza series

Elden Ring is right on the threshold of too big.

I have not met a too-big open world as of yet.

Big enough that I lose interest or notice the padding.

A lot of it boils down to execution. The more urban areas of a Sleeping Dogs or the TW3 map with the Bloody Baron (not the viking map) feel geuinely massive enough though both are on the smaller end. Whereas something like GTA5's San Andreas actively pissed me off because so much of the game was just driving to and from set pieces on the interstate.

That said: I actively don't care about completion unless I really love the game. So if something was 40000km^2... I might never leave the two square kilomters the actual game takes place in and not care about the rest.

As for Just Cause 2 and 3? Neither felt overly large but both were broken down into regions and I mostly just played those whenever I felt like over the course of a month or two. So it really was closer to "levels" than anything else.

Contrast that with a Far Cry 2 which is downright tiny and... I'll never have the patience to drive past even one outpost ever again.

I don't think it can be too large, but like others have said, there has to be enough quality content in each location you can visit to compensate for the vastness of the open world.

It be amazing if you could go inside every single building/dungeon/etc. and have every one of them chockablock full of things to experience, like they did with Elder Scrolls 6, but look how long it took for that game to come out...

An Open World is only too big if it requires loading screens at transition points that aren't natural. An Open World can have an insufficient density of relevant content, where exploring it has too little marginal utility to the player, and therefore it is ultimately not useful to exist.

I recall True Crime: Streets of L.A. being too big. The city felt so similar, I just lost interest. It could have been that the hardware wasn't where it should have been to land a project that ambitious?

I don't think that there's a "too big", if you can figure out a way to economically do it and fill it with worthwhile content.

But I don't feel like Cyberpunk 2077's map size is the limiting factor. Like, there's a lot of the map that just doesn't see all that much usage in the game, even though it's full of modeled and textured stuff. You maybe have one mission in the general vicinity, and that's it. If I were going to ask for resources to be put somewhere in the game to improve it, it wouldn't be on more map. It'd be on stuff like:

• More-complex, interesting combat mechanics.

• More missions on existing map.

• More varied/interesting missions. Cyberpunk 2077 kinda gave me more of a GTA feel than a Fallout feel.

• A home that one can build up and customize. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't really have the analog of Fallout 4's Home Plate.

• The city changing more over time and in response to game events.

Depends on the mood I’m in.

Zelda BotW is a giant map and mostly chill game that I have tons of fun just taking my time exploring.

Far Cry 3 has me going around murdering folks and clearing camps non-stop at a pretty good pace.

Far Cry 4 was way too much pew pew and it bored me.

Depends how full it is, how interesting is it (note this is not the same as full), how fast you can travel, and how fun movement is.

There's a lot of elements to open world and a lot of devs get the balance very wrong. You end up playing in a map rather than the world.

It is all about the amount of content. If you are just wandering around with nothing work doing than to hell with that.