What's the largest a video game map can get in our lifetimes? Could we see an MMO the size of a state?

yes
you could just make a random quest generator to do it automatically

BOTW is not large at all

That's a really poorly worded and not thorougly thought thread. There's already shit like original Elite and Spore and No Man's Sky where procedural generation creates entire galaxies.
You must consider map density, how detailed it is. And means of transportation. A racing game's thousands of square miles is nothing against a big city in RPG. Etc.

TL;DR: shit thread, try again

The real question is how much depth you could provide in the map. As with various examples in this thread, you can have huge maps, but filling it with explorable interiors, worthwhile interactions, distinct quests, a selection of distinctly appearing and behaving people, etc. requires a ton of work on all levels (writing, design, coding, etc.), which would take a large team and years of development. In our lifetime, there could be some improvements to things like procedural generation to make this better, but that's still procedural generated shit. We're nearing the limits of scale, I think. Things like what average graphics look like will improve over time, but depth will always be a budget issue.

I FUCKING HATE OPEN WORLD MEME GARBAGE

Hubs>linear>openworld

FUEL has the biggest single level map of any game I think.

Lotr Online has the biggest area based world map.

>open world meme

conveniently doesn't mention how a lot of people hate fast travel for their open world games

I would be happy with a 1:1 of a major world city and most buildings being explorable

Open world games are made with fast travel in mind. You can't choose not to fast travel without having an awful time in open world meme games.
Unironically the only open world map with enough variety to be passable is HZD.

from eastern kingdoms to kalimdor theres boats and a loading screen but if you were to run from the button of kalimor or eastern kingdoms it would take you a couple hours atleast

how do you define "big"?

are you talking about a big empty space layered with cardboard cut-outs (open world design) or about a limited area crammed with high-quality content (hub design)?

>You can't choose not to fast travel without having an awful time
do you just lack perspective in general or really aren't aware people enjoy traveling big maps and don't use FT

I don't consider that as big as a continent then. I mean something that would legitimately take days to run through and hours to drive

No, I can enjoy that once in a while too but only because the game itself is bad and I'd rather run around doing nothing than bothering with actual game play mechanics.

all I'm trying to convey is there are people that enjoy things you don't
see

Yes, I'm aware.
A lot of people like Ubisoft open worlds when they're new to this medium.

Every time I see screenshots of these large open world, particular in dense cities, I think to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice for it all to be destructible?". Just the thought alone gets me rock hard. I miss Red Faction.

The daggerfall map takes 60hours to walk across at in game speed, I'm sure if you converted it to human speed it would be slower.

>random quests

its easy to make a big world. it's hard to make a big world that actually has shit in it. its not a technology issue, its more about manpower because you need designers to actually build a world of that size.

unless they can get on some proper AI shit soon to generate a world using algorithms. that would be swell.

Minecraft is currently the biggest as far as I know. Not a full MMO but there's mods to make it like one.