But he is talking about "hand-made worlds". No Man's Sky is generated procedurally.

Daggerfall is procedurally generated and not handmade.

Handmade, yes. So far this Gen. But who cares? The game is awesome.

It's not easy to say as game worlds, strictly speaking, aren't measured in "miles" and there's a lot of messing around with scale, movement speed, etc. It's one of the largest RPG open worlds for certain, MMOs aside. But there are some open world driving games that are considerably bigger. As for hand crafted, that makes it even tougher to judge because short of the developer stating so we don't even know which games are made which ways. I will say it is vastly larger than Skyrim and is more in the same league as The Witcher 3. However, I think the Witcher 3 is bigger by a bit. FFXV, we don't know yet but it is looking to be bigger as well probably.

Yes, I know, but I'm starting to play more games this year, I haven't played any Zelda game until July of this year... And then I discovered the potential that Zelda has :) (its incredible dungeons and its open world). And I played my first Kirby game in middle 2014, and it was awesome too . Perhaps I guess I should play games like Uncharted, Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, Mortal Kombat, the first Sonic games for SEGA Genesis (Megadrive in Europe) or Little Big Planet... but at the moment these aren't my most important goals. But you're right, I'm missing new gaming experiences :) 

Well, I can't tell that Xenoblade Chronicles X doesn't look great, because it does looks fantastic :D  The open world it has is incredible, the graphics are very beatiful too. My point of view is that if anyone buy the game, very few ones will be worried. But Metacritic and GameRankings should give their opinion first XD 

The size of Japan thing was complete bullshit. 

There was a similar thing recently where someone at Nintendo said that the Zelda U world would be the size of Kyoto. Or something along those lines. Which someone checked, and would put it as the biggest game world ever made. 

I suspect we're taking figurative Japanese expressions literally.

Not the biggest, not by a long shot, and the geometry is pretty basic when on foot, too, once you get a doll it feels even smaller, too.
in terms of running from one end of the map to another, fallout 3 / nv, skyrim, oblivion and witcher 3 are notably bigger and those are just the tip of the iceberg.
a massive portion of the map is just sea, too.

yeah no chance, in a doll you can run from one end of the map to the other in a few minutes, 20-30 or so on foot. 
if you started in central tokyo, 20-30 minutes running wont even get you out of tokyo ward. 

People really overestimate XCX's map size, once you actually play it you realize it has low quality MMO syndrome.

i.e. the game world feels like they got lazy and stretched the map geometry to make it feel bigger. and even then it isnt.

Let's assume the chars in XCX all sprint at the fastest recorded speed of a human, ever, 44.7km/h, according to this article it takes 31 minutes to get from end to end on foot in the game, keeping in mind that this is NOT direct line since the amount of water prevents you from doing so.

Now even if we assume that it IS direct line (it isnt) and the chars running at usain bolt speeds, it still results in being only 23.095km from one end to the other, by calculating the time it takes to get from two points running and flyng in a doll, you find that the doll travels at 5x the speed of the character sprinting, thus being able to fly, direct line from one end of the map to the other in roughly 4 minutes, you end up with a direct-line running distance of 20 minutes, at usain bolt speeds this would be 14.9km across, so lets just take the median of the two and call it 19km across which is 12 square miles, but because of the shape of the map and the fact 70+% of it is water as shown in this map, we end up with only 3-5 square miles of actual land.

For comparison, san andreas, is roughly 12 square miles, as is red dead redemption, which means the overall map coverage shows the same overall area, and allows us to overlap the two maps central land-square with each other for comparison.

TL;DR, no, it isn't the biggest world in an offline videogame.

I found this so amusing i took the time to do a scale comparison.

Go home monolith, you're drunk.

Not the biggest offline world as Monolith said it's about 400 square KM which puts it at the lower end of the top 10.

Not going to get in this argument of map comparisons but don't assume the characters sprint at anything remotely resembling human speed.  They don't.  In fact, in most games the speeds are unrealistic in one direction or another.  Often very unrealistic. 

However, your 3 to 5 square miles assertion is hilariously off.  I can tell you that right now by looking at character to creature to land form scale.  Skyrim is bigger than that and having played Skyrim for hundreds of hours and worked extensively with the Creation Kit with maps of various sizes including an enormous one, I can tell you with 100% certainty that XCX is far, far larger than Skyrim.   By a very significant margin.