That's very big. With permission from a Nintendo rep, someone was able to take an image of the wider map in the new Zelda game.

http://www.eggplante.com/2016/06/14/full-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-map-revealed-roughly-360-square-kilometres/

Assuming that the fastest way to get across the map is by horse the closest comparison in how long it would take would be the Shahzada endurance race. The race is 400 kilometers and has winning times of ~25-35 hours, let's assume that the average is 30 hours. 360km is 10% less than 400km so if we were to do some rough math here the trip across BotW's map would be ~27 hours. 30-(30/10)=27

This is a rough estimate only so I'll probably be completely off when the game comes out.

@katpottz: It's 360 square Kilometers, so assuming a perfectly square map, that's closer to about 19 km across. It's still huge. From some cursory searching, Witcher 3's total landmass (not counting DLC) is estimated to be 135 km/sq, Skyrim's is 37 km/sq, GTA V's is 81 km/sq, and Xenoblade's is apparently around 400 km/sq.

@katpottz: if it's 360 square kilometers, you'd have to take the square root of that to find the lengthxwidth, assuming the map is a square. So the map would be about 19km x19km; it's not 360km long and 1km wide. Then using the pythagorian theorum, 19^2+19^2=c^2, you get the diagonal distance of the square map to be 26 km. If it takes 30 hours to travel 400km, then thats 0.075 hours per km, making 26km about 2 hours of travel time.

...right?

@viqor: Well shit. Gonna try this again after work.

@flashflood_29: Nice job.

So this thing is 2.6 times bigger than Witcher 3's map? I've got concerns about how dense this thing is, could be a sprawling mass of emptiness.

It's a shame most of it is empty.

@doctordonkey @bollard

I have concerns about this too. In shadow of the colossus a lot of the world was empty but that just added to the atmosphere so maybe this is going for that?

Maybe, but the emphasis on "survival" mechanics and the speed at which weapons break (cause everyone loves worrying about durability...) makes you wonder if they aren't just doing stuff because it sounds good or is popular at the moment.

Hm... a survival game Zelda with weapon degrading and a large, empty world with almost nothing to do in it. Great. *shrug*

I'll wait to see, but this sounds like Nintendo has spent a bit too many nights perusing Steam Greenlight games.

Square miles is kind of a meaningless metric unless movement speed and content are both taken into account.

Just Cause 2 had a massive map, but it's a chore to get across because there's nothing there except the same villages over and over. Skyrim was kind of the same

Shadow of the Colossus is mostly empty, but the atmosphere and the puzzle aspect of finding new colossi and that feeling of exploration more than make up for it

It's all a matter of perspective

Well, according this infographic:

that I stole from Warhorse Studios' website (where is our medieval rpg already?!? they announced that thing back when the current consoles were coming out!) The new Zelda is somewhere between WoW (2004) and Burnout Paradise in size. (360km^2 ~ 130mi^2) Still much smaller than Just Cause 2. Which is probably for the best. That game was huge. (What's the deal with Daggerfall?!?)

That's a whole lot of whimsy!

i'd like if there was a navi equivalent and when she saw some point of interest in the distance she'd sail off and two hours later you hear a distant "heyy... liiistennn..."

people bitch about nintendo never changing. well they've changed. you got what you wished for, everyone!

(for the record i think nintendo's games for the most part vary pretty wildly and mostly have their own unique spins maybe not always revolutionary, but often interesting)

@sinusoidal: Love that image but its crazy no one has updated to include more recent games like GTA V, Just Cause 3, Far Cry 3 or 4, ...... other large open world games.

Ah, the classic open world beginner's mistake, assuming that a larger map is better. I'll bet dollars to donuts that next game they state that the map will be smaller but more dense, just like GTA: San Andreas and GTA IV

@blackout62: I'm afraid that next game might take 6 years.

Or No Man's Sky... :-P

Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall is estimated to be around 320,000 sq km (800km x 400km). Check out this comparison image:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32146097/DagComp.png

Daggerfall used a lot of random generation and repeated assets so it's a little bit different of a beast than some of these other worlds that were handcrafted.

Seeing as this game is coming out on essentially last gen hardware I'm not expecting anywhere near the density of stuff that was found in something like Witcher 3 which also had a smaller world.

Nintendo can make rich feeling world's packed to the brim with content, so can Monolith Software in open world games.

Weve only seen a restricted demo of the game.

That's a bold statement considering we've only seen the tutorial area (and it wasn't that empty anyway). The Great Plateau is essentially White Orchard from the Witcher 3.

Well that's probably a bit too big Nintendo!

Are they gonna really be able to make this interesting for that long? I guess there's these towers you need to be climbing everywhere.

For me, they really need to include some interesting towns to make this size a map interesting.

My suspicion is they could make a map this large (while still filling it with plenty of things to discover) because the cell-shading lets them get away with using fewer polygons and thus spending less time polishing every model.

Daggerfall was awesome at the time, but I vividly remember a very black/blue sky box and walking aimlessly for ever, until getting killed by wolves. But then again that was in like 1997 and I played that game constantly and had no idea what I was doing. I do remember a skeleton in a house that would massacre me over and over again very vividly. But as far as map size, that map might as well of been endless.

Isn't the Great Sea in Wind Waker over 1000 sq. km?

@mikelemmer:

That seems true, and if they are using a modern engine they can literally drop content in on areas. I think this is the first Zelda not to be made using a custom game engine.

Next time they make that image they should include roguelikes, just to point out how ridiculous the whole size thing is

Great! Xenoblade Chronicles X had a huge world and that felt alive and expansive. I never got bored playing it! Then again, you did have a flying mecha in that one to help get you around quicker. But a fast travel system, glider, and horse should keep you going at a decent clip.

I'm way on board!

That's only two years more than the gap between San Andreas and IV so that seems, if not optimistic, then pedestrian.

I though we got past measuring the size big open world maps in the last generation?

Another scientific measurement is that is takes about 10min to ride through Witcher 3 and if Zelda is 3 times bigger lets say it will take about 30min. 3 times bigger doesnt equal 3 times the distance but after the many horse races in Witcher 3 we know now that noone rides as fast as Geralt on Roach and he got endless stamina on the roads.

Im also facinated by how anyone manages to convert these landmasses to square metres so accurately, the scale and movementspeeds are seldom anything close to reality or comparable to the metric system.

Size is a fairly useless metric in open world games, sure big maps are nice, but what is really important is what there is to do there. Big, open and desolate areas with nothing in them, doesn't mean a superb open world.

Honestly, seeing the footage from E3, I wouldn't be surpirsed if this game gets delayed again. Not that it looks bad, but it seems to have ways to go, and I think Nintendo probably underestimated how much work an open world game can take, especially since they haven't done them before.

Both Witcher 3 and Skyrim succeeded in filling their worlds with stuff the player could just stumble upon. Let's not forget the amount of random story vignettes Witcher 3 had.

I wonder if Breath of the Wild contains the same segmentation and blocked progression as previous Zelda games; find the wrong dungeon, with no possibility to enter. I suppose it's much like Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time--never played Majora's Mask, so no idea there.

PS: BroWild, B-Wild or BoWild all sound funny.

I just can not, for the life of me, see Nintendo not filling this zelda game with tons of things to see and do and find. It's what they've always done.

Bigger maps are good for racing games. RPGs benefit more from focus.

They've already said it's entirely possible to start the game, and if you know what you're doing, skip all the story content and go directly to the final boss and kill it. It would probably be incredibly difficult without any endgame items, no Master Sword, and only three hearts, but it is possible. I'd say that's a pretty fair indication that there isn't much in the way of progress gating like previous games.

My favourite open world is still Vice City, they packed a lot of personality into that game.

I'm just correcting his math with the assumptions that he posted. I'm fascinated by the people that would take threads like this seriously enough to say they're fascinated by the people that created them. We're talking video games, we all know the stamina is unrealistic. It's just a fun thought experiment to think about the size of the map in real world terms. Also, 3x the area wouldn't equate to 3x the longest distance assuming a square map. Check your math.

I am fascinated by these fascinating replies.

I personally just hope that the gameworld feels rich, I don't really mind large areas of what appears to be nothingness on the surface, as long as the environments themselves keep me interested somehow.

I find the world of Xenoblade Chronicles X enthralling and fun to run around in despite its massive size which usually puts me off. Since Monolith Soft helped with the Graphics of Skyward Sword on the heels of Xenoblade Chronicles development, I had hoped they had taken their new-found open-world expertise after Xenoblade Chronicles X back to Nintendo to help with Breath of the Wild. At E3 Miyamoto spoke about how they have once again helped with the latest Zelda title, so hopefully that includes the building of the world.

Myamoto told Game Informer (about Monolith Soft):

“Yes they are involved in this Zelda. People from Tokyo and Kyoto are working together on this. There is a team of over 100 helping work on this project, and their work has really been helpful.”

Thanks for clarifying my math. What i do ment is that i enjoy these type of silly discussions so we are on the same side really.

There are no "sides."

@flashflood_29: Clearly not, its all grey.

I see a lot of people complaining that the world seems empty, but I think I preferred the more expansive, barren map of Morrowind over Oblivion and Skyrim. In those latter games, the world was so densely packed with caves and stuff that none of that stuff every really felt special and I didn't really have any desire to explore a cave, knowing that there would be three more just down the road. Having that stuff be few and far between and easy to miss made it feel like you'd actually found something almost clandestine. Skyrim felt like it desperately wanted me to not miss things and for every nook and cranny to have some sort of pay-off and it left me fairly cold on the whole experience. HA! COLD! NORDIC! Comparatively, Morrowind's Vvardenfell was the alluring dime-store novel lounge singer, playing hard-to-get with her secrets. There was an inherent intimacy to finding them. When the name of the game is exploration, having those discoveries be harder fought in their earning makes them satisfying in a way they are not if they don't require effort.

That's perhaps meaningless in the face of how little we know about what the game will be, what the focus will be, how densely populated it will actually end up being, both with stuff to find and characters to interact with, if Nintendo even want players to explore the ins and outs of the world etc, but at the very least, I don't find the concept of a sparser world to be inherently negative. Consider an Ubisoft open world map, fully laden with icons.

As for the map area estimate at hand, the original article is fairly nebulous. Using the grid under the map as a method for extrapolating the size of world from the size of the demo area is fair enough, but the estimation of the demo area is so vague. It just says that they estimate it to be about 2km x 1.5km but, unless I missed something, no mention of how they actually arrived at this.

On the topic of the open world, I am a little curious how accommodating the game will be for people who want to play like absolute nutters. For example, would it be possible to turn all map icons off except for any you make yourself and, furthermore, can you annotate the map with scrawls via the touchpad etc and get enough information from the game itself to navigate to missions etc without way-points and the like. It'd obviously be unreasonable to actually hold the game to that kind of expectation, but I think it's a shame that series like The Elder Scrolls don't cater to that crowd any more, even though they could without alienating the rest of their audience and I could see myself approaching this game that way, given the option.

The emptiness could be true but I had alot of fun playing around in the largely empty maps of MGSV. The basic gameplay mechanics and mixture of tools made for some really fun moments even if the maps didn't have missions/enemy every 5 feet. So again--not a guarantee--but if the mix of new mechanics and weapons are fun and allow for as much freedom as they're saying, I dont think the "empty" world will me the game breaking issue some think it may be.

Also I like games like Wind Waker that ask you to traverse large portions of empty space because it makes the world actually feel vast.

How does everyone else feel about the idea that maybe a large chunk of it is a lake/coastline - harkening back to WW, in terrain that's *expected* to be mostly nothing?

That's like 700 times larger than Ocarina of Time, hope it's full of interesting things to do

These are my main concerns, I don't care as much about the size.