Absolutely. In most RPGs you always want to move faster. Now admittedly that is fun short term (I think Saint’s Row IV you have super human speed, but once you do the map becomes irrelevant holding no meaning) In skyrim you move faster than a human is able (and can kill a dragon “by beating its foot with a rusty sword”) and you use fast travel to bypass the large mass of boring in-between events. I think you guys have the right goal in mind. Keep up the good work bros!
If I have the feeling to be lost in the wood, or can be chased and vanish in the nature, then it is fine for me.
Sometime, big empty areas is good for the immersion, it can give a survival aspect, crossing a wood or a mountain was a challenge and needed to be prepared. Small areas remove this immersion.
One of my best memorie in a video game was a mission in the first operation flashpoint, it was in a big forest, the immersion is in my opinion still unmatched.
I love uncompressed landscape, and yours looks amazing
To put that in perspective, 5:30 in a 1600 meter race (1 mile) for high school varsity track is considered respectable. So yeah, running 7 minutes for a mile in atleast 50 lbs. of armor would be quite alot.
Size is really not the most important factor. The most important is how fast you can travel across the map. That’s what makes the feeling (the FEELING) of how large the map is.
I really like that comparison picture (well, the whole series of those pictures) that is posted in the initial post here and is out there on the web for some time already. For example the size of Just Cause 2 map is really huge. It takes a decent deal of time to get from one corner of the map to another even when you’re flying a jet fighter and those are the fastest machines in the game.
If you had one of those in KCD, then yeah, the map would really feel small.
But hopefully no, you’re not going to have a jet fighter in KCD. You’re gonna have nothing but your own char’s legs and an occasional horse to travel a bit faster, so that the long travels won’t actually take that much long. I’m sure it will be quite sufficient, especially if the movement speeds would be trimmed to approximately the actual speeds of movement (walking, running, sprinting) in reality (unlike games like Skyrim where you have to mod this stuff to work as it should).
And, also, the respective speeds should be the same for NPCs and the PC alike…
A WONDERFUL IDEA 
I hope someone adds a jet fighter mod! That would be soo COOL ^_-!
Look at those maps tho. Anyone noticing that one block from Burnout paradice is the same size as GTA3:s whole map. Seems legit
The problem is that many games don’t use the same sense of scale. Hence, few would agree that the GTA: San Andreas map is so small compared to Oblivion. Stated size is a hard measurement to go by until you’ve actually played.
That said, the Just Cause 2 map is indeed a contender for the most massive non-MMO map.
I appreciate a larger map, but I’m extremely thankful that Warhorse has also said that they will pay attention to the concentration of various places of interest. Something Skyrim failed to do. Every part of that world is civilized by somebody, in some way, at some point in time. It never felt actually open or like you were in the wild. You would run into someone else’s house or camp or temple every 2-5 minutes. They need to have the open countryside actually feel like the countryside sometime.
The largest map size I know of is Battleground Europe with it’s 350.000 km². But that makes A LOT of empty space. I’d rather the map be a bit scaled down and with much content than have a running simulator.
In my opinion what matters is the “density” of the map, not the size. There’s no point having a massive map if everything is very spread out and finding something fun to do takes a long time. Just Cause 2 was one example I thought of a game having a map that was too big. There was loads to do, but the map was just so damn large that getting anywhere was a bit of a chore. GTAV meanwhile felt about right; good size map, but at the same time you could get to something of interest within a couple of minutes. The Elder Scrolls games are also pretty good at getting this balance right. If these guys aim for something along the lines of Skyrim or Oblivion in size and stuff density then that would be perfect.
Tbh TES - and especially Skyrim - is a good example how not to make an open-world game…
The density is high but for the very wrong reasons. Instead of filling the world with meaningful stuff Bethesda filled it with pointless, repetitve stuff like 100 caves all filled with generic enemies…
An immersive game world should offer a realistic density with fewer points of interest but much more interesting ones with actual RPG depth instead of generic places to collect loot and kill enemies. That’s ok for a hacknslay game but pure poison for a story-driven CRPG. So I would be happy if Warhorse was able to make a game world smaller than the TES games but with realistic (slower) walking speed and real points of interest. They said it themselves that there won’t be 100 caves but 10 caves and all filled with interesting stuff connected to the story and the game world in a meaningful way. 
Map size of video games comes down to two simple questions:
- Is it handcrafted?
Generic hills and boring forests in Mount & Blade and Oblivion are just plain awful. As map size grows, more and more is made by using lazily thrown-together height- and forest map, perlin noise and bland algorithms, everything will feel too hilly and generic. I do believe that every screenful of a map in a game should be at least observed by level designer, adjusted where needed, have lots of stuff plain algorithms cannot generate and so on. Well done map > big map.
- What will game feel like? Arma II multiplayer in Warfare mode is great example here:
You respawn.
You grab any vehicle you can find and spend next 20 minutes driving to where action is.
On the road RPG or random wandering AI soldier hits you.
You die.
You respawn…
After 2 hours of playing you realise that you’ve spent 98% of this time travelling, not fighting. How exactly is this good?
I believe Skyrim got map about right, in terms of stuff to do and distance to go. Since Kingdom Come would likely have less cities and stuff to do, so map could be proportionally smaller.
Skyrim is a too much compressed map in my opinion.
Bandits camping at 200m of city guard is not my cup of tea.
Snow landscape coming after 50m of elevation, kills the open world immersion.
Honestly I have the feeling that Skyrim world is like Disneyland.
But I got your point, I think I m one of the 5 per cent guy who prefer big empty map vs small dense map.
I hope Kingdom Come Deliverance will have the perfect balance
Can someone compare the map size to Watch Dogs’s map?
Difficult to say. According to early leaks some time ago, the map size was about the one of GTA IV, maybe a bit smaller. Since GTA IV has about 18 km², Watch Dogs could be about 16 km². That means, it’s way larger. Yet you’re driving a lot faster with your Papavero through the city than with a horse. Definitely the size of Watch Dogs is nice so far, you have some rural areas but not so much empty countryside. So what really matters is the density, not the size.
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Comparisons with GTA and Watch_Dogs and other games like that are pointless. These games only offer a huge world because there are no accessible interiors (apart from a few designed for special missions). In an RPG like KCD you will be able to enter each and every house, it’s not a street simulator with some houses as wallpapers but a world simulator.
Games like GTA or Watch_Dogs would in no way be that big if they had to create the whole interior areas of houses and stuff.
The only comparable game/franchise is TES. And in TES the designer “solved” the problem by changing the sizes of areas and houses and stuff by making them smaller and way more densed. So in a city you only have a few houses which in reality could never offer enough space for all the people living there. And when you enter a building the interior could be much bigger than it is shown from the outside…
In KCD Warhorse wants to create a world more or less based on real sizes. That means that the whole world has to be smaller because of limited manpower and funds. The town featured in the game will be a real town which means that it is recreated in a way in which it really could have existed in 1400 with enough space for everyone. But this is already a lot of work so we should be satisfied with that instead of claiming “a bigger map” again and again…
LA Noire is for example the best example of a wasted big open world (imo most games are, GTA, Mafia and Watch_Dogs included but it’s really obvious in LA Noire). Their open world is not really supported by gameplay. The only thing you can use it for is driving around without any real purpose because there are only streets with zombies driving and walking on it and nothing else. Even TES is way better than that from a design perspective. There is a reason why you could shortcut your way to missions in LA Noire. And there is a reason for fast travel. Fast travel alone is a sign of the faulty design of most open world games nowadays… 
[quote=“LordCrash, post:35, topic:4227”]
Comparisons with GTA and Watch_Dogs and other games like that are pointless. These games only offer a huge world because there are no accessible interiors
[/quote]the main reason really is that you can drive a car or board a plane and thus travel 200+kmph. Which shrinks players perception of the map proportionally.
After all if you ever ask someone how long he’s played some open-world-y game the response is “X hours” not “X kilometres”. That’s why we ran some internal tests (the 7 minutes A-B run tests in several games Dan metioned a while ago somewhere) based on travel time, not actual proportions.
[quote=“LordCrash, post:35, topic:4227”]
And when you enter a building the interior could be much bigger than it is shown from the outside…
[/quote]I love this part about TES, it’s so funny sometimes. I think it was in Morrowind where I found a set of interconnected interior cells which were modelled and linked so poorly that if ran in a particular loop I would be descending all the time breaking all the rules of euclidean space
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Just to tack on here to what @LordCrash was saying about TES, this won’t be possible in KCD because all areas will be part of the same load (mentioned in the livestream video). So instead of loading a new zone when you enter a building you’ll be in the same world occupying the same world space.