Okay, so the new Zelda game is open world. We’ve known this for a while. And we know that it is physically a very big game world, too- the screenshots we’ve seen all seem to hint at that. And then, when we finally got a peak at the in game map yesterday, our suspicions were reconfirmed- this is a big freaking game.
But how big is big, exactly? Eggplante decided to figure this out for themselves. Playing the game for about an hour confirmed the hypothesis that one square on the game map is 1 square kilometer. Given this, and the simple fact that the map is comprised of a grid of 360 squares, the end result is that the Zelda map is 360 square kilometers. Which translates to 140 miles square. Which is a lot of space, a whole lot of it.
And it all looks gorgeous. The gameplay demos yesterday confirmed that the world is lively, teeming with life, and with secrets to find, and this is in spite of Nintendo having removed NPCs and towns from the demo to avoid any kind of spoilers whatsoever. It seems that when Breath of the Wind finally launches on the Wii U and NX next year, it will have one of the biggest, most impressive worlds in video game history.