The map shows you the full geography of the entire playable area, but it doesn't drag you by the nose to every single point of interest because it expects you to find things for yourself. The only icons it shows you are for the locations of merchants, skill trainers, and teleporter pads, but you have to find all of these and interact with them before the map starts tracking them. It doesn't help that most of Skyrim's caves, forts, and dungeons feel functionally identical, or that The Witcher 3 litters your map with the icons well in advance, just by reading a notice board in town.Įlex doesn't bombard you with icons. You're not discovering things for yourself you're going exactly where the game tells you. Either way, it really hurts the feeling of exploration and discovery when the game specifically lays everything out for you. Or maybe it's because they knew their worlds were so big, spread out, and diluted with pointless filler content, that they felt the need to mark the important places to save players the agonizing tedium of having to sift through all the dull filler to get to the good stuff. It's almost like the developers knew the worlds they created weren't going to be fun or engaging enough for players to explore it on their own, and felt the need to drop icons everywhere so that players could skip actually exploring the world and cut right to the chase, more quickly and easily finding all the places actually worth exploring. Finally, while I'll be criticizing Skyrim and The Witcher 3 throughout this article, the point is not so much to disparage those games, but to show contrast between those games and Elex, to better exemplify why I feel like Elex does a better job in certain key aspects.īoth Skyrim and The Witcher 3 suffer from "icon hunting" exploration, the kind of deal where their massive, open worlds are filled with mostly empty space and you simply wander around waiting for the next icon to pop up on your mini-map or compass.
It's been almost six years since I played Skyrim, so my memory is a little fuzzy on some of its finer details, and I may therefore be a little more general in my descriptions of Skyrim.
There are exceptions to every rule, and I may not bother to point out every little exception unless I feel they're significant enough. I'm going to be making a lot of generalizations and simplifications about all three games, which doesn't necessarily mean those statements are 100% true 100% of the time, but that they apply in the majority of cases, or in a general sense. Some of this is subjective, in terms of what I want out of the games I play, while other things are a little more objective, in terms of what constitutes good game design. Obviously, I'm not saying that Elex is universally better than Skyrim or The Witcher 3 I'm just saying that it does some important things better. Thank you GamingBolt for providing us with this information.Before getting any further, I need to make a few disclaimers. Of course, with some areas still to be detailed, the estimate is only going to go one way up! Put simply, we only have conservative estimates of the map size. 3 times bigger than Far Cry 4’s 46 km2, three and a half times bigger than Skyrim’s modest 39 km2! It’s 1.5 times bigger than the 81 km2 of GTA V, 3.3 times the 41 km2 of Red Dead Redemption. Bigger than Everything Else?Įven with this little bit of information, we can work out that The Witcher 3 is at least 3.7 times the size of the 36 km2 GTA San Andreas map. However, that only accounts for the Novegrad, No Man’s Land and Skellige Islands, there are 4-6 more regions beyond that of unknown size, but we do know that they’re also on a grand scale.
For those that need numbers, 1 “massive” is around 136km2. To put it simply, the game is freaking massive. The only question is, exactly how big is the world of The Witcher 3? The Map! Now we have The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt on the horizon and we’re preparing for the ultimate Witcher experience as well as what is expected to be one of the biggest and best RPGs of all time. The original Witcher game was a little clunky, but it set the wheels in motion for the RPG masterpiece that was The Witcher 2, one of the best games of the last generation and when it launched, it was a titan in terms of graphical performance too. CDProjektRED has already proven it has what it takes to make an epic RPG.