The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will present players with a full fledged kingdom of Hyrule to explore in a seamless open world, for the very first time- as opposed to the hub based pseudo open design that previous Zelda games have had. Nintendo have made it a point to point out that Breath of the Wild‘s Hyrule will be massive- but just how massive will that be?
The only game to beat Zelda out is Nintendo’s own Xenoblade Chronicles X, but even that game made the world appear somewhat smaller by allowing for faster traversal via mechs. And as for Nintendo’s previous comments that Breath of the Wild’s map will be ‘over twelve times bigger than the map in Twilight Princess,’ according to Crave, it appears as though Nintendo were accounting for dungeons and other levels in their calculations, too- which is meaningless in a calculation on overworld size comparisons.
So… yeah, Breath of the Wild looks to be a truly enormous open world. Hopefully, Nintendo have been able to keep it varied and exciting, to keep the player engaged and not unnecessarily pad the game out. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild launches on March 3 on Nintendo Switch and Wii U.