There are already some huge maps out there, Just Cause 2 and 3 both have maps at around 1000km^2^, and those games are beloved by their players. But if the next Cyberpunk game was announced with Night City now being the size of an actual large metropolis, say like New York, would you say that’s too big? What determines what “too big” is?
I don’t think it can be too large, but like others have said, there has to be enough quality content in each location you can visit to compensate for the vastness of the open world.
It be amazing if you could go inside every single building/dungeon/etc. and have every one of them chockablock full of things to experience, like they did with Elder Scrolls 6, but look how long it took for that game to come out…
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
Big enough that I lose interest or notice the padding.
A lot of it boils down to execution. The more urban areas of a Sleeping Dogs or the TW3 map with the Bloody Baron (not the viking map) feel geuinely massive enough though both are on the smaller end. Whereas something like GTA5’s San Andreas actively pissed me off because so much of the game was just driving to and from set pieces on the interstate.
That said: I actively don’t care about completion unless I really love the game. So if something was 40000km^2… I might never leave the two square kilomters the actual game takes place in and not care about the rest.