Yesterday Final Fantasy XV Director Hajime Tabata showcased a whopping 45 minutes of gameplay of the Episode Duscae demo. He didn’t come out and say just how big the map of the demo is, but he did something that allows us to calculate it.
He set a waypoint on the map, displaying the distance on the screen. At that point it was just a matter of playing a bit with maths and Photoshop to easily calculate the sides of the map’s rectangle, and its area as a result. Below you can see a picture showcasing the process.
The map roughly measures 1,937 meters by 1,552, for a total area of 3,006,224, which translates into 3 square kilometers, or 1.16 square miles (even if about half of that seems not to be reachable). That is about 8% of Skyrim’s total map size of 37 square kilometers. That’s definitely generous for a demo.
This lets us get an approximate idea of what the map size will be for the final game. Tabata-sansaid yesterday that its map will be ten to twenty times larger than that of the demo.
If we multiply the area, this means that we’ll have between 11.6 square miles and 23.2 square miles. which means that it’s going to be between a little smaller than Skyrim and a bit south of twice its size.
There is, though, another (much less likely) possibility, as Tabata-san might have meant that the map’s sides are between ten and twenty times bigger, which would involve an area between 300 square kilometers (116 square miles) and 1,202 square kilometers (464 square miles).
While it would be awesome, this is definitely unlikely, not only because it would be mindboggingly large, but simply because Tabata-san’s wording seems to indicate between ten and twenty times the map’s area.
If we consider the first option the correct one (and we probably should), Final Fantasy XV’s world size will be more or less comparable to what we have seen in quite a few other open world games.
" Makes me think they've either scrapped the airship or it's being redone as a "Get in the airship and it'll teleport you to the chosen area." like from FFX.