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A bigger game world is not automatically a better one. Its size should match how quickly players move, what they can do along the way, and how much of the environment a development team can make feel purposeful. A compact, detailed city can offer more meaningful exploration than a much larger map padded with empty stretches; a broad world can work when travel itself is part of the experience.
Why bigger game worlds aren’t always better
Every additional block, valley, or road makes a promise to the player: there may be something worth seeing or doing there. It also creates work for the team, which may need to build and maintain visual detail, ambient life, navigation, encounters, and connections to the game’s story. If a space adds scale but little play value, it can become both a dull stretch for players and an ongoing production obligation.
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There is no universal ideal map area or proven density score that predicts whether an open world will be good. Nathan Cheever, a veteran world designer, argues instead for fitting physical space to traversal, gameplay, story, and the team’s capacity. His guidance is a practitioner’s planning advice, not a controlled industry-wide finding. Cheever’s article was published on 6 October 2026.
How traversal speed changes the space a game needs
A player in a fast car crosses ground far more quickly than one exploring on foot. If the game wants both journeys to last a similar amount of time, vehicle-based play generally needs more physical distance—or more reasons to slow down and engage with the surroundings. The relevant question is not simply how large the map is, but what the player experiences during the time it takes to cross it.
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- Fast vehicles: Need room for speed and route choice, but distance alone may become empty travel if little interrupts or enriches the ride.
- On-foot exploration: Can use a smaller footprint while offering close-up detail, interiors, rooftops, combat spaces, and discoveries within a short walk.
- Mixed traversal: Needs a deliberate relationship between movement modes. A district that feels compact on foot may seem tiny from a vehicle, while long vehicle routes can frustrate players if the game offers few meaningful stops.
Cheever notes that terrain can take less time to model than a dense city, while a pedestrian-focused urban game may require detailed immediate surroundings, accessible interiors, rooftop routes, and spaces designed for combat. A vehicle-focused racing game may need different kinds of space and detail. Comparing those production demands early helps a team estimate what it can actually build within its staffing and schedule.
What makes a compact world feel dense
Density means more than placing objects close together. A short route feels worthwhile when it offers a changing mix of activities, discoveries, encounters, or useful choices—and when players can understand how those opportunities relate to one another. If the world is visually busy but every nearby building is inaccessible and every street leads nowhere interesting, closeness alone will not make it engaging.
Hubert Corriveau of Eidos Montreal, in a quotation reproduced in Cheever’s article, described the approach to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided: “Because game design requires us to be at a certain pace, we do a smallish city environment that is very dense. You have a lot of interior next to the other. We don’t want the player to walk for eight blocks of vanilla buildings that have nothing interesting to them, and then get to their mission. We just wanted people to walk into the city and always have something to find, so there’s always something around you.”
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The quotation captures a practical trade-off: a compact district can keep points of interest near the player instead of asking them to cross large stretches of low-activity space. Its usefulness depends on the game’s goals. A larger, quieter landscape may be exactly right if solitude, distance, or the act of crossing it is part of the intended experience.
When travel should be part of the experience
Some games want players to treat the journey as play, not as time between objectives. In an AUTOMATON WEST interview, Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno said the team focused on density and adjusted the world to avoid tedious travel. He described making routes enjoyable enough that players would not feel driven to use a horse simply to escape boredom, while retaining a fast-travel option.
That approach does not mean every trip must be crowded with events. It means the game should be intentional about what travel contributes—such as anticipation, encounters, scenery, or a sense of distance—and give players a choice when crossing ground is not the experience they want at that moment. The interview also says the map is often described as four times the size of the earlier game, but Itsuno said the team did not measure it exactly; that figure should not be treated as a verified measurement.
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How designers can plan a world without overbuilding it
Prototype the detail players will actually encounter
Cheever describes comparing existing world sizes and city layouts to estimate how much unique and reusable detail a team can produce with its available time and staff. Rather than treating a rough map outline as a budget, teams can prototype representative streets, terrain, or activity spaces and assess the actual work required. Modular buildings can support reuse, but they do not erase the need to make routes, interiors, and encounters serve the game.
Cheever’s discussion of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s Prague is explicitly approximate: he could not fully verify its scale, even after speaking with a senior level designer, and extrapolated from familiar prop and street dimensions. His example is best understood as a way to communicate expected detail and surface budget risks—not as a standard method for measuring every game map.
Build a larger-feeling city from connected playable areas
A world can imply a substantial city without making every block equally open or interactive. Cheever suggests using smaller sandbox neighborhoods within a broader city backdrop, placing more linear mission spaces around the edges of hubs, and linking hubs with corridors that support side quests or activities. This gives mission designers room to adjust spaces and lets the world feel connected without requiring the team to populate every intervening block.
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Locations built for one purpose but left unused can also be tracked as potential low-cost opportunities for later content. That possibility is not a reason to build empty areas speculatively: it is a way to retain options when spaces already exist and can be adapted without undermining the main experience.
Use encounter-size estimates as prompts, not rules
For a common action-shooter arena, Cheever offers roughly 100 meters as a starting point based on line of sight. He presents it as a rough check with exceptions and a need for iteration—not a universal standard. The same general idea can inform puzzle spaces: start with the interaction the player needs, then test whether the layout supports it, rather than imposing a fixed size.
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A practical test for every added area
Before expanding a world, designers can evaluate the proposed space against the experience they want to create:
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- Traversal: How quickly will players cross it, and should the journey take time?
- Purpose: What meaningful activity, discovery, encounter, or story beat does the area enable?
- Comprehension: Can players understand where to go and why exploring is worthwhile?
- Variety: Does it add a distinct environment or interaction, rather than repeating an existing stretch?
- Production: Can the team build and maintain it at the quality level the game promises?
- Flexibility: Will the layout support mission changes and iteration, or make them harder?
World size alone cannot guarantee engagement. A 2026 GDC session listing for a talk by Ariadna Martinez, a senior writer and narrative designer at Sucker Punch Productions, says playtesters of Ghost of Yōtei at one point skipped open-world content and rushed toward the main story, creating onboarding, comprehension, and progression problems. The listing describes a talk about narrative methods for engagement and retention; it does not provide a full account of the session. It nevertheless illustrates a useful design consideration: players need understandable reasons to engage, not just more places to go.
Historical map-area figures also show why size comparisons need context. A 2013 GDC eBook chapter, “The Future of Storyplaying,” gives roughly 3 square miles for Grand Theft Auto III (2001) and 400 square miles for Just Cause 2 (2010). The figures are historical claims in that chapter; the passage does not establish how area was measured. They show a difference in reported playable area, not that the larger game offers a better experience.
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