Breath of the Wild: just how big is the biggest Legend of Zelda map yet?
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is sodding enormous.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was playable at E3 with a hefty demo. The area on show - the Plateau - offered hours of gameplay including four shrines, a world boss and multiple biomes.
But this area represents about 2% of the total game, according to comments made during Nintendo's E3 livestreams. So just how big is the whole map?
With this question in mind, Arekkz did a bit of rough calculation during a visit to Nintendo. He discovered that the map available in the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild demo takes about 3:40 to walk across. This map makes up a 2x2 block of a 22x18 grid over the greyed-out map viewable in the demo, it looks like it would take about 40 minutes to walk across the game world from north to south and about 33 minutes to walk from east to west - if you were able to just trek straight across, which is unlikely due to environmental obstacles. Of course, that might not be the whole thing; there might be a shadow realm or something, too.
Nintendo has said The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is 12 times the size of Twilight Princess. For comparison's sake it only takes about 12 minutes to cross that entire map, but Nintendo's likely including dungeon and other internal geometry in its calculations.
For further comparison purposes, it takes an hour to walk across GTA 4's map and about two hours to walk across GTA 5 and The Witcher 3. Those maps are much larger, but designed for vehicles (or mounts), and there seems little doubt The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild boasts the largest open area the series has ever fronted.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild releases in 2017 for Wii U and NX.