Cyberpunk 2077 is CD Projekt Red's follow-up to The Witcher 3's open-world RPG, but comparing their map sizes might surprise some fans.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the upcoming RPG from CD Projekt Red. The studio's latest open-world RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, was a huge success and was praised for both its world design and story. At the time of its release, The Witcher 3's maps were among the largest in open-world RPGs.
Cyberpunk 2077 will take place in Night City, a West Coast dystopian hub known as "the worst place to live in America". Cyberpunk is an ambitious game that was in development at the studio long before the release of The Witcher 3. Regardless, comparing each game's map sizes may lead some fans to unexpected conclusions.
Overall size of The Witcher 3
The Witcher 3 takes place in two key areas - the Northern Kingdoms region surrounding the free city of Novigrad, including Velen, and the island nation of Skellige to the west. The total area of the region surrounding Novigrad is about 72 square kilometers, while the area of Skellige is about 64 square kilometers. Thus, the area of the base game of The Witcher 3 is approximately 136 square kilometers.
The Blood and Wine expansion adds the Duchy of Toussaint to the overall map size of The Witcher 3. The Duchy is estimated to be roughly 8 square kilometers in size, though the irregular, invisible border around the Duchy makes it harder to measure than some other areas in the game. Thus, the total size of the researched map of The Witcher 3 is about 142 square kilometers.
For comparison, the area of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto 5 is about 127 square kilometers, while the size of the Skyrim map is about 38.5 square kilometers. In other words, The Witcher 3's map is about 3.5 times the size of Skyrim and about 1.1 times the size of Los Santos, although much of the Los Santos map is also occupied by the ocean.
Cyberpunk 2077 night city size
The Night City map measures about 4 kilometers across by 6 kilometers high, or 24 square kilometers in total. This means that the overall map for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is almost 6 times larger than the base map for Cyberpunk 2077. However, there are a few complicating factors.
Like Los Santos, Night City is a city on the coast, which means that part of the map is occupied by water and cannot be fully explored. This means Night City is even smaller in play space than some other estimates. However, Night City and Cyberpunk 2077 have one trick up their sleeve.
Night City is a dense metropolis, which means there is one dimension to its world map that is not present in The Witcher 3's medieval fantasy setting: vertical height. While there are skyscrapers in games like GTA V, the vast majority of the action takes place on roads. According to CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk's skyscrapers should be explorable, which could greatly increase Night City's actual size.
Cyberpunk players can expect a world that is not as wide as The Witcher 3. This is confirmed by several other aspects, such as the fact that the main quest of Cyberpunk 2077 will be shorter than Geralt's journey to save Ciri and stop the Wild Hunt. However, this does not mean that Cyberpunk will feel significantly smaller. Fans should not expect the steep expanses or mountain peaks of The Witcher 3, but a very different sense of scale that can only come from visualizing a dense metropolis in the 21st century.
Cyberpunk 2077 releases December 10, 2020 for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One, with a free next-gen update planned for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
