This subject has made the rounds on some parts of the net. There's even a popular thread on the favorite news site of every Vgcharter: NeoGaf. But for some reason it haven't caught on here. I guess we are too busy making NX speculation threads. Regardless, I decided to make a thread on it because I didn't have the same reaction that most people had and wanted to share my take on the matter here, for some reason.

It all started with an article published by Dual Shockers in which they, very convincingly, measured Final Fantasy XV total map area by using various resources from the game. The resulting size? A whopping 786.4 squared miles. Of course, for most gamers such a number is meaningless since, let's be honest, most gamers don't get out enough to have a remote idea what a mile even is. But then Dual Shockers included the following comparison picture in the article:

And queue everyone loosing their shit.

 My reaction? Meh. But I'm not surprised at everyone else hype. After all, now that open world games have skyrocketed in popularity, map size dick-measuring seems to be the fifth most popular gamer sport after specs dick-measuring, metascore dick-measuring, sales dick-measuring and resolution dick-measuring. I guess this give fans some sort of quality reassurance. That's something Final Fantasy desperately needs.

But lets put this map size in perspective, by using these old comparison pics:

And:

The most important one, to me, is the Nightfall map. (CAUTION: senile old man story incoming!) I used to be a huge Guild Wars player, with 5000+ hours of game time. I remember when Nightfall came out. Everyone was hype about the game size, included myself. But the more I played, the more unimpressed I was by the map size. I never felt It was a big deal. I even thought it should have been much bigger. It's not that I felt that it was small, just that it wasn't big. I remember running it many times, to unlock the outposts with all my characters, and going from one side of the map to the other was no more than three hours if I didn't stopped for anything (I think). That's on foot (there were no mounts). Know that the map shown here doesn’t give the complete picture on how big Nightfall was. There's a part of the game that doesn't appear on the map. It was called the Domain of Anguish and was a sort of underworld. I think that area added an additional 25% to the total size. It still didn't felt that big.

So, my point in a nutshell is that I'm not impressed by the map size of Final Fantasy XV due to being unimpressed with my experience of a much bigger map. Not that it matters to me. I prefer a small map that is full of life over a huge and empty one.

Source

Daggerfall is bigger than all those maps combined, I'm impressed!

No big deal? FFXV poops all over the two games being compared to it.

Tbh I don't believe this comparison picture...

i like huge maps even the empty ones as long as theres something at the end of the road.

Is the size of No Man's Sky known ? /ot

Honestly I don't care about map sizes (probably that's why I'm a Nintendo fan), the biggest they are, the more problems there might be...
I don't really know anything about FF but I've seen a few trailers for FFXV and there were gigantic people, what if you can play as a giant and walk from a corner to the other of the map in like 5 minutes ?

I thought Fuel was the biggest, I had no idea. Could you actually wander around Daggerfall? Like from one side to the other? as that is 250 miles by 250 miles. It would take you, at running speed (I estimated at 8-9mph) to take 30-32 straight hours of gameplay to do it, just one side to the other.

.... hmm, not sure on MMOs though, bit unfair using cloud processing. :P

That Daggerfall map is ridiculous.... That's roughly the size of Florida....

Just because I remember a thread once asking about which game would have the biggest world, FF XV or XCX, how big is XCX's map?

This. I believe there's something wrong with it. Anyway, they have to travel on a car, so maybe is that big taking in mind that.