One of the best things about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the open-world concept of the game. However, the actual size of the world in BotW is still a mystery over a month since its release on the Nintendo Switch and Wii U. That is, until a redditor began to document how big the map in Breath of the Wild is and how it compares to other games, including other Zelda titles and Skyrim.
Redditor HylianWarrior approximated how large the world map in Breath of the Wild is and created a nifty graphic. According to him, the map of BotW is about 9km x 6.8km in size, which is roughly over 5 miles long.
For comparison, Twilight Princess has a map that is roughly 1.9km x 2.2km in size, while Skyrim’s map is approximately 6.8km x 5.4km. Check out HylianWarrior’s maps here.
Another redditor, Dystify, took these calculations from HylianWarrior and created this great animation of how each map fits within one another, with Breath of the Wild’s world map easily encompassing all of the other maps.
Check out the Breath of the Wild map comparison gif below.
While these calculations for the Breath of the Wild map aren’t official, they do offer some interesting visual evidence for how large this game really is. The only official talk of Breath of the Wild’s world map came from the developers themselves in The Making of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild series.
In the Open-Air Concept video (shown below), Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi spoke about the process of creating the world map and how the open-air concept started all the way back to the Wind Waker days.
Now that the limitations from past consoles are no longer a factor, the development team and Fujibayashi used the geography of Kyoto, Japan as a basis for the world. For reference, Kyoto is approximately 320 square miles in size.
As they developed the world, they found that Breath of the Wild was about 12 times as large as Twilight Princess. However, the team wanted BotW to have more than just a larger map but be greater in scale and scope, which means that the amount that you can do in the world map is greater and the heights to which Link can travel are much higher.
Check out the video about the world map found in Breath of the Wild below. The discussion about the map starts around the 2:23 mark.
What do you think about the world map size in Breath of the Wild? Do you believe HylianWarrior’s calculations are on-point? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
