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A bigger game world is only better when its added space improves the experience. As veteran world designer Nathan Cheever argues, scale should fit how quickly players move, what they can do along the way, and what the development team can build and maintain. A sprawling map can create room for meaningful travel—but if it adds empty streets or unused terrain, it can dilute the game and consume resources without adding much play.
Why world size has to fit the way players move
Physical scale is experienced through traversal. A car covers ground much faster than a character walking, climbing, or fighting on foot. If a game is built around vehicles, it may need more distance between destinations to give a journey comparable duration. In an on-foot game, a smaller area can feel substantial when players encounter varied spaces and activities at close intervals.
That makes map area a poor measure of how much game a world contains. The useful question is what the player experiences while crossing it: how long the trip takes, whether the route changes, and whether the destination or journey supports the game’s intended rhythm.
How density makes travel feel worthwhile
In a compact city, nearby interiors, encounters, and discoveries can keep a walk engaging without requiring many blocks of travel. Cheever reproduces a statement from Eidos Montreal’s Hubert Corriveau about 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.” The quotation is attributed here to Cheever’s article.
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Density is not simply a matter of putting more objects on screen. Players need understandable reasons to explore and enough variety for nearby spaces to feel distinct. A 2026 GDC session listing for Ghost of Yōtei describes playtesters skipping open-world content to rush toward the main story, causing onboarding, comprehension, and progression problems. The listing points to a design risk: a large world does not, on its own, explain why exploration matters.
When the route itself is part of the game
Travel does not have to be minimized. In an AUTOMATON WEST interview, Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno said the team focused on map density and sought to make routes enjoyable enough that players would not feel they needed a horse simply to avoid boredom. The game also retains fast travel, giving players a choice. This is a different design target from a compact city: the journey can be a meaningful part of play when the game deliberately supports it.
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What a larger world costs to build and support
Every explorable space creates work. Depending on the game, a location may need art, ambient life, navigation logic, interactions, and testing. A city designed for pedestrians can demand detailed street layouts, interiors, rooftops, and combat spaces; terrain for a vehicle-focused game may be less costly to model in some respects. Modular buildings and reusable assets can help, but reuse does not automatically make every additional block worthwhile.
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Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Cheever describes comparing familiar games and city layouts, then building measured prototypes to estimate how much unique and reusable detail a team can deliver with its staffing and schedule. The comparisons help a team judge what scale can support the planned gameplay and story before the map becomes a budget surprise. His examples are planning methods, not a universal measurement standard: he notes that he could not fully verify the scale of Prague in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and extrapolated from familiar prop and street dimensions.
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Unused spaces are not necessarily wasted. Cheever recommends tracking locations that have already been built but are not used, since they may provide lower-cost opportunities for future content. That is different from building large amounts of empty space in advance: the first creates an inventory of possible assets, while the second creates ongoing production obligations without a clear player benefit.
How hubs and mission spaces can preserve flexibility
A world can suggest a much larger city without making every block playable. Cheever’s layout approaches include smaller sandbox neighborhoods within a broader city backdrop, linear mission areas branching from the edges of hubs, and corridors between hubs that carry side quests or activities. These structures can preserve a sense of urban scale while letting mission designers change spaces without requiring the entire city to be equally detailed or accessible.
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This also answers a practical design question: does every location inside the apparent city need to be open to the player? Not necessarily. The boundary should feel intentional, and the accessible areas should provide enough continuity and navigation cues to make the larger setting believable. A connected set of rich hubs may serve the game better than a seamless map whose intervening spaces have little purpose.
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How to choose a useful scale for a game
There is no established universal target for map area or a single correct density metric. A team can evaluate proposed space against the experience it wants to deliver:
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- Traversal: How fast can players move, and how much time should a typical trip take?
- Purpose: What encounters, activities, discoveries, or story moments make travel worthwhile?
- Comprehension: Can players understand where they are, where to go, and why an optional detour matters?
- Interaction: How much environmental variety, interior access, verticality, or local combat does the design require?
- Production: Can the team build and maintain each area at the intended level of quality?
- Iteration: Does the layout leave mission teams room to adjust spaces and routes as the game develops?
Cheever offers roughly 100 meters as a starting point for a common action-shooter arena, based on line of sight. He presents it as a rough check rather than a rule: encounter spaces, including puzzle areas, need iteration and can call for different dimensions. It should not be treated as an industry-wide standard.
What historical map-size comparisons can—and can’t—show
A 2013 GDC eBook chapter, “The Future of Storyplaying,” gives historical playable-area figures of roughly 3 square miles for Grand Theft Auto III (2001) and 400 square miles for Just Cause 2 (2010). Those figures illustrate how reported game areas grew across that period, but the cited passage does not establish a measurement method or show that the larger area produced a better experience. They are not a benchmark for what a modern game should contain.
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