With a Viking-themed Assassin's Creed Ragnarok supposedly coming later this year, fans should be excited to explore early Scandinavia as one of the earliest known Assassins in the franchise's universe. As expected with any Viking-themed media, players should expect plenty of pillaging villages, brutal battles, and especially plenty of seafaring journeys.
Obviously because it's in the game's namesake, Assassin's Creed Odyssey's sea travel took up a lot of the gameplay loop outside of the main storyline, something Assassin's Creed Ragnarok will presumably emulate. Exploration was a big part of Odyssey, but along with that came the criticism of it being overwhelmingly large and vast, which can be either a boon or annoyance depending on player preference. Regardless of preference, it can still be quite a daunting task exploring the entire map, which in turn creates a gigantic imbalance between main story and side quests.
Map Size in Assassin's Creed
With Assassin's Creed Odyssey came the biggest world map in the franchise's history thus far. The entire mediterranean map is estimated to be about 145 square kilometers (around 91 square miles) in size, compared to games like PUBG's biggest maps (64 square kilometers) and Witcher 3's 136 square kilometers (84 square miles). Compared to other Assassin's Creed games, Origins is around 90 square kilometers (60 square miles) in size, making Odyssey around 2.5 times the size of Origins. The closest game to Odyssey's size would understandably be Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, which clocks at just about the same size of 145 square kilometers (90 square miles) of the Caribbean.
For Black Flag it made sense for the map size to be gigantic, considering the game's a bonafide pirate simulator that heavily involves ocean and island exploration. Much of the game's 80 hours of content revolves around sailing in the Jackdaw to explore islands and shipwrecks. Odyssey being based in Ancient Greece means there's also plenty of sea exploration, but obviously regions aren't as small and spread out. Even more importantly, players take on the role of a Greek mercenary who's proficient in ground combat, meaning in a narrative sense there's no point in having such a large focus on naval combat or exploration. The problem is to what degree the sheer size of the map adds to the primary gameplay loop, and how the freeform open-world distracts players from the main story.
Justifying the Sprawl
Every Assassin's Creed game has viewpoints that add details to regions on the world map, essentially asking players to "unlock" the world. For some players that can create a false necessity to find all the viewpoints in a region before continuing the story. In Odyssey specifically, "synchronizing" viewpoints meant the discovery of a bevy of side quests, sending players across several Greek islands to complete various tasks with varying worthwhile benefits. Other than viewpoints and specific quests, the main gameplay loop of Odyssey also involved Conquest activities, specifically tasking players with exploring and liberating regions across the entire Greece map.
Granted it meant Odyssey sure had a lot of content to beat, but the point is Odyssey does a lot to distract players from the main narrative. The sheer size of the map, as with an inherent focus on exploration, means further detachment from what should be the primary concern of Kassandra or Alexios narratively. Taking into account individual playstyle preferences further exemplifies the problem: If someone's a typically story-driven player who solely cares about the narrative, the game's design makes regions more difficult or have more enemies unless they're liberated. For those who prefer to take their time and explore, it means players prefer to explore the world itself rather than take the linear path presented to them in the beginning.
A Seafaring Problem
Now, with a game all about Viking history, players could see an exaggerated version of this scenario in Assassin's Creed Ragnarok. In a game like Odyssey where ship travel is contextualized in ancient Greece as exploration-focused, Ragnarok would make ship traversal an even more integral portion of the game. Vikings were rogue Scandinavians known for their iconic longships and their propensity for conquest via the sea. Assuming Ragnarok follows similar narrative motifs from the last game, it would mean a complex supernatural narrative with plenty of details to keep track of. Mix that in with increased player freedom, and Ragnarok runs into the same problem Odyssey did.
Assassin's Creed Ragnarok would do well to somehow integrate the exploration into the main story, but the game runs the risk of making an open-world far too linear to justify the gigantic map. Odyssey had a similar issue, but Ancient Greece at least could be condensed to several islands clustered around one another. Vikings covered a lot of ocean during their heyday, meaning not only would a theoretical Assassin's Creed Ragnarok world map be bigger than Odyssey, but would also be less thematically and realistically condensed. If certain players were overwhelmed by the sheer size of Odyssey, then Ragnarok is only going to be worse in this context.
In the end sheer map size doesn't equate to the overall quality of a game, something several Assassin's Creed and other open-world games have proven. Ragnarok could contextualize the need for large swaths of ocean in the North and Baltic Seas with a proper Viking's journey. A globe-trotting adventure around the various locales of northern Europe would have to be integral to a Vikings-oriented Assassin's Creed game, especially considering the love and appreciation of The Viking Age in pop culture in recent years. As long as the narrative doesn't rely on staying in an area for too long, Ragnarok could meld constant traversal into the game's story in a very interesting way.
Assassin's Creed Ragnarok is reportedly in development.