Cyberpunk 2077 is CD Projekt Red’s upcoming RPG. The studio’s last open-world RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, was a huge success, and was acclaimed for both its world-design and its storytelling. When it released, The Witcher 3's map size was also among the largest in open-world RPG gaming.
Cyberpunk 2077 will take place in Night City, a dystopian West Coast hub known as the “worst place to live in America.” Cyberpunk is an ambitious game, and has been in development at the studio since long before the release of The Witcher 3. Despite that, comparing the sizes of each game’s map may lead to some surprising realizations for some fans.
The Total Size of The Witcher 3
The Witcher 3 takes place in two key areas, the region of the Northern Realms surrounding the free city of Novigrad, including Velen, and the island nation of Skellige to the west. The total, unbroken region surrounding Novigrad is about 72 square kilometers, while Skellige is around 64 square kilometers. This makes The Witcher 3’s base game roughly 136 square kilometers in size.
The Blood and Wine expansion adds the duchy of Toussaint to the total map size for The Witcher 3. The duchy is estimated to be around 8 square kilometers in size, though the uneven invisible boundary around the duchy makes that harder to measure than some other areas in the game. This puts the total size of The Witcher 3’s explorable map at around 142 square kilometers.
For comparison, Grand Theft Auto 5’s Los Santos is about 127 square kilometers, while Skyrim’s map size is around 38.5 square kilometers. In other words, The Witcher 3’s map is about 3.5 times larger than Skyrim’s and about 1.1 times larger than Los Santos, though a significant portion of the Los Santos map is also taken up by the ocean.
The Size of Cyberpunk's Night City
The Night City map is estimated to be about 4 kilometers across by 6 kilometers in height, or 24 square kilometers overall. This means that the total map for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is nearly 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 some of the map is taken up by water and may not be totally explorable. This would mean Night City is even smaller in terms of playable space than some other estimates would put it at. However, there’s one trick Night City and Cyberpunk 2077 has up its sleeves.
Night City is a dense metropolis, which means there’s one dimension of its world map which The Witcher 3’s medieval fantasy setting does not have: vertical height. While games like GTA V had skyscrapers, the vast majority of the action took place on the road. According to CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk’s skyscrapers should be explorable in their own right, which could hugely add to the real size of Night City.
Cyberpunk players can expect a world without the same breadth as The Witcher 3. This has also been confirmed in some other aspects, such as the fact that the Cyberpunk 2077 main quest will be shorter than Geralt’s journey to save Ciri and stop the Wild Hunt. However, this does not mean that Cyberpunk will actually feel significantly smaller. Fans shouldn’t expect rolling vistas or mountaintop views like the ones in The Witcher 3, but a very different sense of scale that can only come with rendering a dense, 21st century metropolis.
Cyberpunk 2077 is set to release December 10, 2020, for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One, with a free next-gen upgrade planned for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.