Open world RPG games have made a great effort over the last ten years to make as large of a map as possible and fill it with as much good content as developers can. Two games in particular that are compared a lot for the size and quality of their maps are Skyrim and Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Both games have large maps and have a lot of quality that go into them, but here are the differences Skyrim and Assassin's Creed Odyssey have when it comes to their maps.
The first thing that stands out to players when they look up map size is how much larger the Assassin's Creed Odyssey map is compared to the Skyrim map. The Assassin's Creed Odyssey map is a whopping 90.7 square miles while Skyrim has a comparatively low 14.5 square miles. While this size difference seems immense, the maps feel relatively similar in size due to two major components.
First off, the speed at which characters move in Assassin's Creed Odyssey is significantly faster per pixel than characters in Skyrim; players traverse the Skyrim map on foot in an average of about 2 hours. The Assassin's Creed Odyssey map takes about the same amount of time to walk from the north islands to the southern tip of the map. When sailing in Assassins Creed Odyssey, players hit a real world speed of about 45 knots which is incredibly unrealistic. Therefore, although the Assassin's Creed Odyssey map is so much larger than the Skyrim map, it doesn't feel that way to players because of the differences in the way the map is experienced when players travel.
Secondly, the Assassin's Creed Odyssey map is mainly water. While this is imperative to augmenting a realistic Greek environment, some players may feel like this takes away from the true size of the map when comparing to Skyrim. Skyrim is all land with some creeks lakes and rivers, none of which are very large. Traveling around Skyrim feels large because of the effort people have to put into walking or riding from place to place, which is also why the fast travel system is so key to the gameplay.
Some would argue that Assassin's Creed Odyssey isn't really as big as it boasts due to most of the map being water, but the truth is, a lot happens in that water. The game has made a point of bringing a lot of the dynamics seen in Black Flag's sailing environment into Odyssey. A large part of the game is leveling up the sailing skills and fleet, and it could be argued that although a lot of the map is in fact water, that water plays just as pivotal of a roll to the game as the land itself.
As far as content goes, both games have a lot to offer and players need to remember the time that separates the games. The last DLC for Skyrim, Dragonborn, was released in 2012 and while the game has been worked on constantly since then, the base game was released in 2011 which means there is only so much developers can do when it comes to things like graphics and features because of the game's old engine. Assassin's Creed Odyssey was released in 2018, so the developers had a lot more to work with in this regard.
Part of it does deal with how that map sized is used. Skyrim has a total of around 270 quests while Assassin's Creed Odyssey has around 100. That being said, Assassin's Creed Odyssey has a lot more to the game that just quests. T Another thing that comes into play when considering how much content in is a game and therefore how big the game feels when walking from place to place is how many locations or cities the map has. Assassin's Creed Odyssey has about 28 major cities and islands, while Skyrim has a massive 343 locations that players can fast travel to. This makes a big difference in the feel of how big each game's map is, despite the true size of them.
While Assassin's Creed Odyssey technically has a much larger map than Skyrim, players have learned that it comes down to more than just square footage when considering a game's map size. Assassin's Creed Odyssey may be extremely big and unprecedentedly beautiful, but it was made almost ten years after Skyrim, doesn't have as many locations, feels smaller than it is due to the speed at which characters can travel on foot, and is mainly comprised of water.
Skyrim, on the other hand, doesn't offer as much variety in its content, and players move extremely slow. All of this makes the two games feel relatively similar in size when players enjoy them. So while Assassin's creed Odyssey is technically much larger than Skyrim, players need to enjoy both games before deciding for themselves which map feels better.
Assassin's Creen Odyssey is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.