So, according to some videos popping up on vimeo (which I wont link here) it takes 10 minutes to get from one corner of the map to the other.

Here is a size comparison of the maps of Skyrim, FO3, and FO4. http://i.imgur.com/LN4GR4D.gifv

What do you guys think?

I don't agree with that comparison at all. The map looks about the size of FO3's, not significantly larger. The distance between Vault 111 and Concord seemed pretty tiny and yet it takes up a huge portion of the top left corner of the map. I'm a bit disappointed personally, but then I've never played the game so I can't talk much.

After watching the video I have to say it seems pretty accurate. The map is even smaller in reality considering you hit an invisible long before the map ends on the bottom right corner.

I expect a smaller map than Skyrim - Skyrim was a different type of game in terms of the scale of its landscape. All 3 Fallout games have been centered around one major city and the surrounding areas.

Scratch that. It's 1:40 here and I said something dumb and wrong.

I havent seen the video but one of the screenshots has a map legend at the bottom, it said the total area of the map was +400k sq feet, which makes it 27 sq miles. That makes it bigger than FO3.

It's going to end up being smaller than Skyrim unfortunately. Even when you factor the mountains in. Half of FO4's map is water. Granted there may be some decent underwater areas.

I was hoping for a lot more.

This is Fallout. Not TES. Not sure why people keep wanting a TES total conversion mod or hiking simulator. The series was never about making the biggest map in the market. That isn't how it should be structured.

Fo3 or NV size is just right for what the series should be doing. It's the content, quests, characters, stories, and design in that given map that matters more for Fallout series. Hopefully that is what they concentrated on, not miles of boring nothingness (unless it's a fast travel mini-game like FO1/FO2, lol) with the same crap NPC spam and generic towns and same landscapes over and over. Leave that for TES.

If he ran from the top left corner to the bottom right corner he took the shortest route on the map.. The longest route is the top right corner to the bottom left corner. (of land) .. He also probably didn't go out and swim in the ocean.. how fat out can we swim? What's out there? Just saying.. you can't judge a map size by one guys attempt at measuring map size by a sprint through the shortest possible area of land mass.

its 2.5 times the overall area of fallout 3 and almost twice the playable area of skyrim, over half of skyrim was mountains and water, its an illusion how much space there was...fallout 3 has 289 squares and fallout 4 has 729 and if you just sprint across skyrim or fallout 3 you could cover the area fast, for instance paradise falls, look at how much area it takes in the fallout 3 map, a good piece of it, so the map run makes it seem small but he didn't go corner to corner, it was prob on a very easy setting, he was sprinting most of it and moving quite fast, he also didn't really go thru the middle of the city area at all just the far left portion of the map for most of the way, the map is about 37 sq miles and about 30% is water so its not a ton more land mass than fallout 3 or skyrim but it is still more then both of those games and the overall playable area is much more spread out, but yeah at sprinting speed without exploring or stopping/fighting enemies etc, sure you can cover the area fast, i'm not worried, the game took them a long time to make and its a detailed massive world according to todd howard and as long as you don't run down the left side of the map at full speed you should have hundreds and thousands of hours of fun anf replayability

Errr no, because BOTH the structure and the size obviously matter. Not being TES doesn't mean anything. Not sure why you think they are different in that regard. It is an open world game and size does matter.

Can you explain how you made this comparison OP? Are the scales accurate? Which are the reference points of the comparison? Or did you just take the maps and resized them randomly or with how you felt the distance was?

those map overlays are on a lot of websites and i believe they are very accurate, look at paradise falls on fallout 3, it takes up a good size area also but the fallout 3 map still feels fairly big and the fallout 4 map is 2.5 times bigger, sure a lot of it is water but its still a good deal more land area and way more area overall and spread out and skyrim is over half unplayable area, easily.

If the comparison is accurate its size is not bad even if, unfortunately, like 40% of it is water. Now the density remains to be seen. I hope we see even more density than FO3, more important/bigger POIs than the average FNV POI, and less buildings without interiors...

well i'm trying to do some brain excerises, by my calculations if the map squares are the same size for both fallout 3 and 4, in fallout 4 the guy running across the map covered about 2 squares a minute so if you compare to the fallout 3 map and do some calculation its seems right, the guy was doing a lot of sprinting and the sprinting is fast compared to the speed you could go in fallout 3 so if you kinda imagine that fast sprinting speed in fallout 3 i can see running from lets say megaton to the river past the super duper mart in a minute and thats 2 squares so thats about the same distance as the guy running in fallout 4, now this is all with no obstacles or stopping for anything, not having to go around many buildings etc...just straight line for the most part like he did on the that left side of the map, thats like going from the citadel to the jefferson memorial in a minute [also 2 squares] and thats possible at sprinting speed.

I disagree, for example that large empty area with sand storm next to Helios One was utterly empty yet it added much to the atmosphere. Not that i'm asking for an empty map like GTAV but Witcher 3 raised the bar quite high so i'm disappointed.

Uhh...you realize we were comparing the size to Fallout 3 as well right?

Also, the reason I included Skyrim was because Bethesda games (at least before) kept making the map bigger and more detailed. Oblivion war bigger than Morrowind, Fallout 3 was bigger than Oblivion, New Vegas was a little bigger than Fallout 3, Skyrim was bigger than New Vegas.

I think, whether it matters or not, it's still worth noting that this is the first time to my knowledge that Bethesda decided to reduce the size of one of their worlds from a previous game, even if it's from another franchise.

I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, just worth noting.

Though to be fair, I WILL say it's a bad thing that a huge amount of Fallout 4's map is water. Also, you hit an invisible wall LONG before the map ends in the southeast corner. So in reality the map is much smaller than what's presented.

This map comparison is wrong.

Fallout 3 is larger then Skyrim by 2 square miles.

It was 11 minutes, not 10minutes. Skyrim from end to end was 14min, and that was diagonal (south/west to north/east cornor), so longest possible distance. Some time was also spend going around or hopping up mountains.

Sure was interesting to see how people remember Skyrim as being very big, some people said things like "ow it would take 30min to run end to end in Skyrim in a straight line", some even believed it would take more than an hour.

But nope, 14min diagonally.

Fallout does have quite a bit of water. Hopefully the level of verticality and the metro's will compensate for that.

Do you have a source for that?

Yeah, it's the water that concerns me most, and the invisible walls starting way before the map ends.

The GECK/creation kit.

Every Bethesda game uses cells in its outdoor areas. By measuring them, since their sizes are given, you can find the total playable area easily.

-Morrowind was 10 square miles.

-Oblivion was 22 square miles total, but only around 16 of that was playable due to the rest being outside the invisible wall, since they had to map parts of all the nearby provinces for the player to see once they reach the end of the game world.

-Fallout 3 was also 16 square miles.

-Skyrim was 14 square miles.

Further complicating the issue about Fallout 4's size is that the map shown in the video you posted isn't the whole map. According to the map extracted from the pipboy app data, the glowing sea extends BEYOND the dashed border. There is a fairly substantial part of the map seemingly outside the dashed border.

On top of that, the guy who ran from one corner of the map to the other only ran on the land area IIRC, meaning he didn't count all the water from in the lower right hand corner when doing map size. Further throwing the total size off.

Well, FO3 and Skyrim maps are definitely in the same scale. I've seen a static image of the last frame of that animation and if look close enough, you can see that the cells are in the same scale. That's the important bit there, you have to compare cell sizes in order to compare map sizes.

FO4 seems to be slightly too small.

He actually got stuck at an invisible wall before he could go further into the water. That's the main issue here: the invisible walls seem to start long before the map in the southeastern corner. Not only that, but even if the map size is decent, I still don't like that so much of it seems to be water, even if we can find some interesting things hidden there.

Also, in the video we saw the entire map on the pipboy, and he notes where he started from and where he finished. He walked diagonally across the entire game world until he hit an invisible wall. Maybe the glowing sea goes beyond, but the player couldn't reach anything else.

The map size is decent for me is a little smaller that Skyrim but w/o all those mountains that didnt really did much for gameplay.

If they star making bigger and bigger maps u will end with maps that have alot of nothing between areas. A common problem on Witcher 3 maps.

I'm willing to bet that Fallout 4's map has more density than all the previous entries. I mean sure, Just Cause 2 had a map that was astronomically large but it was mostly empty with absolutely nothing to do in it.

but its not smaller, the playable land area is actually about 1.5 to 2 times more playable area, skyrim was huge but the mountains took up more space than people realize, prob half the map area was unplayable in skyrim, if you overlay the map yes skyrim is bigger but thats deceiving, FO4 has more playable area, yes it has about 1/3 water but it still has more land area, compared to fallout 3, the fallout 4 map is 2.5 times the area, the fallout 4 map has 729 squares and fallout 3 has 289 squares and at the speed the guy who ran across the map is going you can cover lets say 2 squares in the same time on both maps, in falllout 3 if you ran at fallout 4 sprinting speed you could run from the top to the bottom of the map even faster than the guy did in fallout 4 and i saw the video and he didn't run in a diagonal line from corner to corner, he skirted around the entire city, but yeah you can cover a lot of ground sprinting if you didn't stop on any of the maps they have made as long as nothing is in the way