Kingdoms of Amalurs world comparable in size to Oblivions

We recently sat down with Craig Krstolic, Associate Producer on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and took a guided tour through the fantastical world of Amalur. While watching him explore the seemingly massive open environments we asked about its actual size, and though he didn’t have the exact square footage for us (though he said he would look into it), he did offer a comparison that gives us a pretty good idea of how much land there will be to explore.

“How big is the game world overall?” we asked as he showed off the game’s map. At a glance it looked very large and open, unlike Fable's, which was broken into small segments.

“I’ve looked at this, and if I look at something like Oblivion, it’s very comparable in size,” he said, though we shouldn’t expect the worlds to look all that similar, even if they’re approximately the same size.

“They’re slightly different scales, though,” he explained. “In Oblivion you have the central city and the area around that. We have a fairly vast area that’s spread out a little bit more with a lot smaller cities and towns within it.”

Though Big Huge Games has teased this before, this is the first time they’ve gone on the record with the comparison.

Oblivion's map isn't the biggest in games, but at 16 square miles it's still plenty large. Krstolic's claims that the world is spread out more than Oblivion's might sound like a bad sign to some, but we're excited to explore these small cities. Oblivion sometimes felt too empty, and we'd get excited whenever we saw a new place to visit in the distance. Having more small, scattered cities will likely enhance this feeling, and we're looking forward to accepting whatever quests its citizens might have.

Oct 6, 2011