The sheer scale of Night City

[pushbak]

Myself and a few intrepid explores over on reddit wanted to determine the size of the map based upon how much area the player traversed in the reveal demo. For reference this is the map we've been provided from CDPR: https://i.imgur.com/uqitDlf.jpg

This is a rough map based on the player path:

We did determine this is 100% the mega-structure V's apartment is in. There's another one in the background.

Here are the clues:

• Stout says 'Headed towards the NID.' That's the Northside Industrial District.
• The narrator states the demo is in Watson
• Allfoods is in Watson/Kabuki based on the hacking scene: https://imgur.com/iST63qu
• Orbital Air Center is visible for both the E3 trailer and gameplay Reveal
• There's a river

Best guess is the demo takes place in this region:

Given the size of the Metro Map, the scale and density of Night City is unprecedented.


So, can CDPR show us the player driving off the dead-end highway?

 

[Rawls]

Solid digging. I had noticed the general area but hadn't actually mapped out the path of the characters in the demo. Definitely looks like the map will be impressive given it's density and vertical assets. Looking across the canal at downtown is staggering in the demo.

The only caution I have is that I would guess the metro map is probably not to scale. Also I'm unsure if metro goes to the "outlying areas" of night city discussed in a couple interviews. Really excited to get a proper look at the map of Night City whenever that gets shown.

 

[pushbak]

Solid digging. I had noticed the general area but hadn't actually mapped out the path of the characters in the demo. Definitely looks like the map will be impressive given it's density and vertical assets. Looking across the canal at downtown is staggering in the demo.

The only caution I have is that I would guess the metro map is probably not to scale. Also I'm unsure if metro goes to the "outlying areas" of night city discussed in a couple interviews. Really excited to get a proper look at the map of Night City whenever that gets shown.

The assumption is at least the total size of the Metro Map is relevant in some way to total size of 'Night City' specifically. The game play demo doesn't leave Night City so the outlying areas aren't taken into account for this purpose. We've already seen space flight so it's a foregone conclusion we'll at least tangentially leave Night City.

What's fascinating is the density. We see an incredibly small area of the map, but that small area is packed full assets and diversity, and that's not even close to densest areas of the map.

 

[hjarg]

Wow, there is some research that really went into this. Awesome!
And if your assumptions are half correct, we are dealing with one huge city.
Anticipation has gone though the roof!

 

[animalfather]

i just hope the city is really big

 

[evilhippo]

Wow, there is some research that really went into this. Awesome!
And if your assumptions are half correct, we are dealing with one huge city.
Anticipation has gone though the roof!

Yes indeed!

 

[sleazy89]

Awesome researching. Given the data the map is crazy! The demo wasn't even set in the most dense part of the city and looked like it was plenty of things to do... I can't even imagine what they achieved this time...

 

[pushbak]

Awesome researching. Given the data the map is crazy! The demo wasn't even set in the most dense part of the city and looked like it was plenty of things to do... I can't even imagine what they achieved this time...

Agreed!

 

[Rawls]

The assumption is at least the total size of the Metro Map is relevant in some way to total size of 'Night City' specifically.

Well IF you're assuming (1) that your path in on the map is accurate and (2) that the metro map is somewhere close to scale ...

Then we can see that the portion of the car trip - 24:38 to 24:48 in the demo video - after the first right taken by the car you pass two blocks in about 10 seconds and roughly an average speed of 40 miles per hour. That would make a rough estimate of that portion of the car ride to be .1 miles (.16 km). Assuming your path on the map is correct, if we take that portion of the car ride to be .1 miles and extrapolate to the full Metro Map, that would make the total horizontal metro map size approximately 5 miles by 5 miles (8km by 8km). Which is roughly the size of the Novigrad and Velen map in TW3. Just much much much more dense and vertical.

There are still too many unknowns to make this a reliable guess ... namely whether the assumptions above are correct and also if the metro map covers the entirety of the city map. It's also quite possible the map size could change during development. But it at least gives us a guess.

 

[sv3672]

Is it guaranteed by the way that the speed displayed on the dashboard of the car is accurate? It is possible that it is also scaled by some factor. However, we can make use of the distances shown to quest objectives as well.

 

[Rawls]

Is it guaranteed by the way that the speed displayed on the dashboard of the car is accurate?

No it's not guaranteed. I was assuming the in world speedometer is an accurate calculator of time, distance & speed.

 

[Seredas]

i just hope the city is really big

A big open world means nothing by itself. I don't really care for it to be huge. Wouldn't you prefer a dense open world with many things to do?

 

[sv3672]

No it's not guaranteed. I was assuming the in world speedometer is an accurate calculator of time, distance & speed.

At around 25:06-25:07 the distance to the markers decreases by 18 meters in 1 second (18 * 3.6 = 64.8 kph), while the speed displayed is ~40 mph, so at least those seem to be consistent. To verify that the marker distances are accurate in meters, perhaps they could be compared to something of relatively well known size (such as the average height of an NPC).

Edit: the demo also shows during the scene with Victor that the marker distance to the meeting point is 1011 meters, that could be used to estimate how large the area on the metro map is.

 

[animalfather]

A big open world means nothing by itself. I don't really care for it to be huge. Wouldn't you prefer a dense open world with many things to do?

both super dense and big

 

[1veryFrustratedguy]

both super dense and big

An open world is not an open world unless its dense populated and has a lot of detail out into it

 

[Jarred_Blaauw]

There should be a countryside part of night city where it's more wilderness and there less people and more nature just to balance out the world.

 

[sv3672]

I wonder if the locations seen on the gameplay demo could be placed on the metro map, assuming it actually shows an accurate layout of the game world. From the video, it can be found out that:

• the ripperdoc is 200 meters from V's apartment to the W-SW (~25 degrees to the S from W)
• from the elevator before exiting to the streets, the ripperdoc is 158 meters to the SW (42 degrees from S)
• the meeting point is 1020 meters to the NE (45 degrees) from the ripperdoc
• it is 503 meters to the N-NE (~25 degrees) from the place where the panning view of the large buildings is shown
• All Food is about 240 meters to the N-NE (20 degrees) from the meeting point

If the entire city on map was 8x8 km, one pixel on the above linked picture would be about 5 meters, but this seems uncertain, from the OP it looks like it could be more like 2.5 m/pixel.

 

[Rawls]

If the entire city on map was 8x8 km, one pixel on the above linked picture would be about 5 meters, but this seems uncertain, from the OP it looks like it could be more like 2.5 m/pixel.

Interesting. The way I measured it was using the hand done map above distances. Assuming the two block stretch of road is .1 miles, and using a ruler to measure the length of the canal to the left in the image, that canal would be about .5 miles in total length. Then I looked at the canal length (which you can see on the main map) as half a mile. That length is about 1/10 the total distance across the map both North/South and East/West. Which is how I got to five miles. Your way may be more precise. I was just using my eyeballs and a ruler up against the computer screen.

 

[1veryFrustratedguy]

The world I am expecting is going to be a horizontal and vertical in almost every direction

 

[sv3672]

Which is how I got to five miles. Your way may be more precise. I was just using my eyeballs and a ruler up against the computer screen.

It is still only guessing, I do not know exactly where the markers should be on the metro map, or if the map is even accurate. I tried to place the markers based on the OP, the above listed distances and angles, and 1 pixel = 2.5 meters scale, but the result (white dot = V's apartment, red = ripperdoc, green = panning view, magenta = meeting point, cyan = All Food) does not look quite right. Perhaps it should really be closer to 5 m/pixel, which would look like this. Too bad there is no in-game map (as part of the UI like in TW3) shown in the demo, that would probably be more usable than the metro map.