I don't know if they decided to expand the world during development or kept this away from fans and the press as a surprise or whatever but I feel like an area of around 200 Km² is far more reasonable than what they initially said. And with their sweet procedural world generation tools I don't think that kind of scale stands as too much of a challenge for the team.
Keep in mind that
Altis in Arma 3 has 270 Km² of traversable terrain and you can still drive across it in 15 minutes. Of course, world of an RPG game is a whole another beast compared to a world of an FPS but still, it's a well fleshed out gigantic island.
Something in the ballpark of 200 Km² would make the world of Witcher 3 about 60% bigger than GTA V's map which sounds about right when you consider CDPR wants to put 3 distinctive regions in there including a large city with surrounding villages, landmarks, fields, mountain ranges, forests, an entire Skellige archipelago and all the bodies of water in between...plus surprise locations. All that while making sure it doesn't look too compressed and artificial. 20% bigger than Skyrim just doesn't seem to cut it anymore, does it?
Anyway, I feel like at one point during development, guys at CDPR sat down around their meeting table and were like: "People, we've got so many of these cool ideas we're gonna have to make a bigger world to fit it all in. But let's keep it a secret, lol. Fans are gonna lose their minds when they find out!"
Now, I know I spent last 5 minutes writing this but the truth is I don't actually care how big the world is as long as it's packed with awesome content which I'm sure CDPR will deliver in spades. I was just a bit puzzled by the fact that many of you guys found it hard to believe that Novigrad region could be around 70 Km². Cheers
