It has been five years since Rockstar Games made Grand Theft Auto V and eight years since Red Dead Redemption. Even after so long, both still stand as two of the greatest examples of open world gaming. Yet there’s no doubt that the genre has since modernized and moved on. In particular, the size of sandbox games has exploded, with titles such as The Witcher 3 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey leading the way forward. Rockstar Games, then, had some catching up to do, and boy did they rise to the occasion.
The games’ wild west setting is a fictional one, but it’s certainly based on actual geographic locations in the USA. The map spreads itself across five fictional US states/regions: Ambarino, West Elizabeth, New Hanover, New Austin, and Lemoyne. Geographically, I’d say they are supposed to represent the western/southern United States, from Colorado’s Rocky Mountains to the swampland of Louisiana.
That’s a huge stretch of land, and while Red Dead Redemption 2’s map might not quite rival that scale, it’s still mightily impressive. We recorded ourselves riding from one corner of the map to other and it took us 16 minutes at full sprint on our horse. You can check out the video below:
So how does that compare with other maps we’ve measured? Well, it’s hard to get a like for like comparison given that we have to allow for obstacles and general differences in terrain between different games. Our video here isn’t scientific, and comparing them to other videos we’ve recorded is further muddied because in other videos we’ve sometimes run or sailed across those. But there is one game that compares similarly to how we’ve recorded Red Dead Redemption 2: Assassin’s Creed Origins.
In our video crossing Origins’ Egyptian map, we also rode on horseback (and rowed one small section at the end). Interestingly, the numbers are almost identical. Origins came out pretty much bang on 16 minutes.
So how big is the map Red Dead Redemption 2 exactly? We’re still busy measuring its actual scale, which isn’t easy given that there are no distance markers as there are in most open world games. If we had to guess, we’d put probably put it somewhere in the region of 30 mile², as that’s roughly the size of Assassin’s Creed Origins. But we’ll have to do our math before we can confirm.
For reference, that would put it firmly within the top 10 biggest open world games of all time.
You can check out our review of Red Dead Redemption 2 here –and yes, we absolutely loved it.
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