Actual World Map with all the fluff removed

[RoguelikeMike]

https://imgur.com/a/Yr7aHiz

I'm not an artist, and I clipped a tiny portion of road on the top and left but this is mainly everything playable. In my opinion, its not larger than the first games.

[SadPlatty©]

Simple solution :
Load DD:DA - walk from Cassardis to Blue Moon Tower and time it
Load DD2 - walk from Melve to Volcanic Island camp and time it
Compare times

This would arguably be "the walk" for both games from one end of the world to the other, and so being able to compare the times would give you a pretty close gauge.

[Fractured]

I prefer DDDA over DD2, this isn't news. But to think that DD2 has a similar map size is kinda ludicrous to me lol. Even if you add BBI, I'm pretty sure DD2 map trumps it.

Now if we are talking about interest points, I feel like DD2 has the same exact amount of points of interest as DDDA, and DDDA has a significantly smaller map. So that's telling all on its own.

[Knavenformed]

Don't really know if Dogma 1 had a "small" world, it was good spacing for what it wanted to do, "map is X times bigger this time" is easily the worst sales pitch you could give me

[VeraelHasta]

I'm eternally puzzled by this - why do you guys keep obsessing so much about every single pixel of the map being filled with something. The map is the map, it has empty spaces and non-empty ones. I prefer it this way instead of having an entire, empty mountain accessible to climb.

[The Debauchery]

You missed quite a bit of it.
Not counting the mountains which don't have invisible walls over them and can be scaled via Levitation shenanigans, you missed a huge chunk off the top of the map where the 5 spelltomes girl lives, the cave above that, and the whole Waterfall Cave area of the map.

Originally posted by VeraelHasta:

I'm eternally puzzled by this - why do you guys keep obsessing so much about every single pixel of the map being filled with something. The map is the map, it has empty spaces and non-empty ones. I prefer it this way instead of having an entire, empty mountain accessible to climb.

So you're not an explorer. Or at least not a cartographer.
Some people will cut off combat to loot. I cut off combat to grind my face against cave walls to get rid of 100% of the fog of war.

[twiggy]

did no one invent horse mounts in this games universe? lol. forcing you to walk places in an open world rpg is pretty stuped from a game design perspective. games only force you to walk on the hardest difficulty setting like fallout 4 survival mode but even then you can still use vertibirds to fly you places or use the institutes teleport. then theres elden ring that gives you a horse and lets you jump super high with it and double jump and lets you do mounted combat and gives it health and healing items

[Fractured]

Originally posted by The Debauchery:

You missed quite a bit of it.
Not counting the mountains which don't have invisible walls over them and can be scaled via Levitation shenanigans, you missed a huge chunk off the top of the map where the 5 spelltomes girl lives, the cave above that, and the whole Waterfall Cave area of the map.

Originally posted by VeraelHasta:

I'm eternally puzzled by this - why do you guys keep obsessing so much about every single pixel of the map being filled with something. The map is the map, it has empty spaces and non-empty ones. I prefer it this way instead of having an entire, empty mountain accessible to climb.

So you're not an explorer. Or at least not a cartographer.
Some people will cut off combat to loot. I cut off combat to grind my face against cave walls to get rid of 100% of the fog of war.

I've definitely tried climbing several places in the mountains and ran into invisible walls. They are fairly common in DD2 actually (If you go outside the bounds of where you should be).

[RoguelikeMike]

So the main reasoning behind this is to be helpful and informative to players. Before you play the game, its hard to tell what is a playable area just by looking at the map.

This is different from the first games map, which has clearly defined borders. In that map, if you see it, its a playable area.

I hope this post is helpful for others in informing their purchase.

[Kaynos]

Many peoples have mentioned it, it's not really open world, it's corridors (roads). You can explore a little bit outside of the main path but not by much.

[Naewyng]

Originally posted by twiggy:

did no one invent horse mounts in this games universe? lol. forcing you to walk places in an open world rpg is pretty stuped from a game design perspective. games only force you to walk on the hardest difficulty setting like fallout 4 survival mode but even then you can still use vertibirds to fly you places or use the institutes teleport. then theres elden ring that gives you a horse and lets you jump super high with it and double jump and lets you do mounted combat and gives it health and healing items

Did you see any horses in the game?

[Draescan]

Not actually the full map btw. Not that you can show that without spoilers but the entire southern gap in the map is explorable.

[Naewyng]

Originally posted by Fractured:

I prefer DDDA over DD2, this isn't news. But to think that DD2 has a similar map size is kinda ludicrous to me lol. Even if you add BBI, I'm pretty sure DD2 map trumps it.

Now if we are talking about interest points, I feel like DD2 has the same exact amount of points of interest as DDDA, and DDDA has a significantly smaller map. So that's telling all on its own.

What do you mean? dd2 has about 5x more points of interest than dd1.

[Ryan Fenton]

Using mods to get a better jump height (for when not playing as a levitation class), I've found huge swaths of invisible walls not just at the 'edge' of the maps as shown in this thread, but also lots of invisible walled sections in the middle.

With that and water, I'd say only about 80% of the shown area is actually explorable. Further subtracting all the area that's just sheer cliff faces and I'd say less than 65% of the area is really usable in terms of exploring and fighting.

It's a whole bunch of fixed corridors with some empty "sponge"-like areas of pseudo freedom, a bit like the Fable games, peppered with the same treasure chests. Add in some of the simpler two-loop Skyrim dungeons, and you've got the layout of everything. DD1 had areas that at least felt a lot more free and explorable.

The closest game I can think of in terms of exploration feel might be Dragon's Age 2 - you know the one that was super-rushed by EA, left largely blank, and just had monsters just spawning at random under the guise that it was just a fiction of storytelling after the fact, with an unreliable narrator. That landscape had that same sort of empty psuedo-open feel, where very little landscape contained meainingful content - and most of that was janky or unfinished feeling.

[Sam]

DDDA may have had a smaller map, but they utilized it better and it had variety.
DD2 is just more emptiness, and the new regions are frankly quite boring.

[Scriptimus]

Originally posted by sam:

DDDA may have had a smaller map, but they utilized it better and it had variety.
DD2 is just more emptiness, and the new regions are frankly quite boring.

What variety? Grasslands and a forest?