There are a ton of spoilers out there for the upcoming Fallout 4, and this will be no different. You have been warned.
Earlier today, Game Revolution posted an image of a map that was stitched together from in-game footage obtained ahead of the game’s official release on November 9th. The poster also attempted to estimate the size of the map, pegging it at around 145,800 square feet. It seems the site was off. By a factor of 7,000. Yes, seven thousand.
Any reasonable human would be able to tell you that 145,800 square feet is not much. For comparison, engineers typically use 100,000 square feet as a rough estimate for the size of a city block. By that estimation, Fallout 4 is the size of roughly:
- 1/250th (0.4%) of Central Park (36.7 million sq. ft.)
- 1/6th (15.3%) of Staples Centre (950,001 sq. ft.)
- 1/2 (48.6%) of Roman Colosseum (300,000 sq. ft.)
What’s perhaps even more bizarre is that Game Revolution’s estimations put the game at about 1/267th the size of Skyrim, a game that came out four years ago.
So, the likely size of the map is much closer to that of Skyrim, as Todd Howard has even said that it is likely on the same scale as their 2011 title. Then again, it could be much larger, as some estimations have put the game around double Skyrim‘s size, at around 30 square miles compared with Skyrim‘s near-15 square miles.
All that to say, there’s no way to accurately figure out just how big Fallout 4 is without taking some pretty big leaps out of reality and into the land of guesstimating.
See the map below, but disregard its scale. At a minimum, we’d expect each segment of the map to be about 550,000 square feet, or about 1,700,000 square feet as an absolute maximum. At a total of roughly 729 segments on the map, we’d peg the size of Fallout 4 between 400 million square feet (14.3 square miles) and 1.2 billion square feet (43 square miles).
Of course, all of that is up in the air until you actually get out of Vault 111 when Fallout 4 hits Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on November 9th.
