I have always been fascinated with the scale of things. As such, I have created an accurate scale comparison of some of my favorite moddable, open world games, of which Grim Dawn is one of the very best. I am only interested in moddable games. I am also missing the Forgotten Gods expansion because I can’t get the map decompiler to work with it. - Edit: I have fixed the image to include the Forgotten Gods expansion.
As you can see, Grim Dawn holds its own even compared to the Elder Scrolls series and Witcher 3. With the addition of Forgotten Gods and Fangs of Asterkarn expansions there will likely be more landscape than Morrowind and maybe approaching Oblivion. If a working Map Decompiler is released I believe it will be relatively easy to expand Cairn to rival even the Witcher 3.
I realize I am missing some of the Elder Scrolls DLC so it might not be an entirely fair comparison, but it works in general. Also missing are countless dungeons and other interiors for all games, some of which are huge.
Edit: I added some notes and clarification to the chart.
Thanks I didn’t realize I could directly embed the image. Fixed and removed the sketchy link.
I determined the scaling through the mod tools for each game, for example in Grim Dawn the cells are 128x128 meters each if I remember correctly. Baldur’s Gate 3 has everything nicely labelled in meters. Elder scrolls games all use the same Cells sizes except for Morrowind which is exactly twice that of Skyrim/Oblivion, and those have been determined and posted, and the distances in Witcher 3 are shown in meters in Game so are easily transferred to the map.
The world of Grim Dawn is approximately 18.3 square kilometers with FoA (Fun fact: FoA’s map is about 75% the size of the base game).
Skyrim was somewhere around 15 sq km by the internet’s approximations. However, both pale in comparison to worlds like the Witcher 3, which was approximately 142 sq km.
That said, Cairn is probably a bit more densely packed.
While Witcher 3 is definitely the largest of the games I’ve compared, it’s actually a lot smaller in playable area than many people think, far smaller than the 142 sq km number that is often quoted. The map size above is very accurate, and there is about a kilometer of unplayable buffer inside each of those regions. I think I figured it out that the whole playable landscape of W3 is around 63 sq km, which granted is still amazing.
That being said, none of the other games come close to Grim Dawn in terms of sheer richness of variety and diversity of landscape, never mind the incredible bestiary. From the Ugdenbog swamps to the Korvan Sands, and from the Asterkarn Mountains to the Broken Hills. Every Biome feels so distinct and detailed. Very excited to hear that FoA is going to add that much more to this already amazing land
Just the 75% size of base game statistic makes me wonder the price for this DLC. Certainly not 14.95 or even 19.95 dollars. Has Crate advertised the cost I wonder?
Considering the cost of games and the whole ‘you will not own the game and be happy Ubisoft philosophy’ $49.99 is cheap for the amount of support and entertainment that will get you with FOA.
Yeah a bargain at twice the price, lol. Content-wise Grim Dawn has always been huge value for your dollar. I didn’t add Elder Scolls DLC here (other than Dragonborn), but no Elder Scrolls DLC was 75% the size of the original games. Even Toussaint didn’t offer a 75% ratio to W3!
