I'm tempted (when I get home later tonight) to walk completely thru each area in the game from start to finish...and time it as best I can. Anyone else up for the challenge???
I'd be interested to hear your findings!
tl;dr version: Bionis' Leg took 8:15 mins to travel from left side of map to upper right corner
I had company over last night and we mostly played MK8 and then went out. However, I was able to play thru one of the numerous areas in Xenoblade Chronicles and record the time it took to traverse it's massive landscape.
The third area in the game is the Bionis' Leg. Here's a map of it. Starting at the 1 on the left, I went in a straight line right and made my way up to Crevasse Waterfall (top right corner). It took me 8 minutes and 15 seconds to make it up there.
There are other places in this area I could have gone (the Upper Level of the Bionis' Leg, which is lower right, for instance) but since I didn't have time to explore every corner, I went to that top right waterfall.
This is just one area out of a dozen or so to explore. There are other areas much bigger than here (Eryth Sea) but the Bionis' Leg is the first area where the gamer really gets a sense of just how huge this game's landscapes are.
I used a save file that has my character's party at the final boss and I'm so overpowered that I could just run past all the enemies in this early stage of the game. However, when you first get to this area you can't just run past them. You're going to have to fight thus making that 8 minute trek something more of an hour at the least.
But remember, the point isn't to run through these areas as fast as possible but yet to fight enemies and level up; explore every nook & cranny looking for 'secret areas'; and to complete side and main story quests. These big areas are meant for the gamer to spend some time in. I know I would spend days in each area before moving on to the next.
Tonight I'm going to walk around the entire perimeter of the Bionis' Leg and time it. This will give everyone another perspective on the size of this area.
Having useful quest related info on the gamepad would be PERFECT.
Going into the menu so much to check up on things got a little tedious since you did it so much.
The gamepad could really be useful for a game like this. I hope they really utilize it well.
The speculation that XBC is 145,000 square miles or whatever comes from a dev's comment that the game was the size of the Japanese archapalego, which is complete rubbish. The game is huge, but it's nowhere near that huge. It's probably not even the size of Tokyo. Think about it. You can walk from one end of XBC to the other in a few hours, but it would take days to walk across Tokyo. It would take months to walk across Japan.
And considering that the largest city in Skyrim has a population of like 70, its figure of 16 sq. mi. probably isn't that inaccurate either.
I loved xenoblade chronicles but thought it was dauntingly huge sometimes. So 5 times bigger is... big...
I lost some of the appeal over not having seen beautiful landscapes in the new game yet. I saw mechs, space and whatnot, but I loved the nature and the beauty of its areas and thought the industrial parts were less interesting.
Back to looking at my trusty map of the Bionis' Leg, last night I started out at Ragrinar Canyon Path (the '1' on the left side of the map) and traveled north along the perimeter, all while recording the time with the stopwatch app on my phone.
I followed along every path and crevice eventually arriving at the Rho Oasis and then Tirkin Headquarters. I passed the Sky Stage and the Viliera Hill and went up along the Daksha Shrine. I made my way to the bridge (point 5) and by the time I got across (point 6) I was looking at 18 minutes and 37 seconds.
That is when I quit because I was tired of this experiment hangovers suck.
Bottom line is, if I had stuck with following along the perimeter and made a complete circle back to where I started, it would have taken me about 40-50 minutes (bare minimum!). It might very well take an entire hour!
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