What is the Real Scale of the Breath of the Wild Map?

Question

I am questioning the world as it was built in the game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Consider the following map:

Using the game's own paragliding system, it's been calculated that the map has an area roughly equal to 84 sq km.

Is this calculation correct?

It only takes a few minutes to fly across the entire desert, and less than a half hour to cross the entire map on foot. However, the time scale is 60x faster than real life, so one would need to take this into consideration.

For those unfamiliar with the game geography:

1. There is a desert in the south-west corner, surrounded by mountains to the north and east. (all of the brown area in the bottom left is desert)
2. Elevations are depicted by lighter colors. The more white it is, the higher the elevation.
3. There is a huge volcano in the north-east, with large lakes of lava.
4. West of the volcano is a large forest/wooded area, surrounded by water on all sides.
5. There is a large butterfly-shaped lake in the southern center of the map with a bridge going across. This bridge only takes a few minutes to cross in the game in real-world time.

Good answers will give estimates based on real calculations, explaining how answers were arrived at.

Answer 1

I know it’s been a while since this thread was started, but I have something to add. I am actually the author of that Reddit post you linked. (I’m glad you found it interesting.) Since then, we've come a long way— and actually have a definitive answer. Through datamining, there is the extremely helpful BotW Object Map. It’s mostly used for the locations of in-game items, but recently I noticed there is a measuring feature that uses the in-game meters system, much as I did. If you turn on the field map areas (the areas the game internally uses to control the weather among other things) you can see the boundaries of where Link can explore. Using the measure feature we find Hyrule is a rather neat 8 km by 10 km, or 80 sq. km— which fits my original estimate of between 72 and 86! So Hyrule isn't very large in real world terms, but the developers certainly did a good job at making it seem so.

I also want to add that they definitely did take the sped-up time scale into account in the game— just possibly not accurately. When you obtain all the memories, Impa says Kakariko Village is about three days from the Blatchery Plain, which obviously means in-game and not in real life. The Object Map tells us that the distance, following the path, is about 2.25 km. I’m not sure if she meant by horse or by foot though, so something to test in the game is how long it would take! To answer the general question of time, I guess it depends whether you assume days in Hyrule are just much shorter than in real life, or if it narratively is supposed to be equivalent regardless of actual activity. That could change the narrative effect of Link being asleep for 100 years— if it’s in Hyrulean time, that’s only 1.667 years in real life!

Answer 2

84 square kilometers is roughly 9.16km to a side (5.6mi). Eyeballing the map, this seems reasonable.

However, the average walking speed of a human is about 5km/hr, which means you should be able to cross the map in about 2 minutes Real Time. If it takes about one day/night cycle in-game to cross the map, this would imply that the map is 120 kilometers across (or ~75 miles). This makes for a total map size of 14,400 square kilometers

If I had to guess, I'd say the map is indeed closer to 85km², but that Time is not set to reflect this in terms of movement speed.

Answer 3

You said that link can cross the map in half an hour. The average jog speed is 8.3 miles an hour. So 4.15 miles for half an hour. Which means at 60 times speed the map is roughly 250 miles across. If you use average walking speed the map is 90 miles and it is roughly 480 miles if you use sprinting speed.

Of course this is only using his movement speed as a measurement.