Comment by jmyeet

A game that (IMHO) handled this really well was Assassin's Creek Odyssey.

Athens takes up a huge part of the map but is on the same scale. Of course it's still a fraction of the size that the ancient Athens would've been but it's still impressive.

The real issue here is time scales. Nobody wants to spend an IRL week riding between towns so those distances get compressed for the sake of storytelling. This problem haunts pretty much every game genre. Take the Civilization games where a unit is moving 1-5 spaces per turn and a turn is 1-20 years. the WW2 time scale is about 6 turns. If you ever played Civ1 on the Earth map, Europe is also about 12 squares so the European theater of WW2 cmes down to a couple of riflemen or modern infrantry and 1-2 Armor units smacking into each other if you get stuck on the time and distance scales.

Books, comics, TV shows, movies, etc don't have this problem because they don't have a constant scale (24 notwithstanding). And the goal is to tell a story. Even in an open world open ended game, you're telling a story.

I miss the old D&D turn-based games, even including the later more graphical entries like Eye of the Beholder. It was kinda funny to duck into a room and camp for 200 hours to heal and recover.

You just don't worry about these scale issues if you're immersed. That's what I learned.