You’re standing on top of a megabuilding in Watson, looking out at the neon sprawl, and it feels infinite. The scale is suffocating. But then you open the map, scroll around, and think, "Wait, is that it?" It’s a weird paradox. If you’ve played The Witcher 3, you know CD Projekt Red loves a massive footprint. If you’ve played GTA V, you’re used to driving for ten minutes just to see some grass. So, how big is Night City, really?
Size is a trap.
In the world of open-world gaming, we’ve been conditioned to think that "bigger is better." We want square kilometers. We want thousands of hectares. But Night City doesn't play by those rules. It’s a vertical nightmare. It’s a dense, layered, concrete lasagna that cares more about how many stories a building has than how many miles it takes to get to the Badlands.
Honestly, the raw numbers might actually disappoint you if you’re looking for a world that rivals the sheer landmass of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. But raw numbers are a lie in Night City.
The Raw Data: Square Kilometers vs. Perception
Let’s talk math, even though math is boring. Based on community mapping efforts and technical analysis of the game’s coordinates, the actual playable area of Night City—including the outskirts—sits somewhere around 75 to 100 square kilometers.
That’s a loose estimate.
To put that into perspective, Los Santos in GTA V is roughly 80 to 130 square kilometers depending on how you measure the water and mountains. At first glance, you’d think they’re comparable. But they feel entirely different. Los Santos is a horizontal sprawl. It’s flat. Night City is a claustrophobic canyon.
Why the Map Feels Both Huge and Small
If you drive from the northern tip of the Oil Fields down to the southern edge of the Badlands, it takes about seven or eight minutes in a fast car like the Rayfield Caliburn. That’s not a lot of time. In Red Dead Redemption 2, a cross-map journey feels like a life-changing pilgrimage. In Cyberpunk 2077, it’s a commute.
But here is the thing: density.
CD Projekt Red’s lead producer, Richard Borzymowski, famously mentioned before launch that the map would be slightly smaller than The Witcher 3’s world but significantly more dense. He wasn't lying. While The Witcher 3 has vast stretches of forests and fields between points of interest, Night City is packed. There is no "empty" space in the city proper. Every alleyway has a bin, a vending machine, a shard, or a gang of Maelstrom goons waiting to flatline you.
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Verticality is the Real Metric
You can't measure Night City in 2D. You just can’t.
Think about Megabuilding H10, where V lives. That single building contains more "playable" layers than an entire town in most other RPGs. You have the atrium, the multiple floors of apartments, the shops, the combat zones, and the garage. When you ask how big is Night City, you have to factor in the Z-axis.
- The Underground: There are sub-levels, sewers, and basement clubs like the Afterlife or Lizzie’s.
- The Street Level: This is where most of the "traditional" map size comes from.
- The Elevated Walkways: Night City uses a "multi-level" city design where you can be three stories up on a pedestrian bridge while traffic flows beneath you.
- The Skyscrapers: While you can’t enter every building (a common complaint), the ones you can enter for missions are massive.
The city is a hive. If you flattened Night City out—took every floor of every accessible building and laid them side-by-side—the square footage would skyrocket. But because it’s all stacked, the "map" looks smaller than it feels when you're actually walking the streets of Japantown.
Breaking Down the Districts
Night City is split into six main districts, plus the Badlands. Each one contributes to the sense of scale in a different way.
Watson is the starting area. It’s cluttered. It’s a mix of industrial gloom and neon markets. It feels big because you’re on foot for a lot of the early game. The narrow streets make the buildings look taller.
Westbrook is where the money is. North Oak is all hills and mansions. Here, the scale is different. It’s wider. You have breathing room. It feels "smaller" because the density drops, even though the landmass is significant.
City Center is the heart of the "verticality" argument. This is where the megacorps live. Looking up from the street in Corpo Plaza is genuinely dizzying. You feel like an ant. This is where the game feels the biggest, even though it’s one of the smallest districts by surface area.
Heywood and Santo Domingo are the urban sprawls. These feel the most like a "normal" city. Lots of streets, lots of housing blocks.
Pacifica is the "what could have been" district. It’s a ghost town. Because it’s so empty, it actually feels massive in a creepy, unsettling way. The Grand Imperial Mall is a behemoth of a structure that dominates the skyline.
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The Badlands are the wildcard. They account for probably 50% of the total map area, but they are mostly empty. This is where the game pads its stats. If you remove the Badlands, the "urban" part of Night City is actually quite compact.
The Illusion of Scale: Comparing Night City to Other Games
Let's get real for a second. We love comparing game maps like we're measuring... well, you know.
- Skyrim: Roughly 37 square kilometers. Night City (urban + badlands) is technically bigger.
- The Witcher 3 (Base Game): Roughly 135 square kilometers. It dwarfs Night City in terms of total land.
- Elden Ring: About 70-80 square kilometers. Very similar in raw size to Night City, but Elden Ring feels larger because you’re traveling by horse on uneven terrain.
The reason Night City feels so huge is the Sightline Management.
The developers use the massive buildings to block your view. You rarely see the "end" of the city until you’re on a high vantage point. By constantly turning corners and seeing new neon signs, your brain perceives a space that is much larger than the actual geometry. It’s a classic trick of urban design, both in games and in real life. Places like Hong Kong or Tokyo feel infinite not because of their acreage, but because you can’t see the horizon.
What’s Actually Accessible?
This is the "Big Lie" of Night City’s size. When people ask "how big is the city," they usually mean "how much of it can I explore?"
Honestly? A lot less than you’d hope for in a "perfect" world.
A huge chunk of Night City’s "size" is essentially window dressing. You see thousands of windows, but you can only enter a fraction of the buildings. This was a major point of contention at launch. However, with the Phantom Liberty expansion and the 2.0/2.1 updates, the "density of content" improved. Dogtown, the new area in the expansion, is tiny on the map. It’s a literal corner of Pacifica. But it’s so densely packed with interiors, vertical layers, and events that it takes hours to truly see it all.
Size isn't just about X and Y coordinates. It's about "Activity Density."
If you have a 100km map with nothing to do, it’s a small game. If you have a 10km map where every building has a story, it’s a massive game. Night City sits somewhere in the middle. It’s a "Large-Medium" map with "High" density in specific hubs.
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The Impact of Vehicle Speed on Map Perception
How fast you move changes how big the world feels.
In Cyberpunk 2077, you have some of the fastest cars in gaming history. When you're blasting through the North Oak tunnels at 200 mph, the map shrinks. The world feels small because you can traverse it so quickly.
If you want to experience how big Night City really is, park the car.
Walk from the southern tip of the Glen to the northern docks of Watson. It will take you a long time. You’ll notice the architectural shifts, the changing graffiti, the different NPC models, and the sheer height of the structures. On foot, Night City is a monster. On a motorcycle, it’s a playground.
The Technical Side: Why Isn't It Bigger?
There are hardware limits.
Night City is one of the most graphically demanding environments ever put in a game. Every street corner is loaded with light sources, reflections, and high-polygon assets. If the map were the size of Just Cause 4, most PCs would probably melt into a puddle of silicon.
CD Projekt Red chose visual fidelity and density over mileage.
They built a city that feels "lived in" (post-patch, at least). The scale is meant to represent the crushing weight of late-stage capitalism. It’s supposed to feel like the buildings are closing in on you. A wide-open, massive map wouldn't achieve that same feeling of "The City of Dreams" where you're just another cog in the machine.
Actionable Takeaways for Exploring Night City
If you're jumping into the game and want to make the most of the scale, don't just follow the waypoint.
- Ignore the GPS: The mini-map encourages you to look at the little dotted line instead of the world. Turn it off or stop looking at it. You’ll find that the city layout is actually quite logical once you learn the landmarks (like the Arasaka Tower or the Space Port).
- Look Up: Seriously. Most players spend 90% of their time looking at the ground or at eye-level. The "size" of the game is in the skyline.
- Explore the "In-Between" Spaces: The space between fast travel points is where the environmental storytelling happens. The back alleys of Kabuki have more personality than the main roads.
- Use the Double Jump: Getting the Reinforced Tendons (Cyberware) changes your perception of the map size. Suddenly, rooftops become your highway. The "size" of the city expands because you’ve unlocked a whole new layer of movement.
- Visit the Badlands at Night: If you want to see the "true" scale of the city, go out into the desert at night and look back at the lights. It’s the only time you get a full view of the entire urban footprint at once.
Night City is roughly 75 to 100 square kilometers of total space, but its "size" is better measured in the thousands of hours of art and detail crammed into its vertical corridors. It’s big enough to get lost in, but small enough that after 50 hours, you’ll start to feel like a local. That’s a rare balance for an open-world game to strike.
It's not about how many miles you can drive; it's about how much world is packed into every block. Night City is a dense, tall, messy masterpiece that proves square footage is the least interesting way to measure a world.