You’ve probably heard that Ghost Recon Wildlands boasts the largest map in a Ubisoft open-world to date – a Bolivia big and mountainous enough to make Amazon delivery drones a practical necessity. Do you want to know exactly how much foliage and transport infrastructure went into it? Here are the figures. They’re predictably mind-boggling.
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Across Wildlands’ 11 biomes – which is about three fewer than Minecraft, I checked – rivers and lakes make up about 16.369 km2.
On the bits that aren’t water, there are 839,862 trees, 3,449,638 bushes and 775,288 rocks. All of them, thankfully, were procedurally created with a tool rather than placed by hand.
If you were to unfurl all of Bolivia’s windy roads and lay them out like muddy intestines, they would stretch to 656.421 km. The railways take up over 90 km, and the footpaths 2150.24 km – which you’d be mad to walk when there are helicopters kicking about.
Finally, it may interest you to know that there are 58 villages in Ghost Recon Wildlands, and 781 road signs for you to purposefully ignore. At your peril, mind – those cliffs aren’t messing around.
All of this was revealed in a GDC talk which is now free to watch online – in which Ubisoft Paris’ graphics and art leads disclosed they only had three technical artists backing them up on the project. Of those, only one had shipped a game before Wildlands. And they say El Sueño is mad.