Spider-Man developer says its Manhattan map will be "four to six" times bigger than its last open-world

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You saw Peter Parker chasing a helicopter across a good stretch of Manhattan in PlayStation's E3 2017 press conference of Spider-Man for PS4, now you may be wondering just how much of the city he can explore. Developer Insomniac Games isn't really into dropping square footage counts, but it did give us a pretty useful point of reference at an E3 demo.

"The map size is probably four to six times that of Sunset Overdrive," Insomniac community director James Stevenson said. Sunset Overdrive was Insomniac's last open-world game. It came out back in 2014 exclusively for Xbox One - here's a look at the in-game map if you haven't played it.

Sunset Overdrive's map was designed to be both dense with activities and vertical layers, which means it doesn't look all that impressive in terms of square footage - definitely puny next to games like GTA 5 or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But those kinds of worlds encourage roaming exploration rather than constant action so it's not really fair to compare them directly.

Looking at our Spider-Man E3 2017 preview, it seems Spider-Man will have an even bigger emphasis on verticality - as if the very essence of the skyscraper-climbing webslinger didn't already make that abundantly clear.

Make sure you check out our full E3 2017 schedule to stay tuned for all the details as they arrive, and check out our roundup of all the E3 2017 trailers. For more E3 2017 highlights, check out our Nintendo E3 2017 recap and Xbox E3 2017 recap. 

Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan
Former GamesRadar+ News Writer

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar+.