Assassin's Creed Shadows is set to be the fourth in the series to adopt the open world RPG formula, following in the footsteps of Valhalla, Odyssey and Origins before it. All of those games had absolutely huge maps, which begs the question of just how big Ubisoft has decided to go with the latest instalment.

Thankfully, Ubisoft has actually addressed this question directly in an interview with IGN that followed shortly after the game's announcement. "It's in-line with the latest Assassin's Creeds that we've done," says creative director Jonathon Dumont, referring to the last three mainline entries in the series.

He continues: "On a scale level, maybe we can compare it a little bit more to the size of Assassin's Creed Origins." Origins was set in Egypt and had a land mass of roughly 80km2.

Judging from a leaked version of the map that made its way onto Reddit, we estimate the area of Assassin's Creed Shadows to cover a very similar 80km2. This would place the game between Origins and Valhalla in size, with the latter covering a staggering 94km2.

While it might seem disappointing for Assassin's Creed Shadows to be a little smaller than the game that came before it, those that played Valhalla will know that it's actually quite encouraging. One of the main criticisms of Valhalla's condensed version of Viking England was that it was far too vast with it taking well over 100 hours to see everything the game had to offer - and that's just doing the main story and side quests.