To say that The Crew’s sprawling open world recreation of the entire US is mind-blowingly-massive is a serious understatement. At 5,000 sq km, it's one of the largest open world maps to feature in a game by some margin. It’s so vast that it takes around 90 minutes – two hours to drive from coast to coast.

To put things into perspective, The Crew’s Creative Director Julian Gerighty presented us with an overview of the map during my visit to Ivory Tower showing how its size compares to other worlds in familiar free-roaming games.

Staggeringly, it revealed that The Crew's open world is bigger than Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos, Red Dead Redemption’s Wild West, Forza Horizon’s Colorado, Need for Speed Rival’s Redview County, Far Cry 3’s tropical island and Skyrim combined. All of these worlds were shown tucked neatly inside The Crew's US map, which makes you appreciate the scale of the world you’ll be exploring.

“In terms of size, our New York is about the same size as Liberty City in GTA IV,” Julian explains. “But on top of that we’ve got Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Miami, Dallas, Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco and all of these cities – I insisted on including Detroit because of the heart of Motor City. But it’s not just these cities: it’s everything in-between. So it’s a very big game.”

But it’s not the size that matters – it’s the diversity within the world…

Find out more in our upcoming hands-on preview of The Crew coming soon.