Building a World That Remembers
The first real question is not how large the world should be. It is whether the places inside it can remember what happened there.
I have been thinking about what makes an old fantasy world feel believable. It is rarely the number of quests, enemies, or map tiles. It is the sense that the world existed before the player arrived and continues to carry the marks left behind.
A tree should not simply disappear when it is cut. A stump remains. The logs fall in the direction of the strike. A clearing slowly becomes a camp, then a shelter, then perhaps a settlement with its own history.
The goal is not merely to build a large map. The goal is to create places that begin to belong to the player.
That principle now guides the work: gathering, construction, followers, weather, creatures, roads, abandoned buildings, and every system that will eventually touch the wilderness.