Developer Lo-Fi games had a simple pitch for Kenshi back in 2018, the year of its official 1.0 launch: "A free-roaming squad based RPG focusing on open-ended sandbox gameplay features rather than a linear story." Overwhelming freedom in a sprawling world was the game's north star, to the point that its Steam description also promises "freeform gameplay in a seamless game world in the largest single-player RPG world since Daggerfall, stretching over 870 square kilometers."
The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall was released in 1996, but even today, its irresponsibly large game world would dwarf nearly anything that isn't a galactic adventure like No Man's Sky. The kicker, of course, is that it wasn't really meant to be explored in the way you'd roam around Skyrim or The Witcher 3. Even so, Kenshi was really throwing down the gauntlet here, one-upping the scale of basically every RPG from the previous 20 years and promising to make its world worth wandering, too.
