Skyrim is really, really small by modern comparison. The only reason it felt so huge was because of the mountainous terrain that needed to be traversed, plus the Dragonborn's natural pace wasn't the fastest. And to be fair, Skyrim felt overwhelming because of the sheer amount of content and ultimately became repetitive in its presentation. Not saying that's a bad thing, but too much can be severely offputting.
Breath of the Wild will hopefully make use of its supposed size and spread things out evenly. As long as it doesn't follow Skyrim's "X person orders you to go to X town to talk to X person to commence X quest" template, then the questing aspect should strike the right balance. The biggest thing that Nintendo should watch out for here is the repetitious nature of overworld questing; recent titles such as Metal Gear Solid V, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and Witcher 3 are equally culpable of rehashing quests. More important than this is how exploration is handled, though, and given what's been shown so far, BotW will have plenty of content to stumble on and a heck of a lot more diversity in its map structure than Skyrim/Witcher 3.
Breath of the Wild will hopefully make use of its supposed size and spread things out evenly. As long as it doesn't follow Skyrim's "X person orders you to go to X town to talk to X person to commence X quest" template, then the questing aspect should strike the right balance. The biggest thing that Nintendo should watch out for here is the repetitious nature of overworld questing; recent titles such as Metal Gear Solid V, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and Witcher 3 are equally culpable of rehashing quests. More important than this is how exploration is handled, though, and given what's been shown so far, BotW will have plenty of content to stumble on and a heck of a lot more diversity in its map structure than Skyrim/Witcher 3.