Aerial shots of the map from Witcher 3 look like real satellite images.

Sorry, non-gamers, this is a game related post. But maybe you'll find it cool that this was artificially designed!

Skellige

White Orchard

The realism here is... unreal. (⌐■_■)

I got these from this thread: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1166771 from user EatChildren, who unlocked the camera and zoomed out. There's no draw-distance fog, and the images are only slightly edited.

"I manipulated the colours in the [first] images to make them stand out a bit more, but otherwise the fog isn't there because the draw distance fog is more stylistic than technical."

From deeper in the thread, I pulled this comment from user Darkstorne, which I thought was very interesting (if a bit haughty).

"I'm an ecologist (survey for protected wildife/environments) and I'm amazed at how much research they've put into understanding flora. Their woodlands and forests have it all - edge effect, canopy, understorey, field layer, the kind of attention to detail I WISH other open world developers would use (The Elder Scrolls in particular has always had awful forest/woodland design). Heck, they even have pollarded trees around settlements when I'll bet less than 0.1% of the players will really notice or understand them. They've set such a high bar for environment design it's going to take a lot to be beaten."

CD Projekt RED really knocks it out of the park with game design. I can't wait for their next upcoming RPG.

(Sorry for the album re-post. I forgot to add two images, without which this post wasn't very substantial. Not totally sure adding images after submitting would work.)

Edit: I was wrong about a tiny portion of the map being playable (it's been awhile since I've played and someone in that forum thread misspoke similarly). @vauhtihirmu linked me a better representation of the playable area. http://i.imgur.com/6usK48n.jpg