I was thinking the same thing at first glance. When I saw the 10km marker for scale my first thought was "a bit smaller than some of the more ambitious game maps out there". But I really don't mind, this is literally still considered a huge map by industry standard.
Truth be told, I'm really not concerned and I'll give you several reasons why:
First off, keep in mind this is the STARTING continent. We're not even sure if the second continent will be the final one. map size =/= world size.
Second, I think for the way the game is set up it's best not to have anything crazy. You raised concerns with the density, which is a fair point, but my worries have actually been on the opposite side of the spectrum. Quite a few people I've come in contact with are at least a mayor/baron holder. This plus several other factors have actually had me concerned about in game content, density, and population. I've played games with a 20 minute travel time from one end of the map to the other, and they've felt dead either because a large proportion of players were centered in one area or spread out too far.
Third, it really doesn't matter how large a game is (and again this is a decent sized map, keep in mind gta v is just over 10km from north to south), but rather the travel time. We're not going to have cars, and many people might not even have horses. For a lot of players city-to-city travel will be the extent of their travel plans. In fact inter-kingdom, inter-duchy, and even inter-county travel might be something that many players only do once or twice throughout their whole experience in CoE. Like I said earlier, I've played games with roughly 15-30 minute travel time. A game with a potentially week long travel time seems pretty crazy to me. Even the two day travel time with a horse is crazy. Think about it, we're talking likely +30 hours of straight travel. Remember, you want the game to seem realistic enough to the point of immersion, without being bogged down by all the inconveniences of real life. If we were talking a time scale of weeks for travel, then expeditions and journey's would be way less appealing and the game would only seem that much more dead.
My final point, again, just going off that 10km scale we're given (let that sink in, the center body of water on map H can house the entirety of gta v), it seems to dwarf games like Just Cause 3, that honestly started to seem too big, even given aircraft. This is not a small, or even medium size map, just that a lot of people hyped it up to be something crazy (which arguably it still is).
