I specifically asked Pete about that on twitter after the trailer was released. He said the reason everything looked so big and NPC's look so small is because they didn't want to show off the NPC's yet.

One of my concerns, regarding the game world is this. When I look at some of the screenshots that show the mountains, I become more and more convinced that they're relying on optical illusions to make the mountains and terrain look bigger than they really are. So when you look at the landscape, it might appear big. Then you get there and realize that it really isn't.

If the size of the world is the same as Oblivion's then the mountains will most likely be even smaller than in Oblivion. Otherwise it would be impossible to have more than three mountains on the map. Just think about the Jerall Mountains/Colovian Highlands. The slope took 1/3rd of the map space (from Lake Rumare to the regions above Bruma). But I think it will feel much more mountainous due to the more rugged and much better looking terrain and distant land. But it will certainly rely mainly on an optical illusion.

I don't think Oblivion's worldspace was too small, but it was boring and with a high athletics skill you could run around in light speed mode. I hope both of these things have been fixed (more interesting and detailed terrain and a reasonable character speed).

My biggest concern isn't on the list - The placement of items

That feature alone is a "make it or break it" for me. If displaying my hard earned loot is going to feel like herding cats like it did in Oblivion, I likely won't buy.

I've said it before
...
The mountains and the landscape look big. A good illusion, considering the world size is the same as Oblivion I'd say.

BUT, to make the best comparison of how big things actually are... look at the trees. How big are they in the far end of the screen?
Example: http://cdnstatic.gamesas.com/akqacms/files/tes/screenshots/LakeMountains_wLegal.jpg
Example: http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c209/dev_akm/oblivion/oto/noise/QTP3_BT2048_KMd_01.jpg

See my point? The Skyrim picture looks huge at first, but when you look at the trees you'll notice how incredibly small it is. The Skyrim picture is pretty much the same distance as where the hill above the fort in the Oblivion screen is. We know the Oblivion world and we know that is a very short distance.

This will show off when we actually run in the world. We'll notice how we reach that mountain so fast, and that worries me.

I think they'll be bigger (the mountains), and they're stretching more vertically than horizontally.

Dragonborn1: It doesn't mean they didn't scale down the size of NPCs (which I think they did).

You may be right.

http://www.elderscrolls.com/skyrim/media/screenshots/dragon-triumphant/ is the one that really make me start to think it. Looking at the size of the trees when they start to disappear and comparing them to the landscape around them makes the landscape look small. The big thing, though, is the use of the mist. It's great for making things look further away than they really are. And when you misjudge distance, you also tend to misjudge size. For me, though, the trees break the illusion.

Im worred about most of them actually... SR will be good though, hopefully all the little things dont add up to be a big thing though.

Added!

Dragonborn1: In what way? I used to develop 3D games myself, scaling is a very effective tool. It doesn't make things lose their details too, it's just a size comparison between objects. So it still is possible that they have made the NPCs a little bit smaller, thus making everything else seem bigger, another optical illusion.

Another optical illusion is the clouds that cover most of the mountains. They make the mountains seem so far away. Another one is the trees that are thin but tall, compared to the trees in Oblivion which were tall and wide (pretty huge actually).

hlvr: I see your point, you may be right.

Yeah same here. But it's still very well done by Bethesda. Mist + big and lots of mountains = world feel much bigger than otherwise. I'm glad for this.
These pictures also show us that the view distance is not that far at all. In http://skyrimguild.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/SkyrimTrailer9.jpg for instance, we can see that the view distance is like... I'd say around 1/3 of what the Oblivion total view distance is in clear weather.

Well when you put it that way you may be right! Hey what happened to your avatar?

xD You just made me lol...

Yeah, moderators took it out because it was offensive to Todd (let's admit it... it wasn't the best picture of him...).

Thing is, for some reason I can't upload a new avatar, I'll speak with a moderator about it.

By the way, glad we agree!

The problem with relying on an optical illusion, though, is that once's it's broken, it's hard to see it again, and it's very disappointing.

I think the heightmap layout of Oblivion was pretty bad for creating the illusion of a large world. It was basically a valley where you could see from one side to the other side. If there are a lot of mountains in between that block the view the world automatically feels larger. Just look at Nehrim, the worldspace is smaller than Oblivion's, yet it feels larger.

I've always wondered what's up with the view distance. I haven't seen a single image with a view distance similar to Oblivion's. Do you think they reduced it to make the world feel larger? I wouldn't mind that at all, but I'm wondering whether it's true or whether I've just missed a screenshot.

Perhaps
One can try and mind-block it ^^
Hopefully speed won't be as fast in Oblivion (but not as slow as in Morrowind either), so that it feels a bit bigger even so.
Still I wish the game world would have been bigger than Oblivion's though, partly for this reason.

@Phitt: Not sure about the view distance thing in Skyrim. Bethesda have kept saying that the view distance is sooo big in Skyrim. That you can see everything. So far, it's minimal compared to what was able to be seen in Oblivion/FO3. I'm confused.

This one looks big as well: http://cdnstatic.gamesas.com/akqacms/files/tes/screenshots/CompositeMountain_wLegal.jpg
... but I doubt it's as big as half the game world, which was able to be seen in Oblivion. There are no trees in it either, so we can't actually be sure how big or small it is.

Or better yet, http://www.untoldentertainment.com/games/sissy/

They announced the draw distance is waaay longer than Oblivion's. Meaning we can actually see more to the distance than we used to in Oblivion. It was one of the things the press was excited about in that two hour demo demonstration Todd gave them.

I voted for everything.

I might be mistaken, but I think draw distance might refer to how close you have to be to an object for it to appear on the screen. That doesn't necessarily refer to how far you can see the landscape. More like how far away can you see that person or that barrel. They may very well have had to sacrifice view distance in order to achieve a better draw distance.

View distance doesn't hurt the gaming experience though, It's lowly rendered. They can draw the view distance all the way. It's what's close that slows the game down, the more details the greater the fps problems.

I personally think they might have been a little generous on that this time around. But I might be wrong...

Mogrus: I can't believe it but I actually played through the whole thing... I wanted to shoot myself at the end... thanks...

That (draw distance thing for objects) doesn't seem to be the case either...
For example: The trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSRtYpNRoN0&feature=player_detailpage#t=22s (watch in 720p otherwise it's hard to see).
At 0:24 you'll see a bush being rendered within the "object distance". The bush is at the bottom-left part of the screen.
That's a very very short object distance I'd say... so I'm confused.

Bethesda, where is the big view distance you've talked so much about? It's the big view distance that's supposed to be the "special" thing about the engine and the reason you didn't choose id tech 5!

From GameInformer article "The Technology Behind The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim":
“The big things for us were to draw a lot of stuff in the distance so we have a really sophisticated level of detail, more so than what we've had in the past for how things stream in and how detail gets added to them as they get closer to the camera,”

Something is not right here.

I am one of the people who hates the size of the map, but I was never really bothered by the render/draw distance. I don't care how large the map seems, I care about how large it is, because I like to explore in addition to the fact that cyrodil was supposed to be the biggest of the provences but was actually smaller than vardenfell was immersion breaking for me.

As weird as it may sound, but I hope Mitheledh is right. If I could see all of Skyrim from a mountain and if Skyrim is the same size as Oblivion then it would make the world feel small. It would also make sense. Optimizing the engine works wonders, but Xbox hardware is Xbox hardware. I guess it would be hard to have a detail like on hlvr's screenshot with an unlimited draw distance.

@DarkDeliverians: Sorry, but that's not true. Distant land is the performance killer. While it may have less detail there are so many things to render that it easily makes up for the lack of detail. The loaded area in Oblivion for example is 25 cells (and you can't even have all of it at once on the screen). The distant land you could see in a single render frame were around (educated guess) 2000 cells with clear weather (weather didn't make a difference regarding performance since less view distance didn't mean less to render, but easier to imagine). Just look at RAEVWD. You need a hell of a lot of stuff in the loaded area to get the same performance decrease this mod causes.

EDIT: That's also why I think the distant land shown can't be praised enough. While I usually express my concerns on this forum I think it's amazing how it looks. Especially on Xbox hardware.

One bush popped in on a video that was recorded at least 9 months from release and there's a problem?