seti18

Cool next time I'm on I'll send you a friend request. I'm hoping we can see some in game footage soon because I can't wait to see the world of Skyrim! I'm sure it's going to look great.

I'm going to send you a friend request too.

I agree with most of what was mentioned. But leave Bethesda unaffected from other games. I'd like my TES to be pure.

WoW, The Hunter looks great.

Pessimism? What pessimism?

Yeah, that game looks absolutely stunning on the Youtube videos.

I'm a bit of a svcker for really beautiful graphics... I'm actually tempted to buy this just to run around in the forest.

I would love it if they really went for it graphics-wise with Skyrim, but the screenshots revealed don't seem all that ambitious so far... They look good, sure (and I love the art + design), but there's not much 'wow'.

On the other hand, though, maybe the game will play smoothly with many mods

Yeah, however Bethesda never tried to give unique dialogue to every NPC. Most NPCs since daggerfall have had only generic things to say.

Bethesda has nothing to learn from just cause 2... infact its the other way round.

lots of game devs are making open world games with FA to do in them.

all you can do in just cause is run around blowing things up... it gets old fast. Theres not even a stealth system.

how about the makers of just cause allow inanimate objects to be picked up? to have NPC's you can speak to rather than hollow shells? buyable houses?

the size of the world means nothing if its soulless.

and the driving svcks.

Yeah I agree. Even though I haven't played JC 2, it seems awesome, performance feels very smooth and it's graphically lovely.
I too worry about a pop-up issue. I hope they make transitions feel smooth, seamless and nonexistent.

While Skyrim is an RPG with lots of content (quests, dungeons, people, towns, etc) I still think it could have done better, based on what I've seen so far.
I think the world, after 5 years, could have been made bigger. People say that 41 square kilometers is enough, and that it's big. I disagree.
JC 2 was like 1000 square kilometers, and that's completely unrealistic to think Skyrim ever could be. To be realistic though, I'd like prefer Skyrim to be 70-100 square kilometers.


The reason I would like Skyrim to be 70-100 square kilometers is basically:

I thought Oblivion was way too small to feel huge. Way to small for huge, majestic mountains and valleys to be there.
You can most likely say good-bye to landscapes like... http://www.ozoneeleven.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Mountain_Valley_1600-x-1200.jpg, http://www.cpawsbc.org/files/athead_Valley_from_Global_TV_helicopter_ride.jpg, http://www.naturewalls.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/beautiful_nature_in_the_mountains_wallpaper.jpg, http://www.wallpaperpimper.com/wallpaper/Landscape/Landscape/Valley-Vista-1-RP6ONRV6I8-1600x1200.jpg and http://2.bp.blogspot.com/__mMx7lCefGY/SxEn5CGyUAI/AAAAAAAAAvU/6w8jUlJmrTY/s1600/North+Klondike+River+Valley.png.
If landscapes like that would be in Skyrim... it would never fit. Any of those landscapes in the pictures would pretty much take up half the map/world space or even more. If landscapes like that would be in Skyrim; they would have to be greatly reduced in scale, which I think would remove their whole "greatness" and "epicness".

And Oblivion felt really http://s2.n4g.com/media/11/newssi/15000/18861_0_org.jpg. I fear for the same feeling.

Oblivion was 41 square kilometers. I'd like something around 70-100
That would be ideal to me.

Combined with this really amazing new draw distance, the world would perhaps feel even smaller?

Maybe it's an age thing, but to me JC2 is a stupid game with lots of paragliding that looks pretty but feels pretty hollow. The freedom of being who you want to be, choosing your race, name and looks is worth a lot more to me than pretty graphics ( and being called Rico ). As I say it's probably because I'm old.

I find JC2 to be LOTS of fun. I love beign a terrorist.

Nobody's saying they want skyrim to play anything like JC2 - but JC2 handled a massive open world seamlessly, it'd be nice to have something like that in skyrim. "Loading Area" begone!

Like I always say, you could wrap Just Cause 2's map around a globe and recreate the entire planet of Nirn in size almost.

It would be a great idea for a future game and i'd take a single player experience like that over anything any day. Traversing the planet and finding you'r own adventures would be awesome.

Appreciate that, but don't want a massive open world, want a massive full world.

In terms of open-world design (sheer size and enormous draw distance), Just Cause 2 is miles ahead of any competition. I'm almost sure that guys from Bethesda will implement some of its "features".
But, don't forget that Skyrim's world is much more detailed, with hundreds of NPCs, advanced AI etc.

I loved JC2 gameworld. Sure, there is a whole lot of empty spaces that is just randomly generated desert, or forest, or snowy mountain or whatever. The variety and loveliness of those places is still awesome though. I was running around in a forest within the game and thinking to myself that Bioware, Beth and some MMO devs should totally get the engine. I wouldn't particularly like a word as big as JC2 in a medieval game, simply because it would literally take hours to move across the map which is a bit much imo. On the other hand, if there added dragons as mounts/shapeshift or something then it'd be quite cool (not that I'm asking for dragon mount/shapeshift in Skyrim).

They could just randomly generate the different parts of the world, then send the world builders in to make everywhere more unique and interesting. Would probably take forever, sure, the end result would be overwhelming in an awesome way though. ^_^

You seem to forget that Bethesda didn't have their own engines at that time

Skyrim, just as Oblivion was, will be graphically superior to Just Cause 2. In terms of detail density, Oblivion has much more packed into much less. If people complained about lack of variety in Oblivion, a game like Just Cause 2 would be ripped to shreds. It allows for such a big game world because not much in it is very detailed. For better comparison, I'd use GTA4, a game similar in function minus the physics breaking stunts. That game world is much smaller, but much more detailed. If Bethesda wanted, they could make another Elder Scrolls as big as Daggerfall, the downside being that it'd look like Daggerfall...

I hope not. That game wasn't even that great. Sold it after the first day of playing it. They need to learn nothing from that crappy game. Let them create their own world instead of trying to "learn" from some other game even though they don't need to.

I don't know why some people say that the JC2 engine wouldn't work for an RPG. Especially after three titles done with a heavily customized, pretty horrible GameBryo engine... so much for "purity" as someone was claiming, Beth uses a lot of external software. Sure, the GTA IV and Bethesda games in general have more "details" in the sense that you can meet fleshed out characters, go on quests, go inside buildings, etc. But if those are not in JC2 I think it's more because of design choices: if you're a smart games developer, you don't try to do everything at the same time unless you want to fail at everything. For JC2 Avalanche Studios picked which kind of game they wanted to do and honed it pretty much to perfection. You may or may not like the gameplay style, but you can hardly deny it's well implemented.

For me the strong points of the Avalanche Engine 2 are cities that look just as good close up as from afar, with big buildings you can still recognize clearly 5 kilometers away. Same with the mountains, jungles and deserts: they look pretty much like you'd expect them to do, no matter the distance. This is in part due to the engine using a lot of procedural techniques to generate textures on the fly and create some variety, instead of just stupidly tiling the same handmade texture all over the place like Oblivion and FO3 do.

If you look at the cities and villages in JC2, they actually have a lot of little details like fruit and cooked dishes on market stands, cafés with tables, people hanging around and leaning against handrails, etc. I don't see a reason why a game with an RPG focus couldn't make those objects pickup-able Oblivion/Fallout3 style, add more complex behaviors to NPCs, and so on. The engine runs so smoothly that there's plenty of processing power left for whatever details you want to implement. Just look at the free to play The Hunter (link in the OP) if you need convincing you can make a completely different game (and in 1st person) with the same engine.

Lastly about the size of the game world: I really didn't like how Morrowind and Oblivion were packed full of dungeons, so that finding yet another Ancestral Tomb (at least for those the frequency made some sense) or "rare and mysterious" Ayleid Ruin (no comment) didn't feel special at all. I guess Beth won't have the balls to try that and will stick to their tried and true recipe, but I'd love to see a company attempt a medieval RPG with similar scale as Just Cause 2. First, you don't have to fill every inch with "interesting" (read: generic) locations. Most of the map can be randomly generated wilderness with the occasional surprise, and the hand-made content can be in similar quantities as Oblivion, just 2 or 3 times more spread out and concentrated in regions where people might reasonably want to live. This would give a more "Lord of the Rings landscape" feeling to the world instead of a medieval fantasy theme park. Of course traveling the wilderness would be very lenghty if you choose not to use travel services/fast travel, but with huge view distances and realistic sized terrain you could finally experience the awesome feeling of a long solitary travel in the wilderness, and then come upon a huge valley with an abandoned temple at the bottom. No, not a temple every 10 meters! A huge frickin' valley just for that temple!

And yeah, exploring such a huge world on dragonback would be awesome, too. Don't hope for that in Skyrim, since the world will be so small (Oblivion size) that being able to fly would make it seem just tiny.

Edit: some spelling/rephrasing.

Passable voice acting?
Illimited parachutes?

I you were trying to spot what Skyrim shouldn't imitate, you were successful. Congrats.

You've been repeating that paragraph enough times almost word for word, that it's practically the first thing I think of every time I see your username/avatar. Just an amused observation.

I think Oblivion's small, cramped feeling comes from the fact that Cyrodiil is pretty much basin-shaped - meaning that you could see quite a distance ahead of you. In Skyrim, even with massive draw distances, you'll have a hard time trying to see past the rougher terrain, and with the Throat of the World sitting smack dab in the middle of the map, there's one problem solved. Not to mention it adds verticality; you can build large mines, dungeons and whatnot in a mountain, and those can run on and on for who-knows how long - trust me, I know this from my experience in playing Minecraft. Dig a tunnel in a hill and soon it becomes a labyrinth.
The other thing about Oblivion was that half of the potential map was blocked off by borders, and the land outside was unused, Fallout 3 may have been a bit smaller in terms of the size of the total map, but it let you travel across the entire square of the map. Oblivion wouldn't feel as cramped if you took those dungeons, and spread them across that mass of unused space. At least Skyrim is shaped more like a square, so more of that 41 sqaure kilometers will actually be used.

http://static02.mediaite.com/geekosystem/uploads/2010/05/Large-Video-Game-Worlds.jpg

Nice comparison map, I'm adding that to the OP.

So Daggerfall wins the palm for largest video world ever eh? Looks like Beth has what it takes to make a JC2-scale game, they're just afraid to use'em . Somehow.

@Ctoagu: I agree overall that Skyrim should feel a bit less cramped, but Morrowind did have a big mountain in the middle too and did feel cramped and rather small-scale (Red Mountain didn't feel like a mountain) to me. So I'm not holding my breath on that aspect.