California with bits of other states isn't a quarter of the (continental US). Maybe an eighth, but I still think that is too much.

Anyways I would like the map to be slight bigger than New Vegas. map. Like take the distance from corner to corner (in New Vegas's map) and make a square out of it.

I don't care about the size as long as it's reasonable. But I want every single place to feel like it's an entire main quest. Oblivion was terrible at that, Fallout 3 started showing some variation, Skyrim did this amazingly well, even if the same dungeon themes and textures were used, which sometimes makes sense. Fallout New Vegas did this kinda well I guess. I don't mind some scripted stuff, but keep them at a minimum... I don't know if it is scripted but I got blinded when I entered a room in Dunwich Building and when it was over a Glowing One appeared, it kept things interesting for me and it was unexpected of a Bethesda game.

i don't know how i feel about this in particular, but just for the sake of discussion, and to incorporate that realistic scale that people want, what if the entire map was a city. Not a quarter of the map like it was for FO3, and not just a tiny strip like in NV, but the ENTIRE map. Of course, it wouldn't be your typical wasteland, but it would play off the "concrete jungle" archetype. Instead of regular settlements, certain sections of the city could be walled off by fallen skyscraqers, leaving only one road in and a couple of open buildings(part of the wasteland, not their own cell. Think cities in morrowind that you can just walk into without loading screens.) that you can look into and see out of. The way i imagine that would be the open buildings you clear the mutants out of in FO3 when helping lyons get to GNR the first time. In the metro you could have other settlements, maybe even a questline about holding back the water line so the metro settlements don't flood. Now this could restrict travel in the sense you can only move in the cardinal directions unless a behemoth decided to uproot an entire building or the nuke directly took out a section of the city, however. Now that i think about it, what if the wasteland could be the nuked section of the city but it would be 75% city-25% waste as opposed to the opposite in FO3. If you want nodes, have them be set up so that there's only one way to enter and exit, and so that entrance would be the node, not a exit in every direction ala FO1. In that instance, the port with the boat to point lookout would be the node entrance/exit, and ONLY that port. That's not to say that the port is the only place to go anywhere in the world, but it's the only place to go from point lookout to the capital wasteland. If you can find a spaceport, i suppose you can create a different node "bridge" to the mothership. With this structure, if you wanted to change nodes, you can have your node, and at the same time have it be a fluid transition, not just some out of place map showing up out of nowhere. In NV, assuming there was only one entrance to the strip(i forget), you could have the door to the strip show the map and the character moving to the relevant section of the strip.

The main issue i have with the traditional node structure is that it's too jarring the way i imagine it, with some map showing up the second i hunt down that fleeing NPC. There was one video i saw where fast travel was modified to show the character actually moving to his destination in the world map as opposed to a loading screen. If that is how node-fans want it to be, i'm all for it but the traditional FO1 nodes don't make much sense to me.