I have always assumed this, as the cities are always way to near to each other, and the population of rivet city and megaton must be much larger, closer to tenpenny tower (How many people must live in each of those rooms?) in lore?

It's the limitation of the game being 1st person. You can not do it 1st person and make it immerse at the same time.

Only Daggerfall managed this and I'm guessing it only managed that because of it's simplistic graphics. Daggerfall was literally about twice the size of Great Britain and had about 15,000 settlements.

As I said, I assume that was because of the quality of graphics then and the randomly generated areas.

Oh, i'm not saying it's a bad thing, I perfectly understand why. I was just making sure I was correct.

New graphene processors (100Ghz++) should make these limitations a thing of the past hopefully.

Hopefully... You'd still need people to design and shape the Britain-sized gameworld, though... I'm fine with about the size Fallout 3 was -- future games could be 3-4 times bigger, but not much more than that if we still want quality and uniqueness.

We then start to run into content issues though. Either theres a heck of a lot of walking, or to space lanmarks like in Fo3/NV, a heck of a lot of writing.

There's always going to be a disconnect in these games as to what you actually play and as to what is "actually" there.

What I mean is that the presentation of the game is limited by the software/hardware, and you have to accept the fact that what you are seeing is not what the "actual" world is supposed to be like.

In NV for example, the Strip is supposed to be a large, bustling place with tons of activity. When you actually go to the strip and there are only handfuls of NPCs in the streets and in the casinos, and the physical size of the strip itself is smaller than a Wal-Mart parking lot, you are supposed to understand that the "reality" of it is that there actually are more people and more buildings.

The Bitter Springs massacre in NV should have had dozens, maybe hundreds of casualties, and just as many graves as well. So when you go there and see only 6 graves, you are supposed to understand that those 6 graves really represent many graves.

When you walk down I-15 in several minutes, you're supposed to understand you "actually" spent days during the trip.