I agree. In many RPGs you are almost like superhero who has to do some combat and save something, and to me it breaks immersion when you have to take a break from that journey/quest to get into real estate or trading, so you can earn money for the things you want.
"hold on a minute. I know the enemy army is preparing to attack, but let me take the time to wander off and develop a successful trade business."
It could also be a bit disappointing to purchase a game that is part RPG, part trade simulator lol.

Yea, on the other hand, wars are won with logistics and weapons armor and manpower, not by one man.

IF you would have 300 000 gold and magical armor and weapons (that you made a lot and some looted from dungeons) you could easily use the gold to buy mercenary help to fight the enemy that is coming, supply them and give them money for salary.

Now you dont have to make it micro management hell, if the enemy has conquered a city. AND you as a merchant/crafter/adventurer would have a lot of resources, why is it so, that you cant hire or give the gold to a lord of a city to form and recruit bring in a horde of army support from some other city that is further away and not in danger. ?

By doing everything like you did in the earlier versions of TES, the game is repeatative, and by doing it mazelike in the wilderness makes the game taste old really fast. (same movement areas over and over again = maze) (open area = you stumble upon new areas or places = alternative route).

As people have said in this thread the same old same old style of TES will not work forever, people will get bored fast even if the graphics are more pretty.

Modders have done working faction systems in Oblivion and Morrowind, adventurers that race you on the dungeons and loot (omg you r not the only one out there??? = imo realistic).

Its not like the developers cant do the game better, its just if they do, they dont have so much rewanues from DLCs later on.

To be fair to Bloodlance, I think in one respect (s)he makes a good point: If you're going to get to the top of a faction and become "guildmaster" or whatever, it'd be nice if that came with something more than "Ok, you've just completed everything we asked you to do. Now we'll all just stand around and do nothing." I mean, really, like the Fighters Guild won't have more bandits to kill, or whatever?

I guess the problem here is that it seems like the only way to keep generating content would be procedurally, so it would probably get a little dull.

:shrug:

But if the Radiant AI is so great as they advertise, shouldnt it be possible to get quests that are the "problems" of the guild members, and they give a quest journal in the guild where you can see all the available quests that concern that one guild (same in all guilds).

So the Radiant AI can then calculate, that one of the guild members ie. a woman gets his staff stolen by a bandit that is part of the thief guild, thus it automatically generates a quest in the mage guild charter that you can take. Retrieve the magical staff of x person and deliver it back. Alternative can be a bandit group that has successfully killed merchants in the game world and thus made merchant guild generate a quest in the merchant guild charter = get rid of the pesky bandits.

This RADIANT AI, IF it is as good as they say, why cant it make quests like that ?

Why cant the world generate automatically quests that you can go and do, and if a bandit group is killed before you get to them, bad luck, the quest just informs you that the bandits have met their end and removes the quest from the list.

And thats just the tip of the iceberg, imagine if you are part of the assassing guild and someone has lost a brother (thief brother) to a keep lord (imprisoned in the jail) and you get a quest in the assassins guild automatically that you have to kill the Lord of the keep for revange. etc etc the possibilities are endless, it is just that if they have quests like that... then they prolly wont have much DLC sales in the end when the game lives its own life.

You could prolly have quests like that are war like, mage guild vs merchant guild , if the people they inhabit just gets their problems escelated enuff vs each others. This opens a new route where one could stash false evidence to ie. mages guild house where it indicates the mages have stolen something from the merchant guild, thus leading to a start of a grudge wave that ultimately escelates to assassinations and more looting etc quests.

good ideas yes ?

That's true, in morrowind when you went from one region to another you noticed. But the problem is that it was not a realistic transition. I walk here, oh look, this tiny island has so many different eco-systems and they instantly change right here at this line on the ground. Oblivion slowly transitioned into the next region but nobody noticed. Not sure what BGS is supposed to do, either they make the regions unrealistic or they make them too realistic, iono, just seems like BGS can't win on the fan front <_<

Fallout was almost half the size of oblivion, but a lot of players thought it was twice as big. Todd or the devs have learned quite a lot since fall out.
A. a huge baby pin with 5 toys
B. a moderate baby pin with 50 toys

What's going to be more interesting?

(I was thinking of fallout 3... Hence the baby pin example lol)

I thought I remembered hearing somewhere that they extended the Fallout map size after saying it was smaller than Oblivion...I haven't played though, so I can't comment on how big it felt.

What if you are a huge baby? You are going to need the extra room.

It is similar to Oblivion's size but a bit bigger, there will obviously be borders to where you an go but being that Skyrim has alot more mountains with purpose there will be alot of versatility involved with exploration

Just like the first post said the similar size to Oblivion.


PS: Did you know that there was no invicible barriers on the mountains that seperated morrowind and cyrodiil, and that you could go there.
But there was only never ending forest...

From what I gathered Todd said fallout 3 was roughly 50-80% of oblivions size. Expansions/dlc expand fallout 3 if that's what you mean...

One needs to be careful about how exactly Radiant Story works. It's not really a quest generator. Rather, what's going on is that Bethesda hand-write quest templates, where there is some range of variation in how this quest template will be implemented for any given character. So for example, one quest template might be to fetch a certain item for an NPC. But there is some variability in where exactly the item is located - is it in dungeon X or dungeon Y? What Radiant Story does is looks at where you've been and then fixes the appropriate value in the quest template. So if you've been to dungeon X but not dungeon Y, Radiant Story will put the item in dungeon Y. But the important point is that all the dialogue, and the general "shape" of the quests, are all hand done. There's nothing procedural about it.

Todd has explicitly stated that they don't want to "oversell" Radiant Story. Some people seem to think - and this somewhat comes through in your post as well - that Radiant Story will be able to generate/trigger quests based on fairly routine occurrences in the game. So, supposing we see a member of the Mages Guild have their staff stolen by a member of the Thieves Guild - and this is an unscripted event, just a "random" Radiant AI thing - one should not automatically expect there to be a Mages Guild quest to retrieve the staff. There would only be such a quest if the dialogue and the quest-conditions had already been written. The game would already need to have some sort of condition which says "There's a Mages Guild quest which is activated when one of the following members of the Mages Guild - X, Y, Z - has one of these items - A, B, C - stolen by one of these members of the Thieves Guild - U, V, W".

In short, don't think of Radiant Story as some sort of world/city simulator, but rather as just a fairly simple way that the game can subtly tailor quests to your character, based on fairly straightforward facts about your character - skills, faction, dungeons.

15 sq miles, 1 less than OB.

http://i.joystiq.com/2008/02/15/fallout-3s-world-50-to-80-percent-as-large-as-oblivion/

Oh yeah, I think I remember now, what I meant before, because last time people were asking about it, I found that article, but the other person said that the size had been increased since that interview.

Oblivion size is a little disappointing, only because (Similar to Fallout NV) the world seems so cramped. You walk for 1minute and stumble upon another labyrinth or ruin. It's much less pronounced in an entirely fictitious setting though, I mean, you can say in your mind every time you see it, "Hoover Dam is 23 times larger than this" or "The Capitol building isn't 13 feet away from the National Archives" so in a total fantasy setting, it's easier to suspend disbelief.

Still, there's the flip side of things. A game like Red Dead Redemption has a huge, sparse world, only a veritable handful of points of interest and not really enough detail and personality to make the large expanses worthwhile, it's essentially how a Modern-Gen Daggerfall would turn out. Frankly, I prefer a tighter experience (Grinning like an idiot now, mind always in the gutter) with greater attention to detail, than a huge generalized experience that does little more than artificially lengthen time and put a new little *(Over9000 sqMiles!) on the back of the box.

I use the example of Games measured in volume. Where Daggerfall would be massive in area, it's depth was rather (World depth) shallow, resulting in formulaic experiences similar to something you'd see in .Hack series. Oblivion suffered from this too, which was surprising and I find it indicative of a rushed project. Fallout 3 was much better in World Depth, and, though not a Bethesda Softworks game, New Vegas (Bugs omitted) represents the point at which we need to be, with it's combination of great world depth, meaningful roleplaying and the under-the-hood game mechanics (The deep RPG number stuff that is seamlessly hidden though mostly fluid gameplay)

Also, not exactly related, but I finished Dead Money for the aforementioned New Vegas, and what was up with all the [censored] that DLC got, I thought it was the best piece of DLC I've seen since Lair of the Shadow Broker. Retards rushing through it probably just got sick of their heads exploding every few seconds.

That interview was in feb 2008 fallout was released in October 2008... I'd say their priority was polish not expanse

But let me know if you find a source otherwise


Edit: typing on my iPhone have mercy

This thread put me to sleep long ago! Made-up complaints by someone who probably is a game designer for one of Bethesda's rivals really is boring to read...

Yet you read it and even replied to it. :confused:

Oblivion and FO3 have the same size cells.

TamrielWorldSpace = approx 4600 playable cells
TheWasteland = approx 2600 playable cells.

I'm hoping if the cells are the same size that Skyrim = 5000 playable cells, but being that they didn't say more, just roughly the same, it'll probably be slightly smaller. Still, that seems hard to imagine when you look at this http://www.gamestar.de/_misc/images/original.cfm?pk=2198717 which is a pretty big landscape yet should probably only cover about the area between the big lake and High Hrothgar on this map. http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/1717/skyrimmapls.png

whilst Todd said it will be about the same size as OB, keep in mind that there is more verticality this time around. Even if you don't traverse the mountain, it's presence (scientifically proven fact) provides the optical illusion of a greater area. So it may be the same size, but it will *LOOK* bigger.

Assuming the cells are the same and that the map in the video has an accurate cell grid imposed, I've calculated that the Skyrim worldspace contains approx 4400 playable cells and that is on par with the official statement that Skyrim and Oblivion are about the same size.

Roughly the same size as cyrodiil.

Yeah, I mean we don't know for sure those were the actual in-game cell sizes, but it does fit in, and about what I expected. How many cells did a city in Oblivion take up in general? (Please be less than 9!)