3d map has nothing to do with "dumbing down".

Well, I think it does.

Agree.

How can a 3D map be "dumbing down"?

Get lost is one thing, get stuck and can't go anywhere is another.

The Skyrim vertical terrain would prevent you from just going to your destination by accident. The world is hardly open if you can't get anywhere.

Personally I like the 3D map idea. Now caves can be twisty and turny, and pass over the same area at different elevations and not look like one mass of lines.

Then, please, explain me why.

:rofl: fixed.

Quick! Like the Skyrim FB page 1,000,000 times so we can unlock three new lore books.

Wait, this sounds familiar...

Why should it be a worn or old map? Skyrim is an active province. Doubtlessly people would constantly be making new maps to sell. TES may be a fantasy setting but I see the word "medieval" pop up lots. The world of TES, if I recall, is older than our own civilizations in the real world. Magic may have made technological advancement unnecessary but that doesn't mean everything should be old, worn, and rickety in my opinion. That town with the wind mill is a good example (backwards sail debate aside). It's a flourishing town with operational commerce. A town like that wouldn't be producing old and worn maps. Maps get old or worn with time. They don't start out that way.

This reminds me of all those stone Greek statues from ancient Greece. I took a class about Greek mythology (required cultural class) and it had a section where we learned about that ancient art. As it turns out, those statues were actually like three dimensional paintings when new! They were in color, and looked very different from how they look now or how most people imagine them! The professor said that the actual artists would probably be aghast to see their creations displayed naked without the paint that was washed away over the millennia. Yet when you see new games or movies about ancient Greece they show those statues as plain stone statues... not at all how they looked back then. I liken a worn map like that. We have these old maps from medieval times, but that isn't how they were back then when in use just as those Greek statues used to be beautifully painted.
http://io9.com/5616498/ultraviolet-light-reveals-how-ancient-greek-statues-really-looked

I understand it's just a preference of course, and there doesn't have to be a logical explanation for it. Personally I welcome the 3D map. I'm disappointed we can't make custom notes, but I hope we can drop markers of some sort. Either way, I'm very much looking forward to seeing this map in action!

As you'd say: "Viel dank... oder danke!" Thanks for the information.

Not being able to set custom markers would be bad.

A missive from Hrolf Broad-Ears, His Majesty's Magister of the Voice

Thu'um, or dragon shouts, are not just for fighting. Utilitarian applications - like starting fires, communicating over long distances, and even shouting yourself to nearby cities - are just as common. One recently perfected application of the Voice is cartography. With the rapidly changing political situation in our province and abroad, is has become unsafe to send out cartographers into the field and downright useless to make maps in general, given how they will be outdated as soon as they are dry. Instead, our best minds put their heads together and came up with a way to use the Voice to map out terrain. A series of Nords stands at the corners of what you wish to map, and each lets of a high-powered, low frequency Shout towards the center. The Shout travels along the terrain, settling into the valleys and rushing over the peaks, and eventually deposits itself onto a sheet of paper being held by each of the Nords. The valley sounds, slowed by their descent, impact the paper less violently than do the mountain shouts. In the end, the paper is raised and creased into the shapes of the land.

Suddenly, lore.

Awesome. Thanks for posting this.

That's all I needed to hear. It works now.

For me it depends on how it looks, I keep getting this image of this immersion destroying hologram map. :sadvaultboy:

Might be interesting to make you, say, replant what you destroyed if it's the crops. You could be put to work in the mines, cut wood, make a bunch of stuff at the blacksmith's forge, depending on what aspect of the economy you screwed up.

Thank you for that! It's very cool that they are not making this map only for it being cool (which is enough to me, to be honest), but there is a lore reason!

Was that a default feature? For some reason I thought it was a mod I installed. I used so many mods sometimes I forget what featured were in the vanilla games.

I admit that I'd be disappointed if we can't set custom markers, but I've been excited by the information flowing in far more than I've been disappointed. I think I'm more excited right now than I have been since the announcement.

Edit:
They actually managed to make lore to explain a 3D map? Awesome.

i'll just say that i have in my possession an artifact named "eye of tamriel" which lets the user see the surrounding lands around (to an extent) from a topside view.

Yea, it's a default feature in Oblivion.

Sorry to break it to you guys, but that was all me. I was just trying to say that it can easily be made to fit the world. Bethesda is, of course, welcome to the idea

I dont know if this is old news, but go to itunes store and search for the PC Gamer Skyrim Podcast, some of this stuff is mentioned
Thanks for the new info.

Wow, you are pretty awesome at that! :icecream:

Hahaha! You really had me.

Hmm. I wonder whether this means that Steam won't be used? I mean, why use two seperate systems for online profiles?

Hahahah, dike move man, dike move!

But really that sounded legit. And awesome.