If they make High Hrothgar HUMONGOUS like one of the taller mountains in the Himalayans and it is scalled to the size of the map then it's gonna be really big, maybe 1.5 times the size of Cyrodiil in Oblivion.

Anyone know how Fallout 3's map compares to Oblivion's? Of course that's a bit tricky with the DC districts...

Ah yes, let's hope for some REAL mountains in this game. I mean, you can't go from sea level to summit in one mile. But in the screenshots in GI it looked like they've done the real thing this time

It'll probably compare in size to Oblivions landmass(ingame I mean) unless it's not just fully set within Skyrim or Skyrims taken land from a neighbor. Which isn't a bad thing. Remember due to being mountainous the scale in height will be much larger and I suspect due to more elevation they'l be able to cram more in. Lets hope they don't save out some locations for a DLC though.

I think this time they are going all out to make it epic and part of that is map size.. I think they learned that while making fallout 3.. some things just need space.

I hope the map is so great that, to go from one extreme to the other one is needed, say, 20 hours of adventure. lol

I want it as big as RDR's map. I think that map is probably the biggest overworld map I've ever played in. I don't even walk in the game. I either ride or take a carriage if I wanted to get somewhere.

oblivion only felt crammped because 9/10 of the world were forest.

This is one of the things I disliked in Oblivion. The character runs too damn fast. It makes distances between towns seem too short and horses close to useless.

I'm confident the game area will be bigger than Oblivions. Just like Oblivions was bigger than Morrowind's.

Oblivion tried to fit a gigantic chunk of land into the size of something only slightly bigger than Vvanderfell. You could fit the Island in TES:III four or five times into Cyrodill on the map. But Oblivion was nowhere close to four or five times bigger than Morrowind. Not even twice as big. So it felt smaller and condensed. Luckily that won't be the problem with Skyrim. It's much smaller than Cyrodill so they should be able to fit in everything they can and make it much more properly proportionate to a real province.

What i'd want is a super advanced game engine that would let you choose map size from gamestart.
What I mean is the game contains all the hand placed stuff from the devs but generates the rest by random calculations. So if a player wanted a small world the game will compact everything, and most of the map is the handmade stuff. But if a player wanted a ultra massive world, the hand placed locations would be spread far far apart, but the areas in between will be filled with computergenerated landscapes, towns, quests, beasts, and npcs.

hmmm, massive cities = bigger map scale wise of course in reality (fantasy reality ) Cyrodil is bigger but in game I think skyrim will be slightly larger.

Well, I just compared the number of cells, and I get:
Oblivion - around 4800 cells
Skyrim - around 3900 cells

Now I don't wanna start a panic, so I'll add that 1) we don't know how comparable the sizes of the cells are and 2) my number for Skyrim is a very rough estimation, possibly with faulty data.

What I did was that I took the Skyrim map seen in the videos and looked at how big one cell is (I tried to make a good estimation by counting several cells and dividing their pixels by their number). Then I made a second transparent layer and blackened the Skyrim area on the map (everything within the actual borders of Skyrim), and let GIMP give me the number of black pixels in that layer. Then I divided that by the square of my estimated cell size.
Same procedure for Cyrodiil.

edit: Wait, after rechecking I get 4800 cells for Cyrodiil. Now I'm confused. Just to be on the safe side, I switched to that number and also changed the word "hype" to "panic"
(Yes, I just re-checked both values, they seem to be correct now. Although I do get an uncertainty of around +-100 cells.)

Genious.

OB was so cramped up it hurt the game badly. If OB was 16 square miles (41 square kilometers), it doesn't help much if it got to be twice the size even (32/82). It will still be jumping happy around in the immediate neighborhood and no real exploring or journeys. Although there is no chance it will happen here, I need something the size of Fuel with an automated created world system, combined with proper gameplay to fully support exploration that feels realistic and longer journeys (real time wouldn't be suitable here ).

...
Five sounds about right.

Huge, its already been stated that it is much larger then oblivion

Source, if'in ya please.

Oblivion was roughly 2/3 the size of Morrowind, at last that's what the devs told us before it came out. They sad that are "making the map smaller but more detailed with more things to do and less running" (for a free roaming game they are sure afraid of making us walk a bit, what with the fast travel and dungeons on every corner). Additionally unlike Morrowind you could travel between the cities in a direct line - Morrowind always had a mountain stark in the middle of your pass, and another one (THE Mountain) in the middle of the map, which made us take turns and walk longer, the roads twisted and turned and changed directions quite a bit, while in Oblivion you had a direct road form one end of the map to another. And of course fast travel - in Morrowind you had to change your transport and run through the city to do that, which added to a sense of "long travel". And of course the fact that you where not able to see the whole of the map from one spot - that's where the better graphics did Oblivion one nasty "favor", Morrowinds fog hid form you some of the map, and that made it feel even larger (btw, I'm not advocating for the fog to return).
I hope they are not making the map even smaller, so we don't have to walk at all (so we don't need the athletics skill, finally! ) In my opinion making it at last twice as big as Oblivion is one of the possible solutions for the world looking nicely sized again with the modern graphics, I don't know about you but I like walking to my distillation, and would love it if it was impossible to hike across the whole map in one day.

For your information Morrowind was 25 square kilometers, while Oblivion was 41.

I'm hoping Skyrim will be about 80-120 square kilometers
Hopefully, with the new engine, making a world should go faster.

There is NO way it will be as big as daggerfall. I think it was something like 62K miles squared, with 750k npcs and stuff. Daggerfall was randomly generated and the most buggy game I ever saw T_T

The trouble with oblivions map size is that you never got an epic sense of the huge scale of things,

there was nothing that made you think.."wow thats huge!"

when you see the city in the distance from a mountain top it should take you ages to get there, not 10 minutes...we have fast travel to avoid repetitive journeys after all

i like the map sizes in the arma games, around 255 square km if i remember rightly

big cities and castles etc would be much more imposing if they were'nt all scaled down and close to each other

this

Just Cause 2 sized.

When I played ob and came apon the ..big.. city I thought.. ok this is the center of the empire.. a high school drama theater with a porta potty out front...