Just out of curiosity, how did you measure it???

But that's just an idle question. The thing is - I can get from Leyawiin to Bruma in less than half the game day. In Morrowind getting for Seyda Neen to Dagon Fell takes at last a day, even with levitation spells, ignoring the roads and at high level. It does not matter what map was larger in square kilometers, what matter is how it feels to the player. I don't know what soiled the illusion in Oblivion - horse travel, view distance, instant fast travel teleportation, lack of public transport, so it was obvious that even NPCs walked to the nearby city like it was "just behind that hill", the final result was that Oblivion felt smaller. And It's not nostalgia speaking - I'm playing Morrowind right now, and just did the temple pilgrimage (since you had to give a wove of silence to do it, no transportation - you have to talk to people to go places), and it took me at lat 26 hours game time to get to the shrine at Dagon Fell from Vivec, and I was not even traveling by roads or delaying to go to a dungeon, just a straight run.
So whatever they do in Skyrim they need to apply some serious level designing skills again. Or just go and make the world plain larger - that would solve a lot of problems without to much skill requirements - a huge world will feel huge, no matter what they do

P.S. Oh, and having 34 cities shipped with the game helped the size illusion on comparison to Oblivions 7... Sure some of them where tiny, and some where just military forts, but just 34 different names in your quest book added to illusion already

I am amazed that people, frequent visitors here even, still think that the actual map size is larger for Morrowind. Yes, it feels larger. NO, it is not larger! This is stated about 10 times in each map thread, yet somehow, some people still don't know.

Anyway, I think about 2x the size of Oblivion, or roughly 80 km/30 miles would be ideal to me. I don't want things too sparse. I found it annoying trying to get between towns in Morrowind, but it was too easy in Oblivion. They need to spread it out with more smaller towns in between but make the map larger, and at least on the former, it looks like this is what they are doing.

It is stated in every tread, and every time it's a different size, and not once I have seen an official conformation of that fact. Do you measure the land with the ruler or something? Please point me to exact statement by the developers on the size of the maps, than I will consider the issue settled. Right now I just stick with the fact that I have no actual numbers, and a gaming experience that may be subjective but at last I can relay on my own perception.

Where do you keep getting your information from? Oblivion did not have 7 cities. In terms of major cities, while Oblivion's were smaller, it had 8 (not including Kvatch) and then there were 2 reasonable sized towns (Borderwatch and Hackdirt) and a bunch of smaller settlements, though few were anything mroe than a few houses. Morrowind may have had more towns, but it only had 4 or 5 cities, so if you're counting towns as cities as well, then Cyrodill has a fair bit more than 7.

Here you go http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Cities_%26_Towns - Morrowind, without the expansions, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Cities - Oblivion. I get my information by playing the games, where do you?

Developers have told us(years ago- logged on the wiki) how many game units = a certain distance and that lets us calculate the distance across a single cell. Then just multiply by number of cells.

Read it. The Oblivion place lists 9 cities including Kvatch. The Morrowind article is called "Cities and towns". It also includes towers, forts and all sorts of things that are not cities.

And we are assuming that the ratio is consistent even thou the games have different engine and technological platform? Sorry, but my maths sens doesn't by that. You can compare Oblivion and Fallout 3 that way, but not oblivion and Morrowind.

The engine is irrelevant. The characters are roughly the same size and it's still just an ordinary map mesh. What's the difference? Better graphics doesn't change the scale.

The game units are constant and Morrowind and Oblivion have the same size cells. However, since rebuilding the engine and having greater ability to put more in a single cell we may very well find that the cells in Skyrim are twice the size of MW and OB. We will have to wait and see.

Why would I need to read it? I visited all of them. Some of thous "towns" are easily the size of Anvil or Cheydinhal. Both Vivec and Mournhold are as large as Imperial city. And as I sad - it's not about the size of the cities, it's about them being a part of the lore, having a trader and in some case a travel station, and a couple of quests to do, guilds and great houses send you there regularly, they have military outposts... In Oblivion I remember only one village like formation somewhere along the orange road, and it had nothing to mark it as a town and not simply a farm...



Link to the dev statement that the units are consistent specifically between Morrowind and Oblivion please. Sorry if I'm a bit difficult about this, but i did to many research papers to be able to buy the logic of "everyone says so, it must be true". As I sad I so at last 5 different size statements for Oblivion alone just by typing the question in to google, so unless there is something official I'm not prepared to make an exact comparison.

Skyrim better be bigger...

That's all I have to say...

You're the one who keeps spurting out completely incorrect information. You say it doesn't matter what they are officially considered just after saying I'm wrong and linking me to official information to disprove me, which I pointed out does not prove your point. And before, saying that the Oblivion map is smaller and then when someone points out that it's not saying that you feeling that it is bigger while travelling is better evidence than an official constant scale provided by the developers.

I'll clarify this for you - some facts, while they are still facts don't matter to me personally that's how you should read it. The actual size of the map does not matter to me personally. What matters to me is the feeling it produces. Is that clear enough?
Having sad that objective fact is that Morrowind had more settlements than Oblivion, the fact I provided you with a "prove" for. Thou your memory if you actually played both games should have been enough. What is not clear about that? And which information provided by me was incorrect exactly?

I'm not sure if this has been posted before- it's a very interesting size comparison of massive world games (including Oblivion, WOW, GTA, etc.)

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/05/its-not-the-size-of-the-game-world-but-how-you-use-it/

It's only a guess, but I kind of assume that Todd and the Gang really are going to raise the stakes this time around and give us a map at least a bit larger than Oblivion. If it were noticeably smaller, I think they know it would be a letdown for even the more forgiving fans. It also feels like Bethesda knows that Skyrim needs to be a real gamechanger. The new engine is a small part of that. Improved faces. Much larger creatures. A much more diverse roster of voice talent. It seems hard to picture- given their ambitions- that they'd dial down worldsize while dialing up everything else.

Curvaceous pic, I hope Skyrim tops tops them all off And I hope you are right about them knowing they have to make a breakthrough, Bethesda sure has a good material to draw form, and I have faith that they'll make something amazing this time around

You didn't say "Morrowind feels bigger". You said "Oblivion is roughly 2/3 the size of Morrowind". You didn't say settlements, you said cities. And if you're counting things that are not cities, don't then link me to official information to try and prove your incorrect point. And then there's the fact that numbering the amount of cities in Oblivion as 7 was flat out wrong any way you look at it. You keep complaining about our facts on the size of the map are apparently innacurate, and then you keep giving out false information yourself, and on the same subjects. If the facts don't matter to you, stop making factual claims that are false while arguing that our own factual claims on the same subject are wrong without reason other than your own subjective 'feeling' on a static, objective matter.

I would assume that Skyrim will be larger then Cyrodil, or at least not very much smaller. The fact that they even had the whole area claim map means that each area is going to have hand done places and terrain features as well. What one can expect is totally up in the air at the moment until we see an actual city to make a scale comparison or get some info from the mouth of God.

it's years old so i'm afraid it's been lost and i personally don't know where copies of it have been stored. I'll tell you this though, your not the first person to obsess over this. Hundreds of people have and the devs didn't volunteer the game unit info, it was badgered out of them by the hundreds of fans obsessing over the scale changes and size difference of MW to OB.

Ok, than we need a baseline for understanding, for me everything that has a trader, more than 5 houses and a traveling point or some kind or official post - military for example is a city. In this case we can remove 5 settlements from Morrowind from a "city list". It lives us with 29.
Oblivion still has 7, if I don't recall something pleas name me another one... I linked you to the list and I don't see or remember any more.

My statement about "roughly 2/3 of Morrowind map" was founded on the rumors, as yours about Oblivion being bigger is, so I relinquish my claim to that - I don't have an objective number, but neither do you. So the point is void. We can't objectively compare unless you have a link to exact numbers stated by the devs. You are arguing the point I have already conceded several posts ago.

The feel of the map is subjective matter, but I insist that Morrowind feels bigger. And for now you haven't provided me with any reason to doubt that.

Do you need more clarification on something?

its not really all that weird, you can do that in the game Just Cause 2... and thats 400 square miles, i think.

i cant wait to see what skyrim's engine has in store for us... :dance:

Agreed. I think the world will be bigger in a perceptual, sensory way in how it feels, but also geographically bigger overall. There's no telling on scale, but I can tell you I am fairly certain it will look and feel a lot bigger. If you had a similar distance to go in Skyrim as in Oblivion it will take longer to cross it in Skyrim, distractions and combat included. The scenery and landmarks seem more unique and the variation in the terrain will make locations appear further, whether you can see them or not, and it will take you longer to get there. However, there is a large tundra plain you can look across in the middle, and i can't imagine that looking right unless it is actually fricken huge.

Take a look at the map, and the number of settlements, the road distribution, the terrain variation and the mountains, and you have to believe it will be bigger. There is no way they will cram locations together so maniacally like they did in Oblivion. And in most cases you shouldn't be able to see one town from another, or one road from another. That gives you a certain size and scale expectation that suggests it will be bigger than Oblivion or Fallout 3. Additionally, to make the world feel right you probably won't be able to see more than one other terrain type from the one you are in, or be able to see an entire hold, from any other place than the top of a mountain. They've said that the 5 biggest cities are huge, unlike what we saw in Oblivion. There are 20-22 settlements total. This is more like morrowind, which felt pretty huge because of the density of the unique locations and the many settlements.

One last thing: why would they build a new engine for all of their open world games and not design it so it could handle larger maps, graphical scales, draw distances, locations, and terrain mapping that make the world feel far bigger and more immersive?

Take a look at the map screencapture and see what you think: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1158031-slyrim-map-discussion-2/

Chances are good that this will be ignored again, since people apparently like to speculate with as little information as possible. However, I did calculate and post these numbers in hopes of starting a discussion about that, so I'll just try again.
Assuming that the grid on the Skyrim map in Bethesda's hallway is the actual cell grid of the game, then this should be a pretty good estimation. And as far as I know, it is so far the only information on game world size that we can derive.

Seing this I'm thinking it has to be bigger than Oblivion at least... It really wouldn't make sense to make it smaller, that is what I think when I see this anyway. Twice as big doesn't really seem that unrealistic to me when you compare these maps. I don't really know much about how the world works in games like Just Cause and so on, but still that is like waaay bigger than Oblivion it seems, so my hopes are high.

I hope not, I want to be able to walk/ride everywhere in a somewhat reasonable time. The size of OB will be fine, esp if the terrain is mountainous as that will make the game world seem larger if you can not go in a straight line everywhere. Though 1.5x larger than OB would be nice, I doubt it will happen.