I have one question I never could understand
Why developers make so small worlds?
In TES3 it was understandable since there was no fast travel and not every one likes to walk.
Although with 500 levitation traveling across Vvardenfell was fast
But since Fast travel is back in game traveling between cities is one click away.

Yet world size is still the same (more or less)
Why? Allow those who like to walk (or have time for it) to walk for 20-30 minutes between cities.
We don't even need additional locations.
Take same amount of cities, villages, dungeons, caves, scenic views, etc. and simply increase distance between them 5 or 10 times
How much more space on disc it would use to simply inflate game world? 50-100Mb maximum I think (not sure, though if I'm wrong please correct me)
This filler space can be randomly generated
Because nothing make scenic places more special as contrast between random middle of nowhere and epic mountain or canyon

Ok, personal thoughts are over, any additional ideas?

Limitations on technology or memory I think.

That answer is wrong, period.

should play daggerfall


so lonely, so open....is that a witch coven O_o...oooh hawt lady.........oh shibbles she turned into and old woman.

TES2*1000 would be bigger than Earth.

*puts a dunce hat on*
So what is the correct answer then proffessor?

It would take so long to get anything much larger than Oblivion's size to have just as much detail and enough quests to match the size. I'm pretty sure we'd be looking at a game that would take longer than Duke Nukem Forever to come out. That's my take on the matter, anyway, and so I think the size we have now is good. It's better than we get in most games, anyway. Daggerfall was only that big because they had a random map generator, random quests, and low graphics. The first two of those points mostly won't work because of the low graphics. A game with modern graphics doesn't really work well with a random map generator (unless they took a very long time to make it), and random quests aren't easy to implement with voice acting.

i felt the OB world was a nice size Skyrim as a provience is going the be the same size of OB as of (as spoken by the great Todd) but he also said that because of the montains you are traveling a greater distance to go up than down the hill or montain than a flat line. ever notince how in OB you could take 30 mins and cross the whole planes north of Anvil? meanwhile, in the montains in the north it took so much longer to cross the same distance on a map.
if you got what i was saying the skyrim map is about as big as OBs but the distance to get from A to B has increased

That answer was made for lulz without any calculation, sorry
I'll fix that

Never played Daggerfall. Just how large is it?

The correct answer, class, is that hand-crafting a gameworld with the level of detail Bethesda is seeming to aim for gets more and more difficult as the size of the gameworld increases. A gameworld is never rendered all at once, so RAM has no bearing on the size of a gameworld. Rendering an entire gameworld at once is just flat-out inefficient and unheard of. Any questions?

Wouldn't mind it to be the size of Fuel, but I really hope if they do go for a big map they do it for all provinces perhaps every single province the size of Skyrim's map, because slightly bigger for certain provinces aka. Cyrodiil.

No more questions sir.

Twice the size of Great Britain. But that's because everything was randomly generated and there were ridiculous amounts of empty space between the cities and dungeons.


But they don't hand-craft the actual landscape between locations. It's randomly generated with plants and rocks and such stuck here and there by the devs. Most of the time spent making the game world is spent on the locations themselves.

Somewhere between Daggerell and Oblivion is the best we are going to get and would be my ideal game size.

10x bigger than daggerfell is NEVER going to happen.

Daggerfell was as big as it was because the world required alot less detail in terms of graphics and because (correct me if I am wrong) but I believe most of it was randomly generated and not hand crafted Edit: Above post confirms this^

I wouldn't necessarily call it a small planet... but I still dream of the day that a new elder scrolls game allows us to freely travel between all the countries of tamriel.

the game is nice size you dont need it huge

O.O

Quoted for reiteration. Skyrim is going to "feel" bigger than Oblivion because of mountain travel. I think Skyrim is a good size, but I think they should get rid of fast travel. You have horses, and won't Skyrim have stage coaches (I could have sworn I read that somewhere)?

I've always hated fast travel. It really hurts game immersion. And I find it fun knowing, "Oh, I have to make it all the way over there. Might as well pick some plants and such along the way". But then I end up picking plants for 2 hours and I walked in the opposite direction of where I initially was supposed to go :facepalm:

The continent of Tamriel is over 8 million square kilometers, bigger than Australia, smaller than Brazil.
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/bigboxshots/5/564545_53892_back.jpg

That's not true. It is said to be the size of Great Britain but it's actually smaller. GB is 80,000+ sq miles. Daggerfall is 60,000+ sq miles.

"9 man years in the making". So that means take all of the hours worked/divided by the number of staff, and the hours were longer than 9 years.... or was this in production way longer than Skyrim?

Based on the http://www.imperial-library.info/sites/default/files/gallery_files/minibigmaproadslore31gv.jpg, Skyrim's size measures roughly 250 miles North to South, and more than twice that from East to West (averaging roughly 600 miles wide). [Based on my own measurements.] This makes Skyrim 150,000 square miles (according to lore), but the game world of Skyrim is only 16 square miles.

This is one of the main reasons why the default Timescale is 30:1 . . . . so that it takes like 1 or 2 game hours to walk from one city to the next. [With a 1:1 Timescale, you could cover the distance in a couple of minutes.]

Morrowind and Oblivion never felt realistically large enough for me . . . even for a fantasy game world. To keep a game world interesting (and perhaps doable for the game designer), it needs to be scaled down a bunch, but turning a 250 x 600 mile land mass into a 4 x 4 land mass is way too much of a reduction.

If you reduced the land mass by a factor of 30 (to match the default Timescale), you would end up with roughly an 8 x 20 mile game map . . . which is 10 times larger than what we will be getting [4*4=16; 8*20=160 square miles]. Then we would actually have the "huge open game world" that Bethesda has been saying that Skyrim is. Personally a 4 x 4 mile game world is not what I would consider to be "huge." Skyrim is going to be pretty much the exact size of Oblivion . . . yet Skyrim has 8 different regions . . . so each region is going to average only 2 square miles . . . 2 square miles of tundra is hardly a "huge area."

I won't buy this "feel bigger" before I actually play game
Until than (based on what I saw in TES4 and FO3) I consider Skyrim quite small

And regarding wandering off. Yeah that happened to me too




Actually even this timescale is too small
based on this map I calculated real timescale (according to how fast I crossed Cyrodiil with character at Speed 50)
I don't remember exactly but actual timescale should be about 200:1, so each ~2min there would be new day in game (just imagine how fast sun and moons should go )

It really comes down to what you want the experience to be a highly crafted world thats some what limited in size but contains uniqe locations and terrain or you get copy pasted areas that go on forever, tech limitations also fit into this theres only so much data a disk can hold, then theres time and money considerations eventually your going to have to cap how much time and money your willing to put into the world otherwise you'd end up with a game that would never get made.