Well Skyrim is a mountainous region, no? So isn't it possible that the world could be the same size as Oblivion's and have all of these civilizations existing in the same area, but at different altitudes and whatnot?

That's how I figured it, at least.

even if it is, you guys still have to realize that cyrodiil was huge.
maybe not just cause 2 huge but still comfortably huge.

but yeah i don't want it to be so cramped that there is no room for exploration.

Well we don't know how large they are going to be.. yet.
But I tell you what I want.
I want to find lot's of things that matter while I'm walking in the wilderness.
I want to feel the world alive and I don't want to be walking for 10 minutes real time without finding something.
Be it a dungeon,a camp,a fort,a village or whatever.

If Skyrim is going to have 40% less dungeons as people say (126 instead of 200) I hope it will have more quests than Oblivion,to even up so the number of things we can do in the game is about the same as Oblivion.

Un-warranted concerns in my view, especially considering that Bethesda has not let us down in the last two major titles for Open World goodness (TES IV and Fo3). Trends matter, the staff is the same + more, the same minds are leading the way.

It's all speculation until the game comes out, but going on history I don't think there is very much to be concerned about.

^This. Once I explored all of Cyrodiil, I realized how small it felt. It took me no time at all to cross the province end-to-end when walking. Dungeon or settlement within eyesight all the time. =/ I could cross it within 1 game-day or less.

I never really cared about how small or cramped Oblivion's world felt because frankly the wilderness of Cyrodil was kind of boring. It was all just the same green hilly forest with the same gray wolves and deer. It was a nice environment, but there just wasn't much there aside from the cave doors and the copy-paste ruin entrances. Never saw a need for the Oblivion map to be bigger than it was.

I agree with that ,but just in basic .


I think the world of Oblivion is much more dazzling than the Morrowind's , not just the improved of the graphics . Compare with TES3 it's lack of variety , but don't forget that's becasue the civilization and history backgrounds of cyrodiil and morrowind are different. The circumstance determine the features of the land ,like the building ,the sculpture, the terrain , the plants , and so on. You can't expect there is another red mountains in cyrodiil , or a branch of the Tribunal Temple in the city , or the sculpture of Almalaxia.

That's why the world of Oblivion looks different than Morrowind . I think the architecture and environment accord with the land's own history well, and it looks really beautiful for me.

Edit: Of course it not perfect. I wish the Skyrim could be better.

Oh, yes, the dungeons are a little boring in Oblivion.

Well in Oblivion most dungeons were cookie cutter. "Oh look this dungeons has more ghosts and skeletons", but this nearly identical dungeon made with the same stone parts has more zombies and vampires" That sort of filler was not as interesting especially when those two dungeons were just on one side or the other or a hill. The best parts of Oblivion were when I walk into a nook of the map to see a pond, exploring the pond, finding and a tiny box. That box had a some jewels in it and a note telling a tiny story.

Less content, more spread apart; but more carefully made to be unique would be far more interesting.

Dungeons in Oblivion was put together with a series of building block, corridors different rooms and some more interesting designs like bridges. Problem was that the interesting designs were limited so they was repeated and it was to few wall models.
To Oblivions defence a small dungeon in Oblivion was a medium in Morrowind where a small dungeon was one or two rooms; however you don’t remember the small ones as they took 2 minutes to explore yes Morrowind had plenty of good sized dungeons but the majority was smaller than a small Oblivion dungeon.

Appears like this is solved in Skyrim as the dungeon team is 8 times larger in Oblivion it was one man.

http://www.nerevarine.fr/images/tamriel.jpg
As you can see on this map Skyrim is smaller than Cyrodil. So its going to have a smaller map than Oblivion. I think what they mean by "roughly the same size as oblivion" is that the story and side quests take just as much time as oblivion. Also I've heard to make up for the small map they are going to add more dungeons, I cannot confirm that as 100% legit but it seems possible.

How did New Vegas have way too many dungeons? On each playthrough I do them all, and I find every location. And its the exact same thing it was on the last playthrough. How is that a good thing for sandbox gaming? I prefer games where I can say "oh I haven't seen this before". Nah, give me 10000 dungeons with a mix of unique, reusables, and randomly generated. Give me Daggerfall. Hell, even most towns there I probably still haven't visited.

@TheArgonianWarlord:
Don't confuse the ingame world with the lore world, they are vastly different. I take it you never played Daggerfall - the biggest game world to this date?

I second that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRQKdGQ_NVE

They probably ment the walkable area. The mountains doesn't count. And roughly is indicating Skyrim is even bigger than Oblivion.

Nice clip from the podcast!

It's hard to not get excited when he talks about Skyrim.

What are you talking about? In the terms of these games, finding new towns, caves and other locations is the VERY DEFINITION of exploration. This isn't Civilization where you send guys out to secure an area and have a settler make a new town, this is TES and Fallout, where you go from place to place, pilfer it, help it, destroy it, or laugh at it and try to better yourself in terms of experience or money. The more you have, the better, up to a certain point. If it feels like I'm walking through a major metropolitan city, yeah that's too much. But if you have hundreds of places where something is happening all over the place, that's awesome.

Agreed

It was one of my few issues with Oblivion. To really give the game decent exploration, it should have been about 4x the size so the player wouldn't stand next to a dungeon all the time as it really doesn't feel realistic to encounter a new ruin every 50 steps, thus breaks the game immersion. I was hoping Skyrim would be larger, so hearing it would be about the same size of Oblivion is so far my only disappointment with the game.

I really hope they don't cram everything in :sadvaultboy:

I think the main difference is in NV, its post-apocalyptic. So they were trying to balance, the scarcity of population vs. there being absolutely nothing to do. Oblivion/Skyrim aren't held to those constraints.