How long would it take you to walk across it, etc?

I was wondering about Daggerfall too.



Due to my age, I came into the series with Oblivion (don't worry, I've gone back and read tons about the first 3 games).


People always talk about how huge Arena and Daggerfall are (DF being twice the size of Great Britain, hours and hours to walk across Arena's gameworld, etc).


So, I was wondering if someone who actually played them could give me a personal account: just how massive were these games (both literally, and how large did they feel to you on a mental level)?

Check out this image:

http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/large-video-game-worlds2.jpg

Made me lol the first time I saw it.

Arena is not a continuous world like Daggerfall. If you exit a city in Arena and travel in the same direction you will eventually come to the same spot. The only way to get from one city to another in Arena is to use the travel map. Arena however has better town layout and wilderness than Daggerfall. Arena towns have peasant, beggers lying around in corners and small alleys in contrast with main streets. Outside towns there are rivers, bridges and road taverns.

Daggerfall is in fact approximately the size of Great Britain, and if your character walking and running speed wasn't raised for gameplay purposes (towns are huge and walking around would take too much time) your travel time would be similar to the values you get from the fast travel window. You can exit the first dungeon Privateers Hold, and walk for 10 minutes south to reach the city of Gothway Gardens without using fast travel. You could also walk all the way to Daggerfall from Privateers Hold but it would taken hours if not days at walking speed.

As an aside: Lord of the Rings Online has that big of a world area? That has to be an absolute pain for an MMORPG. :blink: How would you get anywhere, since I'd image fast travel (which is how Daggerfall got away with being that big) would have to be out.

How do I safely fast travel?

I die every time.

With regards to Daggerfall, I read that it would take 2 weeks(real time) to walk from one end of the game world to the other.

IIRC, Daggerfall's game world was 2000x1000 DF cells wide... With my own measurement of the game (which, admitedly, could be horrifically flawed) I'd managed to replicate the "over twice the size of Great Britain" claim originally fielded in 1996 by achieving 680,555 mi2; this assumed each exterior cell was 3,080x3,080 feet. The ~62,000 mi2 statements would, assuming they count water, rely on a cell size of closer to 933x933 feet. Chances are my original measurement, which assumed each of the "sub-blocks" in each exterior cell were the same size as Morrowind's cells (3852 ft.) is likely over-sized.

As far as the walking distance goes, ignoring the fact that a diagonal route across the map would cross at least a couple hundred miles of the waters of the Illiac Bay, you'd be looking at between 395-1,304 miles; in real-world time, taking two weeks would mean you'd be going between 1.16 to 3.88 MPH.

As for Arena, as Mingorau mentioned, isn't a continuous world: it consists of separate zones that each generate out into infinity. It is IMPOSSIBLE to travel from one town to another without using fast travel. Using the fast-travel map's estimates of distance, you can use that to determine the size of the world map, but it doesn't really have any impact on the game save for calculating travel times: it more of serves as the original lore basis for the size scaling of Tamriel.

20 million square kilometre.