So, i wanted to ask the community as my knowledge on the amount of land mass in the game is a very shallow pool. In the beta i only got to play in small areas which lead up to a somewhat medium sized area that gave the initial impression that it was open ended, when in reality it was a big narrow mountain pass.

I noticed on the large map that there was a place called skyrim, now i dont know much about those areas, but i was wondering if anyone else knew if they were larger (like WAY larger) , more open ended, and easy to access for a player who would like to skip an undesirable quest or two in favor of something more interesting. I know the chances ill be getting the game are extremely small, but id like to know this information.

okay so each zone is separated by a loading screen, the areas are rather large tho and the world is huge....however 1-50 will be ONLY your faction's zones + dungeons + cyrodil (insanely large pvp zone, like it takes a [censored] insanely long time if u just ran across it) and it has some pve elements in there as well; lots to see and explore apart from pvp.......however, once you hit 50, u can then go to the 2 other factions areas and do all their quests...think of it as a large world, but each zone is separated by a load screen......what you CANT'T do, is get bored of 1 zone and then run over to another, as they are level specific, and 1min into the next zone 10 levels above you = death from mobs lol.

but inside the zone your in you can kind of run around the whole thing, but its best to clear sections of the zone, gaining levels before moving deeper in as the mobs get more difficult the further you progress into a zone.

from what you have posted it seems you are refering to the starter islands, as of launch, they will be optional and you can go straight from coldharbour into the larger faction specific zone.

The game is huge. Just Cyrodiil is as large as an entire game by itself.

I am hearing mixed things on what is in Cyrodiil. Being a nostalgic Oblivion fan, I need to know if Cyrodiil is what you generally saw in Oblivion (Are all the cities there and so on...). I heard that a couple of cities are not in Cyrodiil atm.