the state that oblivion was released in tells me that they assumed that modders would fix the game up. any amount of playtesting would have shown oblivion to have the worst npc levelling system possible with everyone running around wearing "rare" daedric and glass armor and simple battles turning into epic slugfests. even for consoles its not uncommon these days for companies to release games with known bugs in them that they address with a later patch.

oblivion and fallout 3 were playable on the console. however, morrowind on the xbox was an absolute nightmare. i dont know anyone who played the console version of morrowind for a few minutes before giving up in disgust. they went out and got the pc version.

as for how they make the game. i hope that they put the latest state of the art technology into the pc version and then simply gimp it for the consoles.

people also seem to forget that the crysis 2 is supposed to take place in an urban environment which is much easier to render than a natural environment with foliage. also i have a feeling that crysis 2 is going to have a corridor design where you will have choices of where to go but you cant go anywhere you want to like in far cry 2 or the first crysis game.

Bethesda thought it was a good idea at the time. I mean, why would they purposfully go and make a "bad game"? It takes more effort to create levelled enemies, than to create a Morrowind style NPC placement.


You do now. I played Morrowind on the xbox for years before I realised the superiority of pc gaming. The truth is, no matter how you try to justify yourself, TESV will be tailored for consoles, aswell as PC's. What's the point in discluding a whole gaming audience? Making a rubbish game for the consoles would lose Bethesda thousands of customers for TESVI


http://cdn0.knowyourmeme.com/i/6512/original/DoubleFacePalm.jpg never fails me.

I really believe that Bethesda will need to make the game to be "fully" playable on both console and PC, but that the PC version should have its own menu and interface that takes advantage of the capabilities of the platform. The consoles have no problem delivering quality animations and graphics, it's the text and menus that cause the problems; yet another reason why Bethesda will probably not abandon full voicing in favor of lots of text that console users will struggle with.

As for overall size, there was "enough" to do in OB, but mainly because you could do the same limited content over and over and over..... Having a little more varied and non-regenerating content that's spaced just a bit farther apart would make it feel like you're "exploring", not going to work just outside the city gates at the same "goblin mine" where you "mine" goblins every third day.

More than "area", the lack of many smaller villages within that area, and the pitifully tiny size of the few that existed, made it seem like Cyrodiil had already been wiped out by some plague or war 50-100 years earlier. I got the constant impression that these were the last few stragglers and survivors trying to rebuild from the all-too-present ruins of past glories, not like a mighty empire just passing the height of its power.

I'd break my fingers if I was forced to use a mouse with Oblivion's system, likewise I'd hate to have to use morrowind's inventory on on a console.

I do resent the idea that I struggle with text though. Using a legible font would help on both platforms.

menus are no problem on consoles, imo. I don't see why they have to change everything around. I personally play MW all the time with an xbox pad on pc. I get by fine, I don't notice it being any slower. I use the right anologue stick to move the mouse, and "A" to click.

@rellac..........companies either design the game from either a PC perspective or a console perspective and then port it. rarely do they make two distinct versions for each platform. remember oblivion and its horrible UI. the first mods that came out made the UI closer to a pc one. also making levelled enemis is not harder than making static ones. its the opposite. all you do with levelled enemies is check the -1 level to character and whala the only other thing you have to do is make the amor weapons list. static enemies require thought about what is too hard here or too easy over there.

im not sure what you have against making the game state of the art for the pc and then gimping it for consoles since that would be the logical way to do it. make the best game possible and then reduce textures, add more loading zones, reduce AI etc and get it to the point it works on a console. im sick and tired of crappy games made on consoles and then poorly ported to PC with so much wasted potential. and if they make the next TES game for the archaic xbox 360, just remember thats the only TES5 game you will get for 5 or more years. in 5 years the ps3 and 360 will be akin to playing the N64 today.

and for crying out loud companies make purposefully bad games all the time. hello rogue warrior. there is no way they released that game thinking it was anything but a steaming pile of crap. they run out of time or money or just give up on the game and release at quickly as possible to recoup as much as they can and move on to the next game. shadowrun was another early release fiasco. and dont get me started on the force unleashed port, or the assassins creed port those were just inexcusable.

another huge limitation of making a game console centric is that its really limited on how many npcs can be used if they have AI of any kind. a game like mount and blade would cause a console to grind to a screeching halt while it runs just fine on a mid range pc. as another poster already stated. prior to mods oblivion just felt dead. there was even the joke about there being more forts in the game than actual guards. i want a city to be alive with npcs even if they are just eyecandy and dont say much.

playing morrowind on a pc with a controller is very different than playing the console version on an actual xbox. were you not the least bothered by the minute long loading times. it was ridiculous.

I think something like 4x Oblivion would be very nice, and have the towns 4x the size too

I don't see what the gaming platform or levelled enemies has to do anything with the landsize of the game, keep the thread on topic :nono:

I would most like something a bit larger than Morrowind but not as big as Daggerfall. That is, as long as they can manage all that space and not make it empty and boring.

I think its the lack of minor towns and the road layout that made Cyrodiil seem so small ( Fast travel- Cyrodiil seemed small to me, even on the fact I did not use fast travel, so I doubt that's completely it. In Morrowind, there was always so many signs, where I would always find a new town to go to, even thought that was because I was new to the game, and died on the way there.

In Oblivion, you could see most the province from a high enough point in the mountains. Let's face it, bigger view distance make the world seem smaller, it's how Vvanderfell feels so big in game but when you load it into the editor it's clear just how small it is.

I guess the only way to solve this without compromising the view distance (which I doubt anyone wants) is to either make the whole game take place in canyons like Gothic 1 and 2 or, much better imo, make the game world large to the point where there's around 5 to 6 kilometers in between cities and around 2 km between villages.

It will be boring you say? Not necessarily. This problem can be easily solved by making important dungeons large and visible from far away, like a large fort/castle/palace ruin or a big cliff side with easy to spot large cave entrance, with smaller, less important dungeons around them. There'd be fewer large points of interests than there'd be villages but more than cities and there would be 4 or so smaller, less visible dungeons around them.
Large points of interest should have multiple stages with different level monsters and routes like "mini-dungeons" but without being too maze-like so the player shouldn't feel compelled to clear the whole thing in one go. A village could be placed close to several of these large dungeons and tied together with a decently sized quest.

Cities would number around 5 or 6, on very large city of around 2 square km, a second only slightly smaller than the first and the rest would be somewhere around half the size of the second.

Transport could be done in the form seen in Morrowind but I guess the far less limited fast travel from Oblivion could be an option, I for one don't like it as much.
Properly depicted horses would be more fun too.

I frequently play Morrowind with MGE's distant land. It's not the view distance that makes the game feel larger, it's the content. Morrowind had obstructions in your paths that you had to manouver around. In Oblivion, everything was one straight path to whever you wanted to go. Also denser forests, the unique arcitechture and what-not you'll want to stop and look at, and the better filling of dungeons and ruins helped too.

Red Mountain also helped. That stopped me from seeing the other end of the map, and it was a HUGE obstacle I either had to avoid or run through (we all know the dangers of the latter)

The game needs to have more content, ala Morrowind. I don't think a game needs to be too big. The games should stay around the scale they are now, and slowly grow as technology advances. Imo.

Even if I would levitate up, and be able to see the whole game world, it just seems bigger than Oblivion, due to the mountains, forests, swamps etc.

And no fast travel arguments, if you can help it. We'll all end up nerd raging. No one likes that.

i dont know if you've played Risen yet, its made by the same people that made gothic 1 and 2 only better in my view and im currently having alot of fun with it. i kind of like how they did their landscaping, similar to morrowind in breaking up the topography. i do like the idea of having only major areas visible but minor ones or "easter egg" places only being visible how you found them ala fallout 3. AEVWD does that sort of since it renders the LODs of most of the big places but not every little shanty or cave. one of the few things i liked about gothic 3 was the diversity of environment. you went from a sandy barren desert, to a heavily forested temperate climate all the way to the frozen north. albeit it only took you a couple of minutes of runnign to go between them which made the game feel really small but the idea was nice.

fast travel does make the game world smaller but im not too worried about it since its easily disabled and someone would make a mod that added morrowind style travel if they dont include it in vanilla. im assuming that when you talk about tying a village to a dungeon or group of dungeons nearby that you are referring to something like diablo..........that would be freaking awesome. if they did that they would have to include "the butcher" :laugh:

@RellacFTW

I agree there, longer routes do make the whole thing look bigger. Still, I maintain that view distance has a significant role in making the place look big or small; in a game, it's very hard to judge the size of the landscape simply by how far you move since you quickly lose sight of most things that pass as landmarks. Because of this, I went about exploring a bit like in RTS games, constantly checking the map to see which bits I had cleared. Not necessarily a good thing but still fun.

I'd also add that, for all I could tell, Red Mountain made it easier to estimate the size of the island since you know it's in the center (well, not really but close enough), so if I were in Seyda Neen, it wouldn't be difficult to gauge the distance to the opposite side of Vvanderfell.

Also, the apparent size of the game world and actually exploring it are 2 very different things. Even if there were lots of dungeons and they were easy to find (which they probably shouldn't anyway) it doesn't mean that the world will be fun to explore. If I was reasonably sure that it wouldn't feel like grinding and dungeons were actually fun to raid then I'd go looking for one even if it was like searching for a needle in a haystack. Conversely, if there was a dungeon every 100 meters but each felt the same minus some aesthetic changes and had some useless junk as reward at the end, the player would be much less motivated to search each one. That's just me though.

At this point I might have drifted a bit off topic but I guess this is how dungeon design ties in with content density and by extension, land size.


EDIT:
@reallybigjohnson

I was thinking of this http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/call-of-juarez/screenshots/gameShotId,189779/ actually, large, very visible landmarks which in this case could host a dungeon or 2, and large ones at that. Haven't played Risen, will try.
And I agree, diversity does make it look bigger since the game world can't just be called "a huge forest" even if it does have a little variation in the form of slightly snowy trees and some swamps with lots of trees, like Oblivion.

The Diablo thing really applies to the "one big dungeon" since you could easily stop at one point and head back to the surface via that shortcut then come back. Essentially, it's the outside world continued underground, different to normal dungeons in that those are only visited once and then forgotten about, whereas these bigger dungeon complexes could even function as tunnels that bypass some really jagged or uncrossable terrain like canyons and cliff sides.

I would prefer a smaller world packed with interesting places to explore rather than a massive world filled with trees.

Actually, the poll seems to indicate that MOST respondants want something as big, or somewhat bigger than, the previous two games. The "bigger" group only edges out the "same size" group by a couple of responses. It VERY clearly shows that the players do not want a SMALLER game. The "idealistic" group that favors something beyond Daggerfall may not be fully aware of the technical limitations and "tradeoffs" of doing so, and quite a few of them might be very disappointed if they actually got what they asked for.

While I would favor a "same size or a little bigger" approach, in order to space things out a bit more realistically even with the same amount of content, I'd probably be content with a slightly smaller but "richer" map with a lot more heavily urbanized areas (bigger cities and towns). The map might not be as large overall, but the content should be far richer and deeper than in OB. I see the map as having 3 dimensions: two of them representing the "area" of the map, and the third being the content ("depth"). To me that total volume of things to see and do is a bit more important than sheer landmass.

About double the size of Oblivion would be more than enough. Less dungeons and more quality over quantity. In Oblivion there were only caves, ayleid ruins, forts and oblivion planes, and there were too many of them just randomly thrown to the world. More interesting overworld locations, for example some of the "dungeons" would have lots of outside places instead of the usual "few decorations and a door to the underground"-style. Less dungeons but all of them could be different (like different textures and styles). Overall they should concentrate more designing interesting dungeons and locations than endless generic sandbox and randomly thrown generic dungeons (I think FO3 was a big improvent in this category). Overworld should have more Morrowind style variety. Maybe same kind of approach as in Gothic 3 (three different kind of landmasses) but even more variety.

Little OT, they should also implement different seasons (snow in wintertime, leafs would fall in falls, etc., different animals would wander the overworld in different seasons). Overall the time and timeperiods should have a bigger meaning to the game (for example "midyear" celebration days, etc?).

I'd prefer something in-between. Not too small and not too big. Maybe something like 3-7% of Daggerfall maybe?

Oblivion was waaaaaaaaaaaay waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too small i thought.

I hated how everything was really packed in and it took 5-10 mins to run across an entire country =S.

When i say big i don't necessarily mean the whole of Tamriel. More like something realistic size and spaced out. i want going from one city to the next to be a treck where i have to set up camp or shelter in a nearby runi to stop me getting pneumonia during the night because of torrential rain.
Now i was going to go and post my fast travel ideas in the nice thread you linked, but then i realised it was a strange youtube video, so am going to post them here as a way of getting my revenge for being decieved =) it's relevant don't worry.
I wan't fast travel to work similar to how it did in morrowind, where you have to pay to go somewhere, that's not that far away and if you want to get somewhere real far away you have to make a few changes. This would make the game world feel so much bigger and stop you from being tempted to just fast travel all the way to the next city because you can't really be bothered to walk.
Also i would like the middle of forests furthest away from paths to be very trecheroiuse and dangerouse, whereas the paths are 100% clear of all monsters except the odd bandit or a group of creatures on a random rampage or whatever.

Depends on which province they're going to use next. I think Oblivion's scale was good, but if they use the same one for, say, Elsweyr, the map is going to be very small indeed, which is not realistic either.

I just finished the ES Novel Infernal City (yes, I'm a bit slow ) and am I right in saying that the distances seemed far greater in the book than it did when playing the Oblivion game?

Agreed, it would make inns actually useful instead of just being part of the background.

The area of the Oblivion game would have been about right for the Imperial City's island alone, not the entire province. If they had limited the game to just that island (blockaded in some manner for the Oblivion crisis), it would have been perfect, and we'd still have the rest of Cyrodiil to explore in the future. That should have been enough for about 6 more games, not including all of the other provinces we haven't seen.

By Oblivion's scale, the rest of the provinces would be tiny. Cyrodiil is supposed to be the largest province by a significant margin, but the small island of Vvardenfell (where MW takes place) in the center of Morrowind province was nearly the same playing area as all of Cyrodiil. Of course, by Daggerfall's scale, Morrowind's game area was barely a speck on the map; it just packed a ton of content into that tight space, rather than have everything scattered 50 REAL miles apart as in DF.

I know that Morrowind wasn't exceptionally larger than Cyrodiil, but I have to say that it felt massive... somehow the geography and the lack of fast travel made me feel like I was in this crazy huge place, and that I needed to get in a boat just to make getting to Vivec reasonable... but in Oblivion, I could pretty much just run to the next town and never felt like I journeyed there.

The atrocious running speed and lack of mounts must have helped that illusion.

If there are horses and fast travel I would like a world about 2x Oblivion and please add more farms like in morrowind. I never understood how the cities survived with very little agriculture. In our medieval times and even up through the 19th centuries more people lived in the country side then cities. I guess with cyrodill being the capital you may see more cities but somewhere they have to grow the food for the mouths in the city, and the nigh monopoly the cities have in quest.

More farms would be nice. In return for the farms, though, we received roadside inns. I love travelling through Cyrodiil and stopping at an inn for a night along the way.