Morrowind and Oblivion satisfied me in terms of size, although the scale did work slightly better for Morrowind, as it only covered Vvardenfell rather than all of Cyrodiil, and since the terrain was generally fairly rough in most areas rather than being like Oblivion with mountains on some of the borders while the rest is pretty flat, as this made travel more difficult (at least until you could easily levitate over any obstacle in your way.) making the world feel bigger than it was, but that's just the way the environment was set up. I wouldbn't mind it if the game world was somewhat bigger, but only if this can be accomplished without sacrificing too much detail. I don't want it to be like Daggerfall where the world is massive only because there are huge stretches of empty land between anything worth seeing, if they're going to do that, they might as well just do what some other RPGs do and just have the only places actually physically modeled be places of interest and some random areas for random encounters, with travel between locations only being possible using the map, as there's absolutely no point in having a seamless world if most of it isn't even worth going through to reach your next destination.

A little off-topic but I would rather they spend the time developing better multi-threaded streaming code for their engine, why? Because I really hate load screens. Even in Fallout 3 it felt so artificial and annoying. Even if the world is only the size of Vardenfell I will be happy if I don't need to load between every city gate, house door or cave entrance. When I want a seamless world I mean actually seamless. The only load screen should appear when you are waiting, sleeping or fast-traveling IMO.

There is a a lot of good middleware that allows for massive amounts of level/world streaming beyond anything we've seen before. Just Cause 2 is a great example of this and while TESV would have to be far more sophisticated, I seriously doubt we'll see a landmass of that enormous scale (possibly the largest open world in any game ever). Just Cause 2 did let your seamlessly enter certain buildings but that was few and far between. Overall, I think Bethesda could pull this off.

Really, if they did Summerset Isle in the same way Just Cause 2 did its island, TESV would rule.

I say bugger the consoles, they hold games back now!! Let's have a world 4 times the size of Oblivion with 4 times the amount of quests. It would be PC only, of course, and would take around 4 years to see everything and complete every quest. I would also like to see better land design, i.e. no 'You can't go this way, turn back' messages. I personally think the places to go (caves, ruins etc...) were perfectly placed apart in Oblivion but I don't think there were enough settlements. It would be nice to see more villages and smaller towns. Oh yeah, lastly, make the capital city heavily populated with people, the one in Oblivion was a little sparse (consoles holding it back maybe?). I do not personally own a gaming PC, but would readily part with my hard earned to play this game alone. That is all .

Bugger the consoles? Bethesda sold more copies of Morrowind and Oblivion on consoles than they did on the PC and not everyone can afford a gaming PC.

I'm talking from a personal point of view to enhance my gaming experience. I don't work for Bethesda so have nothing to gain financially from them selling more or less on the consoles. It was just my 2 pence worth as the person who started this thread asked us for our opinions on what we would like for the next game (if there is one).

Land size is not related to console limitations, it is related to game quality.

I disagree. I'll bet that if there was a meeting within Bethesda and someone said "I want a game twice the size of Oblivion", someone would immediately cut in and claim that that sized game would not fit very well within the constraints of a console. This is probably the case for every game that comes out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. The developer has to look at the weakest of the three and design the game around that.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on this, but from where I'm sitting Bethesda will make the next installment of the Elder Scrolls with what they consider to be the least powerful of the platforms that they are to release it on at the forefront of their minds.

The demo of Just Cause 2 has 35 square miles, alone. The game itself is larger, and this game is for the XBox 360, the PS3, and the PC. Consoles can handle large worlds. Also, when Oblivion was first released, the 360 was a new console and the average PC wasn't really any more powerful than the 360 at the time. Consoles didn't hold back Oblivion and they aren't holding back TES V. Consoles can handle large worlds. Bethesda can't hand-craft four times as many locations in the same amount of time they hand-crafted Oblivion. Land size is related to game quality and development time, together, but not console limitations. Also, Bethesda's games tend to be poorly optimized, and that itself is a limitation. If consoles limit the size of games, then why is Morrowind(originally only for the PC) so small?

That is all I have to say about the topic.

Has anyone played "Just Cause 2" yet?

That map is... gigantic! The biggest map ive ever seen in a game. You could take a game map that big and wrap it around a sphere and have an entire planet to run around on and have adventures.

The only problem is filling it with enough things to do.

Bigger than WoW?

Yep. Just Cause 2. Make that the Summerset Isles map

Any big games on consoles have limits elsewhere. I've never played Just Cause 2, but is it a open ended RPG with tons of lore? A huge game world would lose us a lot of quests, a lot of lore, a lot of gameplay experience, and with voice acting, there will be even less.

You can't honestly think that consoles don't make PC game lack? You're an idiot if you do...

Even with a hard drive, consoles are far far inferior. You honestly believe that they're going to be able to fit everything of a (4gb?) disc??

Do people actually realise just how big Daggerfall was? It's pretty non feasible to have such a huge landmass. Unless you want bland landscapes with 0 detail - no trees, no grass, no caves, not much wildlife, you don't want to be voting even bigger... It will be the same as Daggerfall's landscape.

lol, "even smaller: 0"

Well, I wouldn't personally throw insults around if people don't agree with my point of view, it's just that the way I see it, Bethesda must be keeping an eye on the limitations of the 360 whilst developing this game (if they are). I understand that they didn't realise the full potential of the console whilst developing Oblivion and that the 360 can be pushed quite a bit further now, and Bethesda know this.
I guess that at the end of the day, I'd be happy with an Oblivion sized world, maybe a bit more populated, maybe with more quests but with no 'Loading Area' messages and 'Turn Back' messages. I don't even mind the loading screens whilst you enter a building or cave etc....
And for the record, I also cannot afford a gaming PC, but I sure as hell would save up for one for the kind of game I described earlier!!!!

Just Cause 2 has a much larger map than Oblivion, takes up more than twice as much disk space, and has twice the system requirements as well. It also has a better-looking, more realistic landscape, and still performs better (less slowdown/loading). I haven't played it and can't comment on its general content, but if its size hindered content, that has nothing to do with it being on consoles. Having finite resources applies to all games and systems. Assuming that the Xbox 360 version of Oblivion took up the same space as the PC version (4.6 gigabytes, according to the requirements on my box), there would still be several empty gigabytes on that disk. Default 360's have the technology to read DVD-9 format, which has about 8.5gb of space. I don't even know whether updates or later models improved that; the latest type, DVD-18, has twice that capacity. Any flaws that Oblivion had, they had nothing to do with it running out of disk space.

Consoles can't be compared to PC's by looking at their hardware as a direct match. The Windows version of Just Cause 2 recommends 3gb of RAM; the 360 has 512mb and runs it fine. People have to keep upgrading their PC's just to be able to run the games that come out at the same time on a console that's several years old. Since it hasn't been announced it can be assumed that TESV won't be coming out any time soon, and will have access to more advanced technology than Just Cause 2 did. Either it would be targeted at the next generation, which will undoubtedly have technological capability well beyond what our current PC's do, or it will be a game very late in their lifespans, at which point developers have much easier times exploiting the consoles and could make a game as large as JC2 with dramatically more content than Oblivion. The only obstacle there is the basic limitations to development time/money that leashes all games in the end, not "we don't have enough disk space."

There are ways that spreading a game across systems harms it, but giant imaginary failures in basic hardware compared to PC are rarely one of them.

Least us not forget GTA IV. That game is huge. You can travel anywhere on the map, you can fly helicopters and view the whole city, you can can enter most buildings, its very highly detailed, and you will never see a loading screen other than loading your game when you start. It has HEAPS of dialogue and missions and its on console.

Points taken! This makes me think about it a bit differently, especially the point about GTA4. I guess I'm getting mixed up with an uneconomical game engine. This makes me a bit happier that they CAN do a lot more then they did in Oblivion!

Anybody played Mortal Online?

That game shows how a massive landmass that takes about an hour to walk from 1 city to another with a dangerous environment can be very disorientating and frustrating if you're a low level. I drown from having too much stuff in my pockets to sell, got killed by a Domestic Pig & Gazelles more times that I can count, and we won't even get into having to run from PKers in an MMO that you can kill anybody you want. So, as nice as a very large landmass sounds, I'd like to keep it bigger than Oblivion & Morrowind, but not so much so that it takes you 10 minutes to get to someplace that spawns the lowest level animals without a horse.

A super-large landmass could, in theory, work. But we also have to take into account that Bethesda has much more to do than just make a landmass and let us play, they still need to make meshes for weapons, clothes, armor, characters, architecture, random items, monsters, plants, ingredients, caves, ruins, forts, grass (different than other plant meshes), effects, etc. They also have to record voices for spoken dialogue, plan their story and test everything for bugs; add interesting NPCs, Areas, and Quests; they improved their whole system for a while; they've had to plan where there main quest was going, they've had to test it for bugs, they have to create new & more interesting magic effects/systems, they may have had to improve the fighting system everybody complained about, they had to think of original stories for every NPC, they had to create more lore, they had to create new animations and work on old ones, they had to update their AI, they had to make dungeons complete-able (not to mention if they added something like crawling or climbing, that would take a lot more time), they've had to make more specific Animation Markers, they've had to create different sounds & environmental noises, they've had to make music and make sure it fits the game, they've probably had to play test more often than we've played their games collectively, they've had to run around looking at some real-life references (probably), they've had to figure out the artword/logo/box art that they want, they've had to figure out how they were going to advertise for it, and they still might create even new systems in-game that would take some time to develop. And that still doesn't include all the time they'd have to spend coding the next CS to make sure after they were done we could modify the game and be able to change it if we didn't like something.

We really can't ask for a super-large landmass unless you'd want to triple their work load on everything.

Think of the people doing this too, they can't work for 10 years on a game, they have to release it generally quickly so that they don't lose too much money. They still have a budget, and honestly, they still get bored. They're human, just like us, not some collaboration of gods named "Bethesda Softworks"... well actually, that last statement is arguable.

A very large landmass is possible, but an "Epic and Real-World" Sized game would take too long with today's technology... unless you guys would want everything to be completely randomly generated. Which I'm sure Bethesda would like that just as much as us... which is to say not at all since it would mean no custom hand-crafted world. With little allusions and easter-eggs hidden everywhere.

It sounds like alot, for one person to do, but companys like Bethesda have teams of over 120+ working on thier games. For 3 years, 8 hours a day, 300 days a year, thats like 864000 man hours put into their games. (I dont realy expect it to be anywhere near that). But still.

In response to this (as well as JC2), I do have to point out that while both of these games do have large maps, neither game allows you to move every item in the game (except chairs and tables). Because every item in Oblivion has physics attached to it, they have to be carefully and painstakingly placed, so that in and of itself is a major drain on time and therefore a major reason why they can't do a large map.

Let's not get further into the PC vs console debate, lest our first born childs be eaten by the mods.

I just think that there's far too much time to be spent on a realistic map size. It's really unecessary. Besides, there would be far too much empty space. I think one day we'll be able to have a well designed, large world, but not by todays technological standards.

I chose "Morrowind/Oblivion" in size, although I wouldn't mind if the game can be made slightly larger without watering down the content too far. It would be nice to put a few extra steps between some of those closely spaced ruins, caves, and other landmarks, instead of having them typically about 50 yards apart. The "crowding" effect was more noticable in OB than in MW, first because MW's convoluted terrain made the map "feel" larger and hid a lot of things around corners and behind obstructions, secondly because MW was only supposed to represent a small island in an otherwise large unseen province instead of being passed off as an entire gigantic province, and third because the visibility range was much better in OB.

While limitations in storage space and hardware may be sufficient to double the size of the game world, the manpower to adequately "detail" that much "empty canvas" may be beyond what a developer can afford to spend or being able to get the game to market in any reasonable length of time. Cautious use of random generation to create an initial set of raw content, which then needs to be hand-tweaked and further detailed to give it a "lifelike" feel, can be used to simplify or speed development, hopefully resulting in either a slightly larger total playable area, or more resources freed up for adding more relevant details, quests, and options within that space.

In rebuttal/clarification to the OT Console vs PC commentary:
Console limitations are what they are, as are PC limits, but each is "optimized" for different things. I would certainly appreciate if the menu systems in future games are developed for the specific platform, rather than having the PC users bound by the same restrictions on text and inventory icons as the weakest console. The MW interface for PC showed just about the same amount of information on its single screen as OB showed in all of its menu pages combined. The individual windows for inventory, world map, spell lists, and character stats were all resizable and could be individually minimized, and you could pick up any of dozens of visible items from the sortable inventory at a click of the rodent, and drop them onto your character portrait or otherwise activate or view their status with a rapid sweep and perhaps a click or two at most. The OB interface felt like "Choose A or B" in comparison, with only a few lines of info visible at any given moment.

Oblivion and Morrowind are different scales. Cyrodiil would be four or five times larger than it was in Oblivion, if it used Morrowind's scale.

Games like GTA don't have the volume of interiors and clutter that Morrowind and Oblivion do.

I would like the game world to be 1:1 scale and, like Morrowind, hand crafted. Who wouldn't?

Me. I don't want the game to end up a terrible failure in other aspects. Remember, this thread is taking into consideration limitations.

That depends on the develepor. You could make the pc game first and then port it to the consoles like they did with Morrowind. The PC version dosn't have to suffer because of the console versions. And do you really have to insult people which dosn't share your view?



Ever heard about Blueray?

And didn't we just discuss this? Even if the disc is too small, you could release the game on more than one disc. As i said, it has been done before.



You started the whole thing yourself by your "lets blame the consoles" nonsense and now you wanna withdraw?

Well, I voted MW/OB, if its too big, you can bet with everything else in the game, they will have auto generated terrain. If its like MW style, sure they'll have it auto generated (cause its easy and saves time) but it will give them room to hand place more things as well.