I think I'm talking about a different type of scaling. I'm thinking it means the world size is set, then they make everything else a little smaller (statics like trees and buildings, NPCS etc, meaning the world is bigger. But I don't think that's what you're on about lol.

I'm just pointing out that Bethesda plays with the scale to remove the boring parts.

Most prewar buildings in Fallout are a fraction of their real world size or numbers.

Nimitz Class aircraft carriers are the largest warships ever built and have over 6,000 personnel.

You really could move a town in to an aircraft carrier.

Nellis Air Force Base has 14000 military and civilian personal working there.

In FONV it looked big but not that big.

McCarran International Airport is about 3 miles by 2 miles in real life.

That would have been 1/3 of Fallout New Vegas' 16 square mile map.

And in Fallout 4, the building are looking more and more real.

Plus with access to a vertibird and jumpjet, you will be able to to all sorts of places you could never had reached in F3 or FONV.

I'm also hoping their crowds look more real.

The Vegas casinos looked virtually empty.

This is actually a very good point. From what we've seen so far, I actually do believe that both building and crowd density has been been addressed in a far more realistic way this time round. Just look at the scenes on the way to the vault. There are a great many more actors on screen than we would have seen in previous games, especially outside the vault gates as seen in the trailer. And the number of buildings in this area also seems significant, and not just as a rehash of 'Riverwood', which for a village was actually about half the size of Falkreath.

Now translate both of these concepts to somewhere like Diamond City or Scollay Square.

Take note Obsidian for New Vegas 2. The Mojave desert got a tad out of hand with those annoying mountains forcing you to run around everything.

the final part is the most important ,no mountains in the way so look at a map of Skyrim (since they said it's roughly the same size)and flatten something that high(high Hrothgar) it'll push everything else outward then do that with every other mountain in Skyrim ,so either we're getting a Much bigger map ,or they removed the mountains and we're getting a noticeably smaller map (which I doubt given what they have to work with as far as consoles go)

would rather have more space and more load screens than less space and less load screens.

also, skyrim felt like the smallest map to date since morrowind.

maybe it was because everything looked the same (snowy tundras), or maybe because there were so many enormous montains in the way.

Especially when you had a clear jump over them, but couldn't get passed it due to an invisible wall.

Well it sounds like we are getting the same size as Skyrim, but with a lot more areas to explore (less mountains and verticality and openness of individual buildings)

Plus the Boston Wasteland is just going to have more stuff to explore than the wilderness of Skyrim.

wastleland is important, but one of the biggest knocks on skyrim i could give is the sheer underwhelming presence of their cities and towns. 3 small huts = 1 town.

using high rise buildings is a fantastic way to deal with this, morrowind, imo, had the best cities, for some reason they felt much larger, more interesting and diverse. I also hope there is some room to add custom maps, there was a bucket load of problems with creating new worldspaces in skyrim,

but i'm optimistic about the new engine. Skyrims engine must have started to be built after fallout 3, and it was clearly far superior to the early instances. so we've had around a similar time scale between skyrim and fallout 4, i would hope many of the quirks have been ironed out. I'm anxious to see how it impacts modding. You would like to think the Beth team spent many hours crafting their engine with modding in mind. but with a voice protag, you just never really know what they're thinking.

And no loading screens so yay

thats what i think, if you take into the account the mountains of skyrim and their verticality and flaten them out and turned that into usable space you would have prob twice the area plus more density since a lot of it is city area, i can't see the map size being "the same size of skyrim" in the way some people are taking it, todd wasn't very specific it would be a spoiler. of course the map area is bigger its next gen, 4 years after skyrim, map size isn't everything but to keep it the same size i just can't see that.

especially since on occasion it's nice to wander through a stretch of nowhere without having to engage in a running gun battle ,so a smaller map crammed with that much stuff would quite frankly get annoying, from the amount of stuff to do or hinted at it'd be like a skyrim sized The Mall (from fallout 3) you couldn't go two feet without something shooting at you or something blowing up.

Are the cells in each game really the same size? Because everywhere I look it is saying FO3 was slightly larger than Skyrim. If they are then yes Skyrim would've been nearly 2x bigger than FO3.

Yes, they are exactly the same size. In both games each exterior cell is 4096 units by 4096 units or 192 feet by 192 feet or 58.5 meters by 58.5 meters.

Why are so many sources saying that they are about the same size than? I mean, I am very happy FO4 will be about twice as big as FO3 then, but why do so many say FO3 was as big as Skyrim?

Who are "so many sources?" Can you provide links?

Beyond the surface map area, what about the subway and rail system around Boston? Both it an the "Big Dig" provide some significant potential for underground areas to explore and use for travel routes.

Well mainly some people on here and in all honestly I only ever saw comments on various sites. You're the first person to actually provide any real data.

Big Dig is most likely not in the game... We see Scollay Square... so Big Dig most likely never happened.

Yeah, I always got mods to remove those walls.

That was how Obsidian funneled you in the first third of the story but I didn't like it. I wanted to go my own way.

I don't mind the size so much as the content in the cities and other populated places. I hope there is a lot to do. It is Boston and as a city it doesn't have a huge layout to it. It really depends on what they were trying to capture when they made layout.

A lot of skewed numbers floating around out there. Skyrim's Tamriel world space was only just over 11.2 sq miles if you calculate all of it, including the portion outside of the border which is just distant land and not actually playable. The area inside Skyrims border is much smaller than that.

here's some real data for you but keep in mind these numbers are just the main world space and doesn't include any over sized interiors or child world spaces.

128 game units(GU) = 6ft(height of player character)
Each cell in Oblivion,Fallout 3 and Skyrim is 4096x GU
128GU /6 ft= 21.3~GU
1ft=21.3~ GU
4096/21.3=192.3004694835681 ft
192.3004694835681 ft x sqr'd =36979.47056360071 sq ft per cell
1 sq mile = 27878400 sq ft
27878400 sq f/36979.47056360071sq ft=753.8885650634763 cells make one square mile

OB's Tamriel world space contains 13396 cells(4600-4800 playable)
13396 cells/ 753.8885650634763 cells(1 sq mile)=17.76920439013699 <--entire world space is 17.7+ sq miles
4800 cells/753.8885650634763 cells(1 sq mile)=6.36~ sq miles
Oblivion has less than 6.4 sq miles playable area.

Fallout has 2500 playable cells at the same size:
2500 cells/753.8885650634763 cells(1 sq mile)=3.31~ sq miles
Fallout has just over 3.3 sq miles of playable area.

SK's Tamriel world space contains 8460 cells(4326 playable)
8460/753.8885650634763(1 sq mile)=11.2218176426216 <--entire world space is 11.2+ sq miles
4326/753.8885650634763(1 sq mile)=5.73~ sq miles
Skyrim has just over 5.7 sq miles of playable area.

If you include Morrowind water surrounding Vardenfall it's supposedly 10 sq miles.(don't have cell count for MW but know it has 2x cells[8192x)

So then Fallout 4 will be about ~2 times the size of Fallout 3. Not including the city and its various tall biluildings and what not.

I think this just highlights that there's little point in trying to quantify the playable map size. No wonder Todd Howard doesn't want to say, "oh, it's this big" and just compares it to what they've done in the past. Map size has little to do with how the world is constructed and what's actually in the world. Then, if they made a world twice the size of Skyrim but with just as much content, just more spread out, it wouldn't be distinctly better or worse; they'd have to make different considerations for traveling across the space, though, like vehicles or a different approach to fast travel.

I think you have hit the nail on the head, so to speak (no references to base-building intended).

The most important aspect of the map is not necessarily the exact number of cells or the scale/level of coverage compared to previous title. It is the experience of exploration and discovery. As long as we feel like we are exploring a vast open wasteland, and that there is plenty to discover and do along the way to completing objectives, then I think the overall physical size is kind of irrelevant.