Well map size is my biggest complain towards all gamesas games. IMHO open world should contain full drop and a map as big as possible, everything else is story specific.

ps: Also when the enemys somehow adapt to your lvl, thats total [censored], kills half of the fun in game.

Really ? I would never have guessed, still I don't think you should have any problems with Rats and Goblins .

One of? So not 'THE' largest?

Obvioulsy ignoring Daggerfell since that was mostly randomly generated so it doesn't count

A very good point. This could mean it's actually the biggest game world they have created since Daggerfall.

Gstaff talking like Todd Howard ITT.

So true. I'm surprised he didn't say "200 years"

EDIT: if you read this Gstaff, I was just kidding!

Same size as Skyrim would be ok with me as I felt Skyrim was plenty big. I always get distracted on my way from A to B so sometimes I wish it was smaller so I wouldn't get caught up in stuff along the way, lol.

A bigger map would of course be fun too and allow for vehicles for traveling without feeling small, but I'm sure Beth will make the Commonwealth feel plenty big, regardless of those counting pixels and frames and gremlins.

Unless they've done something with the Vertibird we've seen that ties in to fast travel in some fashion - meaning it's only a transport that takes you from place to place (unlikely in my view) - the map will have to be fairly large and open with lots of roaming space so you don't fly across it in 5 minutes. Which would be fine with me, I've thought they've had maps with too dense of a "amusment park" feel for some time now, spreading things out so there is actual wilderness / wasteland without a "ding - new location discovered" every other minute would be a good thing.

Linear enemy progression doesn't work in a true open world game.

No, but a degree of area progression would be fine. No enemies in safe settlements, weak enemies in the wilds near safe settlements and along frequented travel routes, strong enemies in certain territories and the more distant wilderness, rare but very strong enemies in particular wilderness hotspots.

And OMG WTF strong enemies tied to late mainquest specific plot points. Maybe other main quests as well.

The big question is not 'is it open world?' but 'how quickly should players be able to play through most of the game?' and 'how long should the game stay challenging?'. The easiest solution is to have fixed area based levelling of enemies, and if you go to a quest giver at too low a level they tell you that you need more experience and better equipment. But that forces people to play slowly. Making enemies adapt strictly to your level lets you play fast, but means there's little or no challenge. Somewhere between the two would be good .

I'm more worried about AI rather than levels. Levels don't mean anything, really. If it's easy, I turn up the difficulty. If it's hard, I turn down the difficulty. (although I don't ever touch the difficulty settings during my play).

It's about the intelligence of the enemies. I want there to be dumb enemies as there has been all these years (lol ), but I want smart one's too. If I come across stupid enemies, the smart ones will surprise me later on. Of course, I want them scattered throughout the wasteland at random. Some raiders in a small hideout might not be as skilled as raiders in a more advanced hideout that's intricate in their design for protection and sniping, etc. The number in the LVL doesn't matter to me if the AI isn't dynamic and smart.

Ah, when I said 'level' I was speaking in a very general sense as in 'level of risk/challenge in facing'. Of which AI is a part. A low-level enemy might be smart but feeble, or it might be tough but dumb. A feeble enemy that's really smart might be high level.

So, no just a LVL number, but more a measure of the strength, toughness, equipment and skill (or perk-selection) needed by your character to face the opponent - and perhaps a measure of the skill of the player in using their character's abilities well

I agree. I want two enemies who are mainly melee weapon users to behave differently. I want one to aimlessly attack me as that's the only option they know, while another one uses guns or grenades to get me to move from my location while they flank me and get me closer for a surprise attack from a metal bat with a nasty buzzsaw modification. As an example. AI should have equatable perk/skill/ranks, too.

NPCs have had perks sine like fallout 3, though they rarely do.

Skyrim gave basically every enemy NPC perks however, so I suspect Fallout 4 will have the same.

(looks for the padlock button) Well lets be Honest, going from Map size to perks is a threadjack.

That said I think its obvious by now that the Fallout map may very well be "physically" larger than Skyrims if they are using the same scaling. To me I suspect the map borders ares most likely going to be

Just north ot Dracut/Lowel

Just south of Frankiln (although you can make a good argument for it being Freetown/Summerset)

the east and west border is kind of tricky, its either Marbelhead or Rockport in the east and at least Fitchburg and Worchester to the west, (and you can make an argument for DLCs extending the game west to Albany in a run up to the Next fallout being in New York City)

Why do I suddenly have an urge to get rope?

Ah. Um. Yes, sorry

What for? To measure the distance ?

To be honest, given that the team size making FO4 is (from the little I've heard) surely not all that much bigger than the one making Skyrim, I wouldn't have thought the content in the map is all that much greater, whatever the real-world area or the nominal scaling. And trying to calculate the in-game map-size from the landmarks spotted so far doesn't seem all that useful, as there's no reason to suppose they've used linear scaling across the map.

Um... is there? Was FO3 map linearly scaled to the real-world map? If that was confirmed earlier in the thread, my apologies. It is a very long thread...

In terms of content, I would imagine it also has a lot to do with development time. From what Todd said, work on FO4 started as far back as 2009.

As for the scaling of the map in FO3, it would be useful to find out if it was in fact linear, and if this would then also be applied to FO4's map.

Based on a lot of, admittedly bad, assumptions about the game.

A. That concord/Vault 111 will be the center of the map, like how Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim started you off in the center of the map.

B. That Quincy will be in the game because Preston mentioned it

C. That the game is going to use the same scaling as Fo3 did.

Fo4 could be up to around 20 square miles large in-game.

Quincy is certainly a possibility, especially considering the overall Harbor area (which I still think is the location of the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1526246-the-glowing-sea). But I do think that the top-left corner of the map will be somewhere around Littleton, due to it's relevance to the Revolutionary War (shown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littleton,_Massachusetts). That, and the fact that it would make for quite a good 'outer marker'.