I agree, I like to explore all those open areas, it does feel more beliveable than a world filled with dungeons and towns. The only problem for me with cyrodill is that many areas looked like each other. In fact, my favortie area in cyrodill is the jerral mountains, simply because it was really different from the other ones.

Not sure what that has to do with anything. The precise boundaries aren't set in stone and can shift a bit over the course of development. Likely nothing drastic, but they can still move a notable amount.


Sure, for the full map, but how much of the map is accessible to players? It's not like all cells they worked on are places the player can get to, and the invisible borders aren't aligned to cell boundaries. The borders can be shifted around at any point prior to completion. It would be very difficult to get an accurate measurement of the playable map area.


What evidence is there that Skyrim will be smaller (ie, have less playable space) than Oblivion? The quote "about the same size" is not evidence there's less space, nor does "I believe" or "I have a feeling" count. I've already show why fewer cells does not necessarily mean smaller playable area.

What are you talking about? There are no invisible borders not aligned to cell boundaries. You can go anywhere within the map in Oblivion. One ofthe earliest things they said about Skyrim was "Everywhere you can see, you can go". I think that was in the GI article.


The cells on the map from the video, like I already said, plus the marketing strategy to make things seem as impressive as possible. Surely you remember how many people were hoping for a much larger map than Oblivion before the approximate size was released and they took some time to think it over. And this is the map size, a 2 dimensional overhead view, not counting the height of things. He has said "The map is about the same size as Oblivion". I don't know what makes you think this includes the distance of a near vertical slope. Hell, if that was included in the "roughly the same size" quote, then I'd be very worried about the actual map area, which would naturally be much smaller.

It was specifically and officially said that Skyrim's map size is about the same as Oblivion's, but due to all the mountains, it feels bigger. Ostensibly, that means that there is more actual land to walk on due to more height irregularity.

Edit: Personally, I liked the 'empty' spaces. Wilderness made it feel more authentic, since in a medieval setting, the land would be largely untamed. By that opinion, Skyrim should be even more-so.

Double-edit: And empty areas give the modders places to put things!

The invisible Cyrodiil borders are not aligned to cell boundaries. They're invisible blocks in the game world that outline the playable area, and they aren't fitted on cell boundaries.



Cyrodiil had a lot of cells you couldn't get to. Besides the cells that were there for show (to give you something to see when looking into Skyrim or Morrowind or wherever), the province has a very irregular shape, which effectively caused Valenwood and Elsweyr to both be in the world, but were completely inaccessible and not even fully viewable without cheating or modding.


So, wanting to make things seem impressive is evidence of not being truthful? Take it with a grain of salt, absolutely, but it's not grounds to turn a general "about the same" into a definitive "less".

Oops. What I meant was that there weren't any that weren't on the map border, and that's what I was talkiing about. Seems a misinterpretation on my part.


Valenwood and Elsweyr are not fully there, see this map. http://www.uesp.net/maps/obmap/obmap.shtml Anyway, they have said multiple times that they are reffering to the "Playable area" and that is also what the estimate of the cell number on the map comes from, not the whole map board, just inside the boundaries of the province.


I never said that. Slightly smaller is roughly the same size, so it's not lying. It's good marketing. And the sort of thing that happens all the time.

EDIT: And why does it take you like half an hour to reply to one post, even when I can see at the bottom that you read it almost immediately after I post it?

From the concept art and that game play video that was released a while ago looks like the terrain will be interesting. Was totally cool how that character almost slided off the mountain that kinda stuff makes my nerves squeel (I have a severe dislike of heights). I'm thinking with sprinting traveling will take longer in Skyrim since it seems natural how long you can sprint will depend mostly on athletics level, but with the mountains and stuff I'm a bit concerned about how easily you can sherpa around without following a trail since oblivion and morrowind it was kinda difficult to judge when something was too steep to get over without magic until you ran up there got stuck or fell a few feet and couldn't get back to the spot you were at without descending and running a large circle back.
I suppose Oblivions openess wasn't too bad I got a thrill out of exploring places and the scenery around.. after the first trip or so I just started running straight to an area then fast travel from then on. 3 clicks a load screen and I'm there kind of dulled down the experience for me.

I think denouncing open plains used in Oblivion as wasted space is grossly incorrect. Space between actual landmarks has always existed in any nation in history- you cant have a barbarian camp next to a city gate, or some unexplored dungeon across the street from an inn. It's just not realistic. I thought that the open spaces were actually beautiful, especially when combined with texture mods and the like. If you don't like the open spaces, use fast travel- that's what its there for.

Im a little confused by this post. Everywhere I turned around in Oblivion there were two or three location indicators on my compass. Have you ever looked at a map with all of the location markers activated. There were very few big empty spaces. I couldn't imagine Oblivion having more locations crammed into its map. The funny thing is that not that long ago there was a tread complaining that they crammed too much into the Oblivion map. For me its quality over quantity. I like the wide open spaces as long as the locations i do find are interesting and given what we have been told so far I am sure they will be.

+1

This thread is original.

it wasn't even close to 99.9% procedural. it was more like 40-60% if anything.

the problem with Oblivion's world design isn't that it was wasted space, it was that that space was taken up by locales that were all pretty much identical. like yeah there's a difference between this kind of tree and that kind of tree and i can generally kind of tell whether i'm in the Great Forest or the West Weald, but the difference between the Nibenay Basin and Blackwood is not nearly as big as the difference between the Ascadian Isles and the Bitter Coast. it's all trees and grass, and yeah they might be different colors and there might be different plants but it's still just trees and grass and all that [censored] blends together after a while.

ideally Skyrim will use its mountains as well as Morrowind used its fog. turning off distant land in Oblivion (and tweaking the fog color) makes everything feel a lot different, and you can actually start to see the differences between the regions.

ed i do still kind of hope that even apart from the 130 hand-crafted dungeons there's still a bunch of little tiny caves that don't really serve any purpose other than to go "hey what's that" a few times and then never go in one again.

It said its the same size already..... And its all been hand crafted so it won't be bland and all the same...

I liked the open space with just trees animals, plants, and occasional bodies of water or rivers running through it. In fact, I think Oblivion tried to jam too much generic content into the world thus reducing exploration down to if you have the ability to walk over the top of a hill from one ruin to the next ruin. Major seemly un-explored ruins would sit next to well-traveled roadways. Are you telling me NOBODY has gone into the ruin next to a major highway?!

It may seem antithetical to modern game design but I want TES 6 to be more spread out. I want the distance between one Alyaid ruin and the next ruined castles keep being not over the next rise but over and down the next ten hills! I want and isolated village to be not twenty paces off the main road! The sense of scale needs to be far more realistic even if that means walking from one city to the next is a long journey.

Around 41 square kilometers is very small now.
It was big by the time Oblivion came out. But really small now.
Many other games are much bigger. Far Cry 2 for instance is bigger. Red Dead Redemption is almost twice as big (but the landscape is very open, still).
Just Cause 2 is, I think, 20 times bigger. And it looks great.

My point is, Bethesda will not be able to say that they got "this really huge open world" this time. If they do that, they would be lying.
41 square kilometers isn't huge anymore, just as Oblivion's graphics aren't good anymore.

The map size being around the same as Oblivion is one of the biggest disappointments. Here's why:

1) Risk feeling cramped up. (And yes I know there are less dungeons than OB, but the risk is still very much there. 120 dungeons is A LOT).
2) Part of the enjoyment of previous TES games have been to have a really huge world for you to explore. With our standards changing, this enjoyment has also changed as I see it. Oblivion's map size is far from big according to me now.
3) Everything will be scaled down to ridiculous sizes. You'll never ever be able to have these huge majestic mountains and valleys. And landscapes being vast is as I said above, a big enjoyment.

The TES games are pretty unique for their focus on freedom. You got this free world for you to explore and do anything. If that world is small, it detracts from that experience a lot as I see it. Especially because of the three reasons above
.
While Skyrim is all hand-crafted, I wish that they wouldn't have done that. I wish that they would have used "random handcrafting", as seen in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8YDqdFrHdo&feature=player_detailpage#t=77s
Although we don't know yet if the Creation Kit actually have this "random handcrafting", the map size being around the same as Oblivion points to that they don't have that feature in the map editor.

Oblivion, that big boring, unplausible and unsustentable, lore broking, uninteresting, repetitive open space is more like it.

For some reason Morrowind felt so much larger than cyrodiil.