I saw a map online that was rendered from the game, and it had extended throughout most of Cyrodil and had parts of Morrowind, Hammerfell, and High Rock as well. And it said it was all from the game.

Is this true? I had no idea they had rendered so much of Tamriel outside the playable game area.

Of course, the areas looked quite barren compared to Skyrim. There's hardly any detail. But there was terrain elevation and the like.

Let me see if I can find a link to the map:

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111225143329/elderscrolls/images/8/82/TamrielCompositeMapbyXomm.jpg

This one right here. Is all that actually rendered from Skyrim?

Just low detail distance textures. No detail beyond what you can see at the furthest distances.. Under a certain distance it's a bit ghastly to look at.

Most of the terrain may not even be solid beyond a certain point. Plus I think I remember reading that only half of Red Mountain is present, the other side being an empty void.

edit: Funnily enough, there were a lot of people who thought the presence of terrain outside was definitive proof that there would be DLC that added all of Morrowind, Cyrodil and Hammerfell. Despite well reasoned arguements pointing out why it was unlikely they persisted with their DLC belief and claimed that they'd be ones laughing when the Morrowind/Cyrodil/Hammerfell DLCs came out.

Surprisingly, they all went very quiet a couple of months back.

Oh I know they won't be making DLCs of whole provinces (or any more at all at this point, sadly).

I'm just wondering if everything we see on that map is actually from the vanilla game.

Chances are that it's either for added realism, or they'll be using the basic structure and such for future games. The provinces haven't exactly been to scale in the past, so this might be an attempt to correct that?

Soz, DLC remark wasn't directed at you. Just seemed a bit relevant.

But yeah, a lot of that terrain is in the vanilla game. Low detail as I say, but the height maps and general shape are accurate. In theory, a Province mod could be made using the existing terrain as a base. Though it'd be a massive undertaking.

Here's a screenshot of Vvardenfell (and part of Morrowind) I took a while back. The shot is taken from a point directly over Windhelm on Skyrim's northeast coast. It shows western Vvardenfell and the northern island on which Dagon Fel is located. http://morrowind4kids.com/pseronwyrd/Screenshots/Skyrim_Vvardenfell_LOD.jpg

That looks really cool.

But as cool as all this is, I hope they don't scale to that. Some of the provinces would be too small and compressed if they did.

Heck I even felt that way about Skyrim. If you stand in the middle of the Whiterun plains, all around you all the different mountain ranges look way too close to you.

But I realize that in reality the size of the rendered land has limitations.