I wish I was your friend, I would love to become a normal "casual" player again, who doesn't know much about video-games and keeps getting impressed with everything.

Imagine the fun I would have replaying Oblivion / Fallout 3 / New Vegas!

Youre running from the guards then suddenly you see that the pipe has ended and water is going down...then you look up and the sun first blinds you then the clouds in front of you fade away...epic view and epic music starts.

I'm hoping they'll try a little bit of a "delayed" reaction. Maybe the player breaks out of prison into a forest, to bring attention to the area immediately surrounding you. THEN as you walk along a path, it breaks onto a cliff, with a view of Skyrim that causes the player's jaw to drop.

That said, I can't wait to be stunned.

so you dont like being able to actually see things realisticly that instead of being able to see a low res distant horizon you want to see a black wall exactly 60 meters in front of you.

hah. i remember when i got morrowind in 2004. i played at least 4 hours a day for the next two months.

Morrowind was the most humble opening moment, thus my favorite.

you see a beautiful scene of a little village and a lake and then it gets burnt to a crisp by a dragon and you start a fight

For me fallouts intro was very well done... thrust out of the vault due to events beyond my control, I had to leave behind all the people I'd known before and I even got to find out what a geck was and then find out we didn't have one...

When I read that I was all... "Oh goodie, I'll just activate the geck and everything will be ok, boy I sure hope we have one....... fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck". That depressing smack filled me with such a sense of foreboding dread.

The way the long distant view was implemented, like a huge bowl with imperial city in the middle did actually make the game seem a lot smaller that it was and reduced the nobility and wonder of exploration.

I did exactly as Pseron Wyrd did and made it foggier, but with distance view further than what was in Morrowind, so that I could not see from one side of the world map to the other side.

But is Skyrim, hopefully large mountain ranges would prevent this problem, and hopefully we would not be able to see to the infinity and about a third or fourth of the map length ahead would disappear behind the horizon fog or haze.

The first thing you should see is The Throat of the World.
Imagine walking out of "the sewer" and seeing a massive mountain range in the distance.

Yes. I hope the very first part of the main quest is climbing the 7,000 steps.

My idea would be you exit a door and then you see this huge valley with all the snow falling around. You see Throat of the world off in the distance, Forests in other areas. Whatever it is that they do it will be good.

Fallout's intro was really cool, given the vision-adaptation that needed to occur and all such stuff. However, I never really noticed the effect of you essentially starting out on a hill. Now that you mention it, that does create a pretty cool effect. As great as Oblivion's was (and it is still one of my favorite gaming moments), you were more or less starting with an extremely limited view of the environment thanks to the low elevation and all. Although, to be fair, I was much more interested in Oblivion's environment than Fallout's (but Fallout had some beautiful architecture and an incredible mood) because of my partiality to forests.

So I am all in favor of having us start out at a high elevation so that we can see a great expanse in front of us. Perhaps have us exit on a mountain that it not so high up that the environment is obscured by clouds or a snowstorm, but rather is just high enough to let us see several miles of varying terrain before our eyes, extending into the distance where we can no longer see.

Additionally, the idea that someone proposed of having us emerge in a forest that eventually leads to a clearing of sorts. This actually sounds amazing. Perhaps a rather controlled (in terms of the time of day, not movement) exit, one in which we emerge in a rather dark forest and can run around until eventually we reach a cliff and see the sun rising over the land below. THAT would be pretty epic.

Exactly what I was thinking.

This

That's the first thing I didn't like about Fallout NV. I walked out of the doc's office, after looting the place...and all I could really see was a little ghost town. With fallout 3 and Oblivion, you walked out and you could see so much. It gave you that sense of being tiny. Hell, first thing I did in Oblivion on my first play through was just look over that lake for a while. Then when I finally came to, I ran off the dock and jumped into the water. Now, Fallout wasn't as pretty, but nukes will do that. It was still pretty cool when you got that first look over that waste-land. I'm looking forward to some snow, and a good view of some mountain's in the distance with some green infront of them.

I'd like to be up on top of a mountain looking down at the rest of the land while a light dusting of snow is settling on nearby tree trunks.

I wonder how you'll be issued the first stage of the main quest. The only thing I can imagine is that Esbern or even a full band of Blades will get you out of captivity and at some point during the escape they leave you and say "The exit's right through that tunnel. Let's split up, lest we attract too much attention. Travel light, travel fast, trust no one and don't give away what happened. You're a lone adventurer just passing through for that matter. Things will be heating up soon enough. I assume you'll want to go and see [person] in [place]. We'll see you there. Good luck." Or that some mess happens and you get separated and need to find another way. Anyway, first symbolic view on Throat of the World for things to come would be epic, but I'd be equally happy if I emerged in the wilderness near a town, obviously hinting I should check it out. Seeing some sign of dragons, like carvings or a subtle dragon outline on the horizon you'd just as well fail to spot, would do too.

I hoped for rain when I left the sewers, so it could be like the shawshank redemption

Preferred the OB view, looking up rather than down on the landscape. Would prefer to work for that view, preferably with a mountain top 5 - 10 minutes of gaming away from the prison exit. You escape, the sunlight dazzles you, you take in the view, notice the mountain slope behind, climb it then see the view and the route to the nearest village. Time to climb back down, hear the sounds of a wolf pack on the wind, now we are talking.

Well now that we know there is interior / exterior cell seperation the "wow" moment won't be near as good or epic as it would be otherwise.

We'll see a door, click, wait for loading screen, then fade and end up somewhere else with hopefully a nice view. Definitely not as wow as it could be.

I think you cross the Jerall Mountains with your mentor through a cave and then you arrive in Skyrim: a vast lands before you with high mountain peaks in the distance, a cold breeze makes the trees move while snow flakes fall from the sky.

The Oblivion "out off the sewers" Moment remains one of my best gaming experiences to date- that it was my first open world RPG helped but, I still remember, I can go ANYWHERE, and do ANYTHING!

bliviongate:

Ok it didn't turn out quite like that but you get the idea.

think one step to making it a more "Wow I can do anything" moment is the lack of a quest coming straight out that starting area - say to find some dragon symbols to learn shouts- but the game doesn't tell you where those dungeons are.

Personally I think it'd open best not necessarily from a mountain side. How about from, say, a boat and look across the landscape from the coast.

Or even better- Airdropped from a dragon!

Two things that really made the Fallout 3 'moment' cool were the sound effect and the lighting.

The crescendo of sound is subtle but very well done, and the whole 'blinking into the light' effect of the lighting was awesome. The combined effect was to create a really powerful 'moment'

For me, the equivalent in Morrowind was arriving on the Slit Strider in Balmora. I looked across the panoramic view of the town and just thought ....wow :bowdown: At that exact moment, I knew that Morrowind would be one of my favourite ever games