You realize that 1400m isn't really all that high....

According to Wikipedia: "There is no universally accepted definition of a mountain. Elevation, volume, relief, steepness, spacing and continuity has been used as criteria for defining a mountain.[1] In the Oxford English Dictionary a mountain is defined as "a natural elevation of the earth surface rising more or less abruptly from the surrounding level and attaining an altitude which, relatively to the adjacent elevation, is impressive or notable."

So I suppose 1400m could be considered a mountain...

That's 4 times the height of the empire state building. I'd say that's pretty big for an in-game mountain.

Not to mention that I doubt the steps are continuously connected all the way to the top. I'm sure you have to walk up some slopes in the gaps between one set of stairs and another, so the height could increase significantly.

I'd say the max height of the mountain would be roughly 2000 m, which is fine to me!

That's considered there are 7000 steps, folks. I'm getting this feeling...

or they are 700 or 70 steps.

or maybe 7 even

Heh, maybe a few of them go up, then back down, and then up again?

I'm not to worried about it. The pics we've seen so far look cool at least, with the fog and all. The Throat of the World will probably be pretty cool, but no mount Everest. It doesn't have to be either, at least for me.

I think there's an issue beyond this as well though. Bethesda has camps of people who play differently wanting a ridiculously fleshed-out experience for their style of gaming.

Thieves/Assassins want a huge amount of Guard and NPC AI, restocking merchants, improved sneaking using shadows and sound, grappling hooks, torch extinguishing methods, etc.

Mages want improved spellcasting, spell combinations, alchemy and enchanting.

Warriors want improved physics engines, more immersive combats and impacts that you can "feel", as well as more varied equipment and weaponry.

Then you have social characters or immersion players who want more methods to complete quests without combat options, improved NPC AI, fully fleshed out daily schedules, etc.

Add to this increased land area, more detail, more immersion, better economies, cloaks, capes, mounted combat, and so on, and you have multiple fully realized games that people want combined into a single title. I know I'd love to have a Tamrielic Thief: The Dark Project for when I'm playing a sneaky character, 50 different armor and weapon types with realistic physics for when a troll whacks me with a club for my warrior character, and earth-shattering spell effects and the ability to combine multiple spells with unique outcomes for my mage character, but it's just not going to be possible with the time constraints.

Though I don't think adding large mountains is unreasonable by itself, the sheer volume of what is being expected starts to get out of hand.

Yes, that's a huge number of request!

But I think that all of them are fair, and a great company as Bethesda shall be honored to have such a great consideration from their fans, and having the opportunity to improve every day a bit more is a challenge that would be unwise to take. That's also the reason for these forums etc. Of corse the "perfect game" doesn't exist and never will, or maybe only into the mind of the player, but there's always place for suggestions. If something cannot be translated into reality, well, that's ok, but at least the game will have some improvements that without all this rumors they wouldn't take into consideration.

Exactly.

Skyrim is actually much smaller than cyrodill. So bethesda decicated a large protion of the map to underground areas such as caves, tombs, dungeons and what not. I'm guessing they worked on some what realistic mountains? Because they had to put the real estate somewhere right?

no this woul dmean something like 8x8 or 10 x10 sq km ... this is about the size of my island in blue mars / Crysis lol and you can still see the mountains on the other side it is still too small , to make it big it should be like 40x40 = 1600 sq km this woudl imply the need of real vehicles, mounts and fast transport ... now that woudl be cool ....

How do meters compare to feet?

1 meter is about (a tad more than) 1 yard if I'm right. So a foot is about one third of a meter. Perhaps I can check it somehow. Doing this now...

By the way, one can deduct that 20 cm or 0.2 m is two third of a foot. Because a foot is only 5 mm (which is neglectible) more than 30 cm (in fact it's 30.48 cm to be accurate). A yard equals 0.9144 m (working on it).
So that's 1280 yards or 3840 feet. Right? (Double checking lol) This can't be right.

3.28084 feet in a meter.

Got it. 1400 m is 4593' and 2.11". I seriously fouled up my first attempt.
Thanks to poster above. :teehee:

I feel the land of MW is a lot bigger than Oblivion, am I wrong?

Nope, it's smaller. It does feel bigger, though. That's a product of the infinitely superior fast travel system and verticality and lower draw distance.

No it didn't. A DL disk can hold 9 gigs. OB was less than 5 gigs installed and over 3gigs of that is voice files. It's not the world space eating up the disk space it's dialog.

Yeah, I'd much rather have to wind around the mountainous areas and up paths than run at the side of the hill like a maniac until I find a spot I can traverse up to the top, occasionally spamming the jump to get over a tiny spot.

yes, the mountains in Oblivion svck. It's like a blanket over the earth with some rocks jutting out of the side...

I think in Morrowind space was not so an issue because the only mounts were Red Mountain and Mount Kand and Assarnibibi, but was like they were not actual mounts, but just places with that conventional name, and all were just so fine cause all events were from a little province. In Oblivion all seems big at first, like Imperial City for example, even with not so much people inside. Anyway, that's understandable, considering the caring about every single npc, with every time a new story about him, and not like Morrowind with all the same default "I'm a farmer, as a farmer, I farm, lol". But about mounts, I remember with 10 jumps you found in the top of mountains above Bruma, and that's the aspect that makes me afraid about Skyrim. I don't feel the need to have free climbing as an ability, lol, but at least, have some feeling, even just some illusion about being between the astoning, epic and overwhelming big white mountains of Skyrim...

I have to add the fact that I still didn't play too much Bloodmoon (only exploring for curiosity, still in the middle of the MW mq... and miscellaneus) so I don't remember mountains there, but if I'm not wrong the issue was avoided with large flat snowing lands or something like that.