One of the things I appreciated about the first 2 Fallouts was how the immense size of the wasteland maps was communicated to the player. Travel between marked locations was abstracted, you got to watch a dot representing your character move slowly across a gridded image of the terrain. A clock was present and you could watch the hours and days tick by as your character moved between zones.

New Vegas's wasteland map is big for a navigable game level. But locations still seem so concentrated and close together that the whole thing has a .... theme park feel to it. I hear some folks saying it feels empty compared to FO3 - but to me it feels crowded. Settlements are always nearby, probably within a <10 minute run.

Considering there's already a fast-travel system in place I was curious if any players would be down with miles and miles of randomly generated wasteland surrounding significant locations. It would just be desert and scrub, maybe a ruined highway running towards a city - all with randomly generated critters. If a player wanted he could wander off for days, but practically speaking all long-distance travel would be handled through a map like Fallout 1 and 2's. Your character's attributes, skills and perks would help determine what encounters you might stumble upon while traveling, and you could drop down into the game-world at whim to check something out...

Imagine if New Vegas was a week's journey north from Goodsprings...

You'd prepare - hit the map and watch the date advance..maybe take a detour to a town your map displays on the way, or get pulled into a random encounter that opens a new quest.

I think it would be interesting to invite some serious vastness back into the mythos - the idea that the communities you're visiting really are very isolated from each other. Not just a jog down the road...

I was just thinking about the originals and the last time I played 'em - in spite of their limited audio visual presentation relative to New Vegas, they manage to communicate a larger sense of place and desolation - which may be one reason the franchise still exists even if that breed of mystery is absent from the contemporary contributions of Beth-Soft and Obsidian...

This would be awesome. Didn't Dragon Age have a mechanic like this? I can't remember, but there's no way you just walked everywhere. I would love more abstraction in Fallout.

-HD

I certainly would be. I suggested this last year with an in-depth post of how it could work, how it could be bypassed via fast travel, and how it could be walked through from A to B should the player choose to... And how the Special encounters could be less likely if fast traveled over, and more likely were they walked past in real time.

As I recall it described it as the PC would walk off in a given direction, as the view panned back and faded into the overland map screen. Random encounters would drop you down on some procedurally generated terrain (and /or ruined remnants of a town). Here you could have the fight or barter, or discovery and then fast travel from there or even walk out of the waste until you found the next town.

IIRC this was done in Arcanum... Fast ravel was the norm, but you could walk the way in real time. (I read that it would take an estimated 48 hrs. to walk from coast to coast in that game).

ya i noticed when i downloaded the game to my 360 that its only like 4 gigs?? and i think halo reach is 6 wtf why didnt they make the map bigger or add more stuff if they have more space i dont get it

Very hard to do dynamic terrain in a 3D world (at least with the current game engines and state of the art). Generating terrain in 2D is easy, it's just pixels and go / no-go areas. You can dynamically do underground dungeon type locations as a series of tubes/pipes that you just bolt together, but overland is harder.

That being said, I already wish that the world was larger. On the flip side, if points of interest are too far apart, the player loses interest. But I think both FO3 and NV could have easily just spread everything about about 50-80% more in the horizontal scale and it would have worked. My biggest complaint in FO3 was the 1/2 length subway and rail cars (real subway cars have more then 2-3 windows between the doors) and the whole compressed scale of the subway platforms. And looking at roads from the overhead view always made me shake my head with the 90 degree turns everywhere that would require freeway traffic to slow down to crawling speed to navigate such sharp turns.

But I think that if FO3 or NV blew out the map and made it 3x wider, you would see a lot more complaints of "this is too far to walk to get to the next quest point". So they erred on the side of making it slightly shoebox-like. And who really wants to deal with Goodsprings ending up 4x or 5x larger with dozens and dozens of houses that serve no purpose at all (and probably can't be entered). Even in GTA3:SA, which did a better job of representing the size and scale of a major downtown area, they still cheated it and only a tiny handful of locations were houses/buildings that you could enter (and the city was still compressed down to a few essential elements).

Sometimes I wonder what Bethesda games would look like if they'd continued refining Daggerfall's tack - the outrageously large randomly generated world. I feel like it was abandoned before it was fully explored...

This was done a few years ago with Doom3. Like you say, it was probably difficult... But these guys did it, and when I first saw this, I thought it was early official Bethesda video of FO3 in development.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewN2qBXQKXY

While this was early unfinished work for them... I'd be content with even this as the middle content between the hand built areas.

I feel opposite.. they didnt have enough places in this game lol. in FO3 there was much more places everywhere in sight sorta.. this has more small points and all the big points r right next to each other... and if anyone noticed. the very top part of the map.. about a 5th of the whole map isnt even used.. i got the explorer perk when i came to the lvl and if you noticed theres soooo much unused space...

What i never got about FO3 and FONV(now) is they never used there full potential... the maps couldve been much bigger and much more places and things to do.. not saying theres not alot to do now though lol..