How about gimmicky [censored] like 150+ hand-crafted dungeons, extensive and unique NPC dialogue, numerous NPC activities, factions, thousands of items, tons of enemy types with unique animations, etc.?

It's relatively easy for the ARMA 2 team to make a big-ass landscape and populate it with basically one enemy type and relatively few vehicles. Skyrim will have a lot more detail poured into it, in areas other than the landscape. Frankly I think 16 square miles is enough, for now, and if they make their team bigger for Fallout 4 and TES6 then maybe they'll get bigger areas, but for now, I'd prefer quality over quantity, because when you get down to brass tacks that's what it's going to come down to, no matter how big the budget is.

But, on that note, not many are asking for a world as large as ARMA's. There is no loss in content, and there is an increase in quality. Small, crowded worlds are awkward. Dungeons every fifty feet, no sense of real wilderness, no sense of real scope. Adding in "filler" (which I would argue isn't really filler) is a good idea. Travel between towns is more of a journey, horses might actually matter, fast travel becomes a more worthwhile alternative and is valuable for greater reasons than just, "I didn't feel like doing that thing."

Ideally, the end result is a greater emphasis on survival, with wilderness treks requiring preparation and offering real danger. Alchemy becomes more important as a central feature instead of just a money maker and providing minor buffs. Hunting becomes more valuable and necessary. Caves and dungeons offer shelter instead of just acting as loot dens.

Honestly, this is a bigger priority for me, personally, than more quests. Real emergent gameplay, similar to STALKER's world/NPC/monster configuration, but more detailed and on a larger scale.

I agree about the for now part. i'm happy with Skyrim's size, and I think it will feel larger than Oblivion due to the way it's designed.

For future TES games though, i'd definitely like to see them up the scale by a minimum of x2. For me, that's easily one of the best things they could do to improve the series. Again, making a larger world really wouldn't be that time consuming once you find the right balance between random generation and hand-crafted design.

I would love a huge open world, in fact, I think Skyrim will deliver, especially with the fact that the graphics look better, and there are (wait for it...)
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DRAGONS! It makes it worth travelling if you ask me, but i'm doing that in Oblivion at the moment. It's fun, except I would like a few more enemies between towns (went all the way to Anvil from like, Imperial City, took me about 20-30 minutes, like 5 enemies tops.) Dragons will give me more than what I ask for, in fact, i'll probably be begging for this: "Please, don't let another dragon come across my- WHAT FRIEKIN' LUCK?! Another dragon!" XD

i want a small daggerfall. oblivion had a new cave or fort on my compass every few seconds, whats wrong with adding some space between them? it could add great views in the wilderness, serene groves, great expanses of open fields, great forrests, and towering mountains. quality over quantity, and haveing everything smushed together really take quality away. would you agree? if not im not talking to you :teehee: .

It'd just be an ungodly amount of work :shrug:....

A small world can be done. To fill it up with content? That won't be possible for years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGMs7Iem3Vg

I dunno... I think that a game with ~lets say a really really large game with 28 towns and 7 major cities... (that's big), but the bulk of the work could be started with city-engine or something like it, then customized.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjWQWlbB7r4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXVIuoPlMpY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg9twowhxks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZFaoF5zdq4

**And consider: Some of the cities themselves could even be DLC, where the game ships with some of them not even begun. From a marketing standpoint, some quests could involve traveling to cities that can't be reached until the DLC ships (and you install the city).

Wasn't the Pit DLC? in Fallout 3 such that you fast-traveled there? (Its a guess, because I've never played it.)
The reason I ask, is that most would want to be able to walk from one city to the next.

The final GOTY (dlc bundled game) could be vast. :shrug:

I wouldn't mind at all to see prodedural terrain, since I think they can do that very well with modern technology, but I always prefer my cities and towns and dungeons to have that handbuilt creative touch. Unimportant NPCs can also be randomly generated if they can get them to work as well as handmade ones in terms of schedules and jobs and all that.

You must have been walking. I timed it and it took 20 minutes almost exactly to run (with 30 athletics, level 1) from Cheydinhal to Anvil (greatest distance between any towns on the map if I'm not mistaken, at least as the crow flies).

Daggerfall map was 487000 square miles.
That's 30437,5 times bigger than Oblivion!
Bigger than it? It'd take hours to travel across it...
Exploring it would be impossible. Even in a lifetime.


Oblivion was 16 square miles.
I think that 35 square miles is OK...

Where do you people keep coming up with these false numbers?

Daggerfall was 62,394 sq miles.
http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/large-video-game-worlds2.jpg

How about a literal galaxy of life-sized worlds?
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php

Well, actually....

http://www.gamesas.com/eng/games/games_daggerfall.html
"Travel around a land mass twice the size of Great Britain"

since great britain is 88,744.8 sq miles.
then we're both wrong!!!
it's actually 160000 sq miles!

I always thought it'd be interesting to play a TES game at a 1:1 scale.

Tough to do with the modern amounts of detail.

I'd agree that in the future a larger world would be nice, but for now I'm quite happy with the world size and I think it's pointless to complain about it. Also, if Arwen only had 45 minutes to play a game in a given day I think she'd see why people prefer fast travel to walking everywhere.

Conflicting data.

Daggerfall featured a massive true 3D world the size of Great Britain,
http://elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/

Interesting yes, but for actual gameplay you would want to scale it down a bit...just make sure the terrain is actually scaled to the time, otherwise you'll end up running through a major nation in a single game day.

Lets take LoTR for an example since it's got an at least loosely agreed upon real size and is a noteworthy setting of long journeys. Running from the West Coast of the far East of the "world anyone cares about" is well in excess of ~1000 miles which would take ~100 days to cross at a theoretical 10 miles an hour of constant running in a straight line. Yes, nearly 1/3 of a year to get from one side of the map to the other. That's a bit much, but with that much area even if you cut it down to the TES 1:30 standard it's still a hilarious several hundred actual mile trip...but it might actually be playable now.