I kinda get the feeling of Skyrim being small. Surely Bethesda succeded in making it feel bigger than Oblivion, but somehow its not big enough. The game still rock though, but it seems that everyone says it feels bigger, but if you think about it there is not really that far between Whiterun and the other "big" cities.

Anyone feel the same?

Yes, definitely.

I keep doing things like running off to catch a few butterflies or mine an ore vein or take a peek in a river to see what fish live there, and when I'm done, stop and open my map and try to get my bearings, and all of a sudden, I'm halfway to the next city in a direction 90 degrees away from where I was intending to go. Why does 30 seconds of travel equate to about 10% of the distance across Skyrim? My real-life county has more landmass than the whole province of Skyrim.

I honestly wouldn't mind seeing the world a little more "empty" if it was just large enough to feel like I'm actually traveling somewhere. Especially with the quick travel, there's no reason not to spread out the game a little more.

I think one of the reasons that cities look so damn close to each other on the map is because all of the icons are so over-sized. They cover up such large parts of the map they almost bump into each other as you move the camera around. And to make matters worse, once you have explored a city you now have multiple icons for each city on your map, covering up even more real estate. The lower edge of the southernmost icon over Windhelm is positioned unrealistically close to the upper edge of the northernmost icon over Riften. All of these icons make Windhelm and Riften appear to be much closer than they really are.

I understand why they did this: people who play on consoles need to be able to see these icons from way across the room. But on my computer monitor they look way, way, way too large.

Skyrim also felt small in that it wasn't adequately populated. How many NPCs do we have living in all the main towns and villages? Honestly, most holds looked like they only had two or three homes. And the factions had virtually no members either. For instance, the Companions only have 10, and the College of Winterhold has 16. By contrast, Morrowind's Fighters Guild and Mages Guild each had around 30 members, spread over several guild halls and other locations.

I think that future Elder Scrolls games will focus on populations in the cities and the like. I'd be just fine with a bunch more "filler" NPCs added to the game, just as long as they all have names, just so that we can have more populous cities.

One of the first things I did was change the "always run" setting to 0 in the skyrimprefs.ini. It makes a huge difference.

It feels way smaller than Washington DC, to be honest... o_o''

It feels smaller than Cyrodiil :/