Just a couple of fun stats. The Daggerfall map is made up of 1000*500 world cells (each world cell is the dimensions of a full city like Wayrest or Daggerfall). A world cell can either be a defined location (graveyard, town, city, inn, dungeon entrance, etc.) or random wilderness.
There are 15251 locations defined in MAPS.BSA (4232 of those are dungeons). Pretending for a moment that each location occupies a full world cell the size of Wayrest, just over 3% of the world map is actually populated by something other than wilderness. Considering most those locations are actually much smaller than a full world cell in dimension, and dungeons are mostly "undergound", the real figure is probably between 1-2%. That's pretty empty.
In the course of normal gameplay you could wander for a long time and never stumble on another point of interest. But it's so much more fun when you do.