Hello folks! It's been a long time since I last came to these boards Just wanna share some insights I have regarding map design
When I played Skyrim, I keep feeling that the map is "all over the place", and somewhat meaningless. By that I mean, I never really cared about how the map looks like, the only time I use it is to do fast travel. If I'm going to a location that I haven't been to, I just fast travel to the nearest location that I have been to, mark the destination on the map, and walk towards it. Call me lazy but I did the same amount of fast travel in Oblivion as well.
The point is, Skyrim's map is lack of flow. The map has obstacles and mountains, sure, but they are not placed in a way that promotes flow of gameplay, and gameplay itself doesn't implement a flow either.
Let's consider Oblivion's map. In the center of the map, there's the imperial city, and it radiates several roads out to the rest of the map towards the other major cities. In addition, there's also a circular beltline road surrounding the lake where imperial city is in. Player begins in imperial city, and the main mission takes player to different cities and every once in a while takes player back to imperial city. The imperial city serves as a "hub" where the player frequently visits to conduct business (buy/sell), and the game ending also happens here. Though other cities are very well fleshed out, imperial city remains the center of the game, and it results in an interesting flow: hub and spoke. When traveling, player naturally navigates based on this flow. For example, if you want to go from Chorrol to Bruma, you follow the road from Chorrol to imperial city, and then take the northbound road to Bruma. It makes navigation easy and doesn't encourage fast travel.
Now let's consider Morrowind's map. As opposed to Oblivion's hub-and-spoke flow, Morrowind has a circular flow. The center of the map is the dangerous area where all the monsters show up, and the shores around Vvardenfell are peaceful and easy to navigate. So players naturally progresses around the map in a circular motion, with occasional visits to the central region for missions and ruins.
You can see there's a similarity between Oblivion and Morrowind's map design: they both "direct" player's navigation in a non-linear but easy-to-do manner. Instead of going a boring straight line from point A to point B, in Oblivion player visit the hub (imperial city) first and then go to the other city, and in Morrowind player travels in a big circle. This actually makes the map feel bigger than it really is.
But with Skyrim, which has the biggest map among all three games, there's no such flow that naturally directs the player. "Better" yet, there's no indication of roads on the map, which makes it virtually useless for navigation, so player has to rely on compass marker, which results in a straight line navigation (player keeps the marker in the center of the compass, and keep walking towards it), boring and unmemorable. If player doesn't want to abuse fast travel, there's really no fun in navigation. There's no main roads to follow and I don't remember seeing any road signs (maybe I'm wrong). The whole game is pretty much all about going from point A straight to point B straight to point C and D and so on.
TLDR: morrowind and oblivion have good flow and skyrim doesn't have any.