2 sheogorath88 & hlvr


May be I'm too subjective, but it felt that Morrowind map was really enormous and Oblivion seemed very small... May be I was really confused with the running speed.
Then Bethesda'd better make the running speed in Skyrim much slower - it woul give the subjective sense of a really BIG world.
Personally I like to explore the world - and some of this feelings was drawn away with running for one minute along two forts and three Aylieyd ruins

I know what you mean, I also thought the world of Morrowind felt bigger compared to Oblivion.

To me the running speed in Skyrim looks even faster than what it was in Oblivion. At least it looks like that in the E3 demos I think.

I think the best solution is simply: make the world larger from the start, then spread things out more. I don't think it's good world design to make the world kinda small and then just "pump into" as much stuff as possible into that world.
Unfortunately, Bethesda didn't do that and there's really nothing to be done about that now.
Perhaps mods can reduce running speed if it's too fast...

I'm not too worried about running speed, but I agree having space between POIs is the best and in fact only real solution to this. Also, if you're aiming to make a place feel vast, just make it vast. Duh. A vast place isn't by definition a boring place, but I guess that's what they've been thinking over at Beth.

That's my impression too, may be because the speed attribute has been transformed ( possibly melted in stamina) and the displayed hero had maxed attributes.

That is a disappointment for console users - we have no mods and we can't even simply walk instead of running. Well we can, but it's like controlling speed more than enjoying the environment all the time.
The only option to suit all platforms is making the world labyrynthine as much as possible. But it would surely displease many players. You can't suit everyone
I'm still refering to F3 map however - perfect balance of the places of interest and just wastes to go and explore IMO.

I want big. Skyrim looks awesome but if I can from one side to the other in 10 minutes than exploration will svck.

Really? I thought it looked a bit slower. Well, faster than lvl 1 speed, much slower than maximum speed. This is probably the same speed throughout due to no skill for it, and even if it's not, for demo purposes his stats were pretty maxed anyway, so it's probably high.

I think they are going for best design to size ratio. Next Gen Console will be able to satisfy our lusts for greater sized maps with mass amounts of detail

I was happy with OB size and will be happy with SR(which should feel bigger). I like the journey myself, but I don't like it that much. I would just end up using non horse/foot travel methods.

I wouldn't worry too much about the size of Skyrim. As others have said, the geographical features will, in my opinion, make the world feel a lot bigger than both Morrowind and Oblivon. Couple that with the fact that dungeons actually look like they're worth exploring now instead of being generic tunnels to fight enemies in, and the world should feel huge.

I'm sure new lands mods will start popping up in no time anyway,

Yeah, it would be bad for console users in that regard...
But as others have said... speed attribute is out now. The character we saw in the demo was level 34. We actually have no idea how speed works now, but I still think it looked pretty fast.
I kind of agree with Dragonbone that it looked a lot faster than lvl 1 speed in Oblivion, but slower than maximum speed in Oblivion. To me it kind of looked like (translated into attributes) a speed of 75 when the character ran.
Remember that we can sprint now as well.

Running speed is not really a solution though, far from.
If the world is cramped up, then it will be cramped up, unfortunately :/
Slower running speed can help a little, but it can at the same time make it feel boring and tedious to run around so slowly...


I wouldn't say Red Dead Redemption did the best job ever, but I think they did still a great job with the world size (and the detail in it) and how it worked for being on console.
I think it depends a lot on how the developers use the hardware...
Current hardware can do a lot still. I mean... look at Crysis 2 on the consoles. Next gen consoles would surely help a lot though, indeed.

I don't think it was hardware that made Bethesda choose the same world size as before for Skyrim. My guess it was that Bethesda thought it was simply good/big enough.

I would surely appreciate a bigger world size with the same level of detail. But I'm also of the opinion that if they could, they would have made it bigger. There were many complaints after Oblivion being repetitive, so they focused on variation this time. For me a world to explore would be something like all the wow continents put together. That's a size where mounts really make a difference.

Last time I checked Skyrim was a lot more hilly than Cyrodiil, and is therefore more likely to be more labyrinthy than Oblivion. So it will (hopefully) be like combining the sense of scale you got in Morrowind and the feeling of a huge land, with the size of Oblivion, making it feel even bigger than Morrowind .

Nope, its only 4x4 to make it simpler for "casual" players.

Yup, and I think that's our biggest hope for the world not feeling small or cramped up. There's really nothing we can do atm, other than hoping Bethesda has done some smart level design so the world feel bigger and less cramped up.

Considering that Todd has stated many times himself that the world feels bigger, I feel there are pretty good chances for that hope to at least partly come true.

That clearly isn't the reason far having the world the same size as oblivion

From the http://www.imperial-library.info/content/elder-scrolls-series: "Starting off in Daggerfall can overwhelm the senses. No other game has such a huge world to explore. Travel around a land mass twice the size of Great Britain . . ."

Based on the http://www.imperial-library.info/sites/default/files/gallery_files/minibigmaproadslore31gv.jpg, Skyrim's "real" size around 250 miles North to South, and more than twice that from East to West (average is roughly 600 miles wide).

This is one of the main reasons why the default Timescale is 30:1 . . . . so that it takes like 1 or 2 game hours to walk from one city to the next. [With a 1:1 Timescale, you could cover the distance in a couple of minutes.]
For me, a 30 Timescale is way too fast . . . I don't like the way it makes the days race by [24 game hours = 48 real minutes], so I generally set mine at 8 [24 game hours = 3 real hours].

Morrowind and Oblivion never felt realistically large enough for me. To keep a game world interesting, it needs to be scaled down a bunch, but turning a 250 x 600 mile land mass into a 4 x 4 land mass is way too much. If you reduced the land mass by a factor of 30 (to match the Timescale), you would end up with roughly an 8 x 20 mile game map . . . which is 10 times bigger than what we will be getting [4*4=16; 8*20=160 square miles].

True enough - I am sure the dev team size also has something to say about the end product too. I am just thinking about the size of the dungeons as they are worried we are going to get lost in them - Clairvoyence (SP??) anyone

level up acrobatics then =D
EDIT:your post makes sense if you're new to the game of course

...I don't think people remember exactly how massive Oblivion was, because of the way the game pretty much forced you to use fast-travel if you wanted to get any quests done within a reasonable time frame. It was ~ four times larger than Morrowind, if I remember.

I blame the Fighter's guild for that atrocity in game design... Bouncing between the four corners of the game every quest or two:

Chorrol to Cheydinhal, then to Anvil, then to Chorrol to go to Skingrad and back to Chorrol, then to Leyawin and back to Chorrol, then to Anvil, then to Cheydinhall to Leyawin and back to Cheydinhall, then to Chorrol to Bravil and back to Chorrol to Leyawin and back to Chorrol, then to Anvil, then to Cheydinhall to Bravil and back to Cheydinhall, then to Chorrol to Leyawin and back to Chorrol, then to Cheydinhall, then to Anvil to Bravil and back to Anvil, then to Chorrol to Leyawinn then back to Chorral and back to Leyawin and back to Chorrol and back to Leyawinn and back to Chorrol. Is it any wonder they had poor recruitment, if you had to run cross-country just to sign up, and continue to do so to get any jobs? And no wonder they got no contracts

I was kind of disappointed to hear of Skyrim's size also. I was hoping for something twice as large. But...my hopes will be in the fact that the landscape is filled with plenty of diagonal areas like valleys and mountains with caves or dungeons. The most disappointing area will likely be the tundra. When I think of tundra, especially filled with migrating giants and mammoths, I think of miles and miles of grasslands. I wish the tundra was at least 4X4 miles by itself!

I hope the tundra doesn't take up the entire center of the map so we can see all "4 sides" of Skyrim.

I thought Cyrodiil was small, now Skyrim will feel small as well given the characters speed seen in the demo and the mountains as barriers. This game should have had climbing.

Great way of putting it.

I would never compare those games to a TES game, they are not even in the same league, RDR was the best out of those listed, and it only gave me around 72 hrs game play b4 becoming monotonous, Your choices are severely limited unless all you want to do is chase outlaws for the price on there head, or hunt buffalo/break horses after finishing all the quests, the world was wide open, but filled with spawn points, not random encounters, you couldnt just enter any bldg, you couldnt create a character, or just pick up almost anything you came across, it was a weak comparison, but it was fun for the 72 hrs I was willing to put into it,....... the other 2 bored me to death, couldnt be bothered to play them for more then 2 days,........... point is, larger does not mean better, it just means larger,.... and in the real world as you put it, towns usually did start out only a couple miles apart in lots of areas depending on the amount of resources in a given area, usually.