Hi,

Just wondering, would you be happy with a less dense/detailed gameworld if it was, say 20X as big, more 'realistic' distances with caves/dungeons/cities further apart?.
Do you think it would be more immersive, or would it have the 'opposite' effect?. Personally i kind of like the idea of such a design, but i would probably would be boring for most people.

Oblivion was far too dense for me, so I'm more on the realistic side. Morrowind had a pretty good balance.

I prefer a balance, I hate to leave a cave and see a ruin right in front of me. However I dont want to have to travel for 20 minutes to find a ruin.

Yes, I would like much larger map at any cost. Some people would say a world like that is "empty", but I don't like going form town to town in 2 minutes either. There are a lot of games with cramped worlds where every 10 meters something happens.

Morrowind was smaller than Oblivion and probably similar location density. It was just made in a way that hid this from the player (part of that was due to the low draw distance).

If it was my choice, I'd rather make Skyrim a lot bigger, but then again, that does make it harder to do well-designed environments, and I really like how much more stylistic and unique Skyrim looks compared to Oblivion. Just walking through, you can tell effort was put into the handcrafted world.

If Bethesda keeps expanding it's workforce, maybe next game can be 8 by 8 miles instead of 4 by 4. Or at least 6 by 6.

Skyrim is like... 41 square kilometers. Somewhat around that, like Oblivion.
Fallout 3 was like... 36 square kilometers, and Morrowind 25 square kilometers.

Red Dead Redemption is around 72 square kilometers I think (a really really great western RPG with lots of locations and stuff to do).
Far Cry 2 is around 50 square kilometers I think (open world FPS-game).
Just Cause is 1036 square kilometers (a really huge, beautiful world).


I'm pretty disappointed that Skyrim's world is "only" around 41 square kilometers and not bigger at all compared to Oblivion.

With 150 dungeons and several hundred "points of interest" I fear that the world might feel cramped up, like Oblivion... where you could stumble upon some dungeon every 30 second or so. That kills immersion for me. Instead of being this real world, it feels like a fake world that the developers have just "pumped into" as much stuff as possible.
Like... 70-90 square kilometers would be ideal to me, because then we can have bigger distances between all the dungeons and etc. It would make things seem more realistic and not as cramped up, yet still not so big that it gets annoying or tedious to walk around all the time. It would also allow mountains to feel more big and valleys to feel vast, as well as cities to be larger if needed.

I would happily substitute density for size but never detail for size.

yeah it would be unrealistic in terms of development time for a world 20x as big and just as detailed as it is now, maybe a way around would be an to gradually reduce detail as you move away from a city/village an have 'pockets' of detail around points of interests.

How big was Fo3? The size of that game was perfect.

I would prefer it to be larger with things more spread out. I love the thought of getting lost and since I won't be using the god-awful sat-map ever I'm sure I'll get the opportunity to. For me, bigger is better, and does not necessarily mean less detailed, one just has to work harder to get the same level of detail. I think doubling the km would do it for me, that'd be a good balance.

I'm so sad that thy decided to create skyrim at the same size of oblivion, i was hoping for a game that is about twice the size of oblivion.
I prefer to travel further to see dungeons or ruins, to feel that i need to use the traveling system or a horse in order to reach one place or another.
If it will be on the expense of density i will welcome this trade off.
I am sure that modders will be able to enlarge the explorable areas by adding areas.

I believe your numbers are way off, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Far Cry 2 are around 16-22 square km. Not sure about Skyrim or RDR but I'd say your off on those too. Your probably correct about Just Cause 2.

I want Daggerfall-sized worlds back!

Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim look nice and have lots of detail, but they're far too small. I want to feel like i'm actually in a real world, and that it would take days for me to travel between cities.

A game with a world the size of Daggerfall, but with the detail of it's successors would, for me, be the ultimate TES game.

I think everything will be just fine

I compared several different sources from the Internet and then came to a conclusion for each game. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to show it by showing up several different and credible sources for every single game.

I don't really care though; Skyrim is about 41 square kilometers (16 square miles) as Oblivion was. That's well-known throughout the entire Internet (pretty much, lol) and has been stated in magazines for when Oblivion came out.

Edit: I was wrong about Just Cause 2 size. It wasn't 400 square kilometers. It was 400 square miles, which is 1036 square kilometers.

I was hoping for the same well at least they did added more dungeons and probably more quests and more interesting stuff so it should feel bigger i mean just cause 2 has probably the largest open world i know in a game and after you finish the game you dun have much stuff to do except to find the hatch from Lost

What?
Morrowind was much bigger than Oblivion (I do not count dungeons). You travel from Seyda Neen to Balmora for roughly 20 minutes. You travel from IC to Skingrad in roughly 15. And you can clearly see on the game map that Skingrad is much farther from the IC than Balmora from Seyda Neen.

They are making the game world smaller with every game. Fallout 3 was a good hand-crafted world though.

Nope, sorry... Oblivion had a bigger gameworld.

Maybe you're not taking runspeed into consideration with your crude estimate of how long it takes to travel between certain locations? :confused:

Sorry, but you're wrong. The running speed in Morrowind was much slower and it was also a huge labyrinth of small "hill-mountains" everywhere. It was a lot smaller, but felt bigger.

You have to remember that Skyrim will be a lot like Norway in real life. Because of all the mountains it will slower to move from place to place. Also due to the mountains, there will be more surface then Oblivion. Same space, but more ground you can cover.

The tundra landscape would work amazingly with a bigger game world. I would love to get the feeling of desolation in the game world however it would have to be varied enough to prevent the player from getting bored travelling through it. However I don't see myself wanting to travel through a snowy environment for too long because the possible variation isn't great. They will have experimented with the balance of size to content ratios and hopefully they have learnt from the successes and mistakes in both Morrowind and Oblivion.

Sorry I made a mistake you are correct, its been long since I looked it up. I thought Oblivion said 16 square km but apparently its miles like you said.

No, it wasn't.

And even factoring in the routes you have to take to get their and runspeed, that can't be accurate. I've actually TIMED myself getting to Skingrad from the IC at level 1 and it was about 5 minutes. Haven't timed Balmora but it's probably a bit less than twice as long.

Actually it wasn't, it felt that way due to better topography.

I would like a TES as big as Just Cause 2, however big that be.

Except Norway is "kind of" vaster. And Skyrim should feel like that too.