Ok AGAIN... folks.. the last 2-3 times they were asked how big game x was and compared it to game y they ment the entire game NOT the map.

As in main quest side quests .. in simple terms if you played ob 150 hours you likely will play skyrim that long too as the content is about the same..

But the map may be bigger or smaller then ob.. most likely bigger as making a mountain as tall as the one they talk about wouldnt work very well in an ob sized map.. spoecialy as its only a tiny part of the skyrim map. They have to cram a giant mountain AND an even bigger canyon.. some grand forests and tundra and snow and blah blah blah AND 5 great cities and a bunch of towns... and some lakes and ruins and dragons and mamoths and and and..

Until they say skyrim is x square miles they arnt talking about a ,map. - unkown forum user (these arent my words but i think he said it best)

this is just wishful thinking imo...

1. Morrowind was a lot smaller than Oblivion, yet it didn't feel like it. Proper level design...

2. Cyrodil was bigger than Skyrim on the map I believe. Now we can at least get a more believable scale map.

3. I don't think this includes going up or down.

The word of the day is Verticality.


And it makes ALL the difference.

Bigger doesn't always mean better. Sometimes it means much less of the world is explored. I'm not going to to go trotting around in miles of forest just because I haven't been there before.

1) It wasn't proper level design.... It was the fact that the draw distance of the game was so short with the fog and the fact that you moved at a snail's pace, which really bugged me.

2) Yes, Cyrodiil is one of the biggest provinces, if not the biggest.

3) Not sure what you mean, but Skyrim will have much more Z axis work going on.

Didn't see it that way.
But yeah, I agree that that 7000 steps mountain definitely doesn't take up half of that game space, and we all know that making mountain TOO verticanl isn't better, so I'm sure the overall map size is actually bigger.

still, EVEN if it was Oblivion-sized, with all that variety announced, I think it's gonna feel a lot bigger

Why Morrowind felt bigger.

Morrowind (point) A->C->D->E->F->G->B
Oblivion A->B

I will haha. In a Game by Bethesda. The long ass forest in the middle of the map that sheds no importance will most likely be one of the most interesting areas in the game.

Unless the sides of mountains end up riddled with caves and dungeons, I really don't see that extra technical bit of world-space bringing anything more to the table.

If it is as big as Oblivion, with the dence content of Morrowind, there won't be any wilderness left to explore.

Well they are... So it does.

Morrowind was technically smaller, so Oblivion sized map with Morrowind amoutn of content would be less dense than Morrowind, meaning more wilderness than Morrowind.

"They are", as in, "It's confirmed"?

Honestly packing in dungeons on the sides of mountains would be worse than Oblivion's dungeons every 100ft philosophy. At least in the case of Oblivion, by ignoring compass blips you could stroll by dungeons without noticing. I really don't want to walk up to the base of a mountain and pick off a dozen different caves.

Beyond that, the height of land features doesn't really add much in the way of navigable, interactive terrain. Unless they make every mountain surmountable, or with handy foot paths and stairs all around them, the fact that technically there exists 300 feet of terrain instead of 100 flat doesn't mean much.

I can't imagine it can be any bigger; its not like the xbox got more ram from oblivions' release till now. A maximum size of a cell would probably still be the same.

Maybe even less; if it means loading better meshes and textures than oblivion.

This means because of steep mountain ranges there can be more content on the surface that seem to have the same area size from the bird's eye view.

totally off topic but i wonder how big the free mod nehrim is in comparison to oblivion.

Because that seems really big but that could be because it's a network fast travel system (teleport stones) with walking the rest of the way.

O yeah and if the devs added a network system and a hardcoe mod were insta travel is disabled the game will seem a hell of a lot bigger.

Daggerfall was big but the lands were not so entertaining.
Morrowind was small but the land was amazing.
Oblivion was bigger than Morrowind and smaller than Daggerfall,and the land was SO DAMN BORING...-_-;;;
I wouldn't mind Skyrim being smaller if it has a unique landscape.(which I don't really expect but see a chance)

Im the one quoted and ill quote myself as well from a simular topic...

Ok to get an idea how big skyrim is remember how big chorral was... now remember chorral the town had buildings that were ALL far larger inside then outside AND that the town itself was much larger inside then out...

Now look at it on the map... notice how huge it is on the map? Now look at the skyrim map.. and note the towns are those little itty bitty dots.... And note those towns are open and as such to scale AND the buildings are also likely to scale also unlike ob.... now how big does the skyrim map need to be to make it look like it does compared to the ob map?

It looks like on the Skyrim map the country is about 90 x 50 squares with Riften, for example, taking up 3x3 squares (which of course it might no completely fill). Is each square a cell? How does that compare?

Edit.

Taking Riften to be the rough equivalent to Kvatch, I come up with the following. Kvatch was about 1/25th of the width of the Oblivion map. If we multiply the width of Riften by 25 we get 75 squares. Since the Skyrim map is aprox. 90 squares wide, it means the game could be about 1.2 times proportionately bigger.

Skyrim seems bigger.

I once had a very long argument with a high-school teacher about whether Asia or Antarctica had greater surface area, on account of verticality.

It is CERTAINLY important.

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c307/ColtoColto/Oblivion_vs_skyrim.png

Keep in mind that a lot of that surface area in Skyrim should assumed to be part of impassable mountains, meaning a lot of dead space. With that said, it will still seem bigger because of the many nooks and crannies to place content and the obscured field of vision, regardless of how big the map actually is (unless it's significantly smaller than Cyrodiil)

No, because they already said that everywhere that is visible is traversable. They're not going to block you off from mountains.