Alot of people saying "I'd prefer content instead of size", but, what about alot of content and huge size?
Bethesda had time to do this, but whatever, the map looks nice the way it is now, Oblivion wasn't that big and it took some time (alot) to explore ALL the locations, since I've never cared to explore everything asap, for me things have their time and the game needs to be appreciated with caution, otherwise you'll get into all locations before even completing like 50% of the game.

That's one of the things I'm excited for in Skyrim. It's all hand made. That is unlike Oblivion which reused dungeons and interiors in general repeatedly.

I worked a lot with the Oblivion construction set and it became obvious there how often things truly got reused. But it also got obvious that they built a masterpiece. Especially when I started getting into quest design and things like that.

It is bigger, the problem is your only measuring it from the top down. If you measure it and from every aspect you will find Skyrim is WAY bigger than Morrowind.

Each piece of art has much higher resolution textures. It took a few days to make a character for morrowind, current gen characters take about 2 months to make now. Everything takes longer to create due to normal map, diffuse, specular, glow maps... and much greater detail polygons on the meshes.

Very little voice acting in Morrowind, vs 70 voice actors and every line spoken in Skyrim.

Animations were crude before, and combat didn't even really work, it was turn based. Now animations are motion captured and have physics. Everything is better.

150 dungeons.... add that to the sq miles and I'm sure it's comparable to any older ES game and its going to be comparable.

Sound effects are fabulous and music is RICH. Your not measuring the richness this game has. Morrowind has horrible sound effects. It's a joke. I swear people remember it for something it really isn't. Yeah Doom was the greatest shooter ever in my mind, but if I go look at it now I vomit at the 256 color pallete and square pixels and low resolution. What good is miles of space to explore when its inhabited by fugly characters that don't even have voice acting, and combat doesn't even really connect or work?

And if you really want to compare size... the MW install folder will be TINY compared to the Skyrim install. That is the true measurement of size, how many models, sound fx, textures and content is how to properly measure something not by how big the map is. Skyrim will easily be 10x bigger than Morrowind if you measure the content.

Even if it is slightly smaller, didn't they say it would be more detailed?

Haha! that would be a long time and I would be an old man by the time it came out and probably suffering from elderscrolls withdrawl from now being able to play the next masterpiece in so long.

Another reference to the size if you look at the world map it is actual size, just rendered with lesser quality than the up close real deal it's true! If you watch the video you will notice it takes him 6.5-7 seconds to get across that bridge just north of riverwood.

If you stretch that bridge across the landmass it would probably go across 150-200+ times or so so 6.5-7x 150-200 and that's on a horse granted it isn't running but it's trot is faster than the normal foot running ( I am not talking about sprinting I am talking about when you hold your anolog all the way forward you character runs) so take that info and it would take you 16 minutes 15 seconds to about 23 or so minutes to trot from one end to the other in a straight line. Now this isn't taking the natural lakes/rivers and mountains you would have to cross so you can get the big picture. Now if your horse ran at full speed you could probably make it in like 10-15 minutes. Still this isn't taking into account all the mountains and rivers etc. So yeah it should give us plenty of space to run around in. I'm pretty sure we have 300+ hours in content ahead of us to deal with with just 1 play through and that's if you probably go quick and rush ever single side quest and main quest.

From my experience if you take everything with strides and enjoy every ounce of the game and not run from place to place the game can take you 2-5x longer just because you're spending more time appreciating the game.

In the end you can make multiple choices that have different effects + play different races. So all and all you probably have at least 500 hours ahead if you're a serious elder scrolls gamer and pour everything you got into it. I have over 1000 hours played in oblivion and it's probably a lot less content lol. I can see skyrim keeping people busy all the way up to tes 6 I can bet my life on that one.

This. They could assign a team to work for the TES VI content for the whole 4 or 5 years, it's not like they have to use the same team for Fallout and TES because that narrows it down to 2 years and 2 years is indeed a short time. I thought Bethesda was one of the big companies, can't they afford 2 separate teams?

You got to understand it's not like game designers just flip a switch and BAM everything looks more realistic compared to older games it takes a greater deal of time and effort to put together better looking games. So even though they had like 20 compared to the 100 now it was probably A LOT less time consuming. You also don't take the game world size for the amount of effort that was put in.... The way the game Looks isn't everything there is to the game.... They have to edit how your body moves when you run and how it walks and how it goes from walking to running and how you do things like crouch and get on horses and even how you swing your weapon to make it look as realistic as possible.

They have 70 voice actors and they have to add these voices to over 1000 npcs. They hand crafted EVERYTHING in skyrim. They literally went area to area and hand crafted it. They didn't just randomize things and copy paste 12 different dungeons into 150. They went in there and put the pieces together differently for most of them I mean I wouldn't doubt if you find a few that are similar but if you take oblivion dungeons and put them side to side more than half of them had mostly the same layout with 3-4 different rooms and some of them were the exact same.

They have to edit better water effects they have to edit every single little detail about the game.

You can't assume going from 20 people to 100 will make the game 5x easier and 5x more content.

Well its going to be smaller than Oblivion , but although Oblivion was bigger it felt empty so bigger doesn't always means better, just look at Just Cause 2's world is 400 squared miles but there isn't much to do in it.

Morrowind map size = ~ 10 square miles.
Oblivion map size = ~ 16 square miles.

Morrowind, no fast travel and you had to walk everywhere.
Oblivion has fast travel.

You can ignore this as well, much like a creationist, facts don't seem to matter much.

And the running speed is lower in Morrowind, in Oblivion I felt sorry for the deer I was like Speedy Gonzales

Thinking about it, I don't really honestly care that much. I'll measure content by how long I play it for. Modern shooter, four pound an hour without multiplayer, Skyrim I reckon will cost me, in the long run, about three or four pence an hour. That's what I call value for money.

A lot of people are saying that Morrowind's size is smaller than Oblivion and although that could be true, remember folks that Morrowind takes place only in the island of Vvardenfell, had the devs done the "real" Morrowind map it would have surpass the Oblivion game. Certainly, Morrowind is the "oddball" of the ES series like Todd said. It's the only Tamriel province so far that Bethesda did not made completely. Damn it!