Well you didn't see Cyrodiil in Arena- only a part of the Imperial City- and Vvardenfell was just a big volcanic island with a few randomly generated locations. So, as far as Vvardenfell goes, no. But I doubt many people cared that Vvardenfell wasn't really just a volcanic wasteland. A game in Hammerfell or High Rock would be the first time another game actually re-visited the locations seen in a previous game. A game in Morrowind wouldn't have this problem with Vvardenfell because that's been covered in ash.

Why would the cities be in seperate cells?

That's the way they've done it, starting with Tribunal, it was like that for every city in Oblivion. The reason is simply to cut down on the amount of stuff the game has to load at one time. If the city and the general gameworld are connected in the same type of cell like they were in Morrowind then the game has to load everything in the countryside and everything in the city. Tribunal was the first thing to make cities into 'interior' cells, that is, cells that aren't part of the general landscape (that's why when you add Tribunal as an expansion your load screens switched from saying "Loading Exterior"/"Loading Interior" to "Loading Area", that way not to confuse you by loading an 'interior cell' that is for all intents and purposes 'outside').

Oblivion improved upon Tribunal's system but kept the general idea. Cities are still separate cells from the general landscape (hence why they're walled off and can only be accessed by going through a door) - note how if you manage to jump over a city wall in Oblivion you'll find what's on the other side not quite what you expected. Oblivion made mock-exterior landscapes so that from inside the city it looks like you can still see the countryside when in fact that countryside is completely desolate and not the same countryside you'll enter into if you leave through the gate (ie, if you shoot an arrow over the city wall you couldn't go through the gate and pick it back up).

It allows the devs to make the cities much larger and much more intricate and detailed without killing your computer since the only thing your computer has to load is the city and not the entire gameworld/countryside. Note that each district of the Imperial City is also its own cell for this same reason.

Don't forget Bloodmoon, now.

Secondly, I haven't played Tribunal, yet, so correct me if I'm wrong. Wasn't Mournhold just made an interior cell because they didn't want to create the mainland?

Besides, the huge walls presented in Oblivion look retarded. Open Cities, much?

Well, they can't scrap any parts of it because that will call up the canon people. Anyway, it's probably going to take place hundreds of years into the future so there can be completely new NPCs and cities could be completely different than how they were.

Bloodmoon isn't really relevant, its towns weren't separate cells and you could levitate there.

I agree that every city being walled in looks odd and inorganic (I mean seriously, there should at least be a handful of lower class houses outside the city walls if nothing else). Its just a trade-off, and I happen to agree that its a good trade-off as having large, detailed cities is a very good thing. A compromise might be to somehow make an invisible transition from one cell to the other as opposed to the doors, that way you're just walking along, you have a load screen, and then you continue walking up to the city (as opposed to going through a gate) - this would require alot more work at creating the mock-environments though so that it looks realistic, I also don't think it could be done on the Oblivion engine.

Yes, that is why it was an interior cell, but it also set the precedent for Oblivion. Morrowind's engine had no accommodation for creating mock-exterior cells like Oblivion's does. With Oblivion, you can make a copy of the landscape and use it as a model to put your city in - it'll be separate from the general gameworld, but it'll look like part of it - it can do this because it has more than one exterior terrain map. Morrowind however only had one exterior terrain map, so if you wanted something outside you had to put it in the same exterior cell set as the rest of the island - they got around this with Mournhold by adding a feature that made the sky texture visible from interior cells. This is where Oblivion improved upon Morrowind; if you jump over the wall in Cheydihall you'll land on terrain, it'll just be barren terrain that's a filler, if you jump over the wall in Mournhold you fall into a void.

The reason I brought up Mournhold is because that's when they first banned levitation to stop you from flying over the wall and discovering their trick, they carried that idea over into Oblivion.

The events of The Infernal City guarantee the general atmosphere is going to be rather changed.

I no nothing about large game desighn, so please stop me if i'm wrong, but couldn't you take each gridded cell in oblivion and split it into 6 squares? then your squre and every squre touching it would be loaded, and so loading bars would be much shorter.

I disagree entirely with the suggestion that unreachable locations would be a positive step.

It depends on how well they'd be implemented.

I'm rather divided on the issue. On the one hand it would make the cities feel much more expansive, on the other I was annoyed just in the fact that I couldn't access all the areas of the Kvatch ruins.

Actually, that's 9 squares: 3X3, with your character in the middle. Besides, I think they already load a much bigger array (5X5 or 7X7), but only the closest ones are rendered at full detail. In the outdoors, that's more than adequate. In a city, with dozens of buildings, over a dozen NPCs, and lots of assorted static objects strewn about the place, it's a Frame Rate killer. The answer was to cut out any that weren't "relevant": those on the other side of that big wall....

Perhaps a better answer would be to have the cities a bit more "spread out" into more cells, so you don't have as much in the nearby cells at one time. That would also alleviate the "compacted" feeling of Oblivion's cities, where everything was pressed right up against everything else, and the "other side of town" was about 50 yards away.

I really missed Levitation in Oblivion. In Mournhold, it was "explained away", and it only affected certain areas of the expansion, not most of the underground labyrinths.

I believe it was explained away in Oblivion too. Levitation was illegal in Cyrodiil around the time of the Oblivion Crisis.

Of course, so was stealing and murder, but that never stopped my characters. Not a good handwave for a game where a large percentage of gameplay involves breaking the law.

If levitation is illegal and there is no one to teach you how to levitate, then how will you levitate?

It would be possible (I think that's the general idea behind the grid structure as it is anyway), but then you'd just have more, short ones. With the city as its own cell nothing outside has to be loaded though, just that fact helps you to put alot more stuff in there without bogging down the game.

Well this thread seems pretty far gone. Anyway, I was reading through the daggerfall / arena conflicting with provinces and I started thinking about Akvari, and the other non continental lands. Is there anything particularly special about the elder scrolls of lore that requires a Tamriel setting?

You mean aside from the Elder Scrolls themselves being located deep inside Tamriel?

While there is no particular reason that, say, Akavir should be off-limits, there's also very little reason to expect the contents on any given Elder Scroll to touch upon Akavir. In effect, the best answer is "we don't know", as there's a dearth of evidence on just what individual Elder Scrolls might contain, as it pertains to non-Tamrielic settings

Well, Tamriel is considered the center of the world, and has a lot of lore that is still to be explored. It would be quite stupid, imo, for them to suddenly change provinces, when there are still so many stories being told in Tamriel. So yeah, I wouldn't expect a game in Akavir.

It's the STARRY HEART OF THE WORLD! :bowdown:

More specifically, whilst Akavir is interesting, there's lots of problems I see with us visiting it. Most notably is simply that we don't know enough about it - Bethesda has a chance to take a totally alien location, like Morrowind (which was in Arena/Redguard's comic but was heavily lacking in any substance), and create a varied, exotic, and breathtaking world that will be loved for ages. On the flip side, they can mess up catastrophically, and many people will tell you that the main charm to Akavir is the fact we haven't been there in centuries and know so little about it - this gives it this strange, almost Romantic appeal. Again, Bethesda has the chance to make it really cool, but at the same time they could just tarnish our fantasies and turn it into something sub-par.

Secondly, we assume there's not much Tamrielic influence there. If you spend more time interacting with Ka Po'Tun and Monkey People than with actual man or mer, the game certainly starts to feel less and less like The Elder Scrolls. Even if, say, we play the "recently begun colonization by foreigners" card as with Vvardenfell, I think it'd just feel awkward and forced.

At this point in time I think the only way one could do justice to Akavir is to either leave it alone or to just make a portion of it present, in some awesome spiritual successor to The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard.

if TES ever does go to Akavir, I would hope that they would only open up the smallest piece of it (kind of the way you return to liberty city for one mission in GTA:SA) This way, the mystery remains as to what there is elsewhere on the continent and if they screw up the first visit, they can always claim that it was different than the rest of the continent.
That being said, there is still so much land to explore in Tamriel that we don't need to have a game in Akavir any time soon.

Yep. But is is something Bethesda could consider within a few game cycles. Especially as they draw closer to re-hashing old provinces from other games. I guess that was my thought. I'm also basing this on the way orismer were introduced, which I was not around to see. So if there is something else wrong with this let me know.

why do people keep calling Oblivion towns big? they are more like walled villages then towns. since they where in seperate cells they could have made them way bigger then they did.

an unnecessary trade-off if you ask me.

but if they make Hammerfell, maybe we can get an explaination to why Sutch is now in Hammerfell and not in Cyrodiil.

Neither Morrowind nor Oblivion have large cities, but they are more detailed than Arena's/Daggerfall's and have some differences.

It has less to do with the Scrolls, than all spirts naturally converge on Tamriel, as the designated place of the Convention.

A game could be set in Akavir, but that cripples the mystique of the place for us the player. You would always think of Akavir as what it looked like, not what it truely is.

I want them to visit Skyrim, and I would like it if they made the region a total of atleast 30 square miles(Cyrodiil in Oblivion was about 16, but it's not necessarily to scale). Maybe if they could portion in 2 provinces(Say both Skyrim AND High Rock), and work it to about 40sqmi., then that would be acceptable.