Anyone who has played a Bethesda RPG already knows hundreds of hours can easily be spent on them, but I did some rough math using numbers Todd has provided in various places along with some speculation and it would appear this game will take 100 hours without doing half the stuff there is to do.

For example, the main quest is said to be about 30 hours.

Todd said that there were around 100 points of interest such as a small shrine with some hostile necros around it. No estimate of how long these will take, but based upon Oblivion I am speculating 3 minutes each which is 5 hours just for POIs.

He also said there were around 130 dungeons with 50% being small dungeons and some being 'epic' 1-2 hour dungeons. No word on what percent are 'epic' and what percentage are medium. If I speculate 50% will take 15 minutes each(this is a confirmed by Todd estimate), 40% will be medium sized and take 30 minutes each and 10% will be large and average 1.5 hours each that is 61.75 hours of dungeon crawling glory.

Add these numbers up and it's 96.75 hours and we haven't even dealt with random dragon encounters, guild side quests, non guild NPC quests, random exploration, using the various abilities in the game such as cooking, getting lost looking at the 3D objects in our inventory (some are said to contain clues to quests) and on and on.

Holy crap. My wife will leave me and my kids will forget my name.

I think we knew exactly how much our lives were gonna go down the drain when we saw the words "The Elder Scrolls."

You ain't lyin'! :celebrate:

I believe Skyrim will have a much greater replay value than Oblivion and previous TES games, for the following reasons:

• 280 perks, out of which you can select only 50-70
  
• Perks allow for greater specialization of non-magic using characters (for the first time personally I am interested in playing a pure warrior or pure stealth character)
  
• Radiant Story Quests
  
• Infinitely respawning dragons
  
• greater complexity in NPC relationships
  
• more potential for ambitious mods with Creation Kit
  
• possibly a more dynamic main quest, considering the backdrop of the civil war and the player's involvement with either the Rebel or Empire factions

Accordingly, I estimate 5 - 10 playthroughs of 400+ hours each, spread out over a period of several years.

This is a much greater replay value than my experience with Oblivion and Morrowind




If the hardest difficulty setting is anything remotely like playing Oblivion at around 75% on the slider with FCOM and Duke Patricks installed, then I expect to be dying frequently and even those smaller "15 minute" dungeons will take hours to complete. The bigger dungeons, much longer than 2 hours.

With these mods installed, when I play Oblivion, I die at almost every combat encounter. You can one-shot enemies with your bow, but they can also one-shot you, so you have to approach enemy archers very carefully, hiding behind trees, rocks, etc. It's taken me hundreds of hours since December just to get up to level 7. Since it seems that Duke Patricks Combat Archery was the inspiration for the improved Archery in Skyrim, this looks promising.

They CANT make this game to big!!!!!! No matter how hard they try they will FAIL to make Skyrim to big!!!! :tes:

You make a good point. Oblivion gave birth to great mods because there were a lot of aspects that could be worked on or added in. However there are very few things I can see that would make the experience much better for me. Unofficial patch, the best unique armor, house, quest mods that don't break the game, but my Skyrim won't be a drastic change from stock, unlike my Oblivion PC saves.

Oblivion kept me busy for about 500 hours....

Well let's see, I played about 290 hours on Oblivion (with DLCS), so I'm guessing 500 hours for Skyrim jez lol. Well I played runescape for over 3000 hours, but I'm been playing that game for 7 years lol.

Who needs a job anyways right? :celebration: :celebration:

Skyrim's pure content is a given. And in many ways it could give meaningful hours of content. Things to do is great but then while I think Daggerfall is the best TES ever honestly everything gets boring as it's all procedural. Something Oblivion suffered not in content but in the building of it's world.

The real question is are those hours well spent. Did they craft good tales, characters, their dialogue....to be seen.

Todd said Oblivions MQ was 50, then it went down to 20.... and now you can finish the MQ in less than 4 without rushing/powergaming at level 2? I wouldnt take that as a factor in the calculations..... infact its pointless trying to log hours, I doubt anyone really pays attention to the amount of time going by until after the entire romp is over.

what if skyrim was an endless flat plane of white, where you start on one side of the map and on the other side, which is an in game 1000000 miles, theres the other town, which is where the main quest is.

its possible, and thats why they made it the same size as cyrodiil

I thought they've been consistently saying it's 30 hours of content.

The MQ will turn out to be 1 hour, sorry to disappoint you.

Exactly :clap:

Boss, can you pencil me in for vacation until 2016?

Yeah, I need to spend time with family :whistling:

And Hopefully this time around it will Stick

Not to mention about double the number of lines of dialogue.

+ 300 new books

+500 "unique activities" that the player can do, whatever that means (Craig Lafferty said that)

64,000

Holy madda of Gods

Mhm, can't be said it's not content packed. Good or bad not being known.

The 300 Onew" books is debatable though. Is that the number given for all new books or total books?

As I'm sure some previous books in TES will return

I'm talking about content not just dropping the walls on the sand box and putting a city 10 million miles away making you walk through miles of nothingness. Thats not MAKING anything!

If there are 64000 lines of spoken dialogue and each line takes 2 seconds to listen to then:

64000*2=128,000 seconds=2133 minutes=35 hours.

A 3 second per line average=50 something hours.

And that isn't counting lines like 'Die Criminal Scum' that only take 1 second but we have to listen to 128,000 times. :whistling:

Not that impressed although there are probably more NPCs and definitely a much much larger voice actor pool hired.

However New Vegas had somewhere between 60,000 to 65k or maybe more if I'm not mistaken. Take that as you will.

Um, officially they have stated that the MQ line is 30 hours. But, I suppose for some that don't read dialog or take any time at all to enjoy the story and that go fast as hell just to break some sort of pointless record in a so called "I beat the game in 1 hour" title then maybe that might be possible but i seriously doubt it!

A (several) plastic guitar kept me busy for two years. With that said, yes, Skyrim will last longer than most games.

Oblivion = 14 voice actors

Skyrim = 70 voice actors