As I play Fallout 4 more and more it has the word "potential" written all over it. Say what you want about story options but the actual voice acting and writing has gotten better. The creature models are a great step forward as well. I could go on of how many things are right about this game, but one thing really tarnishes its legacy...

The Map Size...

The more I play this game the more I feel like I've been put in a small melting pot of a sandbox. I've spoken about map size in one of my other threads but now its becoming more and more apparent. This game will be played for a long time, and the small map size is going to kill the replay value among other things. If I'm traveling from one half of the map to the other I should feel like its been a journey to get there. Skyrim did this well due to its different regions that had their own distinct identity's.

Now I'm not saying Fallout 4 needs regions to make it feel bigger. But it should have been bigger in general to get lost and explore... There have been times that I get the feeling of truly exploring and discovering new places, only to hit an invisible wall border... And the sad part is that usually that border has something that looks interesting beyond it. Like a hidden valley, or something that looks like a nest of a creature.

I fear it will get worst with time when people come up with cool mods only to fight over the little open space available. The landscape doesnt really lends itself to world building and adding more npc's will just make it feel even smaller. The point I'm trying to make is that the more mods that add NPC's and locations the more cluttered the world will feel, its already very dense and it might get too dense to the point that immersion is lost...

If nothing can be done about this in future DLC's I just hope Bethesda thinks about how long their fans have to wait for a new game in between releases, so we need world space to fill it with mods while we wait on the next title. There are so many reasons why a larger world space can benefit these types of games and I feel like a larger world needs to be thought of as a contributing factor for longevity.

Edit: I do not fast travel, and I'm not the guy who likes to play with a HUD I'd rather roleplay and get immersed. But even with no fast travel for some reason it feels small.

Feel free to post the things that kills this game for you, if any...

forget map size. count walk through size. if you want to explore, don't fast travel. i've been playing straight since the game is out, and i still find places i've never been.

beth's games have always rather been the "densely packed" than the "vast space" type. don't know if you played skyrim (i assume from your tagline though), but remember that vast barren area around rorikstead? 1st time i came there, it made me laugh out lout, because i perceived it as one huge "gothic 3" parody )

Do not fast travel. makes the area much bigger. That said, you are in a city. Also, most of the mods will be in buildings, and I bet in existing buildings. There are a lot to choose from.

TBH Boston really is a city of two halves. The North side is far to sparse and empty, and though the South makes up for it by being almost excessively dense, it's painfully apparent why so many people make such a big deal over the map size. When many don't go to Diamond City for the first hundred hours or so the impression the North forms of the whole game isn't exactly good.


That was why I took so long to reach DC. Convinced of limited content through the mere handful of places I'd found up North, I just wanted to not go South because I worried that if I did, a dozen or so locations later there would be nothing left to find. When I finally bit the bullet and went to DC I found I was discovering locations every few seconds. That middle area is particularly cramped. There seems almost too much to explore now - it's not fear of seeing it all too quickly, but rather the fear of missing things and I have to fully explore every map icon I discover otherwise I'd never know which ones I didn't do.


So if the game seems too small just head South, that's where everything's at

the map size is 2.5 times bigger than NV and fallout 3, there are 729 grid squares in fallout 4s map, compared to the 289 of fallout 3, its a bigger map, even with the water, NV and fallout 3 had unplayable areas also, especially NV, which was a barren map, they made fallout 4 dense, its got over twice the marked locations as fallout 3 and NV, , i kinda like the density of it but i get your point i wouldn't of minded it bigger, but they wanted it dense, and a lot of the map is dense, i like the dense areas but i wouldn't mind overall larger size so that there is more expanse in between the dense areas.

The one thing I wish is that they put more land on the bottom right where all the water is, but I guess Far Harbor will make up for it.

I agree, not using fast travel helps with this - Gophers "Immersive HUD" helps a lot in Skyrim too. Its really easy in these games if you're fast travelling and using the minimap to just get stuck "completing objectives". Kills the game. The best thing about these games is just wandering around and going - "hey what's over there? I'm gonna check that out..."

That being said, specifically for Fallout, I really feel like the proper feeling to fit the concept is a much, much larger open world. like 3-4x or more. The idea behind the world - the reason people don't get together and start to genuinely rebuild society is because we are broken down into isolated "settlements", with this brutal, unforgiving "wasteland" in-between. Most people cant survive out there. Getting from place to place IS supposed to be not just difficult, but suicidal in most cases - it's not a 1.5 minute jog from one massive community to the next.

Now, I'll go ahead and say that I'm into the "hardcoe realism" type of experience when I play these games, and I always use mods like that. So if that's not your thing I get it. For me though, that's what these games should be;

In the beginning, you basically have to spend some time just doing stuff around your little community - y'know, do the intro portion, teach me the basics, and then you are ejected into the wasteland, where survival is very much the name of the game. It should take serious time, and be genuinely dangerous travelling out there - the distance between two settlements really should be something more like travelling the entire distance of the FO4 map. You're gonna need to eat and sleep, hunt your food and scavenge for water. I realize that doesn't sound like fun to a lot of people, but to me it makes everything you do in the game have meaning. My thought is, with a huge map and more open space, what really winds up making sense is vehicles. So in the beginning, you're forced to scrounge and scavenge for survival, but after you've built up enough caps/influence, or perhaps after scavenging the right horribly irradiated sinkhole and fighting through hordes of horrifying creatures, you're able to get a working vehicle. Now it still needs to be maintained, and gas is REALLY not cheap in the wasteland, so it's not a "god-item" that just breaks all that lovely hardcoe realism we had going on in the beginning, but it does give a solid sense of progression and changes the way you experience the game.

anyway i'm done rambling. more bigger.

I totally agree with Tactical Ace, bigger map and area will be better for FO4. Also I don't think Bethesda's games are always densely packed; in Skyrim it was not densely packed because many times I feel myself walking in nature and watching the scenary with so nice music background. InFO3 same. But in FO4, the game is definitely densely packed- by the way that is so well - but in contradiction the map feels a little bit small. (I don't compare Bethesda's games with others)

OP: "Excuse me, Waiter... my meal seems to be way over-salted, and cold. Can I please have--"

Waiter smiles and starts to pick up plate..

Guy at next table: "Ahh you don't need anything, just Over-Pepper it, it will be fine!"

Lady two tables over: "Mehhh I don't like their Pepper here, ask for some Salsa and cover it with that!"

Gentleman at table 4: "Hey! Your dinner is over-salted too? Tell me, have you tried over-peppering?!"

Waiter: "Actually, Sir, I believe we are out of Pepper, though I hear from the busboy that the Chef is going to crush some Lemons and Peanutbutter for a new condiment, would you like to try that in say...a few hours?"

Grid number, by itself, is meaningless. Before we can make any comparison we need to know the size of the grids in both games. Only then will we be in a position to accurately assess the relative sizes of the games.

For example, Morrowind's cells are larger than Oblivion's cells. If we were merely to count the number of cells in both games we would arrive at a grossly inaccurate estimate of the size of Vvardenfell relative to the size of Cyrodiil.

i know what you're saying, i painstakingly circumvent "black" map markers so they don't turn "discovered" before i have explored the place - which isn't exactly easy in the urban areas (on the other hand, i stumble across countless unmarked little things in the process, totally worth it)

1 cell = 4096*4096 units, equaling ~ 32 times npc height (~128 units)

Last time I played I ambushed a brahim that for some reason was standing on the 1st floor of a ruined building

You win the Gold Medal sir/madam. Bravo!

GLORIOUS! 5/5

-- R. Ebert.

It's so weird, compared to Fallout 3 this game has a huge map and way more content. But it's so tempting to compare it to Skyrim, which has more content, but with that line of thinking pretty much every Elder Scrolls game has had more content than the Fallout games. Did people complain about Fallout 3 compared to Oblivion?

In terms of sheer size, the FO4 map is pretty significantly bigger than either FO3 or NV. I haven't played Skyrim yet (I plan to soon), so I can't make a comparison to that map, but what makes many people perceive it as being smaller is simply the density.

In Fallout 3, there were long stretches of the Capital Wasteland that really just had nothing. I could go on a long journey halfway across the map and not really see much of anything along the way. There are fewer than half as many locations to discover as there are in FO4, so your attention isn't going to be drawn to new locations anywhere near as often. There are random enemy encounters around the map, but even that is often kind of sparse depending on where you're at. To be fair, that's the case for some areas of FO4 as well, and this isn't necessarily always a bad thing all the time. It's nice to have sparser areas of the map as well, but the map in FO4 keeps me more thoroughly distracted, which I like. It's the lack of these wide open areas of nothing that we're used to from FO3 and NV though that make this map feel smaller in some respects.

There are a few areas in downtown Boston that are possibly almost too dense, but this isn't really much of an issue for me. I like the density of the map though. With my first character, I finally set out to head to Diamond City for the first time at about level 40. I didn't actually make it there until about level 70 though. I'd head out, and get distracted by a new location. I'd go check it out, and find an enemy camp to clear out, and then I'd find a nice big dungeon to clear out. Then I'd go around and loot the place and get almost to my weight limit. Well...now since I'm almost at the weight limit I guess I should head home and unload my junk. Then I head back out in another direction and find a new location. There's a character there that gives me a side quest. Throughout the course of the side quest, I find a bunch more loot and have to head home and unload...and so on.

Point is, in my opinion, the play time says it all. When I finished the main quest in FO3 for the first time, I was at about 60 hours of game play. When I first finished the main quest in FO4, I was at over 300 hours of game play. I've already spent more time playing Fallout 4 since launch than I EVER have playing Fallout 3. I've played Fallout 3 a lot. I've got about 400 hours total in it with 4 total characters. That game has been out for 8 years now. I've already got over 600 hours of game play in Fallout 4, with only two characters. And FO4 has been out for...roughly 4 months?

The map feels misleading. It feels like it's taking less time to get somewhere because you're arriving at some location much more frequently. There are way more locations to discover, so you're not getting the feeling of walking through a vast empty space like in previous games. But the density of the map means that there are lot more locations to discover. There are way more buildings to enter now. Most of them have enemies, or someone with a side quest, or a bunch of loot to collect after figuring out a puzzle. There are a lot of little hidden locations that don't appear on your map, but are very much worth finding. The parking garage by Fallon's Department Store is one example of these unmarked locations. It doesn't show up as a discoverable location on your map, but it's one of the coolest and most unique locations in the game that everyone playing this game should visit at least once.

Currently I've found 332 locations. I've heard of people discovering more locations than this, but I'm not sure if there are more or not. It's been a while since I've found a new location. But 332 locations is pretty damn good. I believe FO3 had around 160 discoverable locations. A difference of 172 discoverable and (mostly) explorable areas is a pretty drastic difference. Personally I'll take the denser Commonwealth map over the barren and mostly uninteresting Capital Wasteland map any day.

The map size didn't bother me, what bothered me was seeing a building in the distance, going into clear dungeon mode, and then getting there and it's boarded up. I kind of felt a little trolled at times.

I like having more land though. Probably minecraft has spoiled me, but I like having vast wildernesses in between places of interest. When you're roleplaying a survivalist hunter, it feels weird to hit a city or a raider camp every way you turn. I don't consider areas devoid of dungeons to be boring, I consider them room to stretch my legs. This is important in Bethesda games, where a lot of people will want to set up their homes or settlements out in the wild. The more wild there is for this purpose, the better. Rorikstead is actually one of my favourite areas. Shame about the town, but mods improve that. It's just much more difficult to improve the map size.

Lots of locations that do not get marked on the map, I make notes or screenshot, and changes to locations after you have once cleared them. Spawning growing re-growing re-spawning. Battle locations to return to again and again, assorted types.

Couldnt agree more with the OP. Even if the map was double the size it'd still feel small imo. There's not nearly enough empty space for it to feel like a wasteland. Walking through empty desolate wasteland creates an atmosphere that doesn't exist when you're just walking around mostly urban settings like Fallout 4. The glowing sea sort of does it, but theres rarely a reason to go there.

Morrowind has a better wasteland vibe than Fallout 4.

I never fast travel. I'm finding new places fairly often.

The game needs a map expansion all the way around it to Glowing sea depth

why are people comparing map size of f4 with f3 & f:nv??

- current gen is newer than the gen those two games were in.

- ontop of that you should compare it to skyrim instead, if you want to "compare" it to anything that is. to compare something that is made in 2015 to 2011 should have a significant difference.. you just dodge the arguement by comparing it to something made pre-2010.

so yeah, the map size is small. there is a lot of stuff to visit but i feel a lot is stuffed up next to eachother. Also, the dungeons compared to skyrim feel much smaller.. good sizes would be for example f4's corvega factory.

About the constant comparison with Skyrim.... I am glad that Fallout 4 doesn't consits of a ton space wasting mountains.

Brian Delaney is the 1 thing that kills it for me.