:o YAY!

I thought the one with all the ruins wasn't still populated, and someone said not long ago that Riverwood is a main city. Now I'm happy cause Riverwood looked small and I thought all the other cities would be like that. Sweet!

spears, levitation, wereboars.

The only thing (supposedly) taken out which i'm truely upset about is separate armour pieces. Being able to mix and match not just different types of armour, but also clothing, is a really vital part of the TES series in my opinion.

I did like the birthsigns as I felt they added something to the experience of creating your character... but i'm exactly upset about it.

There are a few other things which may or may not have been excluded, but I can't comment on those yet.

I find these complaints about the size of the world plainly stupid.

With Morrowind, almost everybody was happy with the size and the quality of the world. However, when Oblivion was announced, I suppose they expected a bigger world.
With, people thought that the world size was good, but the quality wasn't, so they complained because of it (and I can understand it).
With Skyrim, we are going to have a world with the size of the previous one, but with verticality, which makes it feel bigger, and with the quality of Morrowind. But, of course, people complain.

I can't understand it. I found Cyrodiil's size great. Sometimes, landscapes weren't great, but the world was huge. Now we are going to have a world with the same size but completely handcrafted, so it doesn't feel boring. Where is the problem?

Well for me personally, I found both Morrowind and Oblivion far too small. Daggerfall is more my kind of size.

That said, i'm not complaining simply because technology cannot handle a game the size of Daggerfall with anywhere near the kind of detail we've come to expect from the series.

I'm happy with Skyrim's size, but do hope that TES returns to full scale in the future.

No , since they said it's almoust the same dimensions as Oblivion its 16 sq miles ... here is a nice picture comparison of other game worlds ....

http://images.mmorpg.com/images/newsImages/192010//worlds1.jpg

RDR is way bigger than Oblivion and just the Crysis island is 16 x 16 kms .... so 256 sq kms ....

Birthsigns
Old style maps
Other than that nothing that I KNOW isn't there. I would dislike grouped armour pieces as much as the next man, but it's not confirmed, and I've seen people quoting Bethesda staff saying they aren't grouped.

Oblivion wasnt realy 16m2.. it was more like 12m2. because you couldnt go to Eswery or Valenwood. The playable world was a bit smaller due to the invisible walls.

Engine.

This "New" Engine seems more like an upgraded old engine, lets hope it has stability something that Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and new vegas lacked. Having to auto-save every 5 miniutes just incase one of its many random crashs or NPCs dying randomly/running off into the wilderness never to be seen again and all the visual bugs too.

It was a really buggy engine and i hope they started from scratch on this new one not just re-written some of the code and sugar coated it.

I would also like to see the return of seperate armor pieces like morrowind had.

Still the game looks amazing cant wait to play it.

Well, Daggerfall's size was just... awesome. The world wasn't very interesting, but the size was incredible. The thing is that... it would be impossible to make a game like Skyrim with that size. Completely impossible. Well, completely impossible if you want the game to be beautiful, I suppose that if you use randomly generated maps, as in Daggerfall, it could happen... but it would be horrible.

It'll be possible one day. Maybe not with quite the same level of detail or beauty as Skyrim... but certainly a massive improvement over Daggerfall.

It looks like theyve sugar coated it.

How do you know the cities was small and underpopulated, we have not even seen them. Though I am expecting a more populated cities mod to be needed based on Beth past games.

I really only care about spellmaking and armor all being one piece. What's left to customize? You can't create new spells. You can't get creative with enchantment combinations. You can't even decide you like the look of one chest with different boots or anything. More than anything else, the mod I want to see is one that separates the armor.

C L I M B I N G

The armors will be like that of oblivion... e.g. boots, pants, chest, gloves, helmet.

In morrowind we had left boots, right boots, left gloves, right gloves, pauldroms etc etc.

The game needs fishy sticks.

The town we saw was a minor town, and yes it looked suitable crowded for me, with a minor town you will perhaps have 20 houses say 3 people in each house, its 60 people, how many of them will be walking in the main street in the middle of the day, not more than a handful, number goes up at it appears that many works outdoor next to it. In Oblivion was that most houses just had one person living in it this did much to making the city look empty, with larger familes, maids and aprentises we get more peoples.
This is not Assassin creed, in Oblivion NPC are named, wear the same outfits as you, live in detailed houses and have a 24 hour schedule. It’s also a question how many npc the consoles can manage: Returning to Morowind AI helps, reducing the numbers of hairs and outfits helps. They will probably go the Fallout 3 way in that many npc are unnamed and respawning like the guards to reduce the memory used for handling them.



Link to mod? as I understand you have multiple mods with lands larger than Oblivion? For Oblivion. I only know of one mod who do this so this is very interesting.

Bethesda always advertises the TES Game World as being "huge." And it is not in my opinion. When I played Morrowind (my first TES game), the world felt sort of huge to me, but that was only because I was a bit overwhelmed at first.

Oblivion felt small to me . . . right from the beginning (even though I never even used Fast Travel). After I exited the sewers (at the end of the tutorial) I was very disappointed at how short the distance was to the gates Cheydinhal . . . and at how tiny Cheydinhal was . . . and how few NPCs lived there.

Daggerfall was truly huge. From the http://www.imperial-library.info/content/elder-scrolls-series: "Starting off in Daggerfall can overwhelm the senses. No other game has such a huge world to explore. Travel around a land mass twice the size of Great Britain . . ." But Daggerfall was graphically a very different game than MW and OB. Doing a game would that size with today's graphics would not be very practical . . . yet.

Based on the http://www.imperial-library.info/sites/default/files/gallery_files/minibigmaproadslore31gv.jpg, Skyrim's "real" size around 250 miles North to South, and more than twice that from East to West (average is roughly 600 miles wide).

This is one of the main reasons why the default Timescale is 30:1 . . . . so that it takes like 1 or 2 game hours to walk from one city to the next. [With a 1:1 Timescale, you could cover the distance in a couple of minutes.]
For me, a 30 Timescale is way too fast . . . I don't like the way it makes the days race by [24 game hours = 48 real minutes], so I generally set mine at 8 [24 game hours = 3 real hours].

To keep a game world interesting (and practical to make), it needs to be scaled down a bunch, but turning a 250 x 600 mile land mass into a 4 x 4 land mass is way too much. If you reduced the land mass by a factor of 30 (to match the Timescale), you would end up with roughly an 8 x 20 mile game map . . . which is 10 times bigger than what we will be getting [4*4=16; 8*20=160 square miles].

Technology has advanced a bunch in the past 8 years (since MW was released in May 2002), so it is a shame that we are still stuck in a Morrowind-size game world. If Bethesda is going to state that their game world is "huge" . . . they should actually be giving us a game world that is "huge" by today's standards . . . not by what was considered to be "huge" 8 years ago.

An 8*20 (160 square miles) game world would actually feel huge. And I wouldn't even mind if it had to be broken up into the 8 different regions (with loading screens when you went from one region to another, which would also allow for Xbox DVD swaps). Then you could add cities that were much larger along with a LOT more NPC's. Imagine Oblivion times 10 (10 times greater land mass, 10 times larger cities, and 10 times more NPCs).

We are not stuck in that. Oblivion was much bigger than Morrowind (Morrowind was similar to Capital Wasteland). So Skyrim will be, plus verticality.

Spears and spell making

Daggerfall : very easy to make a huge world of randomly generated emptiness. Don't get me wrong, love the game, but really was designed around fast travel, in effect it was like a Bioware game, with separate world spaces. Anyone play Daggerfall without fast travel?
On topic, if hand to hand comes under one handed, then perks or no, good enough for me. If not, then imho a huge omission. One thing definitely seems missing from the in play screen and inventory, http://cdn.gamerant.com/wp-content/uploads/Elder-Scrolls-Skyrim-Changes.jpg

Well put.

Less weapon types are one of the major negative points about Skyrim.

We NEED throwing weapons, crossbows and spears, the addition of chain weapons such as flails would also be nice.

Another annoyance is the fact that cities are going to be closed again, although the Open Cities mod for Oblivion has indeed proven that putting them in the main worldspace does not really hurt FPS.

If you include all the islands that you could actually go to (mainly by swimming to them), the difference is not all that great. Did Oblivion feel any bigger? Not to me.

Skyrim is going to be pretty much the exact size of Oblivion . . . yet Skyrim has 8 different regions . . . so each region is going to average only 2 square miles . . . 2 square miles of tundra is hardly a "huge area."

Plus both Morrowind and Oblivion included mountains that you could climb . . . some of you guys act like they were just flat land masses.