It is completely reasonable for a someone playing Oblivion to get from Anvil to Leyawiin in a single day. But what are the distances among the cities if one wanted to transform Tamriel into real-life scale?

There was talk about the population of Tamriel, but what about distances?

It's 250 miles from Almelexia to the top of Red Mountain. Grab a map and you cand do the rest.

Cyrodiil is thousands of miles across. It's not realistic.

But we knew that the instant we entered the IC and realized that only about 50 people called it home. On a realism scale of 1 - 10, OB would get about a 5 IMHO, maybe less. In this case, realism was sacrificed for easy playability.

Uriel Septim VII: "Cyrodiil!"
Ocato: "Cyrodiil!"
Jauffre: "Cyrodiil!"
Patsy: "It's only a model."
Uriel Septim VII: "Shh!"


Just keep that in mind


Playability isn't the only concern; feasibility is a bigger one. Bethesda abandoned the bland-and-generic-looking result when things are procedurally generated like in Daggerfall, instead relying on making everything by hand. in Morrowind. They brought back some measure of random generation in Oblivion, but the bulk of the work is still done manually.

Furthermore, the engine used cannot allow too large a world anyway, it has technical limitations. Daggerfall's world, much more limited technically (no distant view, for example), allowed to have a single continuous worldspace about twice as large as Great Britain. But each cell was so much simpler and so much less detailed than Oblivion's or Morrowind's...

I understand that, I knew that a country thousands of miles across was not going to make it into the game. It's just not reasonable, and I've accepted that. I still get annoyed tho about the cities feeling almost empty, you know? That could've been helped...

I think I would have much rather preferred a more realistic scale-accurate game based in a smaller area, like Morrowind. But this is really getting off-lore, isn't it?

Yeah, I know. That small back-country village near which my parents live, atop a hill so tiny there hasn't been any room to build a new house since the last century, has a greater population that the Imperial City. Heck, more than the whole Imperial Province. Even without counting the children.

Still, though, I think it'd be cool to somehow try to make a guesstimate as to how big Tamriel is in comparison to the "model" versions we actually travel in in the games. Same thing with populations.

But you'd need some kind of scale or point of reference to be able to do the math. Any ideas?

Based on this map: http://www.imperial-library.info/maps/cyrodiillargelowrescr7.jpg the size of tamriel is about 1800x1250 miles.
I have read (not sure if this is true though) that the size of Oblivion's map is about 16 square miles, or 4x4 miles.

That gives to me an rough idea on how big Tamriel really is.

Doesn't much help for population figures, though.

Morrowind and scale-accurate?
No.

Morrowind has a more accurate scale, but that's like saying 80 is closer to 1 than 100. Yeah, it's true. Morrowind's scale is closer to being the same as Oblivion's scale than to being anywhere near "life-size". The only game that approached life-size was Daggerfall. Even it was a bit shortscaled though.

the day that games reach life size specs...
will be the day that I die...
well
seriously.
I'll probably be dead when that happens.

Heh I always thought that past games (till Redguard) are not "real" TES. I mean... Bethesda seem to show past games more like introduction, something that is not that official. It seems like "real" TES starts from Morrowind. It would be great if this scale could be saved in rest of TES games. I mean - next game do not necesarily have to show only one province. We can have 2-3 combined. In like TES 10 we can have whole Tamriel or so. Or maybe even spaces beyond. Thing that would change in provinces might be for example population - make world better, bigger, more complex. IMHO best way to do this would be making something like: TES VII happens 500 years later than TES VI to make everything easier and this transition, game technology upgrading better looking, not damaging lore.

But I guess this is only my stupid theorycrafting.

Well, I'm actually counting on it that way, too. ^^'

Its probably not gonna happen, but it'd be neat if the next TES game was set on more than one province.

well thats just stupid and COMPLETELY threw me off as to where Morrowind really was! I thought it was an island far off from the rest of the world as it was in the game but that map shows it being a 1 hour swim away from the land...

That's because they didn't attempt creating the mainland part. The first plan was to do the whole province, but they thought it'd be too much work and decided then just to do the island, allowing them to do the "infinite sea" thing all around.

The slowly-progressing Tamriel Rebuilt mod for Morrowind is creating the whole mainland part of Morrowind (but not the whole continent, we're not crazy enough for that), starting from the north-east. Currently, map 1 (said northeast) is available in beta version. See my sig for more infos.

The in game world isn't even round. The fate of those who've attempted to circumnavigate the world would surely end in tragedy, just as the Crimson Permanent Assurance had. Two monty python references in one thread :nono:

http://www.imperial-library.info/astro/#B1
http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/cosmology.shtml

Nirn is shown as actually quite round and finite.

That infinite ocean around Vvardenfell would make you think differently though.

I know better, but thanks for the links anyway. I just had to squeeze another Monty Python reference in there.

I know I already replied to this post, but I just remembered I had made this http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/3397/tammorvvarat2.jpg to understand the relationship between Tamriel, Morrowind, and Vvardenfell. (Since it's sometimes confusing.)

OH MY GOD IT ALL MAKES SENSE

*spontaneously combusts*