After hearing that the world is the same size of Oblivion if noteven slightly smaller I was quite disappointed, now my question is , would it be possible ot create a Mod that does only one thing , enlarge to world size like from 6x6 km to something like 40 x 40 km using procedural generation , and actually putting exactly the same things of Bethesda , same place for dungeons , same cities , same landmarks , same of everything apart actually enlarging a lot the space between the zones making so larger larger areas of wilderness...

the only Rule is keep everything exactly 100% the same as Bethesda will do just touching the space in between to make more epic and large....

Btw if someone thinks is not possible please explain why and if you think is possible please post how that coul dbe ....

I personally think take the heightmap , increase the size , fix the cells positions of all places , use the same procedural region generation for the flora / fauna ....

Morrowind's overworld was smaller than Oblivion's but to spend five minutes here you'd think that that game was the Holy Grail. I like the fact that Skyrim's world is smaller - it means more attention from BGS made on each square foot.

Also, verticality.

In other words, size =/= quality or variety. For proof, see Oblivion.

In oblivion my character had a spell misfire and shrunk me to about half the size of everyone else permanently (same body ratio so I didnt look funny). So, depending on how you look at it, the world was enlarged to me!

... that's possible?

Must've been a mod, Oblivion didn't have miscasts.

It is very possible and there was someone who enlarged Oblivion's world 2x, 3x and 4x. I tested his concepts out and they worked really well, but the engine at the time didn't like to draw really high mountains so you had some graphical errors with the 3x and 4x games. Also, you need to go through and test or rescale everything so that it fits properly in the new world size. Forests would need to be redone, and land that accompanied towns would need to be redone all by hand.

It would be a big project and would probably take over a year even for a few experienced modders to port the vanilla game to a larger world. That said, I am planning on helping whoever would be interested.

Unfortunately that would never work because everything would also seem incredibly weird...

I don't understand why so many people relate a big game world with the quality of a game.
Oblivion was huge, it only seemed smaller than Morrowind because in Morrowind you walked really slow (actually thats more realistic but its boring).

And many unique places aren't possible with a big world (economically).
Quality over quantity!

The main problem with your idea is that going from 36km² to 1600km² means that whatever space on the disc that the landmass takes up would take up 44 times as much. Not to mention that if a tree was at (22,44) and a house was a (22,45) and you went that big of a change they would end up at (968,1936) and (968,1980), respectively. This means that the tree and the house that were a meter apart are now 44 meters apart, making the world vast and barren. If you put in more environmental objects to fill in the gaps it would eat the space the game needs even more. So you either get a huge barren wasteland (don't add anything) or a bloated but still very empty feeling (add stuff to fill in the gap)

I'd say balance between quality and quantity. 41 square kilometers doesn't seem balanced by today's standards. I hate a meaningless undetailed landscape, big world. But I also hate a cramped up, small world just as much.

If I were Bethesda, I would keep all the dungeons, towns, cities, etc, but spread them more in a world that's 70-100 square kilometers instead of 41. The "only" thing Bethesda would require to do would be to create landscapes for these new square kilometers.

yes but you only enlarge the wilderness not touching the important areas so if the tree is important quest or whatever then it stays 1 m close ...

But wouldn't the wilderness trees and rocks be super far away from each other, as well as enemy spawns? I like the idea of a bigger map, just not one that is 44 times bigger lol.

And if the tree staying 1m close is on a hillside before the change, but the "arbitrarily enlarge the empty spaces" procedure makes the tree's location into the bottom of a valley? :blink:

I'm fine with Skyrim being the same size as Oblivion. Considering Cyrodiil is a larger province than skyrim, that means skyrim will be closer to scale, and other province mods of smaller provinces will be done more justice.

Good point, in my theory I was using a flat worldspace, it doesn't translate well on a world with a varied heightmap.

That would be the best thing ever! My single biggest hope/fear about Skyrim was world size. And personally I got happy when I heard Skyrim is gooing to be og Oblivion's size since we could have ended up with a midget Morrowind or Fallout 3 (okay they're not that small, but it's fact that they have smaller maps and to me they both felt significantly smaller than Oblivion).

World size is extremely important. I love exploring for hours and hours and I don't mind if the landscapes are monotone. :celebration: For me that's realism, and I want traveling to feel like a struggle lol.

Thats not quiet true, you could speed up in Morrowind by increasing the skill.

The reason morrowind seemed larger was because you could not get from A to B by running in a straight line, there were mountains etc that you could not get up, so had to take the long way round.

Oblivion on the otherhand only had that sort of inaccessable areas in the far North West of the map, so it was alot quicker to go from A to B as the terrain is very flat.

Indeed. Good way to end up with tons of floating objects, doors and buildings inside hillsides, and all sorts of nightmarish stuff.

Well...stuff that's nightmarish if you have to deal with it yourself, and pretty funny when you're watching someone else fuss with it while shrieking "But it should have worked!"

Even Oblivion started to feel too dense with the Obscuro's Oblivion Overhaul mod. Especially on the Goald Coast where it felt like I walked into a new Ayleid ruin every few meters.

No because it coul dbe used the smae settings for procedural world filling that bethesda will use in the area , actually all Oblivion was procedurarly generated if I am not wrong apart some specific places that where hand worked ... this speed up much the work ...

I remember someone doing this with Oblivion. I think the biggest problem would be that changing the world map so dramatically would make it incompatible with any other mod that adds something to the outdoors.

You're correct. All Bethesda had to do was edit certain "environment" settings (I forget the real name for the tool) and then hit "generate" and it would automatically create most of the landscape. I believe most all of the land was created by hand, though. And everything else was hand-placed.

About that mod that I tested that was 2, 3 and 4 time larger. What it would do is first enlarge all of the land including the heightmaps. The program he wrote to do that could actually customize how it would do that so you could say put a cap on the depth and height if you wanted (but it would look funny on certain areas if you had a height cap and the mountain was big, because it would look natural and then sort of flatten out at a certain height).

After that he wrote a program that ported all of the objects into the game in their new proper locations. The real problem here was that they would also be scaled along with the map. So Cyrodiil was literally FOUR TIMES larger in size. This actually looked ok with some things, like Cyrodiil itself (or White Gold Tower looked really cool and realistic at that size). Also trees looked surprisingly ok at that height, but the forests definitely needed some smaller trees put in to look more natural. The problem was that many many objects, trees and rocks aside, needed to be rescaled and hand placed again. Most towns looked out of whack (think Jack and the beanstalk). NPCs and all objects related to you and them needed to be rescaled again (doors, sacks, beds everything).

So it is possible. It would actually be much easier to do it this way, scale the world up and then go through and rescale and hand place objects again, but it would take a dedicated team of modders and it would take a long time to do it. I was interested at the time, but I'm going to wait until Skyrim comes out and hope that this same person decides to write a program for the game again. It was really neat.

I honestly felt like the larger maps made it better for me. It was realistic and immersive.

But then we are back to the same problem as before, the game having a world that is 44 times larger and therefore by your logic filled with 44 times as much procedurally generated stuff taking up 44 times as much space on a hard drive.

And as for Oblivion, the only thing that was generated like that was the actual landmass. They gave some vague specifications and then they 'eroded' the land until it got to something that they thought was workable. All of the objects were then lovingly crafted and inserted into the game by the team.