this.

You're simply wrong, OP. You can go on the mountains. That was stressed many times.

A smaller world isn't necessarily a bad thing I mean Morrowind's tiny compared to Oblivion's map but Beth was able to pack a lot into Morrowind. I think Skyrim will be fine.

Todd never said that you can't climb the mountains... if anything, what we've heard indicates that you CAN. Obviously, you can't just walk up a mountain, since we've seen images of sheer cliffs, but that doesn't mean there can't be paths leading up. What Todd has said is that the mountains will make Skyrim feel LARGER than Oblivion, and I think he has a point. In Oblivion, you could pretty much walk in a straight line to reach many places if you so chose, due to the way the map was structured, since the more difficult terrain was centered around the borders, with the interior being mostly reletively easy to traverse, in Skyrim, on the other hand, you may need to find ways through or arround mountains, and these paths probably wouldn't just be completely straight, meaning that, during real time travel, reaching any place is likely to take longer than it would in Oblivion. Therefore, while the physical size of the map has not increased, from a practical standpoint, it should still feel larger.

obstacles make games feel bigger. like in fortresscraft when i burrowed through the ground and it took me way longer to get somewhere when i wnet underground...when i saw the short distance i travelled i was disappointe.... its going to feel alot bigger becuz of the mountains. think about all that will happen in between then as well. u will have fights. beatiful views. w/e

When I here about passages through the mountains I instantly think of Moria.