i had this idea the other day, ok you know how the elderscrolls isnt "to scale" that is to say that the cities arnt a realistic size, a real medivel city would be a LOT bigger, the imperial city would have 1000's of building realistically, and it would take an hour or more just to move from one side of the city to another, now we all know that realisticly they cant build a city, much less a entire game this size and keep it so you can go in every building, interact with every character, and stuff. but i got thinking, why not, what if they just hired more people, im not talking 30 more, im talking like, (god help us all) a thousand more. bring in real archetechs to help design the cities so they feel realistic , with backallies and main walkway, so that we have A REAL CITY . then do the same thing with the landmass between the cities, where traveling city to city takes 5-10 hours in game (still not to scale real life would be like 3-10 days BUT this IS a game and no1 want to walk on a road for that long) and then also have a system of transport that would act as a fast travel between the cities. all the while also have people building up the ai, then as parts of the cities are complete have people go through the empty houses and start adding furniture and stuff, and then add families to them, then give each family a backstory and stuff ( nothing fancy just names,where they came from, what they do for a living ect.) .now this sounds like a fantisy (and it pretty much is) beacuse a world this size and this indepth would have a few drawback, one, space on your computer (it wouldnt be able to be on current console accept that ) just one city would probable take up more space than oblivion does on your computer, another (the REAL reason it wont happen) is price, we are paying about 60 bucks for a game now, if they had to hire that many people just to pay there employies the game would have to be like 200-400 bucks. would you pay that (actually i would if the game world was that indepth because they woulnt have to realease a new game for a LONG time, or even start working on one, they could add a dlc that would essenctialy be a whole new game but in the same "world" )

would you buy it?

Why would I when I can go outside for free?

haha , because there is no magic in real life (im talking about a fantasy world here, you would play it for the same reason you play fallout or oblivion, or read any fantasy book lol, it would just be more indepth)

Then it would interfere with real life.

I dunno. A setting like that would be awesome, but it isn't everything. If the gameplay, mechanics, story, etc were all crap, then it would be a flop and millions and millions of dollars would have been wasted.

Plus, the same issue arises: Gameplay > Realism. You can't make it too realistic or else it takes the fun out of it.

Towards the right of your keyboard there's a key with a little angled arrow on it that you should hit every once in a while...

And I have no idea if I'd buy a game like that. Assuming it would run on my PC and be a reasonable price (both of which could be gotten around easily with a fair amount of random generation) I think a game with "real" sized cities could be fun if it was a decent game and made up for the possibility of inanity somehow. But frankly I'd be more concerned with the bolded part of that sentence than just cheap gimmicks...

More important question: How many people (console users are pretty much "out" right off the bat) have a system that could even run such a world? You're talking enough NPCs in one place to be like the CGI battles in the LotR movies here.

I think as computing gets better and faster, stuff like this will be there.

doesnt necesarily mean it will, but i dont see whyit would be an absolute "impossible"

and if they did, i am sure amny people wuld buy it.

That would be cool, but I dunno if today's computers/consoles are up to that yet. And even if that was possible atm, I wouldn't buy it if the rest of the game wasn't good. :shrug:

Would I pay several times more for a game with several times more content, basically? Probably not. While a better scale would be nice, all it does is inflate the size of the game. To use Oblivion as the obvious comparison, the gameplay there is mostly made up of fighting through dungeons; explore to find dungeons, steal to make money to buy things that are useful for clearing dungeons, progress through main quest to give a story to dungeons. How long does it take me to get bored of the game? Do I have the interest to visit EVERY location in the game with one character? I know not everyone does. If the game is to scale and has a hundred thousand more dungeons, it's certainly a lot bigger, but is it any better? I'm never going to touch most of them. I won't have any reason to, since even very slow advancement would max out my skills and equipment long before I made a dent.

To have a purpose behind it you're going to need to boost every other aspect of the game as well, so it's fun and fresh for a vastly longer period of time. If you keep going in that direction you're basically asking what people would pay for a nearly "perfect" game, but the higher the cost the bigger the risk the consumer is taking, and the lower the chance they're going to take it. If I'm disappointed by my two-dollar game, it's not much loss. Besides, it's not something any developers would do. The money doesn't come in until after the release, and how are they going to pay those thousand employees for the duration? How are they even going to effectively work together on the same product? There are just too many theoretical factors that aren't going to happen.

My response to this argument is always the same: real life doesn't have save and reload.

Sounds incredibly boring.

When you play Grand Theft Auto, do you want to go in every house and talk to every person there?


Because I don't. Sure, every so often there's a building I think "ooo, I'd like to go in there", but usually, I only want to up to the top of a large building so I can shoot people.

As Morrowind has taught us (or maybe just me) the scale of the game is not as important as the work the developers put into whats already there. Oblivion's landscape was boring partly because they generated it all and left it at that for the most part. Morrowind was all done by hand, and in my opinion is much more interesting to explore. But I am not here to start an argument about Morrowind and Oblivion, I'm just saying.

I had this really cool idea where people actually post replies that relate to the topic.

Anyways, I would love a game like this, as long as it had some sort of outskirts. I think it would feel way too confined to be in a city for the entire game. I can defiantly picture an awesome game from that idea though.

Well, Bethesda could team up with EA and Blizzard/Activision and... :bolt:

YES!! This is probably my dream game - an RPG that has the scale and detail of a real-world country.

Daggerfall certainly had the scale, but not the detail.

...produce a big, steaming, overthought, overwrought pile of [censored]. :sick:

Seriously, just think of this: What would the framerate be in Oblivion with a couple of hundred NPCs in view, all with their AI packages running? There was a reason the Arena wasn't packed full of spectators, y'know.

They already made a game like this. It is called The Elder Scorlls Arena. Did you see how many houses and people are in a city or town? Over hundreds of homes/buildings and a palace. So many NPCs to interact with. So not sure why you asking for them to make one, they already did, and non the less it was Bethesda who as done this. I can't rememeber, but I am sure Daggerfall did this as well. So now you have 2 games.

So go and get them for free of the Bethesda web site and start playing.

Probably not.

Look reality is usually pretty boring. In fact, it's so boring that we tend to pay a lot of money for things that make reality go away for a few hours.

You would need a super computer. 100ghz quad core, 100gb ram and 50gb vram. That's about my current rig B)

And it shows what effect that has on perspective when people to this day insist that Morrowind's map was bigger. It was in fact about a third of the size of Oblivion's.

Fable 3 has a decent size city compared to ES.

Technically it is very viable with today's technology, but nobody is doing that. You cannot feed thousands of employees with just one game unless you outsource it as one temporary project to some third world countries. It is economically inefficient, ineffective, a waste of manpower with too much risk at stake.

The fact is, you drive an hour from your home to work, and it's not even half of the city's size. Your time spent on traveling in a medivel world is not going to be pretty. Watching people passing by you for 30 minutes just to get from one post to another is so much fun. What kind of content are you expecting in this game?

I think some people are missing the point of this entirely.

Firstly, it would be realistic in scale. That doesn't mean it would have to realistically reflect the real world. It could be just as weird and wonderful as something like Morrowind, just a lot lot larger and more built-up.

Secondly, for those of you who think an enormous gameworld the size of an actual country isn't possible, go play Daggerfall. That was released in 1996. We're now in 2011. It's possible. Obviously the quality of graphics wouldn't be on par with Skyrim or Oblivion, but it's a good trade-off for more scale and depth in my opinion.