This has been on my mind for a while. The concept of "if you see it, you can go there" has been central to TES for a long time. If you saw a mountaintop off in the distance, you knew that if you wanted to, you could take a trek and soon be standing on the summit. Virtually no part of the world was off-limits, and this leant heavily to the sense of immersion, exploration and discovery that is so essential into the series.

My worry is that, if we get more realistic, steep mountainsides, will we still be able to explore every inch of the map? In Oblivion, the rounded mountains may have looked unrealistic, but they were at least fully scalable. If Skyrim forces us to be funneled through designated mountain passes, it will take away significantly from the sense of really being able to go anywhere you want in the world.

If there is a cliff side or steep slope, there needs to be some means of climbing it. Maybe levitation. Maybe pickaxes and a climbing skill. There has to be something. The idea of "un-traversable terrain" shouldn't exist in TES.

Does anyone feel the same, or are you alright with a more limited open world?

(note that I'm talking about inside the map, not map boundaries. there are already enough threads on that)

I agree with you.

That is what pissed me off in FNV. Everything had barriers, you couldn't go where you wanted.

There has to be some boundaries, unless the world is randomly generated, which I doubt. Once you reach that mountain your going to see an even bigger one, then another, then another, etc.

Agreed that really pissed me off because I could never get a good vantage point on the enemy base because there were invisible barriers everywhere.

I want freedom, but I also want realistic looking mountains. Frankly I wouldn't mind having to walk up linear trails if it meant the mountains looked better than the hilarious looking "mountains" in Oblivion.

Chances are there the majority of terrain will still be explorable, if I have to take linear paths up the more steep mountains, so be it.

+1 Alex

Sometimes I think that would be better than hitting invisible walls, or "you can't go any farther, turn back" messages.

In Morrowind, if you started "swimming to the mainland", you ended up swimming out into "wilderness" that was never-ending. But it never stopped you from going.

Oblivion had "none may pass" invisible borders, but just about anywhere else in the game was possible.

I ran into problems in FNV because of that. I would attempt to scale a perfectly climbable hill only to hit the invisible wall at the top; skirting around the face of the hill usually ended up with my pc trapped *behind* the invisible wall on the other side of the hill. I would have had several incoherent rants if I'd have been playing on a console. I have never loved the tcl command as much as I've loved it in FNV.

I have no problem with near-impossible to traverse terrain. A huge cliff side that keeps you out of an area, which you know at later levels you can get a levitation spell to get over, or you can get through the pass on the other side populated with huge dangerous monsters.

A certain level of boundaries makes exploration even more fun I think. Although they should not be completely impassable, just extremely difficult.

Also I would like to see a return of the climb skill. It would be very fun fome someone like me who likes to play thief characters.

It was mostly an engine limitation as anyone that has played around with oblivion's height map editor knows. The inability to form terrain 90 degrees vertically puts a serious damper on high you can get. However if you take the tech from FO3 and add extra terrain meshes to the singular landscape mesh then it is possible to have vertical cliffs and that is what is needed to have the terrain feel like a real mountain.

NV was made by Obsidian though and thats pry the main reason why there were so many barriers, but I did like their idea of borders, just having it blocked off instead of invisible walls

I would not mind a climbing skill

I would not mind a climbing skill.

Since this is the Elder Scrolls, sure, no invisible walls, go wherever you want. If this were Fallout on the other hand...

I love the pick axe idea. I can't remember what game it was, but there was a demo for a first person shooter game, and you had pix axes that
let you scale the mountians. I would love to do this for people who don't want to be magic users, or don't have the levitation spell.

I hate invisible walls, but I don't think I would want to see Unscalable mountians, so the only time I want to see an invisible wall is when
we reach the boarders of Skyrim. I think it would be good to have a short viewing distance so we wouldn't want to go further. So have invisible
wall, or just like Morrowind, instead of endless ocean, have endless fog so all you do is walk but can't see anything. This way no invisible wall
and you don't see anything that would want you to continue walking further.

Fallout 3 had zones and designated mountain metro passes, even road blocks. But that's OK because it has some real world reasons behind and not many noticed it. Me, I got seriously irritated because I am even against closed city world spaces. I agree that if we get real mountains, I would like to see through/under/around/over gameplay accompanying them.

Skyrim would be better if you could climb mountains. No invisible barriers, at least not ones you can actually GET to.

This is called Wanna be Sandbox, this how they lazily shaft you by selling a sanbox game and sundenly you realise your in a corridor game.

OTHO the game have limitation and need barrier the solution is implementing the barrier after a uneventfull place or generating a loop in walk. Mountains far ahead you walk run or whatever but you never get there.

And on a side note, there are some place like that but which actually lead you to somewhere interesting, so the player never know!!! Haa the doubt!!
Should i stay or should i go ?

They never said it was a sandbox game, they said it was OPEN WORLD.

Fallout is more story driven, not sandbox exploration driven.

Open world RPG != sandbox, but I do get what you're saying. It's pretty annoying when something looks like you can cross it or climb it, then you can't in this type of game.

As far as Skyrim goes, isn't it supposed to be a pretty mountainous region? I can't imagine you'd be able to climb all of them without some sort of assistance. Maybe magic, some sort of mount, or linear paths if you have neither would help? I don't think it would help believability if you could just trek straight up the tallest mountains in the world.

The problem in New vegas was that even places where you should be able to easily climb were blocked by invisible walls, bascallity everything was tunnelled and silly. I do want steep mountains and mountain passes, makes the mountains seem more epic.. I'ts ssimply a matter of balancing the area and have the mountain area open up once you're up there

I'd actually rather have mountain passes than be able to climb any mountain.

The pickaxe idea is a good one, but it would need to be much slower than simply walking through a pass.

I want a well designed road/travel system where there's actually some point besides easy navigation to walking on the roads/moutnain passes/river crossings and bridges. Assuming the game isn't level scaling (fingers crossed) they could take a hint from New Vegas and make the roads much safer than the wilderness.

Yeah I agree. Being able to stand on any inch of a barren, boring and unrealistic mountain is very low on my list of priorities. Where relatively flat land is concerned then by all means we should be allowed anywhere, but for mountains I would prefer predetermined, hand crafted paths. It's a lot easier for BGS to work in points of interest on the climbs and spectacular vistas if the path is fixed as well.

I agree. Nothing frustrated me more than the terrain in OB and lack of my beloved levitation (or whatever justifiable means needed to play around in the box) because of rushed production on an aging game engine. If you build it we must explore.

I don't have much of a problem with the "you can't go this way" messages.
Unsure about levitate, allows some crazy exploits. Fortify jump and climb skills are ok though.
Climb skill, sure. With a pick axe? Well, good luck I'd rather have proper equipment for it.
Today we can climb pretty much anything with a high skill/level, and run alongside slopes of 70° - which is nuts at any skill.

Pretty much everything should be possible to traverse, but having to work hard for it.
Being a super skilled mountain climber is still highly physical work.
But I don't want these artificial natural barriers forming valleys, like in MW.
And I don't want these truly artificial barriers forming view canols, like in FarCry2.

In terms of "If I can see it I can go to it" yes I think you should but at the same time if I see something beyond a mountain range I shouldn't just be able to waltz across the mountain range really easily.

I would prefer to have a little bit of geographical realism and have certain places I can't get to

There are natural geographical barriers that could limit where the player could go but that's more realistic than being able to just walk over whichever part you want.

If the terrain looks difficult to traverse then it should be difficult to traverse.

The only time it really pissed me off is when I couldnt climb up to see what was inside 1 bldg,... the 1 next to the bldg where the ghouls flew off to space from. Obsidian also peeved me off when almost no roofs are available for snipping from at least fallout 3 had a lot of roofs available to you here and there.