LE Bigger skyrim

[jamesmorlock]

I don't feel as though Skyrim, or it's mountains, are big enough. Yes, at the beginning you are greeted with a vast new world, but as you progress and memorize every location, and climb every mountain, it gets dull quickly. Locations are reached too fast as there are so many settlements you have to *try* not to run into them. I want to literally get my character lost in the vastness of Skyrim, wandering the frozen wastes in search of food and shelter. I don't necessarily want new locations, just sort of *stretch* the map out, if that's even feasible, to create more wilderness and more open space. Also, it would be excellent to scale the mountains larger to reflect a realistic mountain size. I was sort of disappointing post-main quest to find out that Skyrim is roughly the size of my small hometown.

 

Maybe this is impossible or too much work, but I think this would make a lot of people happy.

[Fatecheater]

For sometime, I thought I'm the only one who complains about Skyrim being too small and and meets up with all responses like "Skyrim is small but detailed", "You call that small? Clearly 200hr spent ingame is not SMALL", blah blah blah...

 

I agree with you, man :), on every point you gave. The ruins and dungeons in Skyrim located far too close to one another, to an extent that I feel the Skyrim world is cramped and jammed like a theme park (too little space, too many things). I DO WONDER if whoever wrote a complaint that Oblivion world is empty actually spent hundreds of hours role-playing (play the game, admire the scenes, experience the world from cities, forests, lakes to dungeons,... and actually feel like a second life). Well, Oblivion is still small, though :D

 

It is not impossible to increase Skyrim world's size. There are some ways of doing it, but the results depend on each method. For example, we take the heightmap into account (landmass and water area) and pump it to 8x the original size (every cell get replicated and placed adjacent to itself, then fix the clipping), but this will change every cell ID (thus, imcompatible with... every mods, DLCs, blah blah blah), and every other objects must be hand-placed (gigantic task). I fancy a method in which we work on the given world space, but add cells with customed ID between landmarks, dungeons,..., but then the ratio of the original space may be compromised. If that's done, the cities need rebuilt, too, to match original ratio.

 

Either way, it's not something a single man can do alone :)

[d4em]

I agree as well, Skyrim is even worse than Oblivion in the aspect of being able to walk from Riverwood to Winterhold in less than a day. However, actually increasing the map would be a HUGE, i repeat HUGE HUGE HUGE undertaking, so maybe there are better ways to make skyrim feel larger, ect:

 

- Several mountain ridges that you cannot cross in the exterior, a large dungeon or pass leads from one side of the ridge to the other, giving the player the feel that the mountain is bloody huge

- Cut the open planes of land, post some trees there, make sure the player cannot see halfway across the map. More cluttered and foliaged areas generally feel larger while you're exploring due to the player not being able to see anything. In the frost areas, this could be achieved by large rock formations.

- Make the "marker shows up on compass" range a lot smaller, or remove it completely

- Make the main roads take detours, so the player has to walk longer, and plant more foliage around them to make the forests behind them seem larger.

 

Just some general ideas here... Because I'm pretty sure that actually scaling the map up is a bad idea, most of the reasons are in the post above me :)

[RaktoastTheSandwichTopper]

yup it can take a day to walk up on of the Adirondack peaks so it should take even longer to walk up one of skyrim's

[ElvenHeroine]

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/669051-distances-in-skyrim/page-4?

 

You guys should take a look at my post on this thread about how big Skyrim is suppose to be.

 

I mean technically if Nirn was compared to the Earth, Skyrim should be as big as the 48 Continental United States. This means travelling from Winterhold to Markarth should be similar to travelling from Boston to San Diego.

 

That is a little too much distance for my taste. Given they arranged time to transverse about 1/20th of real time. We can make Skyrim be 1/20th of its actual size. Which is still pretty big, but manageable.

FakePersonality, on 16 Jun 2012 - 10:15, said:

 

I agree as well, Skyrim is even worse than Oblivion in the aspect of being able to walk from Riverwood to Winterhold in less than a day. However, actually increasing the map would be a HUGE, i repeat HUGE HUGE HUGE undertaking, so maybe there are better ways to make skyrim feel larger, ect:

 

- Several mountain ridges that you cannot cross in the exterior, a large dungeon or pass leads from one side of the ridge to the other, giving the player the feel that the mountain is bloody huge

- Cut the open planes of land, post some trees there, make sure the player cannot see halfway across the map. More cluttered and foliaged areas generally feel larger while you're exploring due to the player not being able to see anything. In the frost areas, this could be achieved by large rock formations.

- Make the "marker shows up on compass" range a lot smaller, or remove it completely

- Make the main roads take detours, so the player has to walk longer, and plant more foliage around them to make the forests behind them seem larger.

 

Just some general ideas here... Because I'm pretty sure that actually scaling the map up is a bad idea, most of the reasons are in the post above me :smile:

It is easier than you think. You first need to cut down skyrim to its skeletonic outprint and then quadruple the size or find a means to do so, then use outlyers to mark specific terrain as it was originally, this in turn will simply spread out already established terrain and just manipulate with a randomizer to consistently add trees and flura. Then all you need to do is size up the mountains which just involves the same practice, but roughing out the edges (which may take some time), then you just need to fix any water issues, monster spawn issues, and then add villages. Then add and move triggers for events from where they once were. It saves you time if you just cut and past algorithms that already exist and just change the variable stances to fit this new world.

 

It is easier than what people make it out to be and it can be even easier if you can get yourself a crew together.

Edited February 17, 2013 by ElvenHeroine

[Strokend]

Instead of making Skyrim bigger, would it be possible to just make people and things smaller?

 

I'm remembering a particular Warcraft 3 map. Even at the biggest possible size, a map wouldn't seem very big at all, so one of the map makers actually took all the units, and made them incredibly tiny. The result was a gigantic world to explore (it helped that camera was forced to a similar height as the character's size and character speed reduced to match).

 

Yes, changing building sizes still results in an incompatibility with mods and DLC, but it's easier to fix than pulling it hundreds of miles to another location.

[ElvenHeroine]

Instead of making Skyrim bigger, would it be possible to just make people and things smaller?

 

I'm remembering a particular Warcraft 3 map. Even at the biggest possible size, a map wouldn't seem very big at all, so one of the map makers actually took all the units, and made them incredibly tiny. The result was a gigantic world to explore (it helped that camera was forced to a similar height as the character's size and character speed reduced to match).

 

Yes, changing building sizes still results in an incompatibility with mods and DLC, but it's easier to fix than pulling it hundreds of miles to another location.

 

That may issue a problem with things already too small and it may screw up the graphic detail as a result.

[Strokend]

 

 

Instead of making Skyrim bigger, would it be possible to just make people and things smaller?

 

I'm remembering a particular Warcraft 3 map. Even at the biggest possible size, a map wouldn't seem very big at all, so one of the map makers actually took all the units, and made them incredibly tiny. The result was a gigantic world to explore (it helped that camera was forced to a similar height as the character's size and character speed reduced to match).

 

Yes, changing building sizes still results in an incompatibility with mods and DLC, but it's easier to fix than pulling it hundreds of miles to another location.

That may issue a problem with things already too small and it may screw up the graphic detail as a result.

 

 

All that needs be done is a change to the mesh size. If that's done, texture size automatically resizes, and scalings will still make them even tinier, since they haven't passed their caps.

[ElvenHeroine]

 

 

Instead of making Skyrim bigger, would it be possible to just make people and things smaller?

 

I'm remembering a particular Warcraft 3 map. Even at the biggest possible size, a map wouldn't seem very big at all, so one of the map makers actually took all the units, and made them incredibly tiny. The result was a gigantic world to explore (it helped that camera was forced to a similar height as the character's size and character speed reduced to match).

 

Yes, changing building sizes still results in an incompatibility with mods and DLC, but it's easier to fix than pulling it hundreds of miles to another location.

That may issue a problem with things already too small and it may screw up the graphic detail as a result.

 

All that needs be done is a change to the mesh size. If that's done, texture size automatically resizes, and scalings will still make them even tinier, since they haven't passed their caps.

 

You might have a good point there, but you would need to make everything smaller except for the terrain, rivers, and mountains. Trees would have to be smaller, wildlife smaller, and everything else as you had mentioned smaller.

 

If you can make the meshes to the point where Skyrim is about the size of 1/20th of the 48 Continental United States, then we have a doable large enough world that isn't too large that you feel like it takes you years to do anything.

[AlduinWorldEater]

I'm all for this! Let's make Skyrim bigger. It always irked me that I could walk from Riverwood to Whiterun in under five minutes, when the distance suggests it'd be a thiry minute run. Yes, I would spend thirty real-world minutes making the trek from one city to the next. Why? Because you never know what you'll run into on the road. You might have an uneventful trip, with maybe a wolf or two, or you might get accosted by bandits, thieves, drug lords, etc., or even a dragon. I would absolutely LOVE for it to take me forever to get from one place to the next.

 

I'm not being sarcastic, either. I'm freakin' flipping over this idea.