debaser

The legend of King Arthur is a fantasy story anyway, so it doesn't matter, but: http://www.kingarthursknights.com/faq/roundtable.asp

"Realistic fantasy world" is not the same as "similar to the real world". It should feel like a believable fantasy world, but it doesn't need to be a reflection of medieval Europe. If you want people to feel like this is a civil war tearing apart an entire province of a vast empire, don't portray battles with 10-20 soldiers involved. That's not a battle, that's a large bar brawl. If your engine can't show what your story demands, that's understandable. Just get clever about it. Offscreen that action, think more about scale, tell different kinds of stories. The problem isn't that the game worlds are too small - they're huge. They just suffer from a goofy sense of scale. Morrowind was not great at this, but at least it was only trying to portray one sparsely populated area of a fringe province. Oblivion and Skyrim have both gotten successively worse at it as the design goals and motivations behind the series have changed. By the way, you mentioned the Round Table before as an example. Did you know according to the legend, the Round Table was supposed to seat up to 1600 men?

Skyrim's map takes around 2 hours of real time to walk across. Daggerfall's takes around 70 hours. Now of course there's much, much more to see in the Skyrim map (so you actually *want* to walk across it), but it's still a huge problem for the feeling of scale. There's no empty space in the wilderness, it's just interesting locations all crammed up together. It means the whole province of Skyrim basically feels like a large park instead of a huge region of a living world. How far could you get if you walked out your door and down the road for 2 hours? Enough to reach from one side of your state to the other? Even the capital of Solitude only has a few buildings in it, as opposed to the hundreds of buildings and streets you find in any reasonably sized town in daggerfall (and of course there are hundreds and hundreds of towns). It doesn't matter that many of these buildings weren't enterable - they all contribute to the feeling of actually being in a realistic world. Incidentally, the "real medieval battles were only a few dozen soldiers!" argument is pretty lame. Firstly because it's not really accurate - even the small ones were a few hundred, and those weren't kingdom scale armies like you should see in Tamriel. And secondly because this is an epic fantasy setting, not a realistic medieval setting.

As someone who still plays Daggerfall, I lolled But yes, scale is something Bethesda has always struggled with. Skyrim and Oblivion were huge games with a lot of content, yet felt like very, very small worlds indeed. This isn't necessarily a problem. Bethesda could tell tighter and more compelling stories if they went with a more appropriate scale. But because they insist on telling huge epic stories in worlds that can't really be huge and epic, you end up with lame scenes like climactic battles (e.g. in Oblivion or the Skyrim civil war) where the opposing armies have like six dudes each.