Will Skyrim be small?

[ub3rman123]

I hope it will be large, because that means more space to jam mods into. If it's huge, we won't have to worry about how every single good spot is taken.

[DonKnotts]

Anyone here who has played Just Cause 2 can tell you it's possible to have an enormous (significantly larger than a real life city) worldspace that has no load zones, borders or awful mushy LOD distant land. And surprisingly, still have very nice graphics and frame rate.

[MadMike710]

Anyone here who has played Just Cause 2 can tell you it's possible to have an enormous (significantly larger than a real life city) worldspace that has no load zones, borders or awful mushy LOD distant land. And surprisingly, still have very nice graphics and frame rate.

 

HA. Got JC2 yesterday.. :)

Yeah and I hope with the new engine they removed that annoying occasional "Loading Area..." message, it was even on the consoles... Takes the immersion right from it.

One thing that annoyed me about Oblivion was that once you had explored a few Ruins and Dungeons you could pretty much guess what the next one would be like. So as long as there is more diversity I will be happy, though a large worldspace to explore would be nice too. ^^

[Holyjoely]

As long it is at least as big as Oblivion I won't mind to be honest.

[TheCalliton]

nah, oblivion felt too cramped

wherever you went, a city was nearby and if your graphics were good enough, you could the the IC in the distance from ANYWHERE! felt too controlled

[Zaldir]

SNIP

Actually, Morrowind is not that big really. It only seems big because of the constant fog and rough terrain....

 

Yeah, I didn't mean it's bigger than Oblivion's Cyrodiil, but if you compare it, Cyrodiil should have been bigger than it was according to the map.

[Keanumoreira]

I doubt the game is as big as the map.

 

When going from point A to point B, although it looks like a short walk if you didn't use fast travel; I'm sure it's much longer.

[Vagrant0]

Skyrim is also mostly mountains, so knowing Bethsoft, they'll probably keep the player from being able to climb the really large ones in order to force the player down certain paths as a means of making the map seem larger (It "worked" in NV and Morrowind.) They may even use the snow as an excuse to obscure distant visibility so that the player doesn't have any major landmarks to judge his distance traveled by.

[urbex]

Skyrim is also mostly mountains, so knowing Bethsoft, they'll probably keep the player from being able to climb the really large ones in order to force the player down certain paths as a means of making the map seem larger (It "worked" in NV and Morrowind.) They may even use the snow as an excuse to obscure distant visibility so that the player doesn't have any major landmarks to judge his distance traveled by.

Obsidian chose to do that, not bethesda.

It was due to the inability of NPCs being able to climb mountains (no jumping/navmesh issues)

If the new engine improves by the slightest bit, this will be fixed.

[Vagrant0]

Obsidian chose to do that, not bethesda.

It was due to the inability of NPCs being able to climb mountains (no jumping/navmesh issues)

If the new engine improves by the slightest bit, this will be fixed.

Except that they did something similar with parts of FO3 (DC ruins) where the player is forced through certain areas just in how they are connected with heavy use of invisible walls and obstacles, despite the fact that most of it can function within a contiguous worldspace. Then there's parts in Oblivion where there are steep mountains, invisible walls, or border regions to keep the player out of certain areas or force them to approach from specific routes. Morrowind did this as well with the many steep peaks around red mountain and similar obstructions.

 

In NV it wasn't due to any sort of navmesh inability since paths could certainly be made up mountains, and such paths would be rather common in that environment due to the way that water usually flows down those kinds of mountains creating channels. It had nothing to do with how NPCs would interact with those areas and more to do with having portions of the map which are empty and creating a necessity for the player to take certain routes early in the game.