Will Skyrim be small?

[urbex]

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.

You can easily edit those barriers out - they are mere collision planes/volumes used to section off areas where navmesh would not work out well (very complex terrain, and ultra-narrow pathways), and to bound the region of the Mojave.

 

O.

jus sayin'

[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.

You can easily edit those barriers out - they are mere collision planes/volumes used to section off areas where navmesh would not work out well (very complex terrain, and ultra-narrow pathways), and to bound the region of the Mojave.

 

O.

jus sayin'

But, that was an aspect of the engine. The Gamebryo Engine made this rather easy since the engine itself was not really designed for restrictive play. With other engines changing something like this may be more involved. Going by trends, one could probably imagine something as obstructive as tying something like a navmesh to those areas that the player can move through as a normal extension of how NPCs move through the world. In which case, changing where the player goes requires creating new parts of the navmesh and connecting them properly for each area, and may not be something easily done.

 

Areas outside of the pathed (allowed) sections also tend to be rather empty, glitchy, or not useful, so even if these barriers are lessened it doesn't necessarily mean that doing so will add anything to the game, and if the game features anything like linear routes, may break parts of the game.

Edited December 23, 2010 by Vagrant0

[SupermassiveBlackHole]

copypasta dungeons

 

Haha! xD

[Herculine]

In the end how big Skyrim will be (feel) will rely upon good map design IMHO. The way they laid out Morrowind was excellent because, especially at lower levels, you had to travel farther and longer to get places even though in reality they were just on the other side of that range of rocks, thus making the world seem huge. In the two most recent Fallout games this effect was attempted but botched royally (especially in New Vegas) because rather than using mountains or bodies of water in many places they just threw in immersion-killing invisible collision barriers. "I can see the entrance to the vault right there, but obviously the developers don't want me there yet because there's this invisible wall here. So much for role-playing..."

 

It's my hope that since Skyrim is a rugged mountainous region the formula of map designing used in Morrowind will be revisited. Also, I think I'd like to revisit Solstheim, but knowing Bethesda I'd imagine I'll have to wait for a DLC for that.