Daggerfall had the right idea.

[Rennn]

I wish there was some way to 'spread-out' the things in Skyrim. In five minutes of walking you can pass like two caves, four ruins and a village. I prefer more of what Daggerfall did: seemingly endless terrain, with things much more spread out. Of course, there'd still be trees and hills and grass and stuff, it wouldn't be as bland as Daggerfall's landscape, but other than that Daggerfall was just about perfect.

 

The navmesh bug would make any attempt to edit the landcsape to such an extent fail, however, so it's just wishful thinking. There's no real point to this post, I guess. Thoughts on this?

[Sunnie]

I'll have to disagree with you. Arena and Daggerfall both had waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much open space with nothing happening in it, made for a very boring exploration and made it easy to lose interest in the game. Finishing both of those games was quite painful.

[arcana75]

Yeah, too much space would just encourage fast travel all the time.

[Rennn]

It didn't help that Daggerfall had no trees or grass, or any rocks, or anything that made the environments look realistic. Just to clarify, I meant spreading out the dungeons and towns. Trees and plants and stuff would be as dense as ever. Hmmm...

 

Now I kind of want to try this, even with the navmesh bug. Hopefully Bethesda patches that at some point.

Question:

Can heightmaps be used in Skyrim for generating terrain?

Edited March 5, 2012 by Rennn

[Lunder]

Cool i had the same thought.. i ride for 2 min and pass 5 "important" quests etc.. sometimes it would be nice with a "red dead redemption" distance to things

[Deleted2783630User]

Yeah, too much space would just encourage fast travel all the time.

Daggerfall was built around fast traveling. The map was even searchable. :wink:

 

But yeah, I guess there'd be a case for there being too many caves, etc. I don't have Skyrim yet, but I know that Oblivion has way more caves than I'd ever want to plunder.

Edited March 6, 2012 by Guest

[jet4571]

Skyrim is rather densely packed, they could have doubled the distance between locations and it would've been about right. there should be many spots where there are no locations showing on your compass and spots where there are multiple. I feel that Oblivion was much larger than Skyrim and it feels odd having a bandit camp then a cave and then a ruin within 2 minutes travel time from a city.

[Mansh00ter]

I once tried to ride from one town to the next in Daggerfall, just to see what would happen (I usually used the overland map for quick travel). After an hour of riding, I moved two pixels across the map.

 

Don't get me wrong - I loved the scale of Daggerfall. I loved the idea that you had this MASSIVE world where you could, say, borrow a huge sum of money in Cyrodil, buy a boat, and sail off to Summerset cackling all the way. I loved the clever "puzzle pieces" random dungeon generator that made it possible to have thousands of dungeons and towns and each one different (I actually had a habit of getting lost in dungeons).

But yes, it could get a bit overwhelming.

 

I think Skyrim is on the other end of the spectrum. It's stocked full of unique content, but it feels tiny for anyone who played Daggerfall. And yeah, about 2x landmass size than it has would have been about right. I have to walk everywhere just to get a little bit of that "travelling in the wilderness" feel.

[Ghogiel]

My opinion is that it is somewhat cramped. If the space was even a little bit larger it would work better imo.

[ScarabMonkey]

Could you just scale down all actors and give them slower movement rates?

While you're at it, you could leave dragons the same - then they'd be EPIC!