So I got the new game informer digital copy and a quote on how big Grand Theft Auto 5 is

by Art Director Aaron Garbut

"When you include interior and exterior spaces together, Los Santos is bigger than the worlds of Red Dead Redemption, San Andreas, and Grand theft Auto IV combined, with room to spare"

Are you kidding me, thats a tremendously huge world to be packed with content. Its going to put a lot of games to shame and hopefully Bethesda catches wind to this. Other games are getting bigger too, like far cry 3.

This makes me wonder why skyrim was not bigger...

I always thought what if bethesda did the unthinkable and do two provinces. Another thing I thought of was what if skyrim downsized due to console limitations. If thats true, I wonder how Rockstar is pulling this off.

The Grand Theft games always have a ton of video cut scenes in them and thats what eats up the dislk space. Instead of a bunch of movies we can really only enjoy the first time we watch them, Bethesda gives us actual game content instead which I thank the gaming gods for every time I play one of their masterpiece games like Skyrim

Skyrim has over 300 hours of content that you can explore in one playthrough. 150+ dungeons, etc etc. How much more content can you realistically expect?

I am stricly talking about the map. MAP ONLY.

Because Rockstar knows how to drop old engines. barring the fact that the "quest distribution" between series aren't the same since you know...has nothing to do with the size of the map. proactively thinking thought said Games from Rockstars spawn NPC's on the fly while the majority of the TOWN NPC's are already there.

Not moving of course, but they are there.

inb4 someone says the NPC's move when the players aren't there.

HOWEVER, while I would not mind a Skyrim equivilant of such a massive map in comparison to previous titles, said maps on Rockstar games have to be big because you can move faster in realtime than you can in anything in Skyrim

READ IN REAL TIME, ALA NOT FAST TRAVEL.

Because it seems that they add pointless stuff to Skyrim which they think we want instead of making bigger cities and province size.

If you're talking map only, why would you want more dead space? There are what, 300-some locations in the game? They are spread out pretty well. Increasing map size would not add anything worthwhile to the game except longer travel times if you are traveling by foot.

GTA has cars, you need an large space for them to make sense, Some pure racing games are larger, Flight sims uses even larger maps as in continent sized as you travel much faster.
That you lose in scaling up is details, you can have larger cities if you are just allowed to enter the quest related houses and npc are created then you enter the scene.
In racing and flight sim you drop the npc and entering houses totally as it's not relevant for the game.

Of course the map will be filled with enough content. I doubt that there will be an excessive amount of dead space in GTA 5. Its just going to be natural. Take the wind turbines for example in GTA 5, that could be considered "dead space" but it not only serves as a good backdrop but it also is a realistic aspect to the the environment.

So if skyrim were much bigger Im pretty sure bethesda can match the size with content just like they always do. But I'm under the impression that you actually want every single part of the map to have something to do. And that has never been the case with any of Bethesda's games not to mention would be very unnatural.

Dont give me that, Red Dead Redemption has Horses. Bethesda just introduce Dragon Mounts which I might say travels a speed compareable to a helicopter so thats not a legit excuse.

I'm reluctant to say at the time of Skyrims inception it was an excuse.

Horses don't travel the same speed as cars. And we still don't know how the Dragon mounts are going to play out. Not to mention they were just added to a finished game, rather than the game world being made with dragon mounts in mind.

I don't think he's looking for a reasons why Slyrim wasn't larger it just came of as "GTA5 is gonna be huge, so take that." I've finished the GTAs 3 and up. They have very large maps, already on par if not a bit larger then skyrim ( have not played them in a year plus, could be wrong). That said I've found them to be the same as TES games, large space where you need to make your own fun in a lot of it. So the map will be large, wont really change much in term of how you play the game.

Oh you have early access to Dragonborn? Please, share the details with us!

Don't jump to conclusions.

I just don't see how much bigger Skyrim could be. The Elder Scrolls games already take 5 years to make. They are huge undertakings. If you add even more content it's going to take even longer for the games to come out.

You do realize there is over 300 hours of content in Skyrim, right? How much more content do you really want? Plus they are still expanding the game with DLC. Honestly, the amount of content in Elder Scrolls games is unmatched. While I would love more, more, more (I am a bit greedy), I am also realistic and realize you're probably not going to get a game with more content than Skyrim from the Elder Scrolls. Unless the next game has an even bigger budget than Skyrim, which may be the case, that all remains to be seen.

And how many of these Rockstar locations are hand-crafted? Is every interior hand-decorated, hand-crafted like in Skyrim? How many assets are being reused? Is GTA 5 going to have a lot of dead space? It's possible if the game is that huge. That all remains to be seen as well.

I'm just happy with the amount of content we get from Elder Scrolls. It's a pleasure playing these games and being entertained for a ridiculous amount of time.

Um, there are a few dragons in the vanilla game. Maybe those would be a fair indication of flight speed.

Lets say for arguments sake that we wont be able tofly on dragons( Icant even say that with a straight face lol) the idea is still there. Once Bethesda has the idea of something like that in mind they tend to grow on it for the next game. Thats all Im going to say about that buddy boy.

Go into one of the hundreds of houses within the game. You will find it populated with a realistic amount of items, and you can pick up and interact with almost all of them.

Now go play Red Dead Redemption. Go into a house. Try to pick the fork up off the table.

Well if you consider inside space in Skyrim I bet it is still bigger then GTA5. Also at least in Skyrin I can explore the whole world at the start, and not have sections open up as the story progresses.

Stop complaining. Skyrim is twice as detailed as any rockstar game, and the quality of the map is significantly better.

They are huge undertakings for more reasons then you think. Oblivion took so long because the team was very small, each game the bethesda team gets bigger and bigger hence skyrim being the biggest bethesda game ever. Another thing that I think could limit the map size is the engine, task may take longer then it would with a cryengine 3 or and Unreal Engine 4. The newer engines are cutting down time to perform various task. What that means is more content. Why? Because With the same budget of skyrim bethesda could have added more things because task were a lot more faster.

What's the point in trying to compare a GTA game with an Elder Scrolls?

I've had 270 hours of gameplay out of Skyrim so far, and that'll only increase with more exploring, DLC etc.

For me, Skyrim's size is just fine. The map size is one province, and the size of the province is what I'd expect for the game.

Agreed. Skyrim is far, far too small. Not just because it's a 2011 game, but because it's hand-craftedness makes it so cramped and out of scale - something which didn't really seem to be an issue in Morrowind or Oblivion.

They really need to up the scale with the next TES. Not just a little either - several times larger at least.

And when I say I want a bigger gameworld, I don't even mean more content in terms of quests, dungeons, points of interest, etc. Fairly bland wilderness would do if it spread things out a bit and made the gameworld seem much more realistic and believeable in scale.

This is by no means a complaint, its simply curiosity. Trust me Im well invested into skyrim and any of bethesda's future products.

Those saying the map size is limited by the engine: NO IT ISN'T. It can support a map of up to 14x14 quads in full detail. That is MUCH bigger than Skyrim.

However, bigger worlds greatly increase workload. If you want all landscape (every cell) hand detailed, that is a lot of added work. Also there are memory limits that can enter in (*cough*consoles*cough*).

However, I would appreciate a larger world. And I think it is possible they may do this. I personally think they will wait for the next gen (thank GOODNESS that's gonna be soon) and then do Elder Scrolls VI: Dominion and have it take place in the ENTIRE Aldmeri Dominion (Valenwood and Summerset) with a reformed empire (decades after Skyrim probably) taking on the Thalmor (who wants to join the legion and probably some bosmer rebels and kick some Thalmor ***?). Anyway, that is just speculation. But I think it is entirely plausible.