My suspension of disbelief goes out the window entirely when the game constantly talks about nations, massive cities, massive mountains and serious civil war & strife and all you can see is a game world the size of a gated community and every massive city is just a cul-de-sac in the neighborhood. When it takes 30 minutes to walk from one end of the country to the other from any direction, no, it isn't open world.

In my opinion, Daggerfall's world was much larger than needed, and the landscape between locations was all empty. Unless you had an ungodly amount of spare time, you would end up fast traveling everywhere anyway. The miles and miles of empty randomly generated terrain between locations was not worth exploring.

What I miss from Daggerfall are the cities. Huge cities filled with people. In Oblivion/Skyrim, we get little walled villages masquerading as cities.

Is it technically possible? Yes.
But would it make a good game? Not too sure.

What's great about TES Series from Morrowind onwards, and the Fallout series from F3 onwards is that it's all hand crafted. Sure, Oblivion used some generated terrain for the base landscape, but it was then populated and made unique by the artists. Bethesda's games focus heavily on exploration, on finding new things. If you have millions of miles of tree, bush, bush, tree, then that doesn't make it interesting to explore. If all dungeons are randomly generated, that doesn't make it interesting to explore either.

There's a point where you need to balance size. Daggerfall was way to big that it made it boring to explore. Let's face it, if I walked across Great Britain in Medieval times, unless I hit a city or a village, there wouldn't be much of interest along the way. There's a point where enjoyment triumphs realism.

I'm sorry but, if I found myself in Great Britain during Medieval times, I'd be on high alert, and just about everything would be 'interesting' to say the least. I'm not sure I would even want to find the city or village in question, either.

I meant if you were a person in the times. Sure, you'd be on alert. But in Bethesda games we have dungeon, bandit camp, spectacular waterfalls, mountain, dungeon, city, town, bandit camp, ruins, burial sites, huts etc. My point is that in real life walking you wouldn't have found half of that stuff, but games would be boring with just tree, tree, rock, tree (as Oblivion demonstrated sometimes).

Certainly. The problem is that computer generated stuff tend to be rather bland (as seen by the Oblivion landscapes) and lack that extra detail that many gamers been used to now. I think it would take a great deal of effort to make it generate good stuff, which in the end might not be worth it as so many people are pleased with the hand placed stuff anyway.

Mincraft is extremely bland though, even more so than Daggerfall.

I always felt Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim were too small. I wouldn't need that much larger gameworld to be pleased though, 4x the Oblivion landmass would be nice enough, including 4x the city sizes.

One thing I really liked in Daggerfall, which partly is thanks to the huge world, is how anonymous the player character is, while in the later TES games all the game world changes are all thanks to the player and everyone knows the player.

^I'd be alot happier with some more wilderness. If only to space things out a bit more.

You wouldn't be able to save minutia the same way Bethesda's later games do, and there would likely be less of it.

The reason why Daggerfall's world between cities/landmarks was boring was because there was no content. Simple. Period. That is all.

There were no people, creatures, detail in terrain. If there had been, it would not have been boring.

As much as I love the idea of Daggerfall, it had a LONG way to go to be a "simulator" compared to just a game. Daggerfall was based around the cities... which makes sense for a narrative... but it doesn't exactly help immersion if you travel through the wilderness. In fact, Daggerfall could have been designed to work exactly like Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect 2 where you just choose the location you want to go, the loading screen appears, and you end up in the area you want to be. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the freedom to be able to travel through the wilderness in Daggerfall... but there was simply NO point to it whatsoever. That's an implementation issue, not a problem with the size of the world.

But I have a LOT more faith in randomly/procedurally-generated content than many, it seems. If done properly, it can solve most of the problems in open-world RPG's. But it must be done PROPERLY and IN-DEPTH. If not, you turn the world into Fable 1 or a generic MMO. And if care is taken and given enough content, it will not necessarily be repetitious. That's the key.

The places near me would be just small fields for miles upon miles followed up by occasional hamlets...

It would be nigh impossible to travel any distance alone and unmolested.

You ever been to Norfolk?

It is.

Substance over size. I'd rather see a smaller map that has more interesting content than going big for the sake of having a huge game world. I don't know about Skyrim, but I felt even Oblivion and Fallout 3 were a bit too big for the content they provided. In between all of the cookie cutter caves, vaults, ruins, subways, etc. was a whole lot of nothing. Just scenery. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy exploring, but only when what I'm exploring is unique. There came a point where I saw all that Cyrodiil's forests and snowy mountains had to offer, and with very few standout locations and such a large map, the allure of exploration quickly gave way to extensive use of fast travel.

I doubt I'd go anywhere near an RPG boasting a world even half the size of Daggerfall's as it'd most likely be the above, but worse.

I loved those cities...so big you had to use a map through them a few times before getting used lol... And with so many random npcs that you could kill repeatedly while being a werewolf...hehehe. Nowadays I would be scared to death to kill a non-hostile npc because all of them could be possible quest givers...



Yes...that and the fact that you had to spend hours to get a decent rank in a guild , although doing crappy repetitive quests, and not be able to be grandmaster of everything in a day and without even having almost any magical skill or whatever, is what I miss more of Daggerfall.

I really find creepy the fact that Skyrim guards know all your skills and alliances...I mean, even dark brotherhood ones...come on...first time a guard told me "Hail Sithis" I almost fell from my chair.

At which point, the good graphics they started with will no longer be good.

I cant even imagine how much hard drive space this game would need.

Lord of the Rings Online is pretty big.

Yes.

Exactly. Dwarf Fortress is (imo) staggeringly better than anything out there when it comes to random generation of content. With the new release coming soon (could be weeks, could be a few months still), the Adventure mode will actually be worth playing (for me the top feature is just the gigantic cities it can make. Not to mention caves, catacombs and dungeons). Sure, it's graphics date back to the 70's (ASCII tiles) but all that leftover power in your modern day computer is used to fully simulate the world.

In any case, no, having 400,000 square kilometers is complete overkill. I'd say even 2-3 times bigger than Skyrim would be sufficient. Just big enough to make the cities at least look like towns, instead of a couple huts with a population of 20 people.

No [censored] way. I have to try this. Thank you for providing me with 6 months of entertainment.

As long as a real mile. The scale was 1:1.