So ever since Morrowind, Bethesda Game Studios has been sticking to this "one province per game" rule, which is all good and fine. But the thing is, people have always suggested having another multiple province game, like Arena or Daggerfall, but the excuse most naysayers give is that it's not feasable for a modern game.

And then along comes Zenimax with Elder Scrolls Online.

I'll admit, I'm on the fence about this game, but the one good thing I will say about the folks over at Zenimax Online, is that their game just might pressure the devs at Bethesda into making The Elder Scrolls 6 span multiple provinces. The precedent's been made, now, after all.

What do you think? Elder Scrolls VI: Summerset and Thras (or Pyandonea), anyone? Maybe Elsweyr and Valenwood?

(20 bucks says this'll be moved to the General forum, but honestly, when you're talking about TES Online and TES 6, where do you post?)

Well, the difference with MMOs is... storage space.

Most of a MMO is actually on a server somewhere, NOT installed on your harddrive. That means that devs don't need to worry about things like "storage" or "disc space."

Anyway, this needs to go into the pre-existing TES VI speculation thread, methinks.

Um, no? World of Warcraft needs about 25 gigs of hard drive space.


Like I said, I was thinking of posting in General, but I am talking about how TES Online's gonna affect the series. Makes it hard to decide which forum to use, so I just went with my gut.

As the above guy said, that's basically wrong. And to the extent that stuff is kept online, it's information like who has what and what goes where, not physical in-game information like the game-world mesh and textures. An MMO stores very little more game information online than Battlefield 3 or Diablo 3.

To answer the OP, I actually prefer the approach of keeping to one province (more or less). It allows for plenty of detail, and also leaves something to be excited about in the future. Not much fun is they do one big game where each province has a tenth of the detail as it would normally have, and then leave nothing for any future titles that hasn't already been seen. Although with TESO that problem almost becomes a reality - the upside is that it's set 1000 years before, and BGS is unlikely to craft any future games too explicitly on what's provided in TESO, so that what we know from the lore and maps already is probably all that'll be 'given away.'

Its not that a modern game couldn't handle it, its just the amount of time it would take to develop it is insane. If it takes 3-4 years for Bethesda to fill in one province, imagine how long it would take to fill in 2, or 3, or more. Daggerfall was a randomly generated world, so world size was never really an issue. soon as you leave randomly generated world for a more fixed and detailed world, you have to take into consideration the amount of memory ones system has.


That being said, I do think it would be cool for a TES game to have 2 provinces vs one, but at the cost of ~2 more years of development time, ill just settle for one.

Difference really is that each province in TESO is going to be a lot less detailed than any of the provinces featured in the last three TES games.

Look at half the regions in WOW, you can run across them in only a few minutes. Most of them have a couple of small villages, with a handful of buildings, generic NPCs with less conversational skills than even the most wooden Oblivion NPC and a couple of interesting features. Morrowind alone had more detail than any five WOW regions, heck, Oblivion had more detail than some of the larger WOW regions.

They probably won't go down that route. One province per game is fine.
If the games are released 4-5 years from each other and they only feature one province then with 2 of them it would take at least 1-2 more years.

And why need more than one? They already give us huge, beautiful, fully detailed provinces with so much to do and literally hundreds of hours of gameplay (and with modding for pc and the usual dlc's that number is even bigger) so adding another province would be too much...freedom and lots of stuff to do is good but cramming too much in it is not so good.

And I prefer them focusing on only one province that will be kickass and unique than 2 that will be a bit watered down due to less time dedicated to them because of the need to split resources.

Lastly, from a business standpoint, doing numerous provinces per game will also reduce the series lifespan...so there's hardly any advantages to do more than 1 province and they should continue with their model.

I hate the single province thing they have been doing, worlds always too small in my opinion, would love an epic full Tamriel again.