» Mon Jul 02, 2012 12:19 am I wanted to throw up some thoughts on distance in Skyrim. I'm an avid hiker IRL, so this is something of interest to me. As several people have noted, Skyrim would be only about 15 square miles square if you treated the map proportionately; however, this seems unrealistic to me. ]ust like there's a time inflation factor, it seems to me that distance is deflated as well, as would obviously be necessary to support the time inflation and to keep the map size to what we could reasonably play in (and Bethesda could reasonably compress into a game that works on most of our PCs). Given this, I thought I'd try to gage what the real size of Skyrim is, if it was a real place.
If I used the instant travel feature to walk from Whiterun to Rorikstead - which is one of the longer distances on the map over what is basically completely topographically gentle, open country, the program says that takes 7 hours and 10 minutes of game time. I left at 3:25 pm and arrived at 10:35 the same day, and I assume that I hit no obstacles (like dragons trying to fry me to a crisp or cannibal Foresworn eyeing me for their cook-fires). I figure that over such open country, at a brisk, forced-march/double-time type speed with only highly disciplined breaks (and why would my hero travel any other way?), largely unencumbered by baggage train and the other factors that might delay, say, a marching army, my character can do a little less than 5 miles a hour. A less hardy and somewhat encumbered, but still very healthy, person might do 3.5 miles a hour. That puts the distance between 25 and 35 miles. Assuming that the published game map is more-or-less to scale, this suggests a distance of around 80-100 miles, as the dragon flies, from Riften to Markarth. Of course, if this was a real place, one would do a lot less than 3.5 miles a hour over those mountains, but that's why I used the open country equivalent to do my estimation.
This seems to make sense to me. That's roughly the distance from Glasgow to Inverness, north-south across Scotland, or Basel to Lake Como, crossing Switzerland north-south. I picked those two because they both entail crossing two big mountain ranges, perhaps similar to that in Skyrim, over 80-100 miles. If you want a US equivalent, If you went from the Midcoast to the Nevada border, you would cross three mountain ranges (including the Sierras) and two plains regions over 120 miles. What do you think?
