I can see what you're saying. Some portions of the game would have much more potential in a closed-world game. However, if TES games weren't open world, then you wouldn't be playing an Elder Scrolls game, in my opinion at least. The downsides are apparent. More bugs, less opportunity for large scale battles, but I think that, all things considered, they pull it off fairly well. As stated before, "If TES was anything but open-world, I wouldn't play it."

I'd prefer if it was "semi-open", as in... each hold was its own worldspace and you had a realistically-sized area to explore (4-9 square miles?) but it just represented a small part of each hold at a realistic scale around the main cities. I am somewhat annoyed by Oblivion and Skyrim being completely open-world, but not because of the reason you mentioned. I'm mostly annoyed because it literally feels tiny. When I run from whiterun to riverwood and then to falkreath it takes about 5-10 minutes. If you make your own heightmap that's a realistic scale at the same width and length of the Skyrim one, you'll see that the mountains and rivers and everything about it is seriously tiny and it feels ridiculous to play in after that. All of Skyrim is like the size of a single valley between a few mountains in real scale. The total width is about 7 km. I'd really prefer if Bethesda simply made a few areas of realistic scale (somewhat like Fallout 3 / FNV? Those are like 1/4 scale or something though.), and connected them with fast travel, with a map showing them as being a realistic distance apart.

Open-world worked good in Morrowind, but in Oblivion and Skyrim it makes the world feel ridiculously small. Maybe it's because of the distant land, or maybe it's because they're not islands.

I don't think the battle size limits are because of it being open world though, I think it's because of how AI is handled. Open-world isn't as performance-killing as you might expect. If it's done correctly it should be not much different than a "closed level", since only a few immediately close cells are loaded at any given time.

The issue is that Beth keeps shooting for this "epic" narrative without having the tech to back it up. You can pull of "massive" battles in action games and FPSes because you're limiting the player to a very small section of the fight. Everything else is just a non-interactive set piece. It's as if they never looked at the civil war premise and asked, "Can we realistically accomplish this?" This is why Morrowind's narrative worked so much better. It's all small scale. I mean, big things are happening, but all of your tasks involve information gathering, spying, brokering alliances, stealthy incursions into enemy territory. You're not making big splashes, marching alongside an army. You're a special agent.

Skyrim does this occasionally. Some of the Blades quest capture that feel. But they miss just as often. Beth needs to realize that smaller scale conflict can be just as engaging and thrilling as massive battles (something they cannot do with the tech they currently employ).

Oddly enough, I always felt that KotoR's design was much better than Bioware's later projects (which I find to be almost unplayable). I think it had more to do with the art direction than anything else. Bioware's vision of the Star Wars universe was excellent. Obsidian really struggled with level design on the sequel, but Chris Avellone and his narrative team saved the day with some of the best characters and lore Star Wars has ever seen. But then again, Obsidian has never been good at level/world design.

I agree that Skyrim is far too small and scaled down. It's tiny really. Walking between different holds or going south to north is like a 5-10 minute stroll in the park, when it should feel like an epic journey. But no. Going for a linear gameworld instead would be THE WORST thing that could possibly happen to the series in my opinion.

For me, the key to a good open gameworld is finding the right balance between hand-crafted design, and generation. It's funny really.... people complained about Oblivion feeling too generated with not enough attention to detail. Now with Skyrim, I think the gameworld is almost too hand-crafted. Sure, there's things to find and see every few steps you take, but it all feels so horribly compact and out of scale. One minute you're in a sunny forest - a few minutes later you're in an icy wasteland. Some big, randomly generated wildnerness areas could make a huge difference in spreading things out a lot without demanding too much additional dev time.

I'm not even entirely convinced it's technology holding the scale of the gameworld back. It could be a number of things. Perhaps criticism of previous games has put Bethesda off using random/procedural generation even in moderation. Perhaps they're worried some gamers would find a huge gameworld too overwhelming and tedious.

With the next TES game, they should really aim to up the scale of everything by at least 2x, if not more.

Hi all,

I think that Bethesda should have made a bigger region...even with Oblivion but with Skyrim is really extreme.
The mountains around you don't help in this sense and per se the size of certain cities is really ridiculous.
Anyway the game is a blast but i just wanted a bigger region thats all.

Dbag,
I just watched that entire video. Oblivion was epic, so is skyrim.
That is all.

Large battles aren't really viable in a RPG with current technology
In DAO you had a mix of cutscenes showing masses of troops and small scale battles between the PC and a few foes
In other areas like size of towns there is an argument for not showing an entire province and only showing part of it like MW did but MW's towns still weren't real world size

I have no trouble accepting that the game is only a representation of the world, that in the "real" Skyrim there are many more towns, farms, people, goats etc but depicting them all wouldn't add much to the game and would be a ridiculous use of resources
The open world format has big benefits for exploration and I wouldn't sacrifice it

The problem is fitting it into current lore. Daggerfall was the perfect size to represent two provinces. Then Morrowind was like 12 square miles but was an island so you could argue that they scaled down the island. Then Oblivion is supposed to be the entire main province of Cyrodiil and is only 16 square miles. I'm supposed to believe the entire nation of the Imperials is 16 square miles? Skyrim is in a similar situation.

When someone creates a total conversion mod like Nehrim built in its own world on an island, it's believable. But creating 16 square miles into the Tamriel Lore and calling it an entire province takes away some of the realism. So the capital city in all of Tamriel has less than 100 people in it?

The games are still fun, but I don't buy the "16 square miles equals an entire nation" thing, and looking at the world map makes me chuckle at how tiny this planet has been portrayed with the exception of Daggerfall.

What I like my in my TES

Open-world Fantasy RPG or GTFO.

You have to suspend your imagination because the technology is not available to make proper scale yet. Judgin by how much things have come along in the last 20 years, it won't be long, during our lifetime most likely. Unless of course everyone goes away from the PC and only buys bloody mobile phones and iPads for gaming, in which case, enjoy what you've got, it ain't getting much better anytime soon.

Daggerfall and Arena were bigger, but much of it was randomly generated.

If Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind were anywhere near as large, people would complain about all of the "filler".

Movies are shot on sets that are about a block or two square! How in the world can the represent entire... cities/nations/worlds like that?

Even the highest budge blockbuster hollywood productions create "large battles" by filming about 100 people and then using computers to duplicate and replicate them. Gasp!

The fact is that technology doesn't exist that is capable of creating a real-scale virtual world.

You seem to be getting closer to the answer, keep tugging the thread.

You are already aware that "all have to be scaled down" due to current technology and other good reasons,so i don't see the point here.

Tes is open world and this is the only certain thing that will never change in this franchise i think.

Of course in the future we'll have the opportunity to a far better experience,but until game developers are "forced" to make a game "playable" for 2005/2006 low -level machines (game consoles that represent the large majority of the market i think) they didn't have too much choices in this regard.

What Tes fan would be pleased to play a game settled only in a "big city" (well,not so big after all in the game ) like Grand Theft Auto 4 ?

Truth? It's all about money. If we wanted to pay $420 each for Skyrim, then they could afford to create a huge game with realistic-scale battles. But at that price, nobody would buy it. So they couldn't afford it after all.

That's really all it is. They don't have the money and resources to do what you'd like them to do.

And at the end of the day, Skyrim and other TES games are open-world and interactive games first. They start with that, then do what they can from there to create as "epic" a setting as they feasibly can.
There are games out there that can create life-sized cities and battles. However, the goal in those games was to create life-sized cities and battles. That was never the goal in TES, and it would conflict with things that are.

Ice cold, freezing.

TES games are open world, sandbox games. Anything else is gravy.

I guess I'm enough of a newbie at gameing that I think that Oblivion and Skyrim feel hug. But then again I don't FT ( much ) and most of the time I don't RUN, I walk from place to place. Go into 3rd person and watch how fast you are going. IF I could run from town to town my county would feel rather small, but I'd probably have a heart attack trying. Quit sprinting everywhere.... walk. Look at the time lapse. How long does it actually take to get from Iverstead to High Hrothgar at a walk? You try sprinting up a mountian! Just because your character can do it, doesn't make the world smaller, it just mean's you are going through it faster.

As for epic battles, I'll go with the technoligy isn't up to doing everything yet. I'd rather have the open world.

JMO

The series has always been about open-world freedom. I can't understand why the OP is railing against it now, as if it had somehow betrayed its own roots. Don't like this genre, don't play it. Simple as that. And if he doesn't like it, why is he in here?

Awesome except for the last 5-10 minutes?


But then, I play different games for different things. When I want my character-heavy, romance, mostly linear plotfest, I play Bioware. When I want my open-world, free-form character-build, first-person, explorationfest, I play Bethesda. (And I also play JRPGs, and ARPGs, and roguelikes..... variety is nice. Plenty of genres and subgenres to bounce around between. If I wanted Epic Battle..... I'd probably play something like King Arthur or the Total War games, I guess. Not sure, haven't played games like that.)

The last thing this franchise needs is to pull a Red Faction and switch to linear levels. That WILL be the end of TES.

Obstacles like mountains actually do help to make the provinces feel bigger. Morrowind, despite actually being a smaller landmass than Oblivion's Cyrodiil, felt bigger to most players than Oblivion.

The battle for whiterun was [censored] epic I don't care what anybody says.

He's no closer than anyone else but you seem to think you have the answer. Instead of making Ice Cold comments why not share what's in your mind with everyone. I seriously doubt you have any feasible solution.