Huh?

Its funny how people love to hate people simply for their opinion on this forum -sometimes it borders on the insane.
The guy has a valid point as far as I'm concerned. I would just as happily play an open world game centered around one completely to-scale city and perhaps its outskirts, it would be simply amazing. Sure you would miss the joy of romping through the countryside and so forth, but imagine a living breathing to-scale city populated by thousands upon thousands of npcs, with sprawling districts - slums, palaces, castles, sewers, market districts etc. It would be cool as hell.

I agree fully with this post. Sometimes dugeons are so close from each other that I cannot help to enter into WTF mode.
Although I very much like Skyrim as it is, distance between cities should be about 10x what it is or more, making the whole continent surface 100x bigger.
That's not possible without procedural terrain generation (and stuff to make that area interesting) and I think that will be the future sandbox games to make them really huge.
I mean, the day you can (optionally) walk for hours in the same forest on in a mountain area and still find interesting things to do will be a great day.


But then you will get people to complain that it is too big or empty.

Bethesda can't even maintain the city size they've had in previous games. They've sold more copies with each subsequent release, the team size has something like tripled since Morrowind. What exactly is holding them back from better representing world size?

Perhaps not, but it is a stample for the ES series.

All the other things that they need that team to be doing. The team size has tripled, but they've only managed to release a game that is the same size, if not smaller, than previous games.
Can you imagine what it would take to make Skyrim be a more realistic scale? Their team would have to triple again.

I'm sure playing that game would be fun too... but I don't want that game to be Elder Scrolls.

In future ES games on more powerful PCs and consoles then there will probably be a much better scale of the province without sacrificing the open world element. At the moment consoles and low end PCs just couldn't handle large scale battles or a true to scale size version of skyrim.

It is largely due to console limitations as well. Having large scale cities would cause havock on consoles and only PC players would be able to handle them.

An entire game that takes place in one city? That sounds like Dragon Age 2 and I hated that aspect. Give me my exploration and non-recycled environments.

Have you seen the MERP project? The middle earth they have created is about 30 times the size of skyrim. It looks amazing.

Linearity here would svck some epic testicles. Maybe however, we could have an open world, but the epic battles would sort of jump into a different game world (looks the same but more troops incorporated and separated with a loading screen) kind of like Mount and Blade, but you wouldn't be moving around on a mini map, you'd still have the freedom to explore, just some battles in the MQ would be scripted.

Considering how linear, zone-based areas do not represent the whole area at all, yes, it is the best way.

And it is due to technology, resources and time we have this, because to have a bigger world, you need to cut some corners. Even with today's technology it can be done to make everything bigger and farther away but that comes at the cost of detail. You cannot put the same amount of detail you did at the same time with an area only a quarter of its size. Not to mention the technical problems, keeping more unique and static data can be problematic. That's why if they would do this, the world just becomes empty, you there's nothing to look at and nothing to do, because everything is far away.

And again, the main idea of zone-based areas like Dragon Age, original Fallout games or Witcher does, do not represent the whole world better, because it skips on large parts of the world.

Well then it would be realistic. And yes, they could put the same amazing detail into the countryside no matter how big. They could also fill up the place with the occasional farmhouse, tavern or hamlet (more civilized lifeforms and less crazed bandits/demonic beasts/ walking dead. You get the idea. They could also put many travelers along the road who could provide you with detailed conversation and would pass through the province from time to time instead of going around in circles.

The world limitations essentially come down to console limitations (if you go for the most limited device, which is the PS-3, you have all of 256megs of system ram to play with, as you have half the memory pool of 512megs assigned to share with the GPU), and design choices. Procedurals and fractals are more than capable of generating large worlds; I refer you to the Vue application. You can literally create a planet procedurally, place the camera in orbit, and dive through the atmosphere, down to the nap of the earth, and have all the detail you want. A simple grayscale map can drive 'platform' locations to clear the trees and what not, giving you areas to place structures. Another map can establish what size of building goes where, and -those- can be procedurally placed, as well. Is it realtime? No. But then, it isn't a game engine, either. Much of the render time is due to lighting, and how it interacts with transparencies and translucent materials; you can create your world, bake the illumination into lightmaps, and your render is considerably sped up. The same technology can be scaled back, and you can create a 1:1 world where the wilderness is fully procedural. Trees, rocks, etc. Rivers and streams are nothing but a displacement map applied to the base terrain. And you would never be able to tell the difference between it and 'that which has had every rock placed by hand'. Hopefully by the next game there will be new consoles out (it would also help if the consolians whined a bit about how limited their game appliances are compared to modern hardware and software. The game studios will love you for it), and an increased memory pool to use.

Once the world data set is created, then you place your affectors by hand.....although that isn't really neccesary all the time. For wilderness encounters, those could be placed by mask, by percentages, what kinds of beasties could be driven by terrain altitude as one factor, ensuring that fish stay in the water, birds in the air. Just as you could place 'borders' on the procedural terrain, to limit where things are active in relation to the player character.

Thousands upon thousands of NPC's? You honestly believe they could do that simply by making it one city instead of open country side. The only ways that could be accomplished on current hardware would be to break it up into so many sections that you'd hit a loading zone every few yards, or to have absolutely pathetic graphics, minimal detail, and poor AI. Think GTAV, Just Cause 2, or Saints Row. Those games manage to pack a lot of NPC's into each area but look at how poorly they are handled. It's all due to hardware restrictions. And honestly I don't think too many of us here would be happy to see an entire game revolve around a single city. Personally I would hate it.

well there are thousands of npcs in skyrim as it is (around 5000 I believe), so why not? If it was a to-scale city, it could well take up a good six or seven square miles by itself. I too love the exploration aspect of tes and would not give it up for a game revolving around a single city and its outskirts (I didnt mention that in my initial post), but it would be a cool concept for an open world game imo.

Sounds like an interesting concept for an entirely different game, and perhaps a different generation of hardware. It's not an ES game, though.

I'd like to remind certain elitists that, although "consolians" may not be the world, we are the market. Like your games funded? I thought so.

Not to mention this slimy little detail:

Has anyone ever actually gone wandering in the woods?

There aren't a whole lot of ruins, caves, forts, and dungeons to explore. Making a full size world that is 10x the scale of Skyrim would need to have at least 10x the amount of dungeons and points of interest. If you don't, the world just becomes repetitive and stale. Exploring a forest is not fun. Exploring the forest looking for something to do is fun.

Without all those little "things to do" spattered in, exploring a huge open world is dull. Frustrating, even.

The point is that they've constructed larger cities in the past with a smaller team. No need to increase team size, just recognize what your priorities are and direct the team accordingly. The problem is that Beth has those priorities screwed up. That, or they forgot how to properly manage their time.

I am with the majority here, TES games need to be open world, that is the key defining feature to the series. However, I enjoy the W-RPG styles of BIOWARE's Dragon Age Series as well but for completely different reasons. I enjoy Skyrim for the realism that it brings to the game the gathering of a multitude of indgredeants and putting them together into potions, weapons, armor, and food to eat, the fact that if I spend time wandering around the game eventually turns to night, that the days progress and the NPCs have routines that they run through, they close thier shops and go to the pub, because of what time it is, not because of what actions I have performed to kick off a script to put them in a new location. That is the beauty of the World Bethesda has created. Now... yes there are drawbacks, the world is small... in my opinion... NPC dialogue is very limited... and yes things that should be major battles are a little lackluster. This is why I enjoy Dragon Age as well... I get my fix to TESs limitations from these games.... as I get detailed charachter dialogue to the point where I care about my companions, and I get to have major battles, and a well written story that immerses me more, but I don't get immersed into the world in these games... I don't feel like I am there. When wandering through Skyrim.... I actually feel cold when I hear the wind blowing accross the tundra and see it kicking up snow drifts... that I what TES is about. Now if somehow the hardware would allow for BIOWARE and BETHESDA to get together and merged both of thier stregths together.... that would be a game I may never stop playing.

After I read your post I went back and read the opening post again, and you are right, I would love a game set in a city that was very detailed. Not interested in battles--in a city?--but I think a city that was completely open and detailed would be fun.

Sure it would be fun,and even great...but in that case we would have a revolt with thousands of fans making a rush at Bethesda Studios

Only one great city with credible and great surroundings would be the ideal perhaps,with the "exploration" and sense of discovery still there.

I wouldn't. But to each their own.

It is the landscapes I love in Elder Scrolls games. Those landscapes are what bring me back to Elder Scrolls games time and time again. I have spent literally thousands of the most enjoyable hours of my advlt life roaming through Vvardenfell, Solstheim, Cyrodiil and Skyrim. I spent just half an hour in Mournhold. I couldn't wait to get out and get back to the wide-open game world Bethesda creates so well.

Personally, I don't understand the preoccupation with wanting mega-cities. Most of my characters spend as little time in cities as they can. Maybe it's because I live in a city in real life and I don't need or want to spend my entire game in a virtual city.

If Bethesda created a game that was set in a city I would not buy that game.

Thousands upon thousands vs 5000 is a big difference in my book. Where did you pull out that number anyway? Is that the entire game's population. If so are you saying you want a city the size of Skyrim. If so then what is the difference? You'd be dealing with the same size area and they still wouldn't have any higher concentration of NPC's in a given area. That's just trading nature for man made structures as a back drop. You just can't cram 5000 NPC's into a small area and keep the detail high with today's technology. Something would have to give.