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.

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

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.

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.

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.

@OP

Open World is what defines a TES game and separates them from the other pretenders.

So yes....an Open World Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Daggefall, Arena....is the only way to do it.
Otherwise it's just another Bioware clone.
No thanks.

yes they could do that...
if you give them 5 more years to do it.

Yes, Daggerfall was bigger, but not only it was dinamically created, thus requiring much less manpower, they were basically copy pasting of the same thing.
There are basically no uniqueness in any city in Daggerfall, all of them look the same, they also have the exact same things either.
People already complaining about reused assets in Skyrim, this is nothing from what it was in Daggerfall.

And no adding several miles of empty space does not make it more epic, it makes it more empty.

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.

The open worlded nature of Skyrim is very epic indeed and excellently realised. This topic is ridiculous. I've noticed that the OP has back tracked his ridiculous statements throughout the topic thread without admitting it and accepting that he is wrong.

Dudebag just go play fable or 2 worlds and GTFO

Since what we are talking about here is scale. One thing that everyone must keep in mind when it comes to scale is this. As scale increases details lessen. As scale decreases the details increase. A perfect example of this is when you look at google maps. When you zoom out on a city map you can no longer see all the individual street names. The further you zoom out the more street names you lose.

I am really not convinced that an open world is the best way represent what is supposed to be such a large area like an entire province or state in games like Skyrim, it is really better for smaller areas such as a castle and its surrounding areas or at max a city but when you try to represent an entire province in an open world game like Skyrim due to the limited amount of resources and only being able to make a game so big a lot of the locations in the game, whether they be cities, forests, mountains or even major battles need to be scaled down so much that they lack that epic scale that such a game needs to have.

I mean people always tell me how "Epic" Skyrim is however I just dont see it, I cant see it because everything has been scaled down so much that any conflict or location within the game just feels like a joke compared to what it should have been. When Oblivion came out they told me that it was epic too, the told also me all about how epic the battle before closing the great Oblivion gate was as well, but seriously take a look at this and tell me honestly does this really look "epic" to you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC4cl1Bvssk

Honestly it is [censored] pathetic, seriously this is supposed to be the major battle of the game yet there is barely enough men for a game of football let alone what is supposed to be a massive army made up of men from all the major holds of Cyrodiil, this battle is supposed to be the turning point in a battle for the fate or Nirn not some schoolyard brawl or small skirmish between a group of forest bandits.

I get the advantages of creating a world that is open but considering how damaging it is to the scale of what is supposed to be a very large area and everything connected to it I just feel that the approach does the series more harm than good. There has to be better way to retain the open ended feel that the games are known for yet preserve the epic scale that the games really need.

Couldn't someone make a mod with added territory, possibly even random generated, so you could explore new lands forever?

Folks are working on this even as we speak. One of the largest and most exciting is a massive project to create the entirety of Tamriel as playable landcape that modders can build on. It's called http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1343021-wip-all-tamriel-heightmap/.

It seems that several folks here have misinterpreted what the OP is talking about. He isn't saying that TES should not be open world, he's asking if an open-world format is really the best option for depicting a (very) large land area.

From what I've seen in the last two TES games and last two Fallout games, I'd have to say the answer is 'no'. Why? Because everything has to be massively compressed in order to fit the relatively small amount of playable land. For example: if you run the whole way, it takes approximately 25.5 game-hours to go from Markarth to Riften (or vice-versa); a distance which, if done to proper scale, should have taken at least 4-5 times that long, assuming nonstop travel.

There's also the issue of having far too many locations within a given region; you can't go 100 feet without tripping over yet another ruin or cave of some sort, which is a bit ridiculous. It's true that expansion of the map would likely result in having some sizable areas that are effectively 'empty', but that's how forests and tundras are. As for claims that this would result in dullness: there's nothing that says it is mandatory to have an encounter of some sort every fifty feet, and a larger landmass would allow for better dispersal of encounter zones. If anything, that would heighten exploration, since you'd actually have to go looking in order to find a location that's supposed to be hidden.

What other option is there, besides the Bioware model that no one here wants?

I'd actually prefer to have a "bigger" world so we had to go farther to get places and places were further apart, with fewer random encounters. I am not much of a computer guy, but it seems like they could do that pretty easily. I had always thought the size of the world and how compressed it was resulted from a design decision that people should have lots of stuff thrown in their face all the time to keep the game interesting to folks who might not have the patience to explore a larger landmass.