For those of us who haven't played Mount and Blade, can you describe what that is all about and how you would propose to do something that is not open world but still not linear like Bioware. I am having a hard time understanding what it is exactly that you are proposing here.

If your proposal allows for unrestricted gameplay, then I am all ears. If, however, players are forced to go through some linear series of actions to unlock another area, then I must respectfully decline.


2 Worlds 1 is open world sandbox exploration just like TES. In fact, 2 Worlds 1 is the ONLY non-Bethesda game I have seen that has the same level of free exploration as TES. Although 2 Worlds 1 was not nearly as well done as TES and lacked multiple playable races, in game books to read, deep lore, houses, etc., etc., I still loved 2 Worlds 1 tremendously, corny dialog and all..

2 Worlds 2 is not open world sandbox, but some kind of modified open world wannabie game that reminds me of the first Assassin's Creed in the way you are allowed to explore the world. It is a big world but you have to go through seemingly endless quests just to unlock the next area. I haven't had the patience to get very far into 2 Worlds 2 because it is not open world sandbox like the first one was and I just don't have the patience to go through the linear line of quests needed to unlock the world.

Except that means you know each area contains something of interest then. Destroys the sense of exploration for me. Mind you tripping over caves every 100 metres doesn't do much for it either.


Although the world is overcrowded the random encounters seem a little less frequent than in Oblivion and like MW they have used terrain to make the game seem bigger than it is without resoirting to invisible walls etc.

It seems like if you used the "node" concept you would be able to explore inside the settlement but not the world map area, unless you could walk there like Daggerfall. Could they do a randomly generated world like Daggerfall with modern graphics?


Is it that much extra work to create larger landmasses with the same amount of stuff in them. Doesn't the world get loaded in cells just like entering structures and caves? I am always seeing the loading menu as I travel across the land in Oblivion and Morrowind. I just assumed in Skyrim it worked the same way without the message flashing on the screen (which I would not see anyway since my HUD is off). Wouldn't a larger landmass just mean more cells with less stuff in each cell.

Heh... I have to be honest. I laughed when I got to that battle and was really disappointed. I had traversed the whole land, convinced every town to provide guards and soldiers to fight for Bruma. Then I get there to find no more than two soldiers from each town. I was thinking, "these people must not really care about the fact that their entire existence is about to be consumed by a demon netherworld that will torture them to death and eat their flesh". Yeah, Bruma was pretty anti-climactic to say the least. I haven't done any of the civil war quests in Skyrim yet, mainly because i'm afraid they'll look a lot like Bruma.

Do you turn the HUD off? I ask because the compass shows all locations near your current point, which can't be doing much good for exploration either since it's basically telling you the same thing.

I honestly don't know, although it would certainly take a fair bit of processing power and might be an issue on the current generation of consoles.

The underlying landmass is fairly easy to make, but nobody wants to wander around on a bare height map so you have to make it look like actual land. The main issue is making the cell-cell transitions not look like crap, which means you have to carefully check the seams and so forth for holes, and cover/remove any you do find. There's also the issue of making things like multi-cell rivers, forests, or sulfur plains, which require lots of little adjustments across all the relevant cells to get right. Granted they'd have a team doing it, but still.

That's not accounting for the detail work (fallen tree here, scrub brush there, etc.), structures, or animal/person placement, all of which have to flow together to make the landscape look 'alive'. All of that adds up fairly quickly over multiple cells, even if it's just a bunch of relatively bare tundra.

One question as well related to what you said. if as an example

If Bethesda made the entire landmass of tamriel with only the resources currently in skyrim (textures, voices, armors, etc) would there be that much more space needed in a game dvd?

I always thought 99 percent of the information on your disc was, textures and voice.

Yes, thats pretty simple to do using the SkyrimPrefs.ini file
I'd prefer directions ala MW but I can live with assuming people mark things on my map so I just use the map when I'm looking for somewhere specific and stumble across everywhere else

Gotta keep the open world concept. I think the overall size of Skyrim is just about perfect, I'm not sure I would want it any larger. To the OPs point, it would be nice to have bigger scale in some of the battles - a'la Lord of the Rings style. I think one way of dealing with this would be for the Developers to resist making a huge graphical leap in the next generation and instead leverage the extra horsepower (assuming 2-3x current console power) towards extra NPCs and game objects.

Voice and texture files are, indeed, the biggest disk hogs, however most of them apply to several things at once. You cannot do world-building that way, however, since you need a separate copy of a given object for each cell it's used in. Granted the individual items don't take up much space, but when you have a thousand or more in each cell it adds up fairly quickly.

Ah, I see. I had a feeling that was the case, as otherwise your statement made no sense. Yeah, the node system does tend to tip the player off that a given area may be worth looking into, however one thing they did do was set it up such that which place was which was not shown unless someone specifically mentioned it to you, which at least partially ameliorated the issue.

On the other hand, a node-based system can allow for maps of infinite size, since it's not required to draw the entire wilderness between two locations the way a contiguous map is. Instead, you create a large pool of wilderness cells and call them as needed, in accordance with the area being moved to. Fallout I and II did that, however they only had a small handful of such cells due to technical limitations, which killed random poking about as you knew what was coming based on the portion of the world map you were in at the time.

A modern version wouldn't have that problem, because you can now store thousands of cells on a single disk for later use; somebody has to make them all, though, which takes a lot of time and effort to do properly so isn't much in favor with developer houses these days. It could also be done procedurally, which would save all that work, although the quality would undoubtedly suffer due to everything being randomized and/or generic.

One advantage those games had in this department is that they were isometric rather than first-person, so the player couldn't see the void outside a settlement. This could potentially be a huge problem in a first-person version, since the player can see what's in front of the character and would notice the rather glaring absence of land in a similar situation.