The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way to your local potion dispensary, but that's dragon-ingested peanuts to Skyrim. In fact, the game may be a little too large for Bethesda's comfort.
Thus the jocular suggestion of the publisher's executive producer and game director Todd Howard, in one of the many, many interviews he manages to give between pegging down virtual mountain ranges and micro-managing virtual ecosystems.
Size isn't everything, of course. As you may recall from our exclusive reveals a couple of months back, Skyrim will marry raw scale to organic nuance at ground level. Towns and dungeons will no longer be block-built affairs, transparently derived from templates, but "hand-crafted". Howard claims Bethesda has placed "every tree, rock, cup and such" individually.
Caves aren't exactly untrodden ground for fantasy role-playing, but Skyrim's subterranean spaces will be a diverse and intriguing bunch. Some caves are choked with vegetation, while others are coated with ice. You'll find one inside an Imperial fort, and another sunk deep in the heart of a glacier.
"In Oblivion we let the visual designers take care of the caves, and we also had a couple of dedicated level designers who went over them afterwards. There was nothing wrong with them, but they could have been better," Howard told the site.
"We still stock them in kit form - it's something we've done since Terminator: Future Shock. The difference is that we're better at it."
As the crow flies, Skyrim is roughly the same size as Oblivion - but travelling as the crow flies is tricky when you're charting terrain as rugged as this. "If you put the maps on top of each other, it is about as big as its predecessor. But Skyrim is different because of all the mountains that form our routes." In practice, the realm will "seem bigger" than the temperate landscapes to the south.
For more about Bethesda's latest - including details of combat, the Radiant Story system, dragons, levelling and how to yell at somebody till they explode - check out Mike's juggernaut of a preview.
8 comments so far...
Spiderless on 18 May '11 said:
Sounds pretty awesome, I just hope they don't use the mountains as an excuse to cut off bits of the map with invisible walls. I doubt they will its an Elder Scrolls game after all, but if I see a mountain I want to be able to make a reasonable attempt to climb it and not be needlessly obstructed.
I'm liking the idea of a more distinct change in enviroments, should spice things up a bit.
Grummy on 18 May '11 said:
Big is good, a grand scale and miles upon miles of game world all add to the feeling that you're undertaking some sort of epic adventure and that you really are in control of something greater, affecting peoples lives.
It's important to get that scale right though. Two Worlds, for example, is damn huge, but the scale is off, and the world is largely empty, so you never get the feeling of there being so grand adventure. Not all games get this. ES and Fallout games manage this well, as does Fable, and so did Dark Messiah, but other games like ME and DA don't quite manage it. They work out in other ways with story and character etc, but they don't have that grand scale.
There's something satisfying about running around a massive landscape where you feel both small and overwhelmed, and yet powerful and important all at the same time.
msbhvn on 18 May '11 said:
I loved Oblivion's gameworld, the size of it, how much stuff there was to find, the sheer number of locations to explore and side-quests. And they fit it all on one disc, too. Kind of puts Dragon Age II to shame, doesn't it?
If Skyrim is bigger than Cyrodiil, and looking at the map of Tamriel, it isn't, there might be some other world, planes of Oblivion type thing going on to increase the size, but then Oblivion had that too. They might mean Skyrim is denser, with less empty areas and more locations, NPCs, side-quests, etc.
I'm looking forward to playing a real RPG rather than the watered-down crap that's been released over the past couple of years. Roll on, 11-11-11, I say.
vadersmyfather on 19 May '11 said:
One of the key things I enjoyed about ESIV, as opposed to Fallout, was the ability to actually move around the World map at more speed because of horse travel.
It seemed an age to get anywhere in New Vegas because there was just one speed, which just became a frustation to me.
Grummy on 19 May '11 said:
Never used the horses in Oblivion, having to get off the horse for every encounter, or to pick up every alchemical ingredient got irritating very fast. Run through unexplored territory, then fast travel the rest, but that was largely because Oblivion, as pretty as it was, it's world was pretty bland and not hugely exciting to explore. Morrowind by comparison was always amazing to wander around. I'm hoping Skyrim will bring much the same.
New Vegas wasn't great on most levels tbh, but particularly the travelling as it was all one mass wasteland, and one tiny built up Vegaas strip. FO3 was largely the same, but it was spread out better, the capital wasteland was all part of DC so there was always something of interest to see and stumble across. NV is just mostly the Mojave desert, it's empty and boring anyway, so it didn't have much to offer.
Interestingly enough, ever notice all the pristine motorbikes lying around in FO3/NV? Originally, they were to be our mounts of choice. Bethesda designed them and implemented them early, but found that they couldn't balance them well so never actually used them as mounts, but left them in game anyway.
Cdr JamesCool on 22 May '11 said:
Too big? As long as its filled with interesting areas to explore, some cool stuff to loot, and a satisfying amount of good quests then I'm happy.
IIFBDIIRaz on 24 May '11 said:
Then make it bigger....
ATATCCU on 26 May '11 said:
I was in Game recently, mooching around as you do and overheard one of the assistants talking to his mate. He refered to a game called 'Sky Rim'...this was new to me and I listened in.
There was general chat back and forth and then the realisation hit me. They were talking about a game that I call 'Skrim'. Which is it then, 'Sky Rim' or 'Skrim'?