Bethesda's Shivering Isles and it's jittering madness drives saves over the edge.

[A Black Falcon]

I think it's impossible to have both. You either spend you're time working on an insane of amount of dialogue, story elements, and character interaction or you spend a little bit of time on that and create an insanely huge overworld. Not that it wouldn't be awesome to have both in a single game, but unless and until a company decideds to spend six years working on a game, don't expect that to happen.

Yeah, I know, and I was thinking it when I said that. Still, it'd be awesome if it could actually happen. MMORPGs try for the scale thing with more strategic combat than the TES games have, but they do other annoying things and have more grind than anything else ever... and generally don't exactly have great, highly designed plots. Guild Wars tries, but while it does a really good job, it's still not quite the same as a Baldur's Gate or Fallout...

No way. Fallout uses a similar kind of overworld structure, and while an stunning game in many respects, it's simply not a game that I could concieve of playing for 190+ hours like I did with Oblivion.

Heh.. you never played Arena or Daggerfall did you? :) I said 'like the first two games' for a reason. In Daggerfall the overworld was one contiguous area, but it was INSANELY huge. Way, WAY bigger than the Morrowind or Oblivion ones, by far. It used random generation for a lot of stuff so they didn't have to design everything... and there was a map where you could quick-travel between towns. In Arena things are a bit different -- you go to the cities (which in the first games are actually big) and get quests to do in town, or explore arounds the city, but can't actually get from one city to the next overland. The scale is too large... it models the entire Empire you see, and not just part of one province of it like the other games, and you can visit any major city in any province. The goal is to complete some dungeons, which you find by following the main quest path. Otherwise you can just wander around and stuff...

Anyway, the point is, those games had huge, huge scale and quick map travel. It worked well, and it never should have gone away (though didn't Oblivion supposedly add some faster travel method than Morrowind had?).

Also, including the expansion, Baldur's Gate II is a good 130+ hours long...