20th July 2005, 7:29 PM
(This post was last modified: 20th July 2005, 7:46 PM by A Black Falcon.)
Quote:Would it be better if it took 30 minutes to an hour [if not more] of walking to get to different towns? It'd be terrible, especially if you have to get to some out-of-the-way ruin to accomplish some mission. They take long enough to walk to as it is!
You should be able to warp between places. If they want to limit it or make you explore more then have you only able to warp to places you've been... or have some locations there always but have you have to find others (like how in Arena you can warp to any town anytime but to get to the special dungeons and stuff you have to complete quests that add their locations to the map)...
I know, it cannot be the same size as the real world. But... well, Arena coped by just letting you go to the cities, exploring around each city (though you can never get from one city to the next by walking), and the dungeons. Daggerfall? I've only played the demo, but from what I've read, it's got over 100,000 square miles of land... *checks* http://til.gamingsource.net/fsg/danibenearticle1.shtml 64,000 square miles (195x330 mi.), it seems.
look here.
http://www.uesp.net/tamriel/geography/im...amriel.jpg
Vvardenfell is in the northeast. Daggerfall is in parts of southern High Rock and northern Hammerfell. Oblivion is in Cyrodiil (the central Imperial province). Arena is ... everywhere -- that's the Arena map. :)
Daggerfall (note that it's twisted... north is not up, it's rightish ... oh, and the Daggerfall demo is the island of Betony.)
http://www.uesp.net/tamriel/image.shtml?...iacbay.jpg
So, at the proper scale Morrowind's location is indeed smaller than Daggerfall's, so it should be a smaller area on the map... but it's not so much smaller that "100,000 (or whatever it is, it's big) vs. 15" explains it. :)
Essentially, I think that they decided Daggerfall was far, far too large and scaled Morrowind down... for console gamers perhaps? Just because Daggerfall was too large (and from what I've heard it probably was)? Because they wanted to draw the whole map this time and not have it be random so they could not make it anywhere near as large (this is certainly true)? I don't know... but it hurts the realism some. Okay, so you may argue that a map you can use to get anywhere immediately isn't realistic, but then just do what Arena does, some "guy on horse riding" animation on the map window and a meter showing how many days it took to travel across the continent (it's a lot.)...
Ooh, this is interesting... TESIII Morrowind province concept map, of the whole province... shows it in its Arena form more or less, before they reshaped the island (and added Solstheim from out of nowhere just northwest of it)... actually, comparing that map to the map in Morrowind and the map from Arena (here - it's java with rollover names - http://til.gamingsource.net/maps/), it's interesting how much they changed it... the three towns Arena has on that island are gone without a trace in Morrowind. Only the central dungeon Dagoth Ur is still there...
http://til.gamingsource.net/maps/concept_morrowind.jpg
As for the next game, I've seen in interviews that they've said that they couldn't make a game much larger than Morrowind without having easy travel, and that's true... as for Oblivion it'll be a bit bigger than Morrowind (and will have some form of improved travel), but surely won't be anywhere near as big as Daggerfall... as for how realistic the scale will feel though, it's not out yet so we don't know. :)
As for Morrowind, one other thing I'll say is that the character art (models) are incredibly bad unless you download some mods for improving them (and adding clothing)...