New Zelda Scans: 2 to 3 times bigger than OOT

[A Black Falcon]

What that does is set up isolated areas with little connection to one another that you walk around in for a few minute, get on your horse for a few "days", arrive at another town, walk around for a few minutes, repeat. Maybe it's more fun if you actually play it, rather than just talking about it, but I can't imagine it being more fun than having a large world that's free for you roam through at your leisure without breaking to watch you guy ride a horse. Part of the fun of Morrowind is finding all the little secret areas that are hidden between towns and out in the empty wastes. If you're looking at isolated towns and their immediate surroundings you lose all that.

I like Morrowind's one world, where you can travel to any point from any point. If they broke it apart into little segments it would simply ruin the exploration aspect of Morrowind. I've played Morrowind for many hours and I don't think I've been to HALF of the squares that make of the island.

GR, you'd have a point... if Daggerfall had that "segmented" design like Arena did. It doesn't. What it has is 64,000 randomly generated square miles. You CAN get anywhere by walking... or riding... or using a cart... or using a ship that you buy... or map-teleporting... Daggerfall made some substantial advances over Arena in things like that. Of course, it was also utterly overwhelming in content volume (while, as usual for a TES game, having that volume be limited in variety -- how many dozen randomly generated nearly-identical towns, or randomly-generated nearly-identical dungeons, or miles of walking or riding, are you going to do before you get bored of it all?), and they wanted to cut back on that for the next game... probably a good idea honestly because Daggerfall seems like it'd get dull after a while for sure, but still, it does leave me admiring Daggerfall for its ambition more than Morrowind because it actually tried to have the scale a real place would, something video/computergame RPGs virtually never do, while Morrowind took the much safer, and more familiar, route of scaling everything down...

Scale can be less of a problem with the introduction of meaningful horse-riding, by which I mean that you're actually using the horse to get somewhere, not just riding around the Hyrule middle area going HOLY CRAP I'M RIDING A HORSE... IN A GAME!! which, let's be honest, was the gist of OoT riding. Getting somewhere in 5 minutes by horse where it would take 20 minutes by foot (or whatever, I don't know horse-to-human speed ratios) is already more realistic than the smaller-scale alternative.

Horse-riding does help, but as I (and DJ) said, it's not enough when you reach a really big size. Even in Zelda games you have warping, after all... a game significantly larger than that should have significantly better warping, and that's one of Morrowind's failings -- it has it, but not nearly good enough.

You can also play around with the actual composition of the gameplay. Instead of having a shitty "overworld" with generic enemies that acts solely as a mid-way point between dungeons/events/whathaveyou, just focus more of the gameplay on the traveling. Making it so Link has to journey for several "days" (hours) through Octorok Valley before reaching the sacred Temple of the Octorok Cult is, again, already more epic and realistic than having an owl show up and go "ya the dungeon is behind that rock over there". Even if it stretches the game so much you can't afford to have a million dungeons anymore, it'll work. So long as there's interesting shit in Octorok Valley, the player won't feel screwed over. Put towns with NPCs related to subplots, shady alleys where you get attacked by thieves with a weird recurring tattoo and where you can buy unreliable magical items, strongholds with petty warlords fighting each other, whatever. Just like in books or movies. 3D games can afford that kind of realism and attention to detail, so do it do it do it.

As I said (and as comparing Daggerfall to Morrowind proves), the problem with larger scale is that you lose originality. Either you need some kind of template thing with minor variations or you need random design, because there is a limit to the number of areas that a team of people can personally design... but still, as MMORPGs show, you can still have a huge game that is made of all uniquely designed areas. It'll surely mean less originality in every single area, but it'll feel more realistic, and that counts for a lot... like Majora's Mask. The world in that game is fantastic... stunning. But it's just so small! Do something to the timing and make it like ten times bigger and that would be a truly amazing game... sure, it'd mean many more forest paths and stuff, but you know, in the real world, there isn't just one swamp... :)

Of course you need a good map and warping, but I take those as just about givens in any reasonable RPG. Unless it's either small in scale or they want to be cruel. :)