There's that beautiful moment when you spy Winterhold peeking over the shoulder of a range, tempting you to leave the path (and risk being set upon by wolves) in hopes of an uninterrupted view. To walk this kingdom is to weather a perpetual play of horizons and distances, your attention moving irresistibly from near to far and back again. The roads between settlements aren't long nor especially hard to follow, but goodness me, how long they feel, as each turn, dip or rise unveils some gloomy immensity that vanishes from sight just as swiftly. Having thrown together a new character, I cheerfully turned my back on starting town Riverwood and embarked on a tour of the major cities, from southern Falkreath to the ancient dwarf fortress of Markarth and up to Skyrim's clifftop capital, Solitude, then across the coast to the Mage's College of Winterhold and down to Windhelm, seat of the Stormcloak rebellion. You can trace much of that to Skyrim, whose mountain ranges are invaluable not just for their particular majesty or the traps and catacombs they house, but for how they rend and twist the map, occluding, exposing and magnifying in a way Oblivion never managed.
#HOW BIG IS SKYRIM PC#
It launches on Switch this week, glory of glories, and I've spent a few hours with the remastered PC version to remind myself of its achievements.Ī few months ago there was a great Twitter thread about Breath of the Wild's use of triangular and rectangular silhouettes to rouse and thwart curiosity, layering up the geology and architecture to create tacit routes and kindling suspense around remote landmarks. Skyrim is extremely good at this, to a degree I'm not sure any game environment can rival save the corkscrew terrain of the original Dark Souls. It's more the art of the deceptive miniature - of making the poky or digestible seem enormous to the point of exhausting, even as distant cities reveal themselves for neighbouring hamlets, fearsome mountains for mere well-appointed foothills. If open world games were required to be as large as their inspirations or narrative aspirations they'd never get finished, and in any case, who would have the time to play them? The fascinating thing about open world design is that it's not really about size at all. Steer clear of distractions like temperamental mammoth herds and you can walk from one side of Skyrim to the other in half an hour. More to the point, that's approximately the same size as The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, a game which has become something of a punching bag for Elder Scrolls aficionados in hindsight - neither as grand as its swaggering barbarian brother, nor as memorably odd as burned-out hippy uncle Morrowind. That's a jumped-up theme park, a country music festival. But set against what it pretends to be - a kingdom stretching from arctic wastes to the temperate south, racked by dynastic squabbles and laced with the treasures and detritus of millennia - it's actually pretty dang tiddly, a little over 14 square miles in scope.ġ4 square miles? That's no bygone, mystery-shadowed dominion rearing its shrines and watchtowers amid sunflashed snow. Oh, it remains fairly gigantic by the standards of other virtual landscapes, even next to its youthful imitator and usurper, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. They've quite a larger number of games under their belt now, and that simply will not be a problem.Skyrim's dirty little secret is that it isn't that large. With Daggerfall, Bethesda bit off more than they can chew.
It will be larger than Oblivion was, because that's what people expect, and because it makes sense for Bethesda to push closer to a real-life scale as technology advances. And Daggerfall's so old we can't base the procedural technologies of fifteen years ago with how Skyrim would turn out if it's a larger game. And BOTH are way off when you compare them to Illiac Bay in Daggerfall, which is a 1:1 representation, size-wise. Morrowind is, in fact, larger in the sense of it being to a more proportional scale to real life (and even it's tiny to how it should be), because it's a much smaller landmass than Cyrodiil is, and yet it's, by proportion, larger. It's a tiny scale model of what Cyrodiil is supposed to be. They need to keep to lore and the maps or there is no need for neither.īut Oblivion isn't to scale with real life.