I replayed Ocarina of Time recently, the entirety of Hyrule is basically the size of a small town. Someone did the math and it was something like 55 hectares or 133 acres. Like Monaco is 4 times larger. Felt so expansive when I played it for the first time 25 years ago.
Video game travel always has that weird feel to it, too. For instance, in the Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim, you can run from one city to another in roughly a minute. Even if we very generously assume you’re running at ~15 MPH (which would be crazy fast for any distance), that would put them about a quarter mile apart. At more realistic speeds, 1/8 or so.
There is (was) rather infamously a mod for Morrowind which removes the fog. Said fog was required to conceal the render distance limitations of the hardware of its time, but these days basically any random computer can render the entire Morrowind map in one go which reveals that in fact it’s smaller than Disney World. Morrowind has the smallest map out of any of the Elder Scrolls titles to my knowledge, and it’s surreal to see all the towns and landmarks all nestling practically shoulder to shoulder like that.
Skyrim does an excellent job of making its lands look vast, but the geography is similarly compressed. The climb from lush valleys to frozen windswept peaks is only something like the equivalent of two thousand real world feet, which wouldn’t even qualify as anything more than a foothill to the Rockies here in reality. The Throat of the World which is canonically supposed to be the tallest mountain is actually only 766.5 meters or 2514 feet tall in map scale terms, which isn’t even a third of the way to breaking the treeline in most places.
I tried that in Morrowind years ago. I’m not sure if it was the same mod, or some version of the game with lots of graphics settings, but yeah.
I loved Morrowind so much. I played it so much that I took over a house and turned it into a museum for all my hoarded items and ridiculously valuable concoctions and trinkets.
Having unlimited view distance and seeing how freaking small the world really was completely blew my mind.
Along with the fog, the walking speed must have been even slower than I remember!
i remember playing the original DayZ and while it was fun, running for two hours only to have an individual to log in, snipe you from who knows where (and i haven’t found beans yet let alone guns) and then log out in under five minutes really took the fun out of it.
Gotta suspend some reality though. I get walking simulators are a thing, but to do a quest you would need to travel a couple full days by horse? And filling in that content too, just doesn’t work in most games.
They’re beautiful because they’re fake.
They often have enough room for 12-50 people, yet in lore they house thousands.
I replayed Ocarina of Time recently, the entirety of Hyrule is basically the size of a small town. Someone did the math and it was something like 55 hectares or 133 acres. Like Monaco is 4 times larger. Felt so expansive when I played it for the first time 25 years ago.
preeeetty sure that’s just Bethesda games
usually there’s at least an illusion of a larger settlement than what you can see
Video game travel always has that weird feel to it, too. For instance, in the Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim, you can run from one city to another in roughly a minute. Even if we very generously assume you’re running at ~15 MPH (which would be crazy fast for any distance), that would put them about a quarter mile apart. At more realistic speeds, 1/8 or so.
There is (was) rather infamously a mod for Morrowind which removes the fog. Said fog was required to conceal the render distance limitations of the hardware of its time, but these days basically any random computer can render the entire Morrowind map in one go which reveals that in fact it’s smaller than Disney World. Morrowind has the smallest map out of any of the Elder Scrolls titles to my knowledge, and it’s surreal to see all the towns and landmarks all nestling practically shoulder to shoulder like that.
Skyrim does an excellent job of making its lands look vast, but the geography is similarly compressed. The climb from lush valleys to frozen windswept peaks is only something like the equivalent of two thousand real world feet, which wouldn’t even qualify as anything more than a foothill to the Rockies here in reality. The Throat of the World which is canonically supposed to be the tallest mountain is actually only 766.5 meters or 2514 feet tall in map scale terms, which isn’t even a third of the way to breaking the treeline in most places.
San Andreas has a similar effect when removing the fog. The map looks comically small.
I tried that in Morrowind years ago. I’m not sure if it was the same mod, or some version of the game with lots of graphics settings, but yeah.
I loved Morrowind so much. I played it so much that I took over a house and turned it into a museum for all my hoarded items and ridiculously valuable concoctions and trinkets.
Having unlimited view distance and seeing how freaking small the world really was completely blew my mind.
Along with the fog, the walking speed must have been even slower than I remember!
That’s still more than 7 times higher than the tallest point in Florida!
And then there’s Arma…
i remember playing the original DayZ and while it was fun, running for two hours only to have an individual to log in, snipe you from who knows where (and i haven’t found beans yet let alone guns) and then log out in under five minutes really took the fun out of it.
Running for an hour then getting dropped by someone you didn’t even see
I KNEW that fucking pixel moved!
Man.
Front.
Two hundred metres.
Gotta suspend some reality though. I get walking simulators are a thing, but to do a quest you would need to travel a couple full days by horse? And filling in that content too, just doesn’t work in most games.
In WoW, Eastern Kingdoms is much smaller than you’d think.
https://youtu.be/T4gsxVtJl7A
spoiler
About the size of Manhatten, New York