Vivec Cantons are SO much smaller than TES 3 versions.

leeux

zaria wrote: »

How much larger, some having TES 3 installed could take some screenshots. Think interior was much larger as it was buildings inside, on the other hand movement speed was slower

I launched my modded MSGO Morrowind (outdated, modded ~2013) and took some screenies, not sure if they're enough of even if they're suitable for comparison, but since nobody had did it, I thought I could at least share some, as examples.

Here's an album:
https://imgur.com/gallery/Pn3lTuA

And here's some individual pics from there:

DarcyMardin

I’m glad they’re not any larger. Doing the Vvardenfel dailies reminded me that I still get lost and confused in the cantons.

Elsonso

DarcyMardin wrote: »

I’m glad they’re not any larger. Doing the Vvardenfel dailies reminded me that I still get lost and confused in the cantons.

I know. I can remember playing TES3 and spending way too long trying to find that book store stashed away in the Foreign Quarter.

GLP323b14_ESO

Yeah. Those screen shots show that Vivec City and the cantons were quite a bit larger in TES3.

mxxo

I was always hoping there would be a big city like this again in another Elder Scrolls Game... I dont like it when there are 3 little houses and the game tells you its a huge capital city.

MartiniDaniels

Immersion-wise ESO sucks really.. try to engage both animals and bandits, even if you wont attack them at all, they will still attack only you and never attack each other. This is so stupid. Especially when you remember previous games and how interactive was world there, where for example, giant, dragon and bandits may all fight each other in the same time.

kind_hero

The problem with the cantons in ESO is that they are instanced. So besides they are like a maze in 3d, you need to load each room/hall, which adds to the frustration of finding some quest NPC. TBH I don't care about how it was in TES3. In TES2 Daggerfall looked totally different, so what is the point of all these comparisons, like every game should be a remake of the good ol' Morrowind, which btw, is a game that has not aged well AT ALL, despite the great story and setting.

For me, this event is the most annoying of all, because of how you need to unlock the dailies, and how the quest involves two NPCs (start/end), with the 2nd one being placed in a random floor in some building. Who thought this is a good idea? Compare this to the Clockwork event, where the quest giver was next to the way shrine: teleport, take quest, way shrine, go kill world boss, teleport back, hand in, tickets. Or an other example, the Anvil/Kvatch dailies...

Clanbrassil

Everything is absurdly small in TESO and every other MMO. How long does it take you to walk from one end of Vvardenfell to the other? How far can you walk in that time IRL?

For that matter, what is the population of Vivec once you subtract adventurers? It wouldn't be enough to sustain a village, never mind a city.

The only CRPG I know that has anything like the feel of a real place in terms of scale is Daggerfall. It would be great to see something similar attempted with modern resources.

Jamdarius

GLP323b14_ESO wrote: »

Well, since I was forced to visit Vivec city before I wanted to (stupid Indrik mount), I got to see what it looked like in comparrison to TES3.

My initial impression of Vvardenfell was that it's quite a bit smaller than the original (e.g Seeing Vivec City from Seyda Neen. What!). These have been confirmed by seeing Vivec City and the Cantons. They are quite a bit smaller than they are in TES 3.

I'd hoped that ESO would increase the size of things (given that the landscape has always been significantly compressed after the vastness of TES 1 and 2), but instead they are smaller. That's a shame.

While the upgraded graphics of Vivec City are great, the size is definitely a let down.

I am still devastated that after over a year Amaya Lake Lodge home doesn't have a view of Red Mountain volcano even tho when you exit home it does xD

And yes cantons of vivec city are way 2 small if we compare them to TES III, Vvardenfell map seems rly tiny for me 2

(Offtopic: PS around 2-3 months ago I installed mods for TES 3: Morroblivion and I must say they did good job with updating graphics, and if anyone have seen Beyond Skyrim mods... damn I melted )

Michae

Still it looks quite similar to original. I like the details they added, like mosaics and murals. The whole island is scaled down a bit but I don't have that big of a problem with that. I was far more disappointed in Dragonborn dlc for Skyrim where Solstheim had so much different topography without any explenation. I like the consistency ESO has with other games of the series.

Well, Arena and Daggerfal are grossly outdated so recreating their enviroments would be just boring now. But we do have a certain amount of consistency from TES III up.

Elsonso

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Clanbrassil wrote: »

Everything is absurdly small in TESO and every other MMO. How long does it take you to walk from one end of Vvardenfell to the other? How far can you walk in that time IRL?

Have you walked ... walked ... from Urshilaku Camp (https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Urshilaku%20Camp) to Vivec City?

I have not, but my first pass through the zone was on foot only. No fast travel. No mounts. For an impatient person, I do not recommend this.

WeerW3ir

they look okay, except the interior. the interiors are like 2-3 cantons outside

starkerealm

GLP323b14_ESO wrote: »

In the case of Morrowind in ESO, they used the greater resources to increase polygon count, number of objects, and texture details. To the point of needing to make the landscape even smaller than the original Vvardenfell.

Except, of course, if you've actually played Morrowind in recent years, with any graphical extender that includes LoD data, you'd know this isn't really the case. Vvardenfell is bizarrely dense in TES3. It's just very easy to miss that, because you move like a bear just ate your legs and can't see more than 15 feet in front of you.

What's wild is that, if you took away the endless fog in Morrowind, what you see in ESO isn't that far off.

We all remember Morrowind as this massive, expansive, place, but truth is, you really can stand in Seyda Neen and look south at the cantons in Vivec. It really is that close.

But, here you go, it's not Vivec, I'll let you work out where it is for yourself.

Grianasteri

GLP323b14_ESO wrote: »

Well, since I was forced to visit Vivec city before I wanted to (stupid Indrik mount), I got to see what it looked like in comparrison to TES3.

My initial impression of Vvardenfell was that it's quite a bit smaller than the original (e.g Seeing Vivec City from Seyda Neen. What!). These have been confirmed by seeing Vivec City and the Cantons. They are quite a bit smaller than they are in TES 3.

I'd hoped that ESO would increase the size of things (given that the landscape has always been significantly compressed after the vastness of TES 1 and 2), but instead they are smaller. That's a shame.

While the upgraded graphics of Vivec City are great, the size is definitely a let down.

I think Everything in ESO is smaller than Morrowing/Oblivion/Skyrim etc. A LOT smaller.

The cantons in Vivec were at least twice as big, if not more. It is a shame but I understand why, its an MMO and people need to be able to find things and get to them readily. Vivec is already a bit of a maze.

starkerealm

Clanbrassil wrote: »

Everything is absurdly small in TESO and every other MMO. How long does it take you to walk from one end of Vvardenfell to the other? How far can you walk in that time IRL?

For that matter, what is the population of Vivec once you subtract adventurers? It wouldn't be enough to sustain a village, never mind a city.

The only CRPG I know that has anything like the feel of a real place in terms of scale is Daggerfall. It would be great to see something similar attempted with modern resources.

The problem with Daggerfall was, it's basically meaningless. I mean, yes, there are 750k NPCs, there are thousands of towns, cities are large enough to pass for medieval cities. The dungeons are so massive you can spend weeks trying to find the one cluster of bears you need to kill...

But, none of that means anything, because it's all irrelevant. Two towns may be sixteen, real world, miles apart, but there isn't a single relevant NPC in either one, and nothing of value in the distance between them. In that sense, it's interesting as an immersive backdrop, but it is all randomly generated set-dressing. NPCs are named by picking a prefix and suffix for their first name, based on their race and gender, and a prefix and a suffix for their surname based on their race.

There are only 507 Breton names in Daggerfall.

That's all.

And they do rather well under that system, others like the Altmer have less than 400 possible names.

And, yes, they do get two of those names, so it's not like every NPC you meet will be Kirstne Hararsen... though that gets into something that's even more amusing, because Nord NPCs would literally just reuse the male Nord first names, with a -sen tacked on the end as their surnames. (Nord Female characters had a pool of 91 possible names.)

In Daggerfall, content exists simply to exist, and be able to say it exists. Think of the Radiant quests in Skyrim, except, that is the entire game, right down to the NPCs and the towns. It isn't part of the main story, it isn't relevant to any grand quest, it's just, "there." And, while there is something to be said for a vast expanse of things to do, they kinda require there to be some kind of actual value to that content. That doesn't need to be a new bauble. Interesting dialog can be enough of a reward for running a piece of content. But there needs to be something. With Daggerfall, 99.9% of the time, there isn't. There are over 5k towns in TES2 but less than 50 matter.

swippy

Clanbrassil wrote: »

Everything is absurdly small in TESO and every other MMO. How long does it take you to walk from one end of Vvardenfell to the other? How far can you walk in that time IRL?

right? and who the hell has 5 meters of reach when swinging a sword? maybe Sephiroth, that's it.

leeux

lordrichter wrote: »

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Clanbrassil wrote: »

Everything is absurdly small in TESO and every other MMO. How long does it take you to walk from one end of Vvardenfell to the other? How far can you walk in that time IRL?

Have you walked ... walked ... from Urshilaku Camp (https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Urshilaku%20Camp) to Vivec City?

I have not, but my first pass through the zone was on foot only. No fast travel. No mounts. For an impatient person, I do not recommend this.

I remember I walked, and I mean RP walk like you're supposed to do, from Vivec City to Sheogorad area for the Silent Pigrimage quest for the Temple, and it was quite a experience

Clanbrassil

And how long does it take you to walk a couple of km?

I know the criticisms of Daggerfall, but it was a fantastic experience at the time, and I think it could be done a lot better today. The thing is, you can say that most of the towns didn't matter, but that's realistic. I can look at a map of, let's say, France, and I see a town called Laval, and it doesn't matter at all to me. I've never been there and I'm never likely to go. But the world is like that. It's full of places that don't matter to me, and don't matter to you. So if a fantasy world is going to be realistic, it also should be full of places that don't matter (individually) and people that don't matter (individually), but in aggregate, they DO matter, because that's the way the world is. It's full of stuff.

Elsonso

starkerealm wrote: »

But, here you go, it's not Vivec, I'll let you work out where it is for yourself.

It'd be cool if Elder Scrolls Online had cities like that, where are person could get lost, but something that large would be a zone bigger than Bal Foyen.

Varana

Clanbrassil wrote: »

It's full of places that don't matter to me, and don't matter to you.

But if you would go, you would find individual people with interesting relationships living (more or, in the case of rural France, probably less ) eventful lives. In Daggerfall, you won't. In real life, those names and places don't matter to you because of time and information overload. In Daggerfall, they don't matter because they offer nothing of substance. They're scenery, a background drawing - but one that intrudes on your actual gameplay. They're realistic only in some aspects and totally unrealistic on others.
And then as a designer, you have to make the decision whether having that extensive backdrop and realism in one area is worth the cost.

Ohtimbar

I would have preferred everything to be as extensive as it was in Morrowind, but zos clearly lacked the time and/or budget to fill even the scaled-back spaces in the Morrowind chapter. They made the understandable choice to scale to the content.

Clanbrassil

You could say the same about mountains - they are scenery. Tamriel looks more real because it has mountains, but you can't climb them. They do intrude on your gameplay, because they get in the way. As implemented in TESO, they are realistic only in some aspects and totally unrealistic in others. But I don't think you would say that mountains should be removed.

My feeling is that if you created an MMORPG with a map that was the size of Europe, and a lot of procedurally generated content (which could be done much better today than when Daggerfall was made), so that countries had a realistic population for a medieval-fantasy country, you could have a very interesting result. The nearest equivalent today, of course, is No Man's Sky.

Note that I put MMORPG and not MMO as it often gets written. That "RP" is significant. Personally, I would like to see something that offers more of an RP experience and less of an action combat game. (Others, of course, will have different tastes).

starkerealm

lordrichter wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

But, here you go, it's not Vivec, I'll let you work out where it is for yourself.

It'd be cool if Elder Scrolls Online had cities like that, where are person could get lost, but something that large would be a zone bigger than Bal Foyen.

It is cool in games like Pillars of Eternity, or even Total War: Warhammer, but at the same time, when you're trying to make an MMO out of it, with a shared world space that extends beyond discrete zones, things get squirrely.

Wayrest would be a reasonable size for a small town, but, then you'd have cities where getting from one end to the other would be an ordeal. Which, there's something to be said for that, but it's probably, "annoying."

Castagere

Varana wrote: »

The cantons themselves are obviously supposed to be the same, just that not all of them have been built in ESO. They add a few cantons but they don't magically enlarge them.

I wish they would build them up in an update or something. Even one at a time would be something. I don't get why this would be a problem. The next update has dragons in it. The one thing I loved about GW2 was how they destroyed Lions Arch and rebuilt it.

GLP323b14_ESO

For more realistic scale landscapes and cities you would obviously want to have many fast travel options available.

Most people would be using them. Leaving the in between places for you to explore without crowds.

I like this idea of towns and places that don't necessarily matter. They're just there. You can go there and maybe one or more citizens or the town at large is experiencing some significant (or semi-significant) problem you can take care of for them.

Maybe some other player adventurer has already taken care of it for them, and things are pretty stable there at the time. You can help some lonely old lady find her cat, or pick up things at the market for her (increasing your karma). Maybe teach some children some rudimentary skills, before you move on.

Later that town might experience some new major trouble. Goblins coming down from the mountains and stealing their livestock. The longer it's been before some adventurer has come along to assist them, the more dire straights they are in. Eventually word will get to the larger authorities and they will specifically ask that for an adventurer to head out that way to help out, perhaps for a greater reward.

In Morrowind , Black Marsh, Elswyer you can get involved in a wide-spread, town-to-town underground railroad to help out slaves. Transporting them from one safe house to the next. (Fast travel not permitted, being too dangerous). Or if you're evil, expose parts of the underground railroad (only to never be trusted by the anti-slavers again).

There is A LOT you can do with plenty of otherwise 'meaningless' towns and locations across a vast landscape.

GLP323b14_ESO

starkerealm wrote: »

This is a MUCH larger (and more realistic) Balmora.

Be kind of cool if it was that size in game.