The region XX is one of the largest and popular place in province YY

which in game has population of 20 ppl

This is the issue for all elder scroll games

(And the small towns each have 4 houses so 4 families, and always isolated from outside world, which means the only way the settlement continues for generations is by in____)

The gameworld is actually smaller in scale compared to Skyrim and Oblivion, and much smaller compared to Daggerfall.

I feel the same way sometimes, but eso has a lot of quality over quantity in its zones. The graphics are much better than wow, and each zone is very unique and beautiful.

While the zones might feel small I find there's plenty of exploring to be done in tamriel as a whole.

Iccotak wrote: »

SisterGoat wrote: »

The gameworld is actually smaller in scale compared to Skyrim and Oblivion, and much smaller compared to Daggerfall.

Do you have any sources for that? I have been curious about the size of ESO compared to other RPG titles but have not been able to find anything

I do not but you can certainly feel the difference in Skyrim and Oblivion.

Buffler wrote: »

Play horse simulator in cyrodiil, you'll soon feel how large the game is!

How large *Cyrodiil is.

The reason behind the game's locations being scaled down so much is simply because there are zones spanning the entire continent. From Glenumbra to Stonefalls, Eastmarch to Grahtwood. The Devs wanted ESO to have players span all of Tamriel, but there's no way in Hell they'd try to develop maps spanning the entirety of Tamriel provinces to scale.

I once asked in a thread if people would have enjoyed the game better if ESO was just one massive to scale Zone surrounding Cyrodiil so the game would give you much more sense of distance, and the majority of people here said no.

While the game is probably one of the best looking MMOs, it really fall short when it comes to view distance and that dense white fog to hide it in many parts of the game. This is alleviated somewhat with big things in certain locales like the Red Mountain or Brass Fortress.

Compared to say Skyrim, where you can see full mountain ranges at distance and miles of forest, landscape, and towns below.

Iccotak wrote: »

Tell me if you think otherwise but to me ESO feels lacking in scale. I don't have any "larger than life" moments when traveling Tamriel.
Cities don't feel large and most natural scenery while nice is just not that big.
it makes me feel like I am exploring a small world. It just does not feel vast

The only three things that made the world feel big to me were;
Being caught in the hand of Molag Bal
The Boethiah statue at the end of the dragonstar arena
The Temple of Vivec in Vvardenfel.

I understand that ESO is not WoW and I am not asking for ESO to imitate or try to be WoW. That was their flaw at launch. However one thing I'll give WoW is that their world feels large.
Take this new addition to the world. A sword from a titan pierced the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9I_amgKVMA&t=3s

Do you think ESO lacks scale or is it big enough for you?
Is there anything that gives you that feeling of "larger than life"? What makes the world feel big to you?

Overall the game world is ok in size. The zones, take some time to get through and compare to wow.

What makes it different is the vastness of cyrondil.

Cyrondil is likely one of the largest zones in a mmo.

As for cities, the capital cities do feel like cities... they are both large and well populated with people. Even so, the best "city" is the imperial city. It really is quite large and you can imagine if it was changed to be an actual city not full of daedra (and repaired obviously) it would be an amazing city zone.

It's the exact opposite actually, at least when it comes to certain cities such as Riften. To accomodate the large numbers of players, they artificially enlarged the playing area within the city walls, and it just feels off to me.

Unfortunately most of these moments disappear in loading screens. Think of the mountains that separate the Rift from Eastmarch. You don't have to climb up there because of conveniently placed instance borders. If they were left in, you would get that sense of vastness back. The public dungeons on Vvardenfell as well as Clockwork city had a few more of those moments. My favorite non-spoiler one being Divayth Fyr killing about 40 factotums with one swift spell right at the beginning of the CWC main quest.

I will somewhat agree with the OP in that, in comparison with LOTRO, ESO does not feel quite as...epic-scale.

It's not just the actual size of the maps, or the increased (significantly) distance between wayshrines. It's things like climbing Weathertop, a ridiculously huge mountain which both looks and feels it, under a similarly ridiculously huge moon. I can't recall when I had a moment like this in ESO - or Skyrim, or Oblivion for that matter. They all feel like dungeon crawlers - because they are - with outdoor areas in-between.

And this isn't a bad thing per se. I played Oblivion and Skyrim to death and will likely do the same with ESO until, say, Fallout 5 is out (or some equivalent). But yes, I have to agree, other MMOs can beat ESO on scale. Or single-player "epicness" (story quest boss fights in LOTRO), or even PUG dungeon challenge (TOR has much more mechanics to its bosses on average, IMO). With both TOR and LOTRO beating ESO on some aspects of UI as well. Hell, EVE's marketplace mechanics beat all other MMOs out there as far as I am concerned.

It's the complete experience, however, that ultimately made TOR less satisfying for me vs. ESO even after I've played through most of the ESO quest lines several times over (LOTRO is a special case in that I set it aside for an engine-related BSD issue which I just don't see getting fixed, ever, due to the game's age). So the fact that, just like in Skyrim, every location, quest-giver and shrine are within under a minute's ride from each other doesn't really bother me.

I have really never had a problem or noticed scale and size until........Morrowind.
My BIGGEST problem with our "New Chapter" was the size. They said during beta that it was "Scaled to TES3",
but there is NO WAY in Oblivion that you could stand in Seyda Neen and SEE Vivic City. Hmmmmmph...
But the rest of the World of Tamriel", I Love It!

Content>Scale

Considering how many zones there are, I think there's plenty of land to explore in ESO. It's quite large as a whole.

I just rode halfway across Wrothgar on my horse before this and it took around four minutes to get where I was going, mainly along a single axis. To see everything there, you'd spend several hours exploring. There's some really well done scenery along the way, too, and little finishing touches like bears rubbing their backs against trees, or the pillars of some decayed wall or fortress stretched across the countryside that suggest at the region's history.

If there was one thing I wish had been done differently, it's the cities. It's nice we get to explore the whole place, but that makes it feel necessarily small. I think only having a part of the cities explorable and suggesting areas beyond that - or even having an explorable zone that's basically just a city - would have lent some weight there.