Vivec Cantons are SO much smaller than TES 3 versions.

starkerealm · February 2019

Odnoc wrote: »

Well, TES3 does take place nearly 1,000 years after ESO...

It's closer to 800. Skyrim takes place 200 years after Oblivion. Oblivion takes place about 5 years after Morrowind. So, it might be around 210 years between TES3 and TES5, though I don't really feel like digging out a timeline to check, no offense.

grizzledcroc · February 2019

I really wish they didnt constrain themselfs to the es3 version so much. Whats shocking is we know they can make massive cities ingame.

Varana · February 2019

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.

ErinGoBrag520 · February 2019

nine9six wrote: »

Everything is definitely smaller.

Slow travel?

Boots of Blinding Speed + Cuirass of Saviors Hide + Levitate.

I kept reading this thread going wait... I know I had some combo to compensate. I remember the boots of blinding speed and I think I had a helm that compensated. I miss the levitate.

RedTalon · February 2019

I am more concerned with people not walking like they soiled themselves in elder scrolls 3...we need that has a personality.

The morrowind walk would sell!

Valkysas154 · February 2019

To be fair they had allot more fog or was it smoke from the volcano in TES3
hard to see any thing after 50 yards or less

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phantasmalD · February 2019

GLP323b14_ESO wrote: »

e.g Seeing Vivec City from Seyda Neen. What!

Here's a picture from Tes3 with Morrowind Graphic Extender installed (bigger draw distance).

It's funny, because this is actually a common complaint against MGE, that people can see Vivec from Seyda Neen.

To my understanding Vvardenfell is an almost 1:1 copy, the devs literally used the original height map and then just tinkered with it.

mairwen85 wrote: »

ArchMikem wrote: »

mairwen85 wrote: »

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

Here

Not just bigger, more of them -- which makes sense after ~700 years.

Found this.

So it seems there's only a difference of three more structures. And actually the far left and far right ones are already under construction in the ESO version of the city, which just leaves the far north one left to be planned.

Here's the TESO version
Smaller cantons, and fewer. Especially the plateaus the cantons sit on seem to have a smaller surface area -- looks like renovation and growth over the course of 700-800 years. Alternatively, larger polygons and meshes in older games would also require more space for collision detection than current tech...

Compare the shoreline and notice how the two pictures are of different zoom level so you can't accuratly compare the two. When you adjust the zoom and line up the two pictures you get something like this:

Used the northern shore, more precisely the upper right corner to line things up.

Notice how these two don't line up perfectly. It's actually impossible to get a 100% match.

An alternative version, this time using Ebonheart and the bridge of the Hlaalu canton to line things up.

The buildings line up better, but the shoreline is worse.

Also, Vivec's palace is massive compared to the original.

Here's an old forum thread where the entirety of vvardenfell is getting lined up and overlayed. Notice how Vivec city is the pretty much the biggest difference between the two.

I don't have TES3 installed so it's hard to accurately compare the two but here are a couple pictures I found on the wiki to kinda compare the sizes of the cantons:

If you look closely on the first picture you can see the gondoliere standing close to the archway. On the second picture you can see my character standing close to one. Both archways look to be 3 person tall

So to sum it up, the cantons are actually smaller in some aspect, mostly in that they are less tall, ZoS devs got rid of the empty space above the archways. They also slightly less elongated (square shaped areas instead of rectangles) and therefore probably cover slightly less area as well.

There are a couple of technical things that could be skewing your perception of Tes3 Vvardenfell:
1. Walking speed, compared to Tes3 the default movement speed in ESO is as if everyone was wearing Boots of Blinding Speed.
2. Draw distance was abysmally low, you couldn't see Vivec from Ebonheart even though the two are swimming distance from eachother.
3. Tes3 was made with 4:3 screen ration in mind not 16:9, not sure about the FoV tho.
4. TES3 defaulted to first person view while ESO defaults to third. Everything looks bigger from FPV.
5. Tes 3 Vvardenfell had way more enterable places. Almost all of them are still present on the ESO map but barely a handful can be explored. Case in point, only 2/3 of the 2 out of the 7 cantons can be entered (no underworks).

As a closing thought I leave this video here, comparing TES3 and ESO Vvardenfell. (Vivec is at the very end of the video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmrMrXOIwAo

asuitandtyb14_ESO · February 2019

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.

That's true, but you need to remember that whenever someone points out an obvious discrepancy from the previous games, and/or lore, they will also parrot back the same excuse "but it's X years before X game, and therefore reason".

Browiseth · February 2019

What were you expecting? to get that same feeling from your childhood that's been clouded by nostalgia anyway?

I've been playing through Morrowind properly for the first time these past few days, and Vivec city shares a similar problem to the rest of the game: it's very empty and boring. There's a lot of walking and nothing in a barren empty world, and the capital city is like a micro version of that world.

So as far as I'm concerned, scaling down is exactly what was needed.

BrokenString · February 2019

I'm someone who got Morrowind out of boredom when I was a kid not knowing what it was. I played that game many times over the years, I even bought it a second time on steam because my cd was very old and died on me, last time I finished the game I think was last year. Honestly I gotta say I'm glad Vvardenfell in ESO is scaled down. TES 3 is great dont get me wrong but most of it was useless empty areas that added nothing to the game but travel time. I miss red mountain and the ghost gate though, best place in the game, a shame it isn't included in eso

Soldier224 · February 2019

In Daggerfall, as in all The Elder Scrolls games, players are not required to follow questlines or fill specific character types. Bethesda Softworks claims that the scale of the game is the size of Great Britain:[2] around 229,848 square kilometers (88,745 square miles), though the actual size of the map is 161,600 km² (62,394 mi²). The game world features over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to explore. According to Todd Howard, game director and executive producer for Bethesda, the game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, is 0.01% the size of Daggerfall, but some aspects of Daggerfall's terrain were randomly generated, like the wilderness and some building interiors. The explorable part of Morrowind, Vvardenfell, is 24 km² (9.3 mi²).[3][4] There are 750,000+ non-player characters (NPCs) for the player to interact with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_II:_Daggerfall

It´s clear, that ZOS cant design so big Cities and landscapes when they want to fill them with Details, good Questlines and much to discover. TES2 has huge a Country. But it was poor of Details and the Quests wasn´t so much interesting, it was empty. So the landscapes are smaller in each following TES Game but for it always denser. ESO want to bring moreover Full Tamriel.

MLGProPlayer · February 2019

E7216 wrote: »

mairwen85 wrote: »

ESO: 2E 582 (Vivec in ESO is still under construction -- see in game conversations and visual aspects like scaffolding and construction site)

TES3: 3E 427

Many years between.

Civilisations expand, existing structures are rebuilt, renovated, extended.

Rome wasn't built in a day

Well, neither was Vivec.

All provinces that have their counterparts in singleplayer games (Morrowind, Skyrim) are of course much smaller, so are the towns in the provinces.

All towns and villages which are there in the future wouldn't have room to exist on the maps in ESO, but as they don't have to, who cares?

[Edited to remove baiting]

You're looking at the single player games through rose-tinted glasses.

You also may have played those games in first person, thus making the world around you seem more imposing.

TES settlements are tiny both in ESO and their original games. It's one of my biggest gripes with the series (granted, they were held back by technological limitations in the past).

wnights · February 2019

What I miss are those canton sewers... they would make a cool dungeon/delve

mairwen85 · February 2019

asuitandtyb14_ESO wrote: »

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.

>>>They aren't the same, they are structurally, and ornately slightly different.

That's true, but you need to remember that whenever someone points out an obvious discrepancy from the previous games, and/or lore, they will also parrot back the same excuse "but it's X years before X game, and therefore reason".

9/10 -- people who stamp their feet about lore, don't actually know much about the lore other than a few books they read, or simply don't realise that much of the lore of TES is hardly concrete -- constantly in flux because it is all a collection of reports and assumptions by unreliable narrators with varying agendas and goals. A lot of it is third hand information, propaganda, hear-say, opinion and conjecture, or quoted historical sources (out of context?). It is malleable, and narrators of each era retcon or contradict each other and those from previous eras.

In this case though

but it's X years before X game, and therefore reason

actually is the case. The city is under active construction. Several quests and conversations center around this fact -- it's also a plot device in the main story for the chapter. In other words, Vivec being smaller in ESO than TES3 is part of the lore

You could go so far as to argue that each of us is essentially playing out a narrative that is being written into the annals of books and scrolls amongst the contradictory soup of TES lore in every game -- a theory that holds more water the more you follow that every player story is the truth, but we all play it our way. We are all unreliable narrators of our game world experience, or the subject of a hyperbolic retelling.

Cities in video games are always just hints of civilisation, echoes of what would actually be there and scaled down to a size that doesn't impact imagination or immersion (theoretically).

At the same time, no one is talking about magically enlarging anything either -- things like cities that have a populous get bigger to accommodate more people. That includes extending, heightening, broadening existing structures as well as adding them. I linked a map of London, UK from 1300 further up the thread, it's tiny, hardly a town. Now, 700 years later, it's a sprawling metropolis with nearly 9 million people. Vivec in ESO is ~700-800 years before TES3 -- so in very real terms, yes, it will logically be comparatively smaller.

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.

No -- no, they didn't. IF they made them bigger, they probably used scaffolding, materials, man power, tools and whatever machinery of the age was available -- they had some 800 years to do it in -- but they probably didn't, and the perception of scale difference is likely due to hardware and software limitations of early millennium vs now, or just that they learnt their lesson about having too much emptiness for the sake of illusory grandeur, and realised that density provides a better psychological illusion of scope.

Who knows...

Turelus · February 2019

asuitandtyb14_ESO wrote: »

ESO Vvardenfell fails to meet the standard of Morrowind by a fair margin, and in nearly every category, with the exception of graphics.

One is also an expansion for an MMO and the other is a stand alone game. There were very different design goals and development times.

FrancisCrawford · February 2019

ghastley wrote: »

My recollection of Morrowind as TES III was that I spent all my game time walking to the next place. You couldn't run, because that cost stamina, and you couldn't ride anything but a silt strider. Scaling things down for ESO corrects that mistake.

Boots of Blinding Speed, plus a workaround for the "Blinding" part.

Also, I eventually made super potions that allowed me to fly over the landscape at high speed. Unfortunately, this crashed my Xbox fairly often.

mairwen85 · February 2019

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

ghastley wrote: »

My recollection of Morrowind as TES III was that I spent all my game time walking to the next place. You couldn't run, because that cost stamina, and you couldn't ride anything but a silt strider. Scaling things down for ESO corrects that mistake.

Boots of Blinding Speed, plus a workaround for the "Blinding" part.

Also, I eventually made super potions that allowed me to fly over the landscape at high speed. Unfortunately, this crashed my Xbox fairly often.

Happier times...

zaria · February 2019

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

ghastley wrote: »

My recollection of Morrowind as TES III was that I spent all my game time walking to the next place. You couldn't run, because that cost stamina, and you couldn't ride anything but a silt strider. Scaling things down for ESO corrects that mistake.

Boots of Blinding Speed, plus a workaround for the "Blinding" part.

Also, I eventually made super potions that allowed me to fly over the landscape at high speed. Unfortunately, this crashed my Xbox fairly often.

I used an balistic ring, 6x increase jump 100 for 3 seconds + slowfall 1 for a minute. I once overshot Vivec

Found I could cast levitate to stop.

Varana · February 2019

mairwen85 wrote: »

... the perception of scale difference is likely due to hardware and software limitations of early millennium vs now, or just that they learnt their lesson about having too much emptiness for the sake of illusory grandeur, and realised that density provides a better psychological illusion of scope.

Who knows...

I may not know, as in have it confirmed by word of God, but I'd bet you a crate of beer that it's one of those real-world technical or design reasons, and not supposed to represent an in-game enlargement (by whatever means).

Trying to come up with in-game explanations for clearly out-game decisions and changes does usually do more harm than good. The extreme is that ludicrous idea of Tiber Septim changing Cyrodiil from jungles to temperate forest - no one should actually take that seriously. They changed how Cyrodiil looks like between games, and that's it.

But also other stuff - sure, it could be that the Dunmer 800 years later would find decorated walls excessively lively, and decided to paint them over with a uniform drab brown-ish paste. Or you could chalk that up to Morrowind being a 15-year old game that had issues with texture size and some weird design decisions. In this case, coming up with an in-game explanation might kind of work - but then, you don't have to, and install a texture mod (like you should, with Morrowind).

mairwen85 · February 2019

Varana wrote: »

mairwen85 wrote: »

... the perception of scale difference is likely due to hardware and software limitations of early millennium vs now, or just that they learnt their lesson about having too much emptiness for the sake of illusory grandeur, and realised that density provides a better psychological illusion of scope.

Who knows...

I may not know, as in have it confirmed by word of God, but I'd bet you a crate of beer that it's one of those real-world technical or design reasons, and not supposed to represent an in-game enlargement (by whatever means).

Trying to come up with in-game explanations for clearly out-game decisions and changes does usually do more harm than good. The extreme is that ludicrous idea of Tiber Septim changing Cyrodiil from jungles to temperate forest - no one should actually take that seriously. They changed how Cyrodiil looks like between games, and that's it.

But also other stuff - sure, it could be that the Dunmer 800 years later would find decorated walls excessively lively, and decided to paint them over with a uniform drab brown-ish paste. Or you could chalk that up to Morrowind being a 15-year old game that had issues with texture size and some weird design decisions. In this case, coming up with an in-game explanation might kind of work - but then, you don't have to, and install a texture mod (like you should, with Morrowind).

I'm not disagreeing.

I'm saying the real answer is a bit of both, conception as per lore reasoning, implementation from a technical perspective. Every side of both halves has been covered in this thread.

But yeah -- generally technical limitations guide the implementation, and that then leads to re-thinking and 'fixing' the conceptual aspects. It's a reverse process in this scenario to what most people expect (especially if regarding an established concept) -- the result being what we see here.

phantasmalD · February 2019

Varana wrote: »

Trying to come up with in-game explanations for clearly out-game decisions and changes does usually do more harm than good. The extreme is that ludicrous idea of Tiber Septim changing Cyrodiil from jungles to temperate forest - no one should actually take that seriously. They changed how Cyrodiil looks like between games, and that's it.

I'd disagree, some of the funniest and coolest lore bits were created to explain inconsistencies between game or responding to weird design decisions. Talos achiving CHIM, the Furstocks, the Prisoner and Saint Jiub are all great bits of lore and metaness is part of what makes the world of TES fun.

Although in the case of Vivec City's apperance there's probably no hidden coolness waiting to be harnessed.

Davor · February 2019

Odnoc wrote: »

Well, TES3 does take place nearly 1,000 years after ESO...[/quote

What does this mean? The scale is still off and wrong. After all buildings don't move. As the original poster said, you can see Vivec from Sedna Neya. I guess you are saying tectonic shifts made the cities grow further apart?

Davor · February 2019

The scale of the maps are really off. Just look at Summerset. You think that map is twice as big and long as Auridon but Auridon feels and seems larger than Summerset.

grizzledcroc · February 2019

I like that Orsinium is bigger than really anything in the past few ES sp games.

ProfessorKittyhawk · February 2019

Chilly-McFreeze wrote: »

ProfessorKittyhawk wrote: »

Someone else mentioned it but bears mentioning it again: the city is under construction. Being built. Heck, a few quests have you going to the construction sites for things. So of course things won't be exactly like TES3: Morrowind. It's set hundreds of years before that game.

Right, but the cantons are already close to each other. So expanding them in size would mean relocating or deconstructing the cantons as well. How else would you get enough space otherwise?

Like a lot of other things in the game, both architecturally or environmentally, they've been scaled down and/or revised. Lots has been said about Cyrodiil originally being a lush jungle in this era in previous titles but its since been retconned to be what it presently is. In any case, the city is under construction and there are what appears to be plots for other cantons.

GLP323b14_ESO · February 2019

ProfessorKittyhawk wrote: »

Like a lot of other things in the game, both architecturally or environmentally, they've been scaled down and/or revised. Lots has been said about Cyrodiil originally being a lush jungle in this era in previous titles but its since been retconned to be what it presently is. In any case, the city is under construction and there are what appears to be plots for other cantons.

Obviously for game design reasons the world needs to be scaled down. Except for in games like TES 2, which was largely procedurely generated landscape, towns, dungeons, etc... of extremely low polygon objects and meshes. Though one would hope that as our computer technology increases they would be able to expand on things from earlier games like TES 3.

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.

Oh well. Perhaps TES 6 will begin to head in the direction of more expansive landscapes and fully realized towns and cities, since graphical fidelity is pretty sufficient in my opinion.

You know what I would LOVE to see, is an artist's conception of what Vivec City would REALLY look like if it were as described in lore, and as big as it would be in a 1:1 realization of the fantasy world. With each Canton actually being the size of a town in and of themselves. A total city with a population of a couple hundred thousand or more residents, rather than a couple hundred NPCs we see in game.

Does anyone know of any such illustrations that have been made? And if not, could some talented artist get on it. Thanks.

asuitandtyb14_ESO · February 2019

asuitandtyb14_ESO wrote: »

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.

That's true, but you need to remember that whenever someone points out an obvious discrepancy from the previous games, and/or lore, they will also parrot back the same excuse "but it's X years before X game, and therefore reason".

I'd like to add that in addition to this mindless response we see a lot, it's absolutely subjective to the period and culture, both in real life, as well as in fantasy.

If you compare the time from 1300 AD to now, of course it seems like such a massive amount of time results in massive social, technological, and cultural changes will occur. However, if you compare the 700 years to that of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, which was also approximately 700 years, there is not nearly an extreme amount of change in that period. In fact, there's very little. So the 1:1 comparison is essentially pointless, and completely misleading when taken out of context.

The other issue is you are just comparing growth by human standards, in human history. You aren't even considering how Dunmer differ in aging, cultural values, and other factours. Dunmer can live naturally from 300-800 years. They value tradition, their religion, and making things to last, among other things. I find it extremely unlikely that Dunmer would take the time to build anything, just to change it again in their lifetime, or their children's. For them, in 800 years they may be dead, but their children and grandchildren will still be the next generation. They're not going to be rebuilding cities that fast. They are not going to be having huge cultural changes that fast. They live a long time, and they don't like change.

phantasmalD · February 2019

Davor wrote: »

The scale of the maps are really off. Just look at Summerset. You think that map is twice as big and long as Auridon but Auridon feels and seems larger than Summerset.

Summerset is like 40% unscalable mountains.

Faulgor wrote: »

Elsonso · February 2019

starkerealm wrote: »

GLP323b14_ESO wrote: »

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!).

Oddly enough, not that much.

There were two things about TES3: The slow movement speed, and the short draw distance. Those two made the zone feel far larger than it actually was.

Using a modern injector to add things like LoD data, quickly reveals some shocking things about the original map, including how downright small it was. And, yes, on a clear day, standing in Seyda Neen, you could see down to Vivec. Not when you played the game in 2003, but today using mods to render at longer distances? Yes.

I learned this modding TES 3. Once opened up in the Construction Set, I quickly discovered that everything is pretty much crammed together, with only LOD and terrain preventing this discovery within the game.

Sercisil · February 2019

The scale of TESO Vvardenfell is near 1/3 of the original. Just look at this location: Nilthog's Hollow So, there is nothing in the crater except the arena for the boss. And now look at the original location...