Skyrim's heightmap is rectangular and uses 119 x 94 = 11186 in-game "cells". The engine uses the same cell size as in Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas - 57.6 metres (63 yards) to the side, 3317.76 m (3 969 square yards) of area. The full map thus has an area of about 37.1 km (14.3 square miles). Around a quarter of this is not playable, stuck behind invisible borders.
morrowind vs skyrim map size
If it were a real map, or everyone had the same size screen and resolution, it would be easy enough to eyeball the distance between the above mentioned cities, and call that 110 miles. Although your results may vary, I can guestimate that the longitudal distance of Skyrim is about 400-600 miles, and the latitudinal distance about 800-1000 miles. So, just as a rough estimate, the province would be somewhere between 320,000 miles, squared and 600,000 miles, squared.
You wonder how big is the Elden Ring map, as when you first enter the Lands Between, it seems like one of the largest worlds that gaming has ever seen. The key to Elden Ring's map is its scale, thanks to the towering mountains, huge castles, and the corpses of giants that litter parts of the world. This game is truly as gigantic as its scope, but how big is it in comparison to some of the other most popular open-world maps we have seen in the past? Here's a breakdown of the Elden Ring map size compared with other open-world titles to help answer, how big is the Elden Ring map?
Now to a more recent open-world set in a massive city. In fact, a megacity from the future. Cyberpunk 2077 has its share of issues but size is not one of them. Night City is a dystopian future city on the coast of California, where much of the world is ruined but city-states like Night City have flourished, becoming densely populated, and highly dangerous, hubs of humanity. Fittingly, the map of Cyberpunk 2077 is bigger in square miles than Elden Ring by about 25%.
Seeing this comparison, as rough as it may be, has some seriously interesting ramifications for Elder Scrolls 6. It would be hard to imagine Bethesda creating a world as richly detailed as even Skyrim on the scale of Elden Ring or Red Dead Redemption 2, but then where will ES6 fall in terms of size? Hopefully, we will find out sooner rather than later.
This is a bit of a tricky comparison to make, but we couldn't include Night City without including CD Projekt Red's other massive world. The continent found in The Witcher 3 is a massive place. I mean it is a continent, it should be massive. While the overall map of the continent far exceeds the size of the Lands Between, the playable area isn't quite as big.
Now, for the big one. In terms of matching size with detail, there really is nothing that compares to Red Dead Redemption 2. In terms of square footage, RDR2 is roughly 50% larger than Elden Ring. Both games have a similar range of biomes, albeit with more realistic tones in Red Dead. They are also similar in how open and wild the terrain is, with minimal civilization cluttering up the place.
What is the lore-based size of Skyrim, Morrowind and Cyrodiil? Not only that, but how long would it take to travel from, let's say, Whiterun to Windhelm for example? Vivec to Balmora? The Imperial city to Bruma? Bruma to Falkreath? Numbers do not sit well in my skull, I am a visual learner.
1. We don't have a good map of Tamriel. All maps are different.2. Tamriel is a sphere. And withouth knowing its size (I reckon it to be about the size of Mars) we can't know how much the flat map distorts it.3. My crappy attempt at unifying the distances from the distance measures in Daggerfall article and the xxx miles mentioned in the First PGE.
It has been done before by a number of people including me and Ada. This was the result. The sphere is about the size of Mars. Seems to be somewhat consistent with the thread you linked. Though I'm not sure about the numbers any more. :)
By the end of my participation in that thread, the surface area of Nirn was approximately the size of Ganymede (95.6 million km2 v 87.2 million km2) . But over a week later it looks like he "corrected" his calculations (again) due to a mistake(s) that he made, without explanation to what the mistake was, and now Nirn is a bit bigger than Mars (195.7 million km2 vs 144.8 million km2). This is useful for thinking about planetary sizes.
As a result, Tamriel also increased in size, going from our original conclusion (which was about the size of India + Zambia + East Timor) to approximately the size of Australia - Egypt. Or rather India + India + Austria. If you want to play around with how these sizes compare on a map of Earth, this site is insightful and amusing. It also happens that Tiber Septim's Empire, had it been on Earth, would have been the 12th largest empire in the history of the world, just beating out the Ming and Eastern Han Empires.
Ah yes. And its often passed over in measurement projects because it is inexact (couple hundred?) and hence forgotten. And it changes things vastly. Looking at the most recent official map, even if we estimate the distance between Torval and the Valenwood border is 200-something miles, that means Stros M'Kai is probably around the size of Ireland. Compare this to the Stros M'kai map, where the distance from the Port in Hunding Bay to N'Gasta's stronghold is a whole 15.4 miles.
How do we know that 250 miles in the TES universe translates exactly to 250 miles IRL? If Mournhold to Red Mountain is 250 miles then Vvardenfell and Black Marsh combined are about the size of Britain. Which would make the whole of Tamriel, supposedly one of if not the largest continent on Nirn, about the size of Alaska. Not nearly big enough for the climatic differences. Also, we can assume it is a sphere because of the orreries, and that it rotates on an axis because the sun moves across the sky and according to lore that is the static hole torn by Magnus. Possible that it is just a regular old star system though, and the people of Nirn just haven't really discovered astronomy yet. If it rotates we can assume that gravity and such apply in a way similar(ish) to RL physics, which would mean Nirn would have to have a mass roughly in the same ball park as Earth. So either it rotates super fast (hence in game days being short) and is really dense which is unlikely seeing as everything is not a crazy shape and scale that would come with gravity being warped to such a degree, or Nirn is larger than one would assume from the distance to Mournhold from Red Mountain. 250 miles sound like a lot but on a continental scale that is tiny. It would be like going from a Siberian climate to desert climate (Northern Skyrim to Elsweyr) in a distance of about 600-700 miles, which is about the length of Italy.
In the third TES title, Morrowind, Bethesda scaled back to create a smaller map (just 9.3 square miles, or 0.01% the size of Daggerfall) that felt more intentional. Then came The Elder Scrolls IV IV: Oblivion with its massive 22-square mile map, followed by Skyrim, which is actually slightly smaller at 14.5 square miles but significantly more dense than the previous games.
After the player creates their highly customizable avatar, they have the option to travel to these five continents, exploring their unique atmospheres and learning more about Mira. Available for Wii U, Xenoblade Chronicles X, despite the impressive world size, was met with criticism for the storyline. Still, many players have enjoyed exploring the unique world of Mira.
The Lord of the Rings Online was originally called The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, and it was released in 2007. Players get to choose between four races and seven classes while customizing their avatars. They start their adventure through the region of Eriador. The game was expanded in the years following its initial release, adding several new areas for players to explore while increasing the already expansive map size.
What makes this game even more staggering is that each system has different planets for players to explore. Determining the scale of the map a challenge, not only for how many planets there are but because EVE Online allows players to move around in three-dimensional space. This makes quantifying the size of the map without the developing studio's confirmation difficult. According to an article posted on engadget.com, each warp-in point clocks in at 62.2 square miles, and each object you can warp to has a warp-in point. There's a proposed 326,219,876 square miles worth of locations players can visit. Talk about your expansive video game map!
So, why mention a game that has yet to be released? For the impressive map size, of course! If the game delivers on its epic space-faring adventure that allows players to traverse open space, the map size will be staggering. According to Chris Roberts, a video game developer involved with Star Citizen, the playable map they're working on will be "1 million kilometers by 1 million kilometers by 2 million kilometers high." These numbers, which roughly come to the numbers initially listed above in miles, were released in 2015 during a press conference. When pressed for information later, the developers released an end-goal map size of 400 kilometers high with a volume of 400 quadrillion cubic kilometers.
Why include this in a guide about map size, you might ask? If the developers deliver, this staggering map will top lists for large procedurally generated video game maps, which is why it deserves mention. It deserves to be on everyone's radar.
If the sheer size of the area doesn't impress you, subtle features like great voice acting and clever quest puzzles will. The boss battles have to be some of the most unique fights in Skyrim thus far.
Morrowind takes place on Vvardenfell, an island in the Dunmer-dominated province of Morrowind, far from the typically European-inspired lands to the west and south depicted in Daggerfall and Arena. Along with graphical improvements, one of the most apparent differences between Morrowind and the earlier games in the series is that Morrowind takes place in a much smaller area than the previous games. While Arena featured the entirety of Tamriel as an explorable area, and Daggerfall featured sizeable portions of two provinces of Tamriel, Hammerfell and High Rock, Morrowind includes only the "relatively small" island of Vvardenfell within the province of Morrowind.[15] The change was a result of a conscious choice on the part of the developers to feature more detail and variety in the game. Whereas Daggerfall and Arena's dungeons were randomly generated, each area in Morrowind was specifically detailed, and each item was individually placed. As a result, reviewers were generally impressed with the game world's variety, as this maintained the perception of an "enormous" game-world.[15] The game area expands to the walled city of Mournhold on Morrowind's mainland in the Tribunal expansion, and the island of Solstheim to the northwest of Vvardenfell in the Bloodmoon expansion. 2ff7e9595c
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