Enlarging Cyrodiil

[Iconian]

Does anyone know of any mods--or perhaps game settings--to increase the size of Cyrodiil? I remember that around 10 years ago there was a mod that did this, making Cyrodiil several times larger, but I've been looking on Nexus Mods and can't seem to find it.

In short, I'd like to see Cyrodiil much larger for realism purposes. Apparently one of the prequels, Daggerfall, had the largest map in video game history, but for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, Bethesda elected to have a much smaller map, something like 10 miles across, whereas Daggerfall was hundreds.

Does anyone know of anything like this, or perhaps of some configuration option that could change it?

[Bomb Bloke]

Originally posted by Iconian:

Apparently one of the prequels, Daggerfall, had the largest map in video game history, but for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, Bethesda elected to have a much smaller map, something like 10 miles across, whereas Daggerfall was hundreds.

Haven't played it, but my understanding of Daggerfall is that most of its map consists of "flat ground with a tree here and there". Folks say Fast Travel is the only way to enjoy it, and even then you're just hopping between multiple randomly-generated versions of the same town (or dungeon).

I'm not familiar with any mods that expand Cyrodiil, but I suspect the "old mod" you're thinking of might be Tamriel Heightmaps.[www.nexusmods.com] It fills in all the lands around the province.

[The Rock God]

The Daggerfall map was nowhere near the largest map in a videogame. Microsoft Flight Simulator's map covered 196 million square miles in the '80s.

[Iconian]

@Bomb Bloke: No, it wasn't Tamriel Heightmaps. It was a mod that made Cyrodiil itself bigger. I was kind of curious about it at the time but didn't actually get around to downloading it. There have always been a number of realism issues that have bothered me about Oblivion, and I feel many of them could be corrected if the map of Cyrodiil was far larger.

Like, the whole fast travel system, the sped-up timescale, horses, vanilla Oblivion not requiring you to eat or drink or sleep to survive, lack of consequences for ignoring the main quest, or the fact that Cyrodiil really only has a few hundred people and the Imperial City only has a few dozen and is smaller than many small towns in our world, and yet it's supposedly the capital of an empire.

About a year and a half ago I actually watched some footage of Daggerfall and it was mostly empty as you said, but most of Earth's actual geography is relatively empty too. And that was about 25 years ago--with all the advances that have been made in computers, programming, procedural generation, etc since then, I think massive distances could be handled much better today, while making the story and the setting more alive and enjoyable. I do think it was right for Bethesda to scale way back after Daggerfall, but everything has come a long way since then. It'd be nice to see a mod now that actually handles all those better. Or even an actual game, though I feel like Bethesda is heading more toward dumbing-down the gameplay, rather than making it more realistic.

@The Rock God: Really? I'm trying to find info about that online, but I think it might have mostly been washed out by the recent announcement of their new flight simulator, https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/30/20885197/microsoft-flight-simulator-bing-maps-hands-on-demo

[Bomb Bloke]

"196 million square miles" would be "our whole planet", which is indeed quite a bit larger than Daggerfall's map. Best I can make out, MSFS has indeed allowed flight all around Earth since its very first release.

Originally posted by Iconian:

with all the advances that have been made in computers, programming, procedural generation, etc since then, I think massive distances could be handled much better today, while making the story and the setting more alive and enjoyable.

The problem isn't so much "generating a massive world" as it is "filling it with interesting content". There are plenty of sandbox games that try to do things this way, but they all fall down when it comes to populating their worlds with unique and interesting NPCs.

[Leeux]

There used to be a proof of concept project made by one of the early modders that started to fool around with heightmaps and landmasses, that just did that: Cyrodiil x2 o x4 with no other content and adjustments.

I don't recall the modder's name now, nor how the project was called... it was all started on an old bethsoft forum thread IIRC, and I think he produced some kind results as a plugin that enlarged the landmass... but of course, not all of the objects could be correctly adjusted to the new size, so it wasn't really playable, it was just a toy to roam around and see the land.

I don't think those files are available anymore, as I don't think they were hosted on official mod's sites, and instead they were just uploaded to temporary filesharing services... however, I might be wrong on that :)