How big is Skyrim, realistically speaking?

[Amplifier]

I've read books in the game, where the distance between places are usually greatly exaggerated. Like a Khajit once said travelling just from Whiterun to Falkreath took as long as several days or weeks IIRC.

But all this is almost unbelievable when you're playing the game. Travelling from Whiterun to as far as Riften actually takes just mere minutes, even in-game, it translates to like, just a few hours.
And then there's the many instances and quests where you have NPCs just running on foot from one part of the map to the other end like it's nothing.
Rescued that Thalmor prisoner? Yeah, now he's gonna run from the fort all the way to Windhelm or something, with completely no gear or supplies.
Or that part in the House of Horrors quest, you have an old skinny man huddling in a hut and suddenly he springs up and runs barefooted all the way back to Markarth.
I mean c'mon, it's pretty ridiculuous. And Bethesda expects us to accept the fact that Skyrim is far bigger than that?

[SmooshieBanana]

bethesda needs to understand the concept of immersion for their next game for real.

[SmooshieBanana]

One thought is that it is roughly the size of half of alaska in square mileage. Who knows if that is the intended distances or not.

[Trehek]

It's certainly supposed to be much much bigger than a day-or-two's journey across, and with more than half a dozen towns. I mean, Tamriel is supposed to be a huge continent, not just an island like Britain.

[UncountableCount]

I have read some measurements, they speculate skyrim is between 3 and 3.5 miles across

[SmooshieBanana]

An average human who walks often can cover 25km/h on a decent road, drop it to 20 on a poorly maintained road, 15 without road and further drop it to 10 on a mountainous area. This is without pushing yourself to the extreme and with viable water. If we take the half of alaska measurement we can assume that the width of skyrim is 1819km wide, and the height is 1185km. So that means in pure speculation it would take 72 days on a good road to get from one end to another, poor 91 days, 121 days without road, and 182 days over mountains to cross it's width. To go from south to north it would take 47 days, 59 days, 79 days, and lastly 119 days.
Yes I was bored, no I will not argue this, it's stupid.

[rem]

Originally posted by snelss0:

So that means in pure speculation it would take 72 days on a good road to get from one end to another, poor 91 days, 121 days without road, and 182 days over mountains to cross it's width. To go from south to north it would take 47 days, 59 days, 79 days, and lastly 119 days.

Thank you for this. I was going to say something of the sort, but meh.

[istvan_v]

The UESP wiki has a map of Skyrim that shows the coordinates of any location in the game's map units. If I recall correctly, a distance of 64 units is equivalent to about 1 yard, so the entire map roughly fits into a square of 5x5 km; I do not remember the exact numbers. Oblivion's map has a comparable area that can be accessed by the player. In game, the world feels larger because of the compressed time scale (one day is only 48 minutes), the often unrealistically steep mountains, and the environment changing from forests to arctic over a distance of only a few kilometers.

[Ilja]

The game was designed to work with consoles. While Skyrim came out 2011, the compression tech is from 2006-2007. That made limitations.

Journey of Skyrim took about 10 years and a lot of cash. With tools, compression tech and time - are we actually complaining about the level of quality they put in to modelling and building outdoor terrain?

We could ask then to make the world 10 times wider than this. They would start using compression tech of today, that is required to be compatible with current generation of consoles.

It would seem quite small, compared to tech of that time - especially few years after.

[DFH01]

The average walking speed for humans is around 5kph or 3.1 mph. I have clocked the time from whiterun to riften in the past, one route took around 12 game hours, the other route i took was around 7 game hours. I was bored at the time, thats my excuse and i'm sticking to it. ;)

Edit: I use a controler, so i think i was running, stick all the way forward i think is run.

[Amplifier]

Originally posted by . . .:

I am not disagreeing with you about ''time and space'', but the last thing I do when I am playing is check the clock. When I travel it's by foot and I am not concerned with what time it is; because I am too busy fending off Cave Bears and Spriggans or trying to catch that gosh dang Blue Butterfly that won't land.
You need to take a break if you are looking at your computer monitor and wondering why the imaginary world you are wasting your time with isn't more like real life. Just saying....

Well, some people like me also play this game for a sense of immersion. Anyway point of this topic, is more to do with the intent Bethesda had for portraying the actuality of the game world's size. They put books in the game which convey the feeling like Skyrim is a long and vast continent to traverse in, yet what you see in-game is nearly the opposite, with so few NPCs riding horses and just travelling back and forth from one end of the map to the other end like it's a walk in the park. I mean, at least say reaching point A to point B would only take 1-2 days, not over a freakin' week. This is why I don't read most of the books in-game. They're a huge disappointment of delusional exaggerations.

[Smilodon]

Suspension of disbelief is required, to some extent, for 100% of video games.

[Trigger]

Skyrim is about the size of Newfoundland, Canada

[Nuzzyfuts]

Within lore and whatnot the world is described as large because that is what they want to be conveyed. However, in game is very different. The books are less exaggerations and more what the world is within the lore and what the creators want. In game, things need to be scaled down for sake of file sizes and travel times. Arena and Daggerfall had the largest and second largest(respectively) in game worlds, and because of that both games required a fast travel system(similar to that of skyrim but without finding the locations first) because traveling from town to town could take hours real time and travel across the maps could even take days.

[Delta 1038]

Originally posted by Nuzzyfuts notdeaf:

Within lore and whatnot the world is described as large because that is what they want to be conveyed. However, in game is very different. The books are less exaggerations and more what the world is within the lore and what the creators want. In game, things need to be scaled down for sake of file sizes and travel times. Arena and Daggerfall had the largest and second largest(respectively) in game worlds, and because of that both games required a fast travel system(similar to that of skyrim but without finding the locations first) because traveling from town to town could take hours real time and travel across the maps could even take days.

Don't forget that while big, both Arena and Daggerfall are actually quite empty.

[zeiut]

So you guys want a real life simulator?