Daggerfall Workshop Forums

I was always under the impression that Arena didn't have a physical size. I could be wrong but it felt like each town/city was in it's own instance. I have tried walking from one place to another but I never managed to, it seems like the countryside infinitely looped. Surely if the destinations all existed in the same space I would be able to walk from one to another. Apparently if you walk too far it starts bugging out.

If that's the case then adding up the places together would create a smaller map than Daggerfall, despite the whole continent being available in Arena, there are far less places to go so you could place them closer. The map is almost empty in comparison to Daggerfall so while it would be a lot of work to remake it, it wouldn't be on the scale of Daggerfall. If each place is an instance, you could maybe stitch them together in positions relative to where they should be to allow you to walk between them. And to lighten the load, I'd be fine with those Arena town assets being reused instead of having to make new ones(unless they can't be ported over and have to be remade.) Being separate places could allow you to make the map however large you feel it should be so you could make it smaller or larger than Daggerfall. Although the countryside would need to made in between them.

But that's going on the idea of each town being it's own thing, if the map does have a physical size and everything is in one instance then I don't know how big that really is. Unless it really is that large, then I would say some scaling down is needed if people are to walk from place to place.

If someone would make a map of all of Tamriel with Daggerfall’s size the scale would still be far greater then all the future Elder Scrolls games-a single region in Daggerfall is bigger then Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim combined. Daggerfall is the size of Great Britain whereas future games are minuscule in size. All of Tamriel could fit into Daggerfall’s size and still feel massive with thousands of towns and dungeons and a massive countryside. How many game maps are the size of a real country? The fact that people are acting like putting Tamriel into a map the size of Great Britain would make it feel like a “theme park” just reminds me of how much more bigger and ambitious Daggerfall is compared to modern games lol

But what would be the point of making a Tamriel map the size of Daggerfall? That really eludes me.
To make a town that looks like any other town in Daggerfall and call it “Cyrodiil”?
What I mean is, to make a credible Tamriel what are sorely needed are assets. And by assets I intend flats, province specific guilds, buildings, NPCs, quests, heightmaps, etc…
Now, if hypothetically speaking, a team of modders will one day have all of that, why they should make a tiny sized Tamriel? Given the procedural way in which Daggerfall was originally created, why not go full force ahead and create a full sized huge Tamriel?

A thought related to what Arneb said, though in the opposite direction:

Perhaps what is needed is the map first. If someone could map out all of Tamriel at Daggerfall's scale, and add in the locations and cultures needed (using stuff like UESP and various books as a guide), and of course ensuring you made the biggest locations in each province the cities from Arena, you could still recreate the main quest on top of that.

The next step after would of course be doing exactly what they suggested: Adding tons of resources to flesh out the setting, with geographically/culturally/politically/climate distinct terrain textures, buildings, npcs and dungeon blocks, spread out across Tamriel. But it doesn't make sense to make those til you know where they go, so you'd need the map working first. And I'm 100% sure there are people who would enjoy knowing that they are in Black Marsh or Vardenfall even if it looks exactly like the Illiac Bay at first.

I was always under the impression that Arena didn't have a physical size. I could be wrong but it felt like each town/city was in it's own instance. I have tried walking from one place to another but I never managed to, it seems like the countryside infinitely looped. Surely if the destinations all existed in the same space I would be able to walk from one to another. Apparently if you walk too far it starts bugging out.

Nope, Arena is not a single large continuous world. You are correct that each town is its own instance, and when you leave the town area, it begins randomly generating wild areas. That is why you can't even get to another town, and also why it probably bugs out running to far.

Daggerfall was the first in the serious to have an actual continuous open world that didn't use individual instanced scenes you load into, which was what pretty much every game had done until daggerfall. Another reason this game blew my mind when I was a kid in the early 90's.