Hi All, I was on the Skywind subreddit and saw a thread about the accuracy of Vvardenfell's size in Skywind, and it's got Me wondering if the size of Vvardenfell is larger than Bethesda would have us believe compared to Oblivion or Skyrim
Morrowind Vs Skyrim Map Size
Skyrim, Vvardenfell, Cyrodil, and many other locations are iconic in their topography and size. Size doesn't grow with each game, however. Some of Bethesda's older Elder Scrolls games are much larger than their most recent titles, and some have little to no explorable area at all.
Even if you were to hypothetically line up every unique Elder Scrolls Legends card and measure their surface area, the total "explorable" size would still be too small to do anything. Though it's not an RPG, Elder Scrolls Legends could be considered to have the smallest explorable world of an Elder Scrolls game - although nothing isn't quite the same as 0 miles sq.
Just like Blades and Redguard, nobody really knows the exact map size of Battlespire. However, Redguard had a proper outdoor world to explore as well as dungeons, cities, and other locations that expand the world. Battlespire takes place entirely on this elite training center, and thus is a fair bit smaller in scope than Redguard.
As a result, measuring the size of the map is rather difficult. With how short the game is and how small the overworld is, it is safe to assume that this is one of the smallest Elder Scrolls games of the bunch that still allows a modicum of exploration. After all, a small island is no match for the main provinces the other games take place in, though it is more developed than the Battlespire or Blades' linear levels.
Well, it didn't have convenient fast travel. Players could either pay a fee to use the silt striders dotted across the landscape to travel between towns, or those adept in the arcane arts could mark locations to teleport between. Coupled with the game's slow movement speed, the Morrowind map size feels much larger than it really is. Those that own the Bloodmoon expansion can also travel to Solstheim by boat or by having a high enough Acrobatics skill to jump over the ocean.
Skyrim is much larger than Morrowind, more than doubling that game's size at 37 kilometers (which doesn't include the impressive verticality of the fifth Elder Scrolls title). Some of that space is water and mountains, but nearly all of the landscape has something for players to discover. Its breathtaking vistas and quests keep fans coming back almost a decade since its release. This world feels relatively small compared to others, though, because it's incredibly easy to get around quickly, making exploration both more efficient and less exciting.
The developers of the game commented before launch that Cyrodil is around 100 kilometers while most regions are around 10 kilometers. Adding every region together and assuming the major expansion zones are around 100 kilometers, the map of ESO is around 400 kilometers. This dwarfs the size of the past three main Elder Scrolls games combined! It is the largest Elder Scrolls game ever made that didn't utilize procedural generation for its landscapes.
If we went off of Bethesda's marketing alone, The Elder Scrolls: Arena would be the largest RPG ever made by a massive margin. According to Bethesda, the Elder ScrollsArena map size is over 9 million kilometers large - 9,656,064 km, to be precise. Not only have developers lied about the size of their games, but this is impossible to prove.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is the largest game in the Elder Scrolls franchise by a massive margin when ignoring Arena. The specific number is up for debate, but many fans have settled on the Daggerfall map size being approximately 161,600 kilometers. For reference, Great Britain is around 209,000 kilometers large. The size of both Arena and Daggerfall is thanks to its usage of procedural generation.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a favorite for many longtime Elder Scrolls fans, but it's actually the smallest of the mainline titles in terms of sheer size. At about 16 km in total size, Morrowind is actually the smallest of the main titles by far.
Officially speaking, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is the biggest Elder Scrolls game. Its size is confirmed at around 161,000 km of procedurally-generated world for the player to explore and find quests within. This means each player's experience is unique outside of the main story of the game. It takes place in Lilac Bay and stars the player character known as "the Agent," who was sent to Lilac Bay by Emperor Uriel Septim VII himself.
The game is sectioned off into zones, so it isn't a continuous world in the way that Daggerfall, Skyrim, and the rest of the Elder Scrolls games are. That said, all of the current zones together measure up to about 400km in size, so it does exceed the size of Daggerfall.
However, there are several catches to that size. The main one is that the game apparently just starts looping terrain on the player when they try to walk from town to town, so that size is both not really there but also technically infinite. That said, the area being infinite would also technically make it the largest Elder Scrolls game ever made. However, even that isn't really true, as the game just starts breaking down after a while. All in all, Elder Scrolls: Arena is technically the largest Elder Scrolls game ever made, it just has several asterisks listed next to that achievement.
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.
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.
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.
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