Given I sunk 150 hours into Oblivion before I even started on the main quest, I cannot see a 50-80% of the size game being a bad thing IN THE SLIGHTEST.

Truly, I think I need to change my pants now.

Either way, isn't that still a significant amount, given that Oblivion's game world is supposed to be equivalent to about 16 square miles?

As long as they fill the world with lots of stuff to do, the bigger the better.
If it feels empty & the size is just there to prolong the run from A->B->C, I'm ok with a smaller world.
(But lots more good stuff is better than merely a handful square miles of good stuff...)

Let's hope the game has more depth than Oblivion did. It had a lot of acreage, but the game didn't really make good use of it.

Really? I found plenty of crap to do, even when I wasn't actively pursuing side quests.

YAY Dogmeat!

Y'know, the responses to this thread got me thinking. Yeah, Oblivion had a lot of empty space... But would Fallout benefit from huge tracts of desert?

You have to realize something, they tossed out a ballpark figure. 50-80% is a broad number personally I think they are polling the masses. They want to get an idea of just how big people want the game. I say something like 75% is big enough for Fall Out.

It'd be cool if instead of having borders, the world had featureless, endless desert that would eventually kill you from heat, exhaustion and radiation, no matter how powerful you were. Oh, and it would save your data to a global database to populate everyone else's game with all the corpses of people who died that way, kind of like in Nethack! You could go looking for your body and try to make it just a tiny bit further next time.

On the other hand, I'd gladly have a game just 25% of Oblivion if they'd get Sean Bean on board again. He's so dreamy.

I hope they get no-name actors who are just as talented and spend the millions they save on, y'know, the game?

I've mentioned my shallowness argument before and I accept that not everyone agrees with me here. The landscape of Oblivion is absolutely crawling with old ruins and such. Except for a few rare instances where they're specifically tied to city quests, there's no sense of history in them. They're just places to plop down some random monsters and treasures. I cleared out quite a few of them before I lost interest; except for some changes in layout and architecture, each was the same. No books lying around explaining what happened to it in some forgotten war or why it was abandoned. No real sense that it was organically tied into the landscape around it.

Interplay was a big shot back then, but it wasn't the voices that made it, it was the writing.

"May the water you find in the desert not shine at you in the dark."

"Harry think he beat your head now."

They really misused Sean Bean in Oblivion, that is perhaps the only time I've felt actively sorry for an actor while listening to them in-game. They burdened him with third-rate fantasy gibberish dialogue. But Bethesda generally misuses their voice talent, hiring big name actors for promotional value primarily, just as they have done for Liam Neeson. It was the first detail of the game they released, and so important for them they made an entire press release just to announce the fact. Now, let us see if they have gotten any skilled writers involved since the abysmal writing in Oblivion.

While I loved both Oblivion and Morrowind, what I'm still hoping for someday is "The Elder Scrolls: Tamriel" where they do a game covering THE WHOLE FREAKING WORLD. Ever since Daggerfall, that's what I've wanted. They don't even have to raise the graphics fidelity much over Oblivion, just craft the world of Tamriel. That's not too much work, is it?

Agreed. I don't want some 14 year old interrupting the immersion as I walk from one side of the continent to the other.

In other news, Michaelangelo has announced Mona Lisa 2, now with 300% larger (or smaller) canvas.

I find the world size claims to be pretty meaningless. "X square miles, Y quests, Z weapons". It is all 100% meaningless.

One could make a game centered on just two villages and their close surrounding areas which are chock full of life, quests, and multiple outcomes, or they could make a world of EPIC SIZE filled with cloned NPCs with choiceless, static dialogue, where most of your 50-hour gameplay time is spent moving around the vast, repeating landscape.

Or, one could make a game centered on just two villages and fill it with crap regardless. Thus, the size of the world means absolutely nothing. It's just a number, thrown out there to imply things about the game's quality that very well may not be true.