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10th Jun '13 2:35:15 PM Ryan914

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9th Jun '13 11:16:02 AM TrevMUN

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* Averted in ''EVEOnline''. Everything in the game is to scale, which is impressive considering that most distances in the game are ''measured in Astronomical Units''.
* Averted in ''CityOfHeroes''. The bulk of the game world takes place in Paragon City (an alternate-reality Providence, Rhode Island), a huge port city with islands and one of the ten largest cities in the world. Although the city is quite literally square miles of urban jungle, the city is divided up into zones by a system of 1500-foot tall perfectly orthogonal "war walls" (the existence of which is thoroughly {{Justified}} by the game's setting and backstory). 
** The war walls' existence is less justifiable in the case of missions that take place in alternate dimensions; it's a result of developers reusing the same city maps to represent places where the course of history turned out very differently.
** Subverted with in ''City of Heroes: Going Rogue.'' For Praetorian characters, the bulk of the action from the 1 to 20 level range takes place in the capital city of the globe-spanning empire, Praetoria, spread across three city zones with no actual visible barriers like the War Walls in Paragon City. The total land area covered by the three zones is actually smaller than Manhattan, which may seem like the trope is being played straight. However, the relatively tiny size of the city is due to the fact that humanity nearly went extinct in a decades-long war with a crazed enviromentalist and his legion of monsters seeking to KillAllHumans.

25th May '13 8:33:32 AM Psychopompos007

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22nd May '13 1:16:28 AM sadron

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15th May '13 5:43:06 PM Discar

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13th May '13 4:15:10 PM VPhantom

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2nd May '13 12:53:48 AM thatother1dude

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20th Apr '13 8:30:42 AM polutropon

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16th Feb '13 4:49:33 PM TrevMUN

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Reordering the Elder Scrolls examples with some relevant stuff brought in from Thiriving Ghost Town.

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* The world of ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind Morrowind]]'' is perpetually shrouded in fog. This was originally for technical reasons... but if you download a no-fog patch, you can see it was also to disguise that all the major cities of the world are fewer than a hundred meters apart.
** ''Morrowind'' also made use of terrain to make it really hard to travel in a straight line between towns, instead requiring winding detours through channels, bridges over gaps and around the ghostfence. All of this extended the time it took to go places and made the game feel much bigger than it really was (because traveling took so long). This, along with the absence of universal fast travel like in Oblivion led a lot of people to believe Morrowind's map was bigger than Oblivion, despite it being the opposite (as travel by foot in Oblivion tends to involve far fewer detours and it was possible to fast travel between any two explored destinations).
* ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion Oblivion]]'' doesn't even pretend to be to scale. The imperial island, which on the world map is about the size of Great Britain, is scarcely large enough to contain the Imperial City, which is as big as a large parking lot.
** And the country itself is small enough that if you turn off fogging and increase visibility range to maximum, you can still see the Imperial City's central tower when climbing mountains near the border. The in-world info would have you believe Cyrodiil is a huge empire; on in-game scale, it's smaller than most of Europe's micronations (under 42 square kilometers according to official data from Bethesda.)
** The level of vertical exaggeration applied to said mountains is fairly incredible too; the road from the Imperial City up to Bruma is almost all at a 30 degree (or more) slope. The chances of ever getting eg. a horse and cart up there don't seem good - or wouldn't be if the citizens ever needed to transport anything…
** And if the horses in the game [[YouFailBiologyForever weren't part mountain goat judging from how well they climb.]]
* ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'' features a return to ''Morrowind''-style twisting roads and obstructing mountains, in an effort to visually avert this trope. While the world itself is only about twice the size of Cyrodiil in ''Oblivion'', as a result of the redesign it looks much larger.
* Soundly averted in ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]]'', which has a map twice the size of Great Britain and loads of randomly-generated maps. However, try walking from Privateer's Hold to Daggerfall City without going crazy - it's like "Desert Bus" on the PC. Try walking across ''one city state'', even. TropesAreNotBad.

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* ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls'' franchise started out by averting this trope, but with successive titles it's been playing it straight. On a case by case basis--
** The first game, ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsArena'', was the largest and most fully-featured in terms of both square mileage and population--you could explore the entire continent of Tamriel which was on a scale with an actual real-life continent. Mind, the people and scenery tended to get a bit repetitive ...
** ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall'' also averted this by featuring the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell at their full size. Bethesda says that their physical size amounts to 188,000 square miles (or 487,000 in square kilometers)--that's twice the size of Great Britain. There are ''15,000'' full-sized towns, cities, villages, and dungeons to explore, and more than 750,000 [=NPCs=] capable of interaction--impressive for a game from 1996. However, most of the terrain is randomly generated, and traveling by foot is as lengthy and tedious as [[DesertBusForHope playing Desert Bus]]. In the case of cities, most houses cannot be entered even by the most skilled thieves--the player will be told "This house contains nothing of interest."
** ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind'' was the point where the series played the trope straight, and to date is the game with the tiniest explorable area. Bethesda's game director and executive producer Todd Howard has said that ''Morrowind's'' physical size is 0.01% that of ''Daggerfall''--only 10 square miles (or 25.9 square kilometers). Bethesda attempted to disguise this fact by using heavy fog effects (which, when removed with a patch, reveals that major locations are no more than 100 meters apart) and by requiring travelers to take winding detours through channels, bridges over gaps and around the ghostfence. This was a conscious decision by Bethesda; although the scaled down world would be incongruous with the vast explorable lands from before, they could afford to spend more time giving the fewer [=NPCs=] and locations more depth and interactivity.
** ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion'' follows the same development philosophy as ''Morrowind'', but is somewhat larger as the explorable area is 16 square miles (41.4 square kilometers). Lore would have you believe that Cyrodiil is the heart of a continent-spanning empire; in-game, it's smaller than most of Europe's micronations. City Isle, which is about the size of Great Britain on the world map, is in-game scarcely large enough to contain the Imperial City, which in the game is as big as a large parking lot. In fact, the Imperial Province is small enough that with the visibility set to maximum and fog options turned off, a player can still see the Imperial City's central tower when climbing mountains near the border.
*** The level of vertical exaggeration applied to said mountains is fairly incredible too; the road from the Imperial City up to Bruma is almost all at a 30 degree (or more) slope. The chances of ever getting something such as a horse and cart up there don't seem good--or wouldn't be, if the citizens ever needed to transport anything…
** ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'' also continues to play this straight; Bethseda says the explorable area is comparable in size to ''Oblivion'', though ''Skyrim'' also uses winding pathways as was done in ''Morrowind'' to give a sense of vastness. The way the world has shrunken down stands out when comparing locations featured in ''Arena'' to ''Skyrim'', such as the town of Riverwood. In ''Arena'' it's a bustling town that contains 200 or 300 buildings, but in ''Skyrim'' it's a hamlet with seven houses.

15th Feb '13 9:34:40 PM DoktorSoviet

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