
However, the third game in the main series didn't half fast travel at all. Vvardenfell is around half the size of Skyrim, coming in at 16 kilometers squared. The same can be said for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. In contrast, the White-Gold Tower at the center of Oblivion's map often left players aware of just how small the world was despite that world being larger than Skyrim. Skyrim made particular use of varying elevation and winding paths to make journeying through its world take longer, and to stop players from being able to see across the map easily. However, these differences in size don't necessarily reflect how big each of these worlds feel. Skyrim is slightly smaller than The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion's Cyrodiil, at 41 kilometers squared, with another 10 kilometers added with the Shivering Isles DLC. In comparison, Skyrim's map is only around 37 kilometers squared.

While new zones are constantly being added with new content like the Gates of Oblivion expansion, the total world size of The Elder Scrolls Online is roughly 400 kilometers squared, making it one of the biggest Elder Scrolls games to date. While the Elder Scrolls games since Morrowind have attempted to create unbroken worlds, the map of The Elder Scrolls Online is broken up into more than thirty separate areas.

RELATED: The Elder Scrolls Online Makes Major Change to End-Game Champion System It also means that some locations that exist in the lore simply aren't present in the same areas when represented in-game. The town of Nimalten can be found in the Rift in The Elder Scrolls Online, for example, but is nowhere to be seen in Skyrim. Riverwood, a tiny hamlet in The Elder Scrolls 5, is at least big enough to warrant having its own ruler - Lord Asgens - in The Elder Scrolls: Arena. This leads to vastly different scales and in-game world sizes across the different Elder Scrolls games.

Tamriel has no canonically established size, however, leaving its real scale to the imagination of the players. The scaling doesn't quite line up either - if the map of Tamriel is to scale, then the Imperial city at the heart of Cyrodiil would be around the size of a small country. Indeed, while Elder Scrolls games like Skyrim use tall mountains and unnecessarily winding roads to help create an illusion of greater scale, all of the areas represented in-game across the franchise are best understood as scaled-down metaphors of the areas from the lore. The Elder Scrolls Online also does not claim to represent the entirety of Tamriel, instead allowing players access to smaller areas of each province divided by loading screens. While The Elder Scrolls Online includes areas from all nine of Tamriel's provinces, it does not create a large unbroken game world like Skyrim largely does.
