Skyrim - Perfect World and Big Enough

Here's a pair of Skyrim articles.

IGN has a piece titled Skyrim's Perfect World and discussing "how crafting, alchemy and well-constructed mythology could make Skyrim one of the most impressively cohesive worlds in gaming":

It's an incredibly enticing prospect for the natural gaming hunter-gatherer when every collectible thing has its uses. You can even swim in Skyrim's rivers, plucking fish out of the water and roasting them on a campfire spit later. A familiar alchemy lab, meanwhile, lets you magic things like bonemeal and plants into potions to help you or hurt your enemies, experimenting with different combinations of ingredients to negate or catalyse their negative effects.

Smithing is rather more complicated. You can mine ore from deposits all over the place – from the tops of mountains to underground caves – which then has to be turned into ingots before you can use it for a helmet or a sword or a breastplate at a forge using hammer and bellows. There are grindstones for improving blades as you develop your skills. Meanwhile, all those wolf pelts that you inevitably accumulate on your adventures can be cured and made into useful, wearable, smithable leather for use at a workbench. As well as treasure and secret nuggets of Elder Scrolls mythology, you'll now be searching for rare ores and ingredients in Skyrim's hidden places. It's yet another reason to explore, and another natural way of immersing you in the game's fiction.

Over at Joystiq are some PAX comments from Todd Howard about the world size:

Though the theme of Skyrim is obviously "bigger and more," some aspects of Oblivion have had to be scaled back in the sequel. But Howard said that those decisions were motivated less by time and budget and more by a desire to present the richest overall experience.

"In Oblivion, we did ... maybe nine big cities? And here, we decided 'let's do five, and make them more unique.' There are fewer of the really large cities, but the ones we have here ... there's more to them," he said.