Elder Scrolls: Every Game Ranked By Map Size
The open worlds in the Elder Scrolls games are known for being beautiful and easy to get lost in. We rank them by how big their maps are!
The Elder Scrolls games are known for their beautiful open worlds where players can get lost for hours. Every game in the series puts a focus on immersion that is unmatched in the RPG genre. In Skyrim, you fight dragons, and in Morrowind, you explore an alien world. Part of what makes this series so popular is that each game takes place in a different world.
Skyrim, Vvardenfell, Cyrodil, and many other places are famous for the way they look and how big they are. But size doesn’t get bigger with each game. Some of Bethesda’s older Elder Scrolls games are much bigger than their newer ones, and some of them have very little or no space to explore.
The Elder Scrolls Legends (None)
The Elder Scrolls Legends is, in a way, an Elder Scrolls game. But since it’s a card game, it doesn’t have the same amount of exploration as mainline RPGs. In fact, there isn’t even one, unless you count reading flavor writing.
Even if you put every unique Elder Scrolls Legends card in a row and measured how much space they took up, the overall “explorable” size would still be too small to do anything with. Even though it’s not an RPG, Elder Scrolls Legends might have the smallest explorable world of any game, though nothing is quite as small as 0 miles sq.
The Elder Scrolls Travels: Stormhold, Dawnstar, and Shadowkey
In 2003 and 2004, three mobile games called “Travels” took the Elder Scrolls name on the go. These games were made to represent TES players on mobile devices. Even though these games weren’t as big or detailed as the major games (which at the time would have been Morrowind), they were still a lot of fun for the time. But depending on which version a player got, which was mostly based on how strong their phone was, more material, like new areas and even new classes, became available.
The smallest versions of each of these games only had eight dungeons and six classes, while the biggest versions had 36 dungeons and an extra class. Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowey was made for the Nokie N-Gage, which is a cell phone that can also be used to play games. Even though the game got a bit better, Shadowkey is still smaller than the later mobile game Blades, which had a lot of open places to explore instead of just a few small dungeons.
The Elder Scrolls: Blades
Without a question, The Elder Scrolls: Blades has the smallest world of any Elder Scrolls game. It has dungeons, a world map, and towns and settlements to check out, but the real area you can explore is very small because you can’t move around much and Doodle Baseball is linear.
No one has taken an exact measurement of Blades’ map size, but even compared to Battlespire and Redguard, two other games whose map sizes aren’t agreed upon, Blades feels small and confined. Battlespire and Redguard at least have open worlds that can be explored, but Blades is much more straight and leads you through small zones in a much more controlled way.
An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire
An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, which fans usually just call “Battlespire,” is a spin-off from Daggerfall that takes place in the closest thing to a space station in the Elder Scrolls world. The Battlespire is a “elite training center” that has been taken over by Daedra. It is hidden in a small part of the land of Oblivion.
Like Blades and Redguard, no one really knows how big Battlespire’s map is. Redguard, on the other hand, had a real world to explore outside as well as dungeons, towns, and other places that made the world bigger.Battlespire only takes place at this top training center, so it’s a lot smaller than Redguard.
The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard
Between Daggerfall and Morrowind, Bethesda made a few spin-off games in the same world as The Elder Scrolls. The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard was one of these games. This game takes place on the southern coast of Hammerfell, on the island of Stros M’Kai. This game is different from most main games because it is more about finishing levels in a certain order than about exploring a huge world.
Because of this, it is hard to figure out how big the map is. Since the game is short and the overworld is small, it’s safe to say that this is one of the smallest Elder Scrolls games that still lets you do some exploring. After all, a small island isn’t as big as the main areas in the other games, even if it has more detail than the linear levels in Battlespire or Blades.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Morrowind is the smallest open-world Bethesda game in the series. This might surprise Morrowind fans who have played other games in the series. There are about 16 kilometers of playable room on the whole island of Vvardenfell. This game didn’t have fast travel, so players had to walk almost everywhere if they couldn’t pay for a ride. This made it feel much bigger than games like Skyrim.
Well, it wasn’t easy to get around quickly. Players could pay to use the silt striders that were scattered across the landscape to get from one town to another, or those who were good at the arcane arts could mark places to move between. The slow moving speed of the game makes the Morrowind map size seem much bigger than it is. Those who have the Bloodmoon update can also get to Solstheim by boat or by jumping over the ocean if they have a high enough Acrobatics skill.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
People joke that Bethesda has already resold Skyrim six times, including the Special Edition, the Greymoor update for Elder Scrolls Online, and even a port for your Amazon Alexa. The player is always close to something interesting, like random encounters or undiscovered dungeons.
Skyrim is much bigger than Morrowind. At 37 kilometers, it’s more than twice as big as Morrowind, and that’s not even counting how tall the fifth Elder Scrolls game is. Some of that land is made up of water and mountains, but almost all of it has something for people to find. Fans still play it almost a decade after it came out because of its beautiful landscapes and quests. But compared to other worlds, this one feels small because it’s so easy to get around quickly. This makes exploring both easier and less interesting.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Morrowind has a problem that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion doesn’t have. Many fans remember this game as being much smaller than others, but that’s not true.Compared to the last three main games, Oblivion is bigger, and players can visit the province of Cyrodil.
This game has a huge world to discover that is 41 kilometers long. Like other Bethesda games, big towns and dungeons keep players busy while they explore. Adding the Shivering Isles, a special area that is about 10 kilometers in size, makes this area even bigger. When you add up everything in Oblivion, it is one of the biggest games that Bethesda has made in recent years.
Elder Scrolls Online
Putting an MMO next to a single-player RPG seems like cheating, but The Elder Scrolls Online is actually not the biggest Elder Scrolls game. No one really knows how big ESO is, which is a shame. Not only is it hard to measure because each area is its own “instance,” but big expansions often add new zones.
Before the game came out, the people who made it said that Cyrodil is about 100 kilometers long, while most other places are about 10 kilometers. If you add up all the regions and assume that the big expansion zones are around 100 kilometers. The ESO map is about 400 kilometers long. This is much bigger than the three main Elder Scrolls games put together. It is the biggest Elder Scrolls game that wasn’t made with procedurally generated settings.
The Elder Scrolls Arena
If we only looked at how Bethesda marketed The Elder Scrolls: Arena. It would be by a huge amount the biggest RPG ever made. Bethesda says that the Arena map is more than 9 million kilometers long. To be exact, it is 9,656,064 km. Developers have lied about how big their games are, and it’s impossible to show this.
Players have tried to walk from one town to another to figure out how far they are. But when they get too far away from a town, the game seems to loop the same scenery over and over again. If you do this for a long time, the game will start to fall apart. Cities do have special places to play. But none of them add up to be better than the last place on this list.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
If you don’t count Arena, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is by a huge amount the biggest game in the series. Many fans agree that the size of the Daggerfall map is about 161,600 kilometer. Though the exact number is still up for question. To give you an idea, Great Britain is about 209,000 km long. Both Arena and Daggerfall are big because they use procedural creation.
Everything, from the world to the tasks, is made by chance. This has also led to old dungeons and sometimes impossible quests. But Bethesda’s big sandbox in Daggerfall is hard to beat. “Live another life” is the motto, and this game lives up to it better than any other game in the series. Players can buy houses, join groups, get loans from the bank, own whole boats, and even go to court to settle legal matters. It’s not as polished or interesting as games to come, but the playground it gives you is almost endless.
