@Ulquiorra Schiffer: But that's the thing, I don't consider Oblivion's "scale" to be any major accomplishment. On a whole, it was one small set of content, copy+pasted several times so that it could fill several square miles of game world. The dungeons all looked the same, the environments were all identical save for a little snow in the north.

Size of a gameworld means nothing when every part of that world is populated by the same thing. All Bethesda did was make enough content for one area, and multiplied it until it filled a larger space.

Even that small amount of content that they had, to me, felt broken and unpolished. Other games at the time may not have been as large as Oblivion, but what they did have was polished and functional and fun to play.

I'd rather have 10 hours of solid, coherent gameplay than 100 hours of copy+pasted quests and broken combat.