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Introduction

Having spent sometime with Covid-19 earlier this year awaiting my visa for Canada, I decided to kill time reliving one of my favourite games of all time (and possibly most gamers as well). To complete all the main quest lines including the DLC took me like 6 weeks of average 2-3 hours a day I think. That is a lot of time to be wasting on a game admit tingly. But since this was going to be the last time in my life for a long while where I could be able to piss away time like this, I figured “Why not?”.

Thus, I smashed my way through it the game but in doing so, I started to wonder how large the Skyrim map (both the in-game map and the lore size one) was compared to our world.

I got to work using QGIS 3.22 (2022), I needed to make steps to constructing my overlays. The endgame was to basically apply a transparent layer of the in-game map on top of a famous example of our world.

Step 1: Making the Shapefile

Since we were not able to obtain a shapefile from the internet, I had to make it myself from a reference source. Hence, I decided to trace this map of Skyrim from the official map that is provided for a game (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Official Skyrim Map as presented with a physical copy of the game, 2011.


Whilst this map was not the most accurate in terms of details, the primary goal of this comparison was to grasp the size of the in-game map when compared to our world. To that end, I created a shapefile to the best of my abilities using a drawing function. Here is the result (Figure 2) after fixing the geometry for errors.

Figure 2: An overlay of the shapefile I created on top of the map shown in Figure 1.

Step 2: Scaling

Now, in order to scale the map to an ideal size to match its in-game counterpart. I needed to find the correct scale for it. To this end, I was lucky enough to have this bit done for me. A few sources on the internet displayed different ratios but were all in the ball park of 3.1km x 5.2km. In the end, I decided to go with the calculations made by Matt Sutton(2012) on Quora. Note that these estimations were approximate in conjunction with measurements on characters and objects in the game. There were ranges and limits on the dimensions of the map and whilst it is not 100%, I have decided to stick with the original calculations.

Therefore, I adjusted my shapefile for the ratios given above and measured them accordingly using the affine transform feature in the toolbox. The result as presented in figure 3.

Figure 3. Skyrim Shapefile Scaled for in-game representation.

Step 3: (In-game) Comparison

With our map all set and ready to translate, the question was where to. For personal comprehension, I wanted somewhere that was familiar to myself so I initially superimposed my map on top of the busiest intersection in the world. Here’s what it looked like (Figure 4 and 5.). I was able to translate the shapefile from the middle of the ocean where the coordinates (0,0) are to the Tokyo area via the MOVE plugin.

Figure 4. Shibuya, Tokyo Intersection. You know this one.


Figure 5. In-game Skyrim Map superimposed on top of Shibuya with Shibuya crossing at the centre.


As you can see (or maybe you can’t), the Eastern extent of the map overlay extends only to about halfway between Shibuya and Roppongi. The Northern and Southern extents respectively reach the next stations over, Harajuku and Ebisu. Both of which are on the Yamanote line. So in essence, this implies that the in-game size of Skyrim is merely a fraction the size of Tokyo.

Thus, ends a short journey of perspective. I know that other people had already figured out how big Skyrim was and I was kind of riding off the coattails of their success. If my project accomplished anything, I would say that I was able to prove to myself that I can draw maps with some accuracy and translate fictional maps to real-life scales.

Till next time fam.

Acknowledgement

QGIS Development Team (YEAR). QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project. http://qgis.osgeo.org”

Sutton, Matt. (2012). How large is Skyrim’s Overworld? Quora. https://www.quora.com/The-Elder-Scrolls-V-Skyrim/How-large-is-Skyrims-overworld.

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