If there’s one thing that Elder Scrolls games are it’s big. The world you get to wander around is huge, and based on the last video walkthrough we watched The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the biggest game yet in the series. Even Bethesda has admitted the game is too big to have a demo.

With games like L.A. Noire shipping on multiple discs for Xbox 360 we assumed that Skyrim would be the same and may even span more than that games’ 3 DVDs. But we were mistaken, and somehow Bethesda has managed to fit the expansive world on to a single DVD. For 360 owners it means there will be no disc swapping, although a large hard drive install may still be on the cards.

How has Bethesda managed to fit this massive game on to a single DVD? There’s been no official explanation, but the 30 minute gameplay walkthrough video we saw leaked earlier this month (sadly it has now been removed at Bethesda’s request) gives us a big hint as to how the development team did it.

Dynamic elements form a big part of the game, so while you may see a very detailed environment that changes due to weather conditions, none of that is created by artists and textures. Instead, Bethesda lets the game generate the final look in code, meaning there can be significantly less texture data required to ship with the game.

Even considering the dynamic nature of the environment it’s still an impressive feat to fit such a game in around 8GB of storage space.

Source: Bethesda has squeezed Skyrim on to one DVD for Xbox 360

Hope nothing has been taken out for this. Would be sad if it had mountable dragons and they took it out for a one disk release. (needs this)