Oblivion and Morrowind had great cities and towns for their time. Each individual person had their own unique schedule and played a role in towns they lived in or traveled to. But after a while you get to realize that the towns and cities are kinda small and get a little old after a while. What Skyrim needs are bigger life like cities and middle age towns that feel real. I felt like the scale of the towns in Oblivion weren't very realistic. But I can understand why, I mean over 1,000 unique non alike NPC's... thats got to be time consuming to create.

I'm a little confused

Did you see the trailer? At one point (1:13) it shows a city, and if you look at the bottom of the tower directly in front of you, you'll see a person, and they look tiny
Add that to the fact that the city looks to be completely open (no stupid loading screens) and I'm pretty sure you'll be happy with Skyrim cities

Morrowind didn't have schedules in the vanilla game. That was added by various mods later. It was actually a bit embarrassing after a while, when you realized that no one actually did anything - they just stood around waiting on your every whim. Sure, there were certain quests where an NPC would follow you, but for the most part, cities were fairly static in MW.

Oblivion was an improvement in that area, NPC's at least appeared to do things, other than wait on the players beck and call.

I'm really hoping that Bethesda fixed the problems with Radiant AI that caused them to tone it down in Oblivion, and that they reintroduce it in Skyrim. That would make even modest cities feel more "alive" than the ones in the past.

So long as every single npc has an ENTERABLE house, i will be orgismic

Someone asked Pete on twitter if the npc's looked so small in the trailer because of the games massive scale or just because they aren't showing npc's yet and Pete replied......"Right, more that we aren't showing NPCs yet. We know folks want to see their argonians, dark elves, etc"

So I think it has more to do with them not wanting to show too many close up npc shots yet rather than the cities having that massive of a scale.

I noticed pretty quickly that morrowind's people really didnt do anything besides stand around. I started on oblivion, so it was quite obvious when npcs are in the same exact place every time i go looking for them. Since i'm still on my first morrowind playthrough only mod i really have is a delayed start to tribunal. So i dont have mods giving people schedules.

Quality or Quantity: Some of Daggerfall's cities were repititive mazes, I would prefer smaller cities with more detail and less repetition.

I would like to see the return of Nomad Camps like in Morrowind, but this time Reindeer Skinned Tents with Eskimo like Nords. Those settlements were so different to the other cities and had great unique sounds (rattling charms) and feel to them.

I think what he meant by that is they didn't zoom in too much to avoid you seeing them, rather than physically shrinking them down compared to their surroundings to make them harder to see

Yes I rather did enjoy morrowinds small isolated villages and camps. They were nicely realistic. The only realistic village in oblivion was hackdirt in terms of the way it was built. Other than that hackdirt was F'ed up

i think i heard somewere that the capitpal will be 2 and a half times bigger than the imperial city

The imperial city should be the size of an average city in Skyrim IMO

I agree there should be a few mega towns and yeah I miss those nomad camps from Morrowind and the sounds of the wooden wind chimes really enhanced that experience ! but hey, lets not forget about dungeons, there needs to be some crazy long dungeons in the game too. I would even like to see some sort of underground towns where people have linked miles of underground caverns and dungeons by having dug tunnels. there would need to be multiple exit tunnels in a massive system like this.....sorry a little off topic but it's that important to me.

Maybe the topic originator can add "dungeons" to the topic title ?

Haha, yesh.

"My time is precious, Outlander, so make it quick!"

What? You've just been pacing around this same spot since I arrived here from Sedya Neen three months ago. :stare:

On the other hand, it's not surprising he was so cranky - he must be knackered !

Well from what we have been told and what we have seen in the trailer, the cities are massive and they seem to be open as well, which many of us had deduced as needed if your going to have dragon attacks :tongue:

Well, in Oblivion we've already seen that the capital city of the vast and powerful empire has a population of..... 26 - so by logic Skyrim can't have any cities with more than that

Seriously though - I'd like to see Assassin's Creed style cities. They were extremely immersive despite the people being randomly generated. I don't need every single person to have 10 lines of dialogue.

Thats what makes it all so real tho.. If it was like Assassins Creed it wouldn't feel like every individual person was created for a purpose and instead being mindless drones that just walk around cities. Elder Scrolls's backbone is based off it's AI and interaction with other characters

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Imperial_City_People

And the Assassins Creed style, besides being IMO very innapropriate for the style of game, plain wouldn't work in ES because of the way NPCs are made and have to interact with the player, and give quests and such. People in ES are people, not scenery. You can't pickpocket someone in Assassin's creed and if you kill someone, another identical person takes their place. In AC, you can't walk around, talk to a few people and end up with a quest. You'd have to talk to thousands before you found one that was more than a piece of scenery. You can't talk to them (except specific mission ones) at all and they have no names, because they are not even real objects, they are just minute programs that run randomly at random points.

That's odd. I have not heard this from any official source at all.

However, going by anolysis of the size of the cities compared tot he size of cells on the Skyrim map in the behind the scenes video, they will be a similar size to an average Oblivion city. Nonetheless,they could still be much more packed with buildings, as the cities in Oblivion need that extra space for walls and are notoriously empty.

There is of course no way to know the actual size the major cities are going to be until confirmed or played. I wonder how much larger they'll be? Since I guess there are only 5 vice 9 that Oblivion had. It'll be interesting to see how they match up.

They should all be at least the size of the Imperial City.

I don't know that the town and cities need to be geographically bigger, I would be happy with just having more people to interact with. I understand the logistical problems with that, but the Imperial City seemed kinda deserted to me for it supposedly being the capital of the whole Empire. I just want more people to talk to, and of course that will lead to more quests. lol

Considering that all NPCs are not unique anymore, maybe there will be more people?

It's true we can't know for sure, because changes may have been made since that map.