I really think this will happen with Skyrim. This was the idea of radiant AI, they just didnt have enough time to do it properly in Oblivion.

With a new engine and longer to develop radiant AI im very hopeful for good AI and believable cities.

The only thing im not so confident they will do is have enough NPC's. For a city to look real you need assassins creed's level NPC's, im just not sure a TES game can do that.

Folks, this thread is about cities that feel alive, it's not to have a PC vs consoles argument :nono:

*posts removed*

If we get more and more people in towns, we need a way to locate the important persons faster. Else it would be like searching a needle in a haystack...

I'd like to see caravans of merchants moving from city to city, and people tagging along because they would get better protection that way. So now and then you see a group of 10 people leading a few carts with horses to another town.
The same could be with ships from place to place.

it'd make great for quests, and you could hop on to travel on the cart (like the silt striders) having the option to skip the travel until a random encounter, or just living the entire journey.

SO TRUE. I don't think the lifelike quality of a town really has much to do with all this "radiant AI" crap. I think it's more of the little things. stray dogs, people loading and unloading carts, window washers (speaking of which, i'd love to be able to see into windows this time around), folks transporting goods, addressing their acquaintances by name, having a larger and more logical progression for their conversations (no more saying hello, talking about mudcrabs, and then departing!!), drunkards wobbling home after happy hour, running for shelter in the rain.

I don't think all this is terribly hard to implement and it doesn't have to be universal. Perhaps the loading and transporting of goods is scripted, that's realistic given delivery schedules and such. Rain triggers people to go inside the same way night time does and if they are out they simply run while covering their head. Having more believable conversations probably would require more voice acting, but even if there are a select few "friends" in each town who address each other by name, it would go a long way. Also having conversation topics that refer to events that the player will never have knowledge of. "Well I have to get going, but we'll meet Loredas for drinks to discuss it further." and stuff like that!

Oblivion was a huge step up from Morrowind with respect to the liveliness of towns. the day/night and weekly schedules of NPCs were great, and i think they should be taken farther, but you would need a better way to quickly tell what time and day it is while you were playing (pocket watches perhaps?). If the jump from Morrowind to Oblivion is any indicator, I'm guessing that i will be pleasantly surprised with Skyrim.

NPC AI like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjbx6-KQoRg? Here's hoping they got the Radiant AI fixed so it works like that in Skyrim.

I'd personally want larger cities in general. The provinces are densely populated in the game. And if there was some memory left over, yes, I'd love to have the citizens being more active. Oh, and being less generic.

Fair enough. ThoughI didenjoy learning what I did about how they optimise it.

Yeah, the problem with cities in OB and FO3 is that they felt awfully static and didn't change much at all.

There should really be random events set in motion without your character having to go out and do a quest. It felt like nothing happened in OB and FO3 without you allowing it to happen. Which is fine with quest-lines but a huge open RPG shouldn't be totally dependant on quests. Now FO3 did have random events happening and made the world feel more spontaneous but the settlements was really lacking in that department. Sure you can blow up Megaton but that is not as much altering it as much as just deleting it from the game.

So yeah, make a visit to a city feel less like a doll-house.

I have the luxury of speaking wiith the might of a fairly powerful machine, so technology concerns do not really affect me. I think that the one thing that would detract from cities was to make them full of randoms, a good balance might be to increase the number of hand crafted NPCs but not go into such detail with all of them so that they could still have quests and storylines attached but there would be far more of them, but slightly less detailed. of course it would be sad to see the epic sidequests simply abandoned, and i would be the first to admit that a balance is hard to find.

I could even pay having randomly generated people, as long as the variety of dialogue was great enough to avoid them simply turning into generic 'hello, here are my rumours' characters. Perhaps a few lines related to your progress in the quests around town, some neighbourhood gossip, some chitchat....as long as its original

It might be interesting to see something as simple as new sidequests or events showing up only after you have passed some particular amount of time within the game. say... 30 game days after visiting some town, a circus comes to town, a bunch of new NPCs and stuff are there for a while, they say for a week and then the leave. that would be pretty cool. it wouldn't even need to have quests, just some interesting characters and maybe a merchant with some really unusual, rare, esoteric, or random items.

i hope there are guys busking on the streets for money, it would be fantastic if beggars actualy entertained you rather than annoy you. the sound of music in cities would make them feel so much more lively and a good mood setter without strange music coming from nowhere

Also, conversations between NPCs could be handled better. In OB it seemed as if every single conversation that ever occurred in Cyrodiil was either related to the main characters quest, or simply talking about neighbourhood gossip or the appearance of Oblivion gates. Perhaps some teasing, joking, even animosity (fights breaking out and guards being called in).

In Oblivion, Elsweyr mod had more "alive" cities than vanilla Oblivion. If you go to Corinthe you can see a market full of people and details, you can see people and goats walking around, I also like the blacksmith who is working in his yard.

So imagine this:
You are going through a white forest. It is cold and snow is falling. You suddenly see a city. You enter through the wooden doors. People are walking around in their coats. Beggars are warming up on their fires. You see light coming from every house's window.
You arrive at the market. Lots of people are here buying and selling their stuff. Lots of fur and meat are on sale. You need a place to stay. You see a giant wooden house, and it says "Inn". You enter and you see couple of drunk nords singing. You buy the room and you go to sleep. While you are laying on your bed, you hear crowd voices. Suddenly there is no more voices. You only hear the wind blowing. It is late and people are in their homes. You fall asleep.

I am all for this as long it does not create more bugs and glitches. Like the whole town turning hostile for no reason and NPC's just running into walls. Have the NPC's do several tasks every other day so they are not in the same place doing the same thing day after day.

Supposedly, NPCs in Oblivion all had weekly schedules, however for the most part this wasn't noticeable, most characters had a simple day/night routine and that was about it. There were a few interesting ones, like the NPCs who traveled regularly between several towns over the course of a week.

It would be interesting to see shops closed one or two days a week on, say, loredas and sundas, if you need so barter on these days you're out of luck save for the pawn shop. It would also be nice for the shops to have signs outside that change regularly, something like "We're open! Come in!" or "Sorry, we're closed!" this would be way helpful (and realistic too!)

That is all I meant have a different day/night routine.

Yet again blaming something on the consoles...
Yes, maybe they have worse hardware on paper, but they are optimized for the sole purpose of gaming and definitely wouldn't have trouble handling bigger crowds. Just look at Assassin's Creed 2, the cities in that game actually felt real. I'm sorry to say, I was quite disappointed by the cities in general in Oblivion, and since my PC is rapidly falling behind, I won't be able to mod Skyrim, so they better improve on this

I like the random npc generation idea, that way when I rp assassin I don't have to worry about resurrecting them so my cities become (more) underpopulated. Besides I think fallout had so much oblivion didn't was because they didn't have the engine until the last 6 months of developtment whilst they've learnt it from SI, fallout and NV. So hopefully the new engine incorporates the best features of the old engine plus many new decent things.

Besides the only times I actually speak to npcs is if they're a quest giver or a merchant.

It would be interesting if they took a riff from the FO games and made random NPC encounters, like a random caravan along a trade route, a random vagrant passing through town, that sort of thing. They would add a lot of life to the word and the towns and would provide some dagger fodder to you stab-happy assassins.

There are some great mods for Oblivion that added npc's to the cities and countryside. I'm sure these mods will be made for skyrim as well.

NPC's should have a slider for their traveling and adventuring: from dangerous to safe.

If set to dangerous: then the NPC would go to places that would most likely kill the NPC.
if set to safe: then the NPC would never go anywhere near caves, or other dangerous areas.

ofcourse the slider could be set anywhere in between. (it couldn't be changed by the player, naturaly)

:nope: We can't have smoking! Think of the children!

Having a lot more (and more diverse) IDLE animations would greatly add to the atmosphere in my opinion. Just imagine a bunch of Nords sitting at a table in different ways, drinking their Mead with different animations (instead of the single generic glug-glug-glug animation)

I've seen lots of animation mods that looked very fluid and natural, while at the same time making the world feel much more realistic. Even the way how people stand still could be more varied to add more diversity. One guy may be standing there with his http://www.mmocrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/GW2_Warrior.jpg, while the other is http://images.epilogue.net/users/chriskuhlman/TAGHF30002_06.jpg

Maybe I should just don some armor later tonight and make screenshots of my poses

They need to work,have a profession.

Well they did it on Dragon Age Origins and AC , how hard can it be?