I was thinking back to the cities in Oblivion, and remembered how in the Imperial City specifically, there did not seem to me too many citizens walking around a lot. I mean the imperial city was supposed to be the biggest and most important place in Cyrodiil, and yet it really wasnt that big and didnt have that many people walking around. It just didnt really seem too alive to me. Dont get me wrong though, I still enjoyed venturing to the imperial city frequently with my character because I liked the shops it had.
My question is do you think Skyrim's settlements will be more populated, and whether you think Oblivion's settlements were not populated enough.

Skyrim is supposed to have more citizens walking around. I remember reading it in one of the interviews, but I can't find a link to save my life...

As far as size of cities, I think they will be bigger than Oblivion as well. I am almost positive that there will be many more NPC's and bigger cities than the last two games.


bliviongate:

Yeah, I assume that Bethesda tried not to have a lot of filler NPCs, because they wanted everyone to have some purpose. I think they may be moving away from this, as they stated that NPCs will have less unique dialogue (don't quote me on that). This probably means more dense populations.

I believe it's a RAM issue. Bethesda has to determine the environment detail / NPC ratio for all the areas in the game.

Yea that sounds about right, hopefully there wont be too many filler npcs' though then it would just get boring because I have a feeling lots of them would have the same character build/format.

5+ years experience with current hardware + new engine.

Considering NPCs can actually do quite a lot of things you'd expect to see them doing, besides milling about and gossipping, the cities and towns will feel a bit more alive already.

They didn't really use filer NPCs in the traditional sense in either Morrowind or Oblivion - which I thought was an impressive an wise break witfh the sea of random and confused crowds that populated the cities of Daggerfall. By that I mean that almost everyone except for the guards seemed to be persistent, named, and have a home as opposed to being spawned and generated or completely cookie cutter "villager" models. In the previous two games there wasn't much reason to include filler NPCs besides for the sake of a sense of crowdedness and I think the problem of where you have them go at night might have done more harm to the sense of immersion than adding them would have helped.

Now though NPCs can do far more than simply mill about and gossip about you - and the inclusion of rudimentary economic systems into the game world may require there be more NPCs to do those jobs. The problem is still whether you create filler housing for NPCs whose purposes will be that of scenary and worker primarily, or you have them dissappear or de-spawn in the evening (ideally not right in front of the PC), or you effectively have prop housing for these NPCs. The last is easy to do for the large cities - particularly if they are devided into segments. They can exit the segment through the same gates that anyone else would use and be stored in an inaccessible cell (games have used that to warehouse NPCs who are neither dead nor disabled but "out of the picture" back since the days of Ultima VII and earlier) until the workday begins. That would certainly make the cities feel more populated and alive. Alternatively you could create prop housing/tenements for these prop NPCs. I guess the trick really is being able to include a crowd and add realistic bustle and activity without having to create each member of the crowd's uninteresting house but also not having the player wonder where the heck half the city goes at night.

That probably won't be necessary in the smaller settlements though. The brief footage of the player walking around one of them does seem to show that those settlements feel sufficiently inhabited and the fact that people are going about their work as opposed to milling about makes it feel sufficiently alive. I do agree though that the absence of crowds in large cities presented in games is a persistent flaw in the believability of those locations. When I think about it - this sense of emptyness in supposedly cosmopolitan major cities is pretty pervasive across the genre. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, KOTOR, the Gothic series, and many other popular titles seem to find creating that atmosphere to be a challenge. While games like Baldur's Gate II were able to do it to an extent, I'd rather they do something better than plopping down "villager" and "merchant" npcs like potted plants - something that has a more significant effect on performance than it did in the ancient times of 2-D hand drawn area maps and 2.5-D creatures and objects populating them.

I would add that in most games that have attempted to create that sense of crowdedness have rarely done it well and sadly Fable is probably the current benchmark for trying to create that atmosphere. When that's the current high water mark it means that there's plenty of room to improve it.