yea that makes sense :hubbahubba:

I don't know about "massive" citys, but at about 7:00 in the second video interview on this page(link at the bottom), Todd Howard mentions "Epic citys that have been carved into mountains by dwarves".
Of cource he's talking about lore and history and stuff, so it might have nothing at all to do with size.

Anyway, I'm hoping for big towering citys whith lots of npcs wandering around working and shopping and just living their lives. :happy:

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/01/13/road-to-skyrim-the-todd-howard-interview.aspx

Define massive?

Ummm... Huge? overly big? very large? humongous?

Something along those lines... lets just say... alot larger than OB's

Massive would start for me at about 2xImperial City, with no doors between quarters, and about 4xIC's population. Population is very important to define "massive", otherwise it's just a massive ruin.

Define ""Massive cities""? The size of Vivec, only not built of premade cantons but free-standing houses instead. That's just about right for TES.
For a second definition just look at the city on the arch in the official trailer and keep in mind that the windmill is a part of it. With that kind of distance you can make out how ""massive"" it will be.

I tend to measure cities in terms of the number of buildings. A while back I made a thread on the subject over in "TES General discussion..." And here I'll repost it. I've listed ALL cities in Morrowind and Oblivion, as well as the three main capital cities in Daggerfall. (yes, I counted for all the cities named here) Also included are rough depictions of Daggerfall's three main categories for cities: excepting a handful of cities like the capitals, they tend to be procedurally-generated, and hence vary a lot. The important thing here is to try and determine the correlation between the number of buildings in a city, and how "full" the city feels.

Overall, I notice a DISTINCT trend: the more buildings a city has, the more lively it feels. Overall, while the Imperial City seemed large and alive, the county seats that served as OBs "major cities" seemed kinda sparse to me; moreso than the three major house seats of Morrowind, ESPECIALLY Balmora. Balmora is where I'd roughly define the line for the smallest a city can get and still seem to be of decent size; overall, thanks to the generally-shrinking size of locales in Oblivion, the game DOES feel more dead than Morrowind did.

Anyway, the list. As suggested above, the names are color-coded by game. (or the game the expansion belongs to) cities that are intended, by their parent game, to be major ones are in bold and underline.

• Daggerfall - 523 buildings.
  
• Wayrest - 439 buildings.
  
• Sentinel - 307 buildings.
  
• Other Major Daggerfall cities - 200-300 buildings. (>100 in-game)
  
• Imperial City - 92 buildings. (came as a surprise to me; feels smaller than Vivec. Number does not count Prison or Arcane University.)
  
• Vivec - 74 buildings (15 Foreign Quarter, 12 Hllalu, 10 Redoran, 4 Arena, 13 Telvanni, 8 St. Delyn, 7 St. Olms, 5 Temple/Palace)
  
• Medium Daggerfall cities - 50-200 buildings. (>500 in-game)
  
• Balmora - 38 buildings.
  
• Ald-Ruhn - 31 buildings.
  
• New Sheoth - 26 buildings.
  
• Leyawiin - 24 buildings.
  
• Skingrad - 24 buildings.
  
• Sadrith Mora - 23 buildings.
  
• Bravil - 22 buildings.
  
• Bruma - 22 buildings.
  
• Anvil - 21 buildings.
  
• Cheydinhal - 21 buildings.
  
• Chorrol - 21 buildings.
  
• Small Daggerfall cities - 20-50 buildings. (>2,000 in-game)
  
• Caldera - 19 buildings.
  
• Raven Rock - 19 buildings.
  
• Gnisis - 17 buildings.
  
• Mournhold - 17 buildings.
  
• Vos - 15 buildings.
  
• Dagon Fel - 13 buildings.
  
• Maar Gan - 13 buildings.
  
• Seyda Neen - 13 buildings.
  
• Pelagiad - 12 buildings.
  
• Suran - 11 buildings.
  
• Tel Branora - 10 buildings.
  
• Tel Mora - 10 buildings.
  
• Khuul - 9 buildings.
  
• Skaal Village - 9 buildings.
  
• Ald Velothi - 8 buildings.
  
• Bleaker's Way - 8 buildings.
  
• Border Watch - 8 buildings.
  
• Ebonheart - 8 buildings.
  
• Split - 8 buildings.
  
• Hackdirt - 7 buildings.
  
• Molag Mar - 7 buildings.
  
• Tel Aruhn - 7 buildings.
  
• Hla Oad - 6 buildings.
  
• Aleswell - 4 buildings.
  
• Passwall - 4 buildings.
  
• Blankenmarch - 3 buildings.
  
• Deepwallow - 3 buildings.
  
• Fellmore - 3 buildings.
  
• Hale - 3 buildings.
  
• Highcross - 3 buildings.
  
• Pell's Gate - 3 buildings.
  
• Water's Edge - 3 buildings.
  
• Weye - 2 buildings.

You sir or madam or awesome. I definitely would want to see massive cities like Daggerfall, the only problem is making all the buildings unique, interesting, and worth it. I never played too much of Daggerfall, but could you enter all of the houses?

Actually, you couldn't enter all of them. Somewhere around 50-70% (though that still left 30-50% you COULD enter) would, upon attempting to open the door, give the message, "This house has nothing of value." Kinda strange, admitedly, given that there was, I believe, an INTERIOR design for every single type of house. (and not that the ones you could enter really had anything of value EITHER...)

Overall, Daggerfall shows another element here: there is a "value per house" as far as immersive feel in a city: this is where Morrowind comes in. Overall, Oblivion did *NOT* increase the "immersiveness per building" over Morrowind, hence when they cut out buildings, you feel it. Alternatively, it could be that once you cut down to that small, you'll feel it no matter how immersive each building is: obviously, no matter how detailed/immersive it is, a single house or two will NEVER pass for anything other than a wayside stop. Such stops also formed the "fourth" level of cities in Daggerfall, typically ranging around 5-12 buildings, of which 1-3 would be inns/taverns or temples. (basically, it was a city temple or tavern district cut out of a city and made a settlement of its own)

For a game that had good detail, (I think Morrowind is where they hit about maximum) to really be a true, full "city," you'd need around the size of Balmora: Ald-Ruhn and Sadrith Mora distinctly felt lesser, similar to how all seven of Oblivion's remaining county capitals seemed underwhelming. So, keeping in mind that asking for colossal cities might be too much to ask, the following is how I'd categorize how effective cities are in Skyrim of feeling big:

• 65-100 - Large and massive. Suitable to pass off as a major capital.
  
• 35-64 - Decently sized. Big enough to feel like a vibrant city, and pass off for a regional capital.
  
• 10-34 - Modestly-sized. Big enough to feel like a real, tangible settlement, but definitley insufficient to truly feel like it's a major political or trade hub.
  
• 6-9 - Small-sized. About the smallest that one can pass off as a real, permanent settlement.
  
• 1-5 - Insignificant. Too small to be considered a real settlement. This size would be more fitting for an outpost, enclave, or other very specific location. Think a monastery, a wayside inn, overgrown family farm or perhaps small commune or such. In settlements this small, there should be a CONNECTION between everyone living there, that brought them to live there, rather than the other way around as it is in larger communities.

Of course, added to the above is the design: Balmora probably helped by having just the right amount of density: the Odai river provided a physical seperation to add physical distance, while close enough buildings prevented it from seeming to be a joke of a city that didn't feel "urban." It's probably a delicate balance.

Ideally, of course, I'd like a TES game to feature 8 cities of the largest class, (as TES lore from Arena has implied every province has 8 major cities) with numerous cities of the smaller classes. Failing that, I'd be satisfied with a total of 8 cities from the first and second categories. (i.e, 35+) Anything smaller and the game WILL feel kinda sparse.

I agree. The problem is that we will be seeing a lot more NPCs this time around (at least I think so, what with children there will be more traditional families), Having too many houses and other buildings could cause some serious performance problems. Unless BGS has a secret new technique they aren't sharing yet. I personally think at least one city will be partially underground (so in an interior cell), and the others will have a lot more vertical stacking similar to Bravil.

Most of the key here, of course, is how gamesas handles LoD scaling, as well as how efficient they manage to get their AI code. Those were the two main causes of performance hits in Oblivion in cities. Since a return to single-worldspace maps (without "zoning" for cities) seems to be present, gamesas must certainly have done something to improve. And indeed, Fallout 3 seemed to handle better overall.

Oblivion had crap for LOD scaling. Unless you were foliage part of SpeedTree, you had two stages: you either were in a main cell, (part of the 5x5 grid loaded, which ran out about 400 feet in any direction from the camera) or you were outside in the "LOD cells." In the main cells, EVERYTHING was loaded at full detail. Outside of it, some objects were marked with a super-low-resolution alternative model, that let you view cities from a distance... Except all buildings looked like square blocks if you zoomed in. The alternative? Not showing up at all. (also made it easy to hide dungeons; otherwise you could spot them easily from miles away)

Hopefully, we're seeing a massive improvement here, that will allow for in-between steps, letting the graphical load keep low while in cities. Similarly, the AI problem is also there as well: too many NPCs actively computing slowed down the CPU side, too. Some of the solution might be to figure out which NPCs can be set to "lower priority/lower precision" calculations, and also simply making the scripting more processor-efficient.

Nottheking said some pretty interesting stuff. I think some other things that made balmora in particular feel so vibrant was the density of quests available. You had the sense that there were whole opposing factions that were very active. you have fighters, magic, thieves, house hlaalu, the temple, and the councils guild i think was one. on top of that you have a few quests from the inns and bars. So having the sense of others doing quests makes the town/city feel a lot bigger

One thing that I always thought that shrunk OB was the speed of travel. It was sort of nice, but you'd run down a street and be by a large house in merely seconds. All of oblivion felt a lot smaller than morrowind because you could run so fast and just zip by buildings. along with the speed of travel, oblivion was also a lot more open. I feel (although I may be wrong) that several cities had nooks that hid little things whether they be shops or just a few houses. It took a lot longer to find everything, because it was all sort of hidden.

So even if there are a lot of buildings, which would help, the cities still could feel small. I hope they bring back more of the immersion that was found in morrowind

Very true. I think that the increased movement speed was a needed addition to Oblivion, but it did make everything seem much smaller.

oh yeah, i agree, I certainly liked being able to move through the wilderness. I think it might have been a tad too much, especially when you are moving through cities. I wonder how the game would have worked with more effective horses and slower walking. it would have made it more necessary to invest in a horse maybe, and the cities would have felt a lot bigger.

I think there is also some fun you can have with role playing if your slow. walking across a city would become a lot more important, you might be interested in getting everything done on one side of town done on one trip rather than running back and forth. IDK

What is the capital city and how big can we expect it? If the five cities are "massive" just how big can we expect the capital to be?

You know how much bigger Better Cities mod made oblivion cities. Not much it added a few docks and stuff, but the cities felt a whole lot bigger than before. It has to do with detail. In Oblivion one street in a city didn't look much different from another.

Also another thing about Morrowind cities is that they may be smaller but they spread out further, Oblivions are all clumped together.

Great job with all that, Nottheking! I agree with most of what you said. It feltquite sad, I thought in Oblivion, that there were only 10 villages and the average village size was 4 houses. One thing I disagree with you on is the Imperial city. I do not feel like it seemed large and alive. For me the most large and alive was Skingrad because the layout made it seem bigger than it was and the thin streets made NPCs fill it more easily. Your categorising system is interesting too. Personally, I expect the 5 "massive" cities to be mostly in your "decent sized" spectrum. If any, probably only Windhelm (said to be the largest) will be in your "large and massive" range. But you never know.

As for Vivec seeming bigger than the Imperial city, I agree, though I think this is because it was PHYSICALLY quite substantially larger, just that a lot of that was empty space.

Huh? Morrowind was a lot more densely packed (in most places) than Oblivion in terms of settlements. Just look at the online map on UESP. They had a lot more and larger towns in Morrowind, so despite the fact that (most of) the cities were smaller, it did not feel sparse. I mean just come out of Vivec, there's Seyda Neen to your direct West, Pelagiad directly North, Balmora a while further behind some hills, Ebonheart to the Southwest, a plantation right next to Pelagiad and Suran a little further East. And the furthest town from the entrance to Vivec I listed (Balmora) is probably about the distance between Chorrol and the Imperial city.

I hope they are as good or even better than that one mod made for Oblivion by that one Czechoslovakian girl...It increased the size of that suburb of the IC...and it was like European streets...thin and labyrinthian. The bad thing...she left way too many bugs in it.

Where can I find this?

I'd note that for me, a lot of the "feel of size" was based on not touching any of the quests... However, quests play an important role, too. Especially, as you hint at, the presence of facilities and guilds. Pointless houses don't really serve too much other than as sight-seeing filler: that's partly why Daggerfall's cities could've felt just as large and liveley even if they were a bit smaller. For Daggerfall city, of course, the important parts are the landmarks: you've got the mages' guild, the fighters' guild fort and its moat, the shopping district, the main street grid, (amazing given how haphazard and unrecognizable most streets in the game are) the distinct neighborhoods, and, of course, the road leading up to Castle Daggerfall itself.


The capital would be one of them, most likely. Daggerfall, for instance, had 3 main giant capitals. (those of Daggerfall, Wayrest, and Sentinel) that were gargantuan: all three had the equivalent of a 12x12 block of Oblivion's cells of buildings, plus a wall around the entire thing. On top of that were another 37 capital cities for lesser kingdoms, (the 5 other "kingdoms" were just non-independent territories without capitals) each 10x10 in size.

Lore states that Skyrim has/had 8 truly major cities: any and all capitals (imperial, rebel, cultural, historical) would've been one of them. Or, alternatively, a smaller city that WASN'T the largest. For instance, Ebonheart in Morrowind was comparatively tiny: mostly just a dockyard and a massive fortress, as it served more as an administrative hub than an actual city.


Well, I'm not saying the IC felt PARTICULARLY alive... Just that it managed enough of it and enough feeling of scale. (mostly, it just felt LARGE... As in sprawling) Overall, yes, Skingraad did the best, though for me it was a personal letdown: it was the city I'd looked forward too the most, and I'd been expecting something around twice as big as it actually was. However, the feel of a dense, urban city was MOSTLY there: and the crammed space meant that there were plenty of NPCs in sight, contrast to the often-sparse streets of the IC.


I do agree that spacing can play a key role: placing a river through a city (or canols for Vivec) can add to the volume without feeling like it's stretching it too much. I think it's a key factor in the feel of Balmora, for instance.

I'd say as long as the major cities have 40+ buildings it will be enough, especially if the number of NPCs is built up. Another essential part in making cities feel alive is a good ration of utility buildings to residential buildings. For every 5-10 or so houses you should probably have a utility building (shop, blacksmith, guild hall, inn, communal hall); this also adds an interesting concept of having small towns of 10+ buildings with only one faction present which could influence the aesthetic of the town. Who wouldn't enjoy a town that only has a mages guild or fighters guild or thieves guild? I usually find it pretty boring to wander on a town with a couple dozen buildings without any sort of legitimate trader or guild representatives

The opposite is also true, which is why the number is given importance over just the "number of shops." Little in RPGs feels more fake than a "town" that consists of nothing but shops that clearly cater to adventurers like the player. In some games this is excuseable: a lively, deep world isn't what we expected in, say, Diablo II, as it was a Rogue-like hybrid game, so "town" being "where the shop NPCs are" made sense.

However, in a sandbox-type RPG like TES ones are, the whole motto ("Live another life in another world") kinda need a lively setting, else it manages to fail on that "another world" part. The purpose of a large, lively city is to grant tangibility to the game world, so that changes to it, and interactions with it that the player make feel like they have meaning.

Going beyond the simple "number of buildings, there's a number of specific things that are perhaps what REALLY matter, and just happen to be gotten at while going on simple numbers:

• More different facilities makes the town feel more self-sufficient, as you mentioned. When people think of a "big city," one of the first things that comes to mind is that "you can get anything there:" be it in the real world or in fantasy, they're economic and trade hubs, so if you strangely cannot find, say, a jeweler, then it's obviously not a major city.
  
• Redundancy is a key factor here. If the town's only got one weaponsmith, it may feel fine until you kill or make him/her hate you; then the town feels small once you realize you've no one else to sell that load of ebony longswords you just found. This is one of Daggerfall's main scale strengths: even in spite of the somewhat bland result the massive reliance on procedural-generation yields, there's still that feeling that you can always pack up and move, and base out of a different town.
  
• Building on both of the above is variety: rather than just having more than one inn, when there's multiple of a place, they're DIFFERENT: this is demonstrated a small amount in Oblivion, for instance, where there's a clear demarcation for inns in each town: typically there were 2, one clearly being the "rich inn" and the other the "poor inn." In an open economy, business owners will specialize to fit whatever niché their clientele fits into. in Skyrim, one would imagine that there would, like elsewhere in Tamriel, also be lines done racially: the dunmer, being arguably the most racist of the people, would likely create their own sub-communities with their own examples of each shop, etc.
  
• Although a bit less tangible, feelings of scale and "getting lost"

Oblivion had a few problems with the above, really:

• The guilds were a particular thing of note, especially the Mages' guild: each shop only specialized in one school, and once you passed rank 1, you stopped getting quests from ANY of them. Morrowind had about what I'd consider the minimum, though; five different locations, each with their own quests... And the fact was that you could become the archmagister of Vvardenfel WITHOUT completing them all! It was rather nice that you could entirely opt to skip certain quests in the main line... And then, of course, the faction ITSELF had its own side-quests, such as the Staff of Magnus and Warlock's Ring quests from Ajira.
  
• There was a distinct lack of redundancy for places outside of the Imperial City, which was problematic. While there were always at least 2 inns in each major city, there often wasn't even a FIRST of many shops; every place had at least one tavernkeeper merchant, one blacksmith, and one general store, but that was often it. In a major city, such as the shipping hub of Anvil, you'd figure that there might be, say, more trade in imported luxury goods, like clothing or jewelry, or perhaps an apothecary/alchemist or bookseller? Rather, NPCs boast about how "First Edition" is the game's ONLY bookseller. Contrast to, say, Balmora, which has FOUR taverns, three general stores, two smiths, as well as an alchemist, book seller, clothier, and a number of shops found within the guilds, including another smith, another two alchemists/potion sellers, (Ajira and Sharn Gra-Muzgob) and an enchanter. (Galbedir) This also gave you the choice of whether you'd patronize Guild-run business or not; in Oblivion's cities, the guild was usually the ONLY place to buy spells, enchanting equipment, or alchemical supplies.
  
• City layouts in Oblivion were very simple: it was hard to feel of most of them as having distinct, separate areas except that which was really forced, by virtue of using that "separate worldspace" to keep part of it outside, such as castle Skiingrad and the Anvil docks.

Obviously two of the major issues with Oblivion's cities is that they were too similar and were closed. If Skyrim can have highly varied architectural styles and open cities then I think it will easily be an improvement on Oblivion. If they can add 50% more buildings also then I don't think there will be too much to complain about

You are very much an expert on this topic, aren't you? I agree about the types of buildings. A city should have a variety of buildings, particularly those that match it's economic position. I always wondered where NPCs went to get their clothes and jewellery in Oblivion if they didn't have that particular store in town. Oh, though the First Edition is one of I think 4 bookshops in the game. It's not the only one.

The other day I had a shot at building a "massive" city to see what sort of size and layout would be required to make a city feel "massive". It gave some interesting results. Here is the city layout I did. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/37723-1-1300949923.png though I've actually expanded it since then, and added a city wall. It has 46 buildings (52 in updated version) including ships and I think it works a lot better than most Oblivion cities. There are seperate streets you can go down and different paths to different places (although this is a rather unusual one as I actually made it a canol city, so some alternate paths are by boat). But I feel there was one major flaw in my design that made it feel quite small, and that was the fact that you can get from the main gate to the dock on the other side by following one street, which made it feel much smaller. From looking at the map, do you think this city could give off that "massive" feel (or at least if I made it take another street to get to the dock)? How would you lay out a city to do this? Any ideas?

Every city has a general store that deals with clothes and jewelry, if not exclusively.


First Edition, Mach-Na's, Renoit's, and Southern Books. But again, there's also general stores which have books for sale.