I really don't think you can compare a modern city to a city in a game that takes place in a more primitive society.

I find it hilarious that I got 5 pages worth of responses and not a single person even aknowledged my original post...
So for the third time, Did Bethesda claim Skyrim was going to have bigger cities than oblivion? or was it a rumor?

I do agree cities are small in skyrim, maybe winterhold was the biggest compare with soliute before the collapse, but they dev got so lazy on it. The Imperial city was very well built, the whole city is like 6 holds in skyrim.... even in morrowind, the dark elf palace is pretty much 3 cities built together, also with the second expansion that city is big as hell. I mean come on, some skyrim city are just as big as a fortress dungeon.

Also the house in soliute (might as well be the biggest house in the game) has one chest in the whole entire house, seriously what were they thinking.

You did read my post and get my point right? Size, time period etc. are not an excuse. Medieval cities were still far larger than any of the cities in Skyrim, and if I haven't given enough reasons, it's a fantasy game, they're not hindered by historical accuracy, they can make them as bgi as they want. The cities just don't feel like cities, 2 streets is a village in any period.

In one of the early articels or interviews, he did not literily say they would be bigger than Oblivions, but that they would be "massive".

Once again we were lied to. :sadvaultboy:

IIRC they said the cities were about the same size, but more diverse and convincing.

Ok thanks for the response man.

Not in those words, no. That and the claim that each city was bigger than the Imperial city were extrapolations. What they did say was "5 MASSIVE cities" and I don't think that word could be even vaguely applied to any of them.

They never said that at all. Probably with good reason (if you tell people there are less cities than Oblivion, but they're the same size, they're not going to be impressed). You're thinking of the actual gameworld.

Overall Skyrim feels much smaller than Oblivion which was WAY smaller than Morrowind. And based on the downloaded size of 3.9 gb with saves it is small. For a game like this I would have expected around 8 gb. The 3.9 gb explains where a lot of things went.

:facepalm: The file size of the game does not mean anything.

oh yes ofc vivec ,sadrith mora ,balmora , i sure remember =)

I agree with this. In a country such as Skyrim "cities" are just glorified forts. The only city there in a realistic sense is Solitude which is the Imperial capital. Solitude, which has more of a cosmopolitan nature would be more modeled on the cities down south.

That said, I do miss individual specialization shops that sort of make a city more unique.

I think the imperial city in Cyrodill (Oblivion) is as big as one quarter to half the cities in Skyrim combined and I'm not being sarcastic or anything.

We live in the era where the gaming industry seems to think that better graphics = better game. I'm tired of this mentality because it creates a game that's exciting for all of 5 minutes. The success of indie games like minecraft and the continued popularity of morrowind should really show that people really care about gameplay and content more than graphics.

The fact that games are pushing the graphics to the point where it's dominating the features table and forcing out details like more people, more armor slots, etc. is just unnerving. The least they could do is focus on dynamic weather and keep it from going through rooftops and walls :brokencomputer: The shiny nice to look at graphics aren't even nice to look at!

So the hours of play that the shivering isles offered could have been accomplished with about 4 mb instead of 900 mb? Not a chance. With any kind of computer data size is everything. The fact that skyrim is so small shows that a lot more could have been added. Even a full pc download is barely over 5 gb.

The cities are bigger than oblivions

Cheers

No, they seriously are not

Cheers

Not sure if serious..

Like anyone, I love in-depth NPC's. But at the same time, I think we need a lot more of the generic, dime-a-dozen NPC's just to roam around cities and the like, as well as more buildings to house them. There could even just be more, bigger inns. Anything to give these people an actual place to live. I mean, where do all of the guards live? They make up about half of the population in any given town. They have to have families somewhere, they certainly have to come from somewhere. They don't just spring to life in the barracks, and live in it for the rest of their lives. Solitude does a great job of looking huge although it's not that big. The problem with Solitude, however, is that the great streets are empty. There should be npc's swarming the streets, even generic ones. There should also be buildings to house them, they don't even need to be enterable. Sure, they'd be generic and overall inconsequential, save that they would add that much needed city-feeling to the towns.

We're in the frozen north, the land of the nords. However, that doesn't mean that all of the 'cities' should be barren and empty. I'd expect the Capitol of any imperial province to be, at the very least, packed with people and buildings. Lore-wise, of course they won't be as big as the imperial city. Then again, lore-wise the imperial city should be dozens of times the size that it is in Oblivion. The entire world should be. It doesn't hold up well as an excuse.

Oh really? Since when is the limiting factor file size? I always thought it was budget/time constraints.

More like hundreds or thousands of times the size. The Imperial city has about 100 buildings. Going by the lore from the first pocket guide it sounds like it should have something in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Assassin's Creed would like a word with you.

Honestly, I like the feel of Oblivion's cities more. Cities like the Imperial City, Anvil, and Bravil just felt more alive. But I do like the differences in Holds in Skyrim.

And btw I only consider Markarth, Soltitude, Riften, Whierun, and Windhelm to be cities. Like people have previously said, the rest are barely considered towns.

Would you consider Dawnstar a city if it's layout was like this? http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/xx316/randomguyface/RoughplanforDawnstarrevamp.png