Yeah what happened to "cities larger than the imperial city". Half or more than half of the "cities" in the game are small open villages with just 10 or so buildings. It's fine to have those, but I wanted full on, gigantic, epic cities. Huge walled cities, multiple districts, cities possible to get lost in. All the cities seem pretty small. The big ones in the game seem smaller than the small ones in Oblivion; but this is probably because the Oblivion ones all had a bunch of open space and Skyrim's cities are cramped full of buildings. There's only like three or four full sized cities, the rest are small villages. I mean I love this game but this is one of the only complaints I have.

I consider that a settlement.

Oblivion had those scattered throughout Cyrodill, Skyrim calls those places cities.

The cities of skyrim are the towns/settlements of oblvion

The towns/settlements of skyrim are mills, consisting of maybe 3 buildings.

The towns in Skyrim are pretty comparable to the Oblivion ones, maybe you're remembering with rose tinted glasses, none of the "towns" (as opposed to the cities) were as big as even vanilla Dawnstar. The average number of buildings for an Oblivion town was 4. I suspect it is very close for Skyrim.

Y'all whine like mules...Just play the game or don't. Maybe Nords don't have the architectural vision the Imperials had? There could be a visionary reasoning behind the "omg smaller" cities. Besides...Cyrodiil IS supposed to be the capital province, correct? Bigger cities are probably one of it few site seeing thingamabobs for tourists.

I prefer Skyrim's smaller cities with actually unique and interesting NPCs over Oblivion's sprawling metropolises where 90% of the population talks about the mudcrab they saw the other day

File size is a limit. Simple as that.

And there are many games that have much more to offer that were built faster and on a smaller budget. So considering the graphics, music, landscape, and character movements a lot more could have been added. Even if it was a simple copy and paste. Just adding some more generic dungeons and npc's could have added a lot to the game and file size. Even a handful of special scenes would have been nice.

Idk when I think of towns from Oblivion I think of the one where everyone was invisible, or the one that rained dogs.

Those had maybe 6ish buildings, but at least had interesting stories and quests behind them, unlike skyrim where its a mill that you can work for.

?

This thread has so many misremembered perceptions. Practically every named NPC (except beggars) in Oblivion had their own unique things to say... no briefer than Skyrim's.

The one that rained dogs had 6 buildings, the one where everyone was invisible had 3. I just calculated it, the small towns in Skyrim have an average of exactly 4, same as Oblivion, though there are fewer of them. On the other hand, I'm not counting mines, mills or burnt buildings in that count. I think in terms of story and quests, Skyrim wins here, the towns each have, it would seem, at least 2 or 3 quests that start there or involve them, while Oblivion's usually had 1, or in some cases, 0. Either way, the picture I linked you is not even close in size to those settlements, there are 19 buildings and 5 boats in it.

Oh alright, I really just haven't come across any towns/settlements in Skyrim then I guess... Seriously all I find are mills, caves, mines, and ruins.

Have to keep looking I guess.

I can't believe people are comparing cities in Skyrim to the Imperial City. That's the capital of the friggin' empire, of course it's gonna be huge. -_-;

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Settlements Here's a page listing all of the towns and settlements. It's not that huge. It's a very similar size to Vivec, which is basically the only properly major city on Vvardenfell. The others in the game aren't presented as cities often, more as towns. Given the size, it feels far more natural going into a 38 building town than a 19 building city.

True...speaking of that, am I the only one that remembers Morrowinds cities almost always being small, outside Vivec and the area around it? I don't see where people are getting the idea Morrowinds are bigger. >_>

I have seen so many nonsense complaints since before the release of the game and it only got worse after. I really do not see why all the complainers just don't go play another game if they hate TES V so frikkin much. The cities are too small, the graphics svck, the game is too hard, the game is too easy....etc etc etc, On and On, blah blah blah....whine and snivel. :violin: My heart really bleeds purple koolaid for those people that are never happy.

So glad I am playing the game more then reading the forums lately..... :wacko:

ditto


Post-Daggerfall, Elder Scrolls "cities" have, by real-world defitions, not even been villages, but rather hamlets with the exception of Vivec and the Imperial City which may be villages. Morrowind's settlements never seemed larger than Oblivion's to me. Arena and Daggerfall at least got the village rank down...

Balmora, and to a lesser extent, Ald'Ruhn and Sadrith Mora, are bigger than Oblivion cities. I definitely feel this in Balmora. But even then, these were just supposed to be large towns, Vvardenfell was not meant to be densely populated (and yet it has 4 times as many NPCs as Oblivion). The thing about Morrowind though is that it had loads of towns and villages, and all of those were themselves quite large, like no village had less than 6 buildings and some, like Caldera, had up to about 20. It was a much more dynamic and realistically settled world.

Vivec was Rome, skyrim and oblivion cities seem to be stuck in the dark ages. I think the main Redoran house is bigger than all the towns in skyrim combined.

Vivec was definitely not larger than the Imperial City and if anything, the Imperial City would have been Rome.

Ehh..I guess. I think the fact Morrowinds cities are open makes them feel..smaller in my head.

Also, we need more places with giant, dead crabs used as buildings.

Edit: I'm pretty sure Vivec was bigger than the Imperial City...in my head anyway.

Yeah I clearly remember they told that cities will be lesser in number, and bigger in area compared to Oblivion. I don't care though.. because it's loyal to the Lore.

In simply the space it takes up, probably, but remember that those cantons are mostly just catacombs. Still, it's a very similar size.

As it should. It's the center of the empire and Tamriel. Skyrim is a cold, harsh environment and the smaller towns and populations make sense.

Besides, I'm sure there will be a mod to add more NPCs. Not sure about increasing the town space, though.

City size in Skyrim seriously bugs me...but what can we do I'm pretty sure they reached the hardware limit. I'll be concerned if cities stay this small with next gen consoles.

As big as the IC was it's still disappointing as the capital of the entire empire...

I doubt it. Assasin's Creed runs perfectly well on this console generation, the entirety of Just Cause 2 runs well, as well, and Morrowind, with it's open, no-wall Vivec, ran fine on the Xbox. The limit is how adamant Bethesda are on pushing the graphical fidelity and their limitations with occlusion rendering technology. I doubt they've hit some in-born limit with the hardware of the current console generation, namely the Xbox 360 (they seem to focus their development specifically on the 360) limiting city space. If they really needed to, they could take a page away from the Imperial City and just divide the cities even further into separate cells to allow for larger sizes.

Do I have to repeat the same thing to everyone that comes into this thread? Please read some of my earlier posts discussing scale, city size and the difference between games.