One would believe that with technical advances it wouldn't be too hard to create truly large and impressive cities bustling with life and activity. The small towns and hamlets in Skyrim are quite the let down for a 2011 game.

In one interview yes he did. In another he changed his lie to more cities each being slightly smaller than bruna is what he said.

Link to either please? I don't believe either of these was ever stated.

The "cities" in Skyrim are more than just what is inside the walls. Whiterun, for example, technically includes 3 farms, Honingbrew, and in a way Riverton too. The "cities" are far more rural rather than urban. It seems to me a lot of the complaints people are putting forward are basically "the cities aren't urban enough." Honestly if Skyrim was more urban it would bother me because it wouldn't feel right. Sure the population isn't huge but if anything there should be more random shacks and hovels around outside the walls.

Also consider how much of the population is currently living in imperial/stormcloak camps, watermills, mines, shacks in the woods, or are just bandits in camps (yes bandits count as population, they are people not monsters).

Skyrim has a very large population they just don't all live in one spot, which believe it or not was the normal thing in days gone by. Large urban centers was a result of the industrial era and capitalism (neither of which fits in TES games.

the imperial city is the trade capital of tamriel
white run is the trade capital of skyrim
skyrim is also at war, so i imagine many people fled to another province.

do we need more houses and stuff? yea
did i expect to have massive cities? no, im content with the game one day i might get the pc version and have more people to talk to.

I really wish they would have made them bigger :/

The list is not entirely complete (seems to be missing some farms and mills, and one town) but I went through all the people in the skyrim:people page of UESP and I counted about 530. That's less than Oblivion, which had about 850, and about a 5th as much as MW, which had about 2500.

I find it amazing, that such an important feature in the athmosphere of a game gets pushed for the community to fix. As if no one in game testing (if there was) noticed that....

i really do love how people try to defend obvious flaws with lore... according to the lore im sure whiterun is supposed to be smaller than the IC, but according to the lore the IC is supposed to be larger than the entire province of cyrodiil as depicted in oblivion, so lets not go there. even my tiny mountain town is 4 miles across and filled with 3500 people, so as long as an in-game city isnt bigger than that, you really cant use the lore excuse. the cities are never to the scale they are supposed to be, that would be ridiculous; its up to beth to make them as close to a realistically sized populace as possible with the technology... and they didnt even try to improve on the scale of oblivion. in fact, theyve been getting progressively smaller since daggerfall.

im sorry but "streamlining" of cities has got to be one of the stupidest excuses ive heard from the forum, and that is saying something. its a CITY: the single most important aspect of effectively showcasing the atmosphere of a city is to make it have MORE than you could ever need. it is not a little farming village where everyone knows everyone and you butcher your own meat; it is an ecosystem unto itself, a dense labyrinth of a thousand different cliques and cultures that no one person can every fully experience. where do you get this idea that knowing everyone personally in a CITY is a good thing?! do you know everyone in your city? NO! you know maybe a dozen people out of thousands. the vast majority of people mean nothing to you. the vast majority of stores youve never even been to because you only ever need to go to a few. cities have such great and diverse populations that no individual, barring some OCD attention-[censored], will never find the need to interact with EVERY other citizen, and most wont ever go outside their little circle of people.

tl;dr: having a bare-bones "only what you need" city is like going to a sperm bank and calling it six. its everything you need, right? no point in that whole otherworldly pleasure; its just needless filler anyway!

I certenly agree that things such as them ages guild of the imperial city being much larger than winterhold for exemple, maybe even that the average city (within walls) being either about the same size or even smaller than in oblivion but... one thing I though was much cooler was how they populated the holds well rather than just the cities, in oblivion you have nice cities within their walls/instance, but then outside it was mostly wildreness and dungeons with a few isolated homes or camps, in Skyrim you see vilagges farms, mills, mines within their holds populated well enough, granted some of these were silly small, but comon its a game, we cant expect them to make real size fledged cities can we?

I personally wouldnt call any of the towns cities

i live ina a small town in the country which has more land mass and population than these so called cities!

fair enough its a game but i still wouldnt consider them cities, small towns or castles maybe!


but i endorse any1 who wishes to expand them

i for 1 will be making mods to expand the areas outside the towns - adding new buildings and more npcs!

I remember how magazines said that the cities were MASSIVE and that they were the size of the Imperial City. What a joke. Almost one distrinct alone or Waterfront is bigger than Skyrim's cities.
They feel like moderately large villages at most, but to call them cities is laughable.

It's also funny that the cities lag so friggen' much even though they are closed, with loading screens and with such a small size. It truly shows how bad Bethesda are at technology.

I don't expected huge cities, but I expected at least bigger than Oblivion, especially since that was boasted. 30-50% bigger than Oblivion's cities would be good. What we have in Skyrim is just laughable.

HIRE BETTER PROGRAMMERS BETHESDA SO YOU CAN RENDER BIGGER CITIES.

Think like this. Skyrim is like a country in the scandinavia. I've read iceland as an example, Iceland has a population of ~300k, we can say that skyrim is like that. New York alone i belive has 8-9 million people. A bit different.
Or we can say Skyrim is like Sweden, if we want skyrim to be compared to something a little bigger, Sweden got about 9 million people in the whole country. The same as new york, roughly anyways. So, Imperial city is like new york, Skyrim like a random country in scandinavia. The cities/towns are perfect in compare to Cyrodiil in my eyes. And yes, Sweden only got one city with a real city-status.

(Sorry for my english, not my first language)

You're getting that, too... on PC (I'm pretty sure I remember you saying that's your platform)? I'm having that a lot on my PS3... a lot of stuttering in Whiterun, but just a generally sluggish fps in Markarth and Riften. Solitude is fine beyond a bit of stuttering and I haven't been to Windhelm, yet.

wow, bethesda is already the ONLY software house that programs living breathing mechanics into their npcs aswell as create and populate a living breathing world... but I guess they "need better programmers" O.o
gee some people are really either very demanding or incredibely unware.

That doesn't help with the fact that this game has a lot of technical issues and shortcomings. The PS3 version is practically broken at the moment, for example, because of how continually worse stuttering and performance dips are getting for quite a few players as their saved data files increase in size and apparently, generally poor performance in the cities is quite common. I'm thinking that yes, their technical aspects could use some work.

i remember todd saying every city will be roughly the size of the imperial city oh well

ye it does, do you know any game that doesnt?
I feel for console people, particulary ps3, I heard that many have tech problems aswell, but its nothing that isnt comon to every software house really... pops to mind the fiasco of GTA adopted to the PC from the console version... what a mess...

All platforms suffer from low FPS in towns. Even the most powerful computers that can run Battlefield 3 on maxed settings smoothly has low FPS. Something is very wrong. It renders so little, yet it lags so much (like all Bethesda's games). That's just really bad programming; it has to be. Other games can render several times as much in crowded areas at a much, much better framerate.

Some people say it's because Skyrim is heavily CPU bottlenecked, and use only but a fraction of the real power - the GPU. It would explain a lot of the bad performance, and if so... like I said: get better programmers Bethesda.

The PS3 problem is "quite common", indeed. It's all the PS3 technical section has been buzzing about and even major media outlets have taken notice. Performance in the cities is performance in the cities, however. If, with my PS3, I'm experiencing constant, unavoidable slowdowns and generally poor performance in the cities, all with the PS3 version would be experiencing the same and all with the game, period, should probably be noticing the cities are abnormally demanding, hence hlvr mentioning it on his PC version, here. When companies like Ubisoft and Avalanche Studios can make huge, open-ended environments (far larger than any Bethesda "city") that look good and function well across all platforms, it points out just how outdated Bethesda's technical techniques are.Better occlusion techniques, I say... we need better occlusion techniques.

I'm sorry what? I seen battlefield being played on 4 different PC's, only 1 of them being "high end" just fine without any issues at all either in or out of towns...
one of the rigs cannot run Battlefield on maximum but runs Skyrim on maximum only having lag in large scale battles O.o

Do we have any tests to verify that or is it just speculation?

This is exactly what I felt when I looked down from that balcony.

I consider them all to be large settlements, not cities in the traditional sense of the definition.

I personally like having a large open wilderness as opposed to huge sprawling cities that take up most of the map.

Here's all the proof you need: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1264038-screenshot-test-for-people-saying-their-getting-constant-60fps-ultramaxed/

I think that really says all that needs to be said about Bethesda needing better programmers.