It is sad to be sure.

What the game needs is more "common houses", things like apartments, where a large number of people can live in a smaller building. This would add more NPCs to cities without having to increase the area of the cities.

Yeah the cities are way too small. Veeeeery unfortunately it is...

Windhelm feels like it should be 5x times bigger, but it's not -(

It also feels like it is kind of an art solution - it's like devs are telling you: "See, this is how this city looks like, now, you can imagine the rest..."

They should expand the cities as a whole, with buildings and NPCs like there is in Skyrim. They should expand all of the content because as it is, its tiny interesting villages not big interesting cities. I want big interesting and cities and it looks like a fair number of people want this too.

Cities were disappointing and I would of gladly have traded 10% of those '150' dudgeons to have small friendly settlements built into them.



Sectioning may have resolved this.



I think they had a few of those in FO3. Nothing wrong with packing the poor in knee deep in some areas. Also as much as I like all people having a story, there is nothing wrong with slapping an NPC with a name, a face and a script and letting them roam.

Its a simple concept that i suggest people get familiar with.

Beyond technical issues and immersion based reasons, TES games have always been about vocal NPCs, you would hardly want the game to turn into Assassins creed where the cities are positively overrun by people who dont interact with you at all, besides being a huge pain to get by trying to get somewhere.

The Lore of the series has many many more people that the games ever will, but that is lore, you don't have to code lore.

Hey so no one answered my original question lol . Did Todd Howard claim that the skyrim cities were going to be bigger than oblivions ?

Hmm... actually, that would be kind of cool. But I think the problem lies in Skyrim being a open world game, so you can not have cities like Florence or Rome.

Just think about it, Morrowinds Vivec meets Assassins creeds Florence, but in Nord fashion. OMG we have a winner! :celebration:

I agree with you about the series being about vocal NPCs and whatnot. I would hate to see nameless NPCs populating cities like in Fallout 3. Nobody here wants it to be like Assassin's Creed. However, we simply want maybe 15-20 more NPCs with ~10 more houses added to each city. This is completely achievable with the current systems and would go a long way to developing immersion and the like.

EXACTLY.

There was a mod for Oblivion that added 40+ generic NPC's to each city. They didn't have names, just "Farmer" or "Apprentice Mage" etc.
Then I downloaded a mod that added an ambient backtrack of a crowded city (tons of murmur, shipments coming in, laughing, etc) and the immersion was BEAUTIFUL.

You can't expect to know everyone in a city, and not everyone wants to share their life story with you and have you retrieve a long lost family heirloom for them so they can give you gold and a quest.
There should be generic NPC's in the cities of Skyrim. Makes the game more realistic and more believable.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/sushirush/screenshot/542897235591332586?tab=all

I'd go for doubled, myself. Double the NPCs and double the buildings. Not necessarily doubling the area, though. Some of the cities feel too spaced out to me.

Of course, I'd still like to see the whole map doubled. At least.

riften is smaller then anvil?, anvil was a circle

Rifteb is definitely smaller than anvil.

The cities in Oblivion might have been bigger, but they were urban islands in a sea of wilderness.

In Skyrim, cities have actual hinterlands. You can't just look at the walled portion of Whiterun and call that "Whiterun." It may be the urban core, but you have to include the the farms and the breweries and the towers that make up the greater Whiterun area.

In that respect, these cities feel a lot more alive and real to me than the cities in Oblivion ever did. But, that may just be the professional city planner in me talking.

You guys are also forgetting that Skyrim takes place 200 years after oblivion, populations could have grown in that time as in the 21st centur boston is igger than 19th century New york.

This, definitely...

This thread is so full of fail, it's unbelievable!

You can't compare Skyrim to Cyrodil. One is the capital of Tamriel, the heart of the empire and the home of the Imperial Guard...a lot of work was put into Cyrodil as the Capital by the Empire. Skyrim however was settled by Scandinavian savages who would much rather be out fighting/hunting/drinking mead that establishing proper cities and culture (stereotypes FTW!). So of course they're going to be different! It'd be ridiculous if it wasn't so drastically dis-similar really.

I think the cities are head and shoulders above Oblivion. Oblivion felt like "generic city #2" whereas Solitude, Winterhelm, Whiterun, Markarth (only ones I've been to) are all well made, unique, and full of quests (Whiterun alone had tons not counting the Companions.... I still have a few there)

I for one totally disagree. Oblivion may have had more buildings but they were generic and with little to do.

J

Are you [censored] serious? The market district wasn't even close to what you can call bustling. You had 5-7 NPCs at best walking around talking about mudcrabs. If you so much as looked in their direction they would greet you and compliment you by saying you "have the hands of healer!" Now, I'm not saying Skyrim is any better, but the Imperial City was a total joke. In fact, the most traffic you ever saw in that 'city,' was in the market district at the 4 way intersection. That's it.

yeah this is what i ment when i said ''riften is smaller than anvil?'' it seems so much bigger considering the docks the farms that sorta thing and anvil felt like a circle honestly like chorrol but without the other part of town cheydinhal and skingrad the imperial city felt the most alive to me leyawin was a ghost town

Imperial city was all copy pasted stuff. Are you really surprised that its a bigger city.

Cities in Skyrim have a HELL of a lot more character than any of Oblivions. Theyre all forgetful.

Alright, I have lurked this forums for awhile. I have not really felt the need to post, but have enjoyed reading about the many characters and adventures other people have experienced in skyrim. This topic has forced my hand, especially those who claim that the small city size kills immersion and realism. Now let me tell you, Bethesda has hit the nail with the cities and skyrim in general, why you ask. Well I live in northern Alberta, Canada. On average we have six months of winter, our largest community is 50,000 which is 576km away from me roughly a six hour drive. The community I live in has a population of 3,500 and is considered a major hub to many smaller communities that surround us. Many of those communities have populations of less a hundred to around 500-700 hundred, not to mention there are several that are even farther north than us ~ 250-300km away (This is still in my province, the North West Territories are even more remote and removed from civilization with many communities only accessible by plane and during the summer months). As to an early post about why they are not more shops for competition, let me explain to you why there would not be. 100-150 years ago these northern communities had to be self sufficient and were removed from larger urban areas, as travel took several months one way. As such there would be limited resources and trained specialist, although there was money many of these communities used a barter system ie: A farmer needs to have his horse get some new horse shoes put on, since he doesn't have the money to completely pay the blacksmith he pays by giving the blacksmith a bag of potatoes, a chicken, and a half dozen eggs. This way the blacksmith has food, but also helps the farmer by allowing him to continue farming.

The fact is Skyrims environment is so realistic that when I first saw the scenery minus the mountains I could have sworn it was my backyard lol. They nailed what life is like in small communities especially in a medieval fantasy setting, they captured the isolation and self sufficient way of the nord perfectly.Try and remember for RPing sakes that to go to riften would take months for these citizens. For some they would not even have made it. Communities had to be self sufficient or else they wouldn't survive. You wouldn't have more shop owners because the population just isn't there. Think in the wintertime when the passes became snowed-in trade would cease till spring thaw. The cities do not need to be bigger because it would not be realistic at all.

P.S sorry for the wall of text but I thought if I explained where I lived it might help my case .

Ive not gone much farther than whiterun, but if its the big/main city im dissapointed in the cities...Imperial city was awesome, so much to do. All other cities where at least the size of whiterun, most larger...

Certainly not bigger but a lot more interesting with a lot more character. The towns in oblivion may have been larger but were they ever dull and boring. Felt like the same town copied and pasted 6 times.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Panorama_fjellheisen-improved.jpg. It doesn't matter what the environment is like, or how big the cities are in Oblivion. The scale is different and the games are merely representations of a reality. The cities in Oblivion felt too small as well, but now with fewer cities and no IC comparison, we have dramatically less content. Didn't you ever notice that MW had settlements that were dramatically bigger than Oblivion? Did you wish they were smaller because Vvardenfell is just a small volcanic island? No, because even if the cities were 10 times the size, they would still be miles smaller than a real city, even if it's in a low populated area. it's all scaled down. This is in NO way an excuse for having such small cities in the game. Skyrim is an entire country, not a small English shire. And even if it was, you'd be hard pressed to find major trading hubs with 17 buildings.

I know people won't play it because of the graphics, but the cities in Daggerfall had more house you could buy than even exist in Skyrim's tiny settlements. One shop at most of a type doesn't make me think of a city.