I want cities to be in interior cells and I want the same for dungeons and houses. I'm paranoid about some hostile enemy coming and killing everyone in town or some hungry NPCs wandering by my house and detecting valuable alchemy ingredients as food items, and performance gets a boost on top of those benefits.

I don't get your poll. Is it about interior/exterior cells, like it claims to be? In which case, what's the problem? They are basically a way to partition the game space into discrete chunks, and have specific benefits and drawbacks in regard to how the game engine deals with physics, AI, path finding, memory usage, line-of-sight calculations and so on.

Or is it about the method of transition between cells (which can be a loading screen, like in Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout, a seamless transition with the help of a portal, and one of a bunch of variants of those two methods)? Because this doesn't depend on whether the interiors of a building are in a separate cell or not, for example ...

I want everything to exist in exterior, but I will be content with just open cities and maybe a few open houses.

The cities being in different cells is a limitation of the engine, so we'll just have to see what their "new engine" is capable of. Also I hated the fact that every cave had a door in both Mw and Ob, couldn't they do it like they (Obsidian) did it in FO:NV, with just a dark hole in the side of a hill, Goodsprings cave coming to mind.
Goodsprings cave http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh59r_XRQ1U#t=144s

Keep dungeons and buildings interior cells and make cities exterior cells. One step at a time guys, we can make dungeons exterior cells in TES VI maybe if you're all good.

Personally, I would like building interiors to not be separate cells. It kinda svcks infiltration wise when I can't do anything with all those windows.

Really, the only reason Morrowind was able to get away with doing exterior cities in the first place is because, compared to Oblivion, it's practically braindead. No physics to handle, most NPCs don't even have any AI and the few that do are usually just on a "wander aimlessly" setting, there're far fewer objects that need to be zoned in and drawn and everything else, so on, so on. Try and do external cities while taking into account each nearby NPC's AI routines, each object's interactions with others in the same space, the AI routines of NPCs who are HALFWAY ACROSS THE MAP, and all the static and dynamic objects withini a half-mile radius or more, and even the most powerful of computers is going to chug like there's no tomorrow.

Pick your poison: external cities in a world practically bereft of activity, or a living, breathing dynamic environment partitioned into seperate instances in order to prevent a meltdown.

You do realise there's an "Open Cities" mod for Oblivion which does exactly that (aside from IC and Kvatch) - and it works fine, without much of a slowdown, right?

I still hate loading screens, i dont get why people would still want them. If the new engine can handle getting rid of many of the loading screens it would be amazing. Like said before not being able to use windows svcks. I believe red dead redemptions world is much bigger then oblivion the whole thing is an exterior cell.

QFT

The ideal scenario IMO is who Gothic 4 handled it. No load screens except for major plot transitions. Everything in one fluid and continuous worldspace.

However I don't know that modding would be easy to handle that way so I think interiors should be within their own cells. Cities should be part of the natural exterior where they belong.

It also has the advantage of coming out more than two years and a PC hardware generation after the base game's release, and from reports I've heard still causes some consternation to your PC unless you've dumped a good load of money recently into it.

Don't mind cells at all, as long as they are transparent enough. If I enter a dungeon at night in bad weather, and look up through a hole to see the sky, I don't want to see daylight and nice weather. But I much prefer MWs handling of towns, within the landscape, than Oblivions town cells. I didn't vote though, as whatever the devs do, I'm sure it's pretty well thought out (more brainstormed than we can ever do).

Obviously no interior cells would be the pinnacle of an open world game, but realistically I don't think it will be much different from Oblivion, with the slight possibility of cities in exterior cells.

Gothic 3 is a game comparable in size to Oblivion and there are no doors or loafing screens to enter towns or houseq, everything is open. You can lure the beasts in town which opens funny possibilities.

I haven't played the Gothic series so my impressions may be entirely unfounded, but I always thought the interiors were smaller than Morrowind/Oblivion and it was somewhat restrained to certain paths when outdoors. Please tell me I'm wrong, I'd love to play a seamless, fully open world game.

I don't really care. If having seperate cells for interiors/cities makes the game a lot more smooth and stable, I'm fine with it

Do as much as can be done to reduce the amount of cells without compromising framerate. If the engine can handle the whole world being in one cell, then do it. If not, the priority should be for cities and wilderness to all be in the same cell, and buildings and caves to have their own cells. That would allow for Levitation to be brought back as a spell.

Handled for maximum performance and short loading screens!

... and we're a few generations ahead of this one still, with even my lowly laptop having a 1GB video card inside, 6 GB of RAM, and a multi-core 64 bit CPU. And this one is a year old already.

Really, it's a non-issue on current hardware.

At the least, Bethesda should finally work to make cell transitions transparent, so we can use those windows and chimneys, break open house doors, scale castle and town walls and so on. And maybe stop making impossible (in 3D) maps outside of Oblivion realms, I'm tired of trying to map something only to find out a bunch of rooms actually occupy the same space, as is the case with damn near every castle in Oblivion ....

Honestly, I don't like towns being in the world. It frustrates me to no end when some enemy NPC strays into Village A and whipes out 2-3 NPCs. Things like this make me go up a wall in rage.

The Gothic series maintained smooth transitions very nicely. There was no transition in or out of caves, houses, etc. From a distance, a cave entrance was merely a black hole, but as you got closer, the cave loaded and became an actual hole you could go into. The game just handled space streaming very well.

If TES V could do this, I would be a happy man.

I don't mind interior cells for houses and dungeons, but I really prefer cities to be in the exterior cells.

That's a very good point Having the city in an interior cell make things safe for the town NPCs from enemy NPCs and the wildlife. Which kinda brings an important point, I don't want very mean powerful wildlife to spawn near cities, settlements or major roads.

true to that query but i believe that this new engine will optimize the potential of the game to create an open environment

I want interior cells to remain, because without them I'd worry we'd be limited to very basic dungeons or building interiors. (Think Fable 2/3 buildings, very basic stuff.)

And how much more powerful are the Xboxes and PS3s these days compared to the ones when Oblivion was released? Gotta keep those in mind when talking about what the developers will put into the vanilla game, see...