I know The Elder Scrolls is more single-character focused when it comes to fighting and combat but I would like to see/fight in at least one epic large-scale battle in Skyrim. I know it probably wont happen but i would like to see hundreds of NPC's fighting each other on a battlefield or something and im right in the middle of it hacking away. Thoughts?

Yeah, that would be awesome. I always want to have a large scale battle in any action game, but it doesn't happen often. Hopefully it may happen in Skyrim.

lotr?

anyways i wouldn't like it! maybe some nords in the civil war beating each other up but i am dovahkiin and the only one who has even a chance against dragons - the evil enemy of skyrim...

It is something I would definitely like to see... But, it would cause tons of lag.

Hopefully not a main battle as part of the main quest. What will my stealth-based characters do while surrounded by huge amounts of people?

the hero in skyrim has a specific mission and a cant really be risked in a pitched battle it just doesnt fit with the story

Yeah. The reason why there were not big battles in Oblivion was not because it's single player..... It's that the game can only handle like 15 NPCs on 1 screen

I know, youre right. Or maybe just a side quest where you have to help defend one the cities or towns from thirty or forty attacking goblins.

I've always wanted faction wars. I'm thinking more of a 15 vs 15 whereas 1 faction (lets go with fighters) has an assault on a thief faction's base. Quests occurring in the future may vary with the battle's afteremath.

I suppose a bunch of respawnable guards protecting a city from a daedric/goblin/whatever assault would be epic. I can't imagine hundreds of NPCs clashing though. Not that I'm aposed to it. I think the closest thing we've come to that is summoning a bunch of golden saints and dremora in Morrowind and having them go at it.

I think the biggest battles in oblivion were Kvatch, Bruma when the great gate comes and the one in the imperial city when Dagons comes.

In the podcast Todd Howard did with Gameinformer, when asked about 'companion' characters like in Fallout (I assume that was what they referenced, I haven't played FO really at all..) he said that there would not be companions with such great depth and back-story, instead, he was sacrificing that depth for a much greater number.

So I'm assuming that will fit in the story actually...


And remember, Oblivion was FIVE years ago, in terms of technology... I'd say that's pretty nuts and I'm sure they're system will allow for a much much larger implementation of battle.

Yeah but that was quite a few years back. Wasnt Oblivion one of the first games to come to the 360? Im sure hundreds of NPCs isnt practical but what about fifty? The big battle in Oblivion only had like twenty or thirty total.

They had issues with the game engine limiting the numbers of NPC's in one area at once to about 15. That's why the enemies in the end of Oblivion spawn in waves, why The Strip is devided in three in NV, and why there are so few to fight at the end of Fo3. Hopefully this new engine fixes this issue. Allowing for more like 40-50 NPC's to fight at once. Now THAT would be cool.

Mount & blade and Warband manages battles (not very big, the vanilla max number of combatants at a given momment is 100 and 150 respectivelly) and the graphics are Very basic to let the computer handle this. The price in graphics would be too high to make a feature not used frecuently.

They said you're able to fight 2 dragons at once, and considering you can also use a shout to call a dragon to assist you I'm guessing they have atleast tested it with 3 dragons in 1 instance. (This is just an example of how much we can see on screen)

Todd also mentioned that at one point they thought of making it so you could recruit everyone as your companion.

Expect much larger scaled battles than what we've seen in the past.

I would like to see something near the end of the main quest, where one or perhaps several dragon(s) are attacking a major city, and the city guard attempt to fight them off with your help.

I too would like to see something like that in a Elder Scrolls game. Something like that would probably require alot of testing and hours to make sure that it owuld work just right, so I dont see it happening in Skyrim. Although, I would LOVE to see in sooner rather than later

Todd also said that recruiting everyone as your companion was scrapped after a week, haha. I can see why that would be a bad idea.. just like in Fable "Follow." Kinda loses its meaningfulness at that level.

He also said, same interview I believe, that when he's bored he'll just summon a bunch of dragons to ransack a town, So I assume the dragons will work well with many NPCs running around and quite a few fiery beasts on location...

This is one thing I felt that Dragon Age did very well. They had large-scale battles but your part it in was kind of, "behind the scenes". There were hundreds of people fighting in the background. The scale of the whole thing felt good though.

YES PLEASE

this is one of the greatests fails of oblivion,

the greatest aid of leyawin!! 2 guys -_-
all the survivors of kvatch!!!! 2 guys u_u
the huge aid of imperial city!!! 0 guys ?_?
the grand aid of the bloades!!! the oldest blade and another guy <_<
the super strongest aid of Cheydinhyall!! 2 guys -.-
the mytical aid of chorrol!!!! a woman o c'mooon!!! ?o?
... and so on

i have seen more guys in a street fight than in the epic war of cyrodil !!!!!!

to be honest, its not always about graphical power whne it comes to large battles. The graphics in mount and blade definately arent going to win any awards, yet even with a very power rig, the game can not support 500vs500 without slowing down due to the sheer workload the CPU is put under. A bigger example is Arma 2 in the Chenerus map. The character models, the Vehicle models etc are all extremelt well done and detailed, yet 1500 vs 1500 brings and Overclocked machine to its knees again, not because of a lack of graphical power, but lack of CPU power.