Gamescale svcks, doesn't it? What kind of city is comprised of a mere hundred citizens all living within two-minute-jogs of each other? The Elder Scrolls games have always been open world, and although wilderness exploration is a fun and worthwhile activity, the design focus on large, geographically diverse provinces detracts from the substance of ostensibly and canonically sprawling metropoleis.

Like the Imperial City. Raise your hand if you were dissatisfied with the Imperial City's presentation in Oblivion. I know there used to be a lot of aggravation around here about the way Oblivion handled the lore, and I'd be surprised if it disappeared in my absence.

So here is my proposition to all whom it may concern: An overhaul mod on the level of Skywind or Morroblivion which replaces the game world not with an updated recreation of Morrowind, but instead with a fully-scaled version of Rumare Isle and a weirder, more interesting Imperial City. I propose Oblivion: White Gold Edition.

It's a monumental project, obviously, requiring a lot of work on both creative design and technical implementation, and at present the only momentum behind it is my own. Nevertheless, even TESRenewal must have started somewhere, and I hope I'm not the only one who'd like to see the true Imperial City realized.

What do you say? Does this sound like an idea you'd want to support? If you're interested, there's plenty of fun conceptual work to go around.

If you were dissatisfied with the way the Imperial city looked, then you have no idea how computer graphics worked back then, simple as that. You were NEVER and will likely NEVER get a full sized town. There is not a game in existence where a town is full sized to what it might be like in RL without some MAJOR hits.

Compared to the rest of Cyrodiil, the Imperial City WAS HUGE.

Fie on you, nonbeliever.

The only games that I've ever played that were close to real life cities are the Rockstar games, and even those are not full-sized and the npcs in them for the most part are either severely disgruntled trigger happy cops or living ragdolls for your amusemant (outside of story characters).

too even furthere this point, remember, the rockstar games basically take place ONLY in the city for the most part, thus the entire world building went toward building the city, and it is STILL not full-sized, where as Oblivion needed to fill an entire region.

OP, what you are asking is not some sort of result of laziness or something, the simple fact is, making full-sized/filled cities are basically impossible to make TODAY, let alone in 2006.

I'm not impugning Bethesda's motives for shrinking their in-game cities, I'm just saying I think we can do better if we aren't constrained by expectations of profit.

I reject your conclusion that full-sized cities are impossible to make today. I intend to test the presumption that it is impossible with the technology of 2006. If that fails, I will use the technology of 2011.

What do you believe the specific obstacles to full-sized cities are? I am unimpressed by your vague talk of technical limitations.

size, number of NPCs, coding, basically everything.

Think about it, do you not think that a Grand theft auto or Saints row, or even Watch Dogs game would have tried to make a full sized city if they could? their entire games are based around single cities, and even THEY have never had full-sized, full on cities. not only that, but besides the generic NPCs that walk around and the police, gangs, etc that count for enemies in the game, there are not many NPCS in the game, no where near the amount Oblivion had. Not only that, but Elder scrolls NPC ALL have instrcutions on how what to do and a timetable of when to do things, and most of the time, many of those do not work properly.

You are insane to think it is possible to make a full sized city.

Are you misunderstanding my purpose here? I do not intend to scale the entire province of Cyrodiil, only the island on Lake Rumare. It would be a large expanse of mostly urban sprawl, yes, but I do not believe it would have many more NPCs than do Skyrim, Oblivion or even Morrowind.

The Elder Scrolls games also have a technical advantage your chosen counterpoints lack. The Construction Set and Creation Kit allow the use of disjoint cells. It's not necessary to cram everything into a single world, particularly when dealing with a walled city.

Would you care to elaborate on the 'basically everything' part of your argument?

The only way it would be possible is with some serious trickery. All of the "city" and "NPCs" beyond a certain radius from the player-character would have to be rendered the way distant objects are rendered in Oblivion. In other words, they'd have to be 2D mockups, which only changed to 3D when you got close.

There were actual "cities" in Arena and Daggerfall, but everything that moved in those games were 2D sprites, and buildings were just flat boxes. Most of the "people" were just procedurally generated.

As soon as you go full 3D with nice-looking textures, the memory and processing requirements go up exponentially.

I recognize your points, but 'difficult' does not equate to 'impossible.'

As I said in the first post, this would be a colossal undertaking. But think of the glory if it succeeds!

The primary problem is the AI processing. There are limits on 2006 (or 2015) technology, on how many NPCs you can have at any one location. It certainly wouldn't be possible using Oblivion's engine, which couldn't make effective use of multi-core CPUs.

That's good to know. Do you have the precise numbers on you?

Cool cool cool.

Actually, this is something on my modding to-do list. Quite far ahead in the future, but it's there. I'm only really interested in making Oblivion mods, but this would probably make for a better Skyrim mod (since it's just a more capable engine afaik).

Currently my thinking was that the project would start off not as a worldspace mod, but as a quest mod that focused on telling a series of short stories, each with a small, unique worldspace, where each individual exterior cell (representing, say, part of one street in one section of the IC) would have an enormous amount of off-access background scenery to give the impression of being part of a true-scale city.

The quests would be simple, not too long or grandiose, and once you finished (or gave up) the quest you would exit the self-contained city worldspace and resume life in normal-scale Cyrodiil. Current title: Vignettes from Cyrodcity. Over time, these Vignette quest mods would be joined up to each other with bigger stories, and even given an independent existence outside of the quests. Then I would join them up to the load doors of the vanilla city and focus on compatibility with vanilla and modded quests in the vanilla IC cells, so it functioned as a true replacement city.

As I say, this is a distant plan, lots of other modding ideas I want to get done first.

I'd love if this project was made as part of Beyond Skyrim and it was integrated into that release.

I quite like living in apartments, even in Beth games. Spending a week or two away from my wandering/exploration living to walk about the Imperial City and take in the city life would be a lot of fun. Buy a lot of books, get piss drunk, and take in the sights of the greatest city made by humanoid hands.