Reminds me of pulling boss mobs into towns in World of Warcraft and watching them ravage the noobs. Haha!

The best we can hope for is that they make exteriors viewable from interior cells. Two mods have accomplished this for Oblivion: "Reneers Interior Mod" and "Immersive Interiors"
Would be disappointing if Bethesda couldn't do the same.
It really adds a lot to the game.

It's a nice confirmation!
As long as every single city isn't encased in a giant egg or something... :T

Great news, but I truly wish they could have figured a way to make the inside of buildings viewable from the outside. Us Rogue's need to be able to do some recon before picking that lock.

This game gets more epic every day...

Well hopefully he means its open and not enclosed like the Oblivion cities I would like to see a return to open cities I hope a bunch of monsters just dont rampage threw the town, Morrowind had no problem with that so I dont see why Skyrim would...

Seemingly good news, but I'm going to take it as though it means one of three things. 1) More loading times in order to load the city even when you're not near it, 2) Less detailed cities (I don't think they would do that), or 3) The engine they are using is very good and is able to load whole, detailed cities faster than ever before. I'm leaning toward 3.

One of the best news I have heard about Skyrim so far

I'd say 3 as well. This engine is really something...

Yeah it does.

Too bad we have to worry about creature killing the villagers if we get to close to town sorta like the travelling merchants in fallout 3.

The old engine had no problems with loading open cities. Arthmoors' (amazing) open cities mod for Oblivion doesn't impact FPS at all, or loading times. And yes the engine is more optimised.

Woohoo!!

Another question. WIll this mean that if you enter something like a castle, will there be no loading screens going into rooms IN THAT castle?

@Scharesoft Everything outside is one open space. Interiors are separate spaces.

I'm pretty sure Towns are not interior spaces.

Like every BGS made game, exteriors are consisted of big cells linked together, there are literally hundreds of them in Fallout 3 and Oblivion that make up the big open wilderness.

In Morrowind, the AI packages of NPCs and creatures did not allow them to travel through these cells, while they could chase you, eventually they would reach the point where they would stop and come back, those limits included cities, once getting near a village / town the NPC / creature would stop chasing you and return to it's original location. Because of that, there were never a single issue with creatures attacking NPCs inside cities.

In Oblivion, this changed, NPCs and creatures could travel through multiple exterior cells and follow you whatever you went.

In Fallout 3, a lot of settlements were wide open, this allowed NPCs and creatures to travel through, occasionally a mad Deathclaw would venture into Girdershade and kill Sierra and Ronald if they were outside of their houses, or attack one of the brahmins located outside.

Im sure they have rectified any problems, besides Oblivion at the time was considered a very very heavy game for systems, Skyrim looks like a high end game but hardly the power hog Oblivion was at its time. Basically Im saying technology has increased since then so Im sure it will run better now especially with their own engine. This is all assumption on my part however.

There are no loading times in any new games, at least that I know of; whether they are open or not. They disappeared pretty long ago.
This is not very good. I'd say this is average and expected nowadays.

I think a lot of people on these forums are kind of "stuck" in the thinking of the outdated Gamebryo engine previously used by Bethesda. Can't blame them though.

I would lean towards three as well...

Also with this news I think levitaion will return.

I worry about the open cities and the people being attacked but in Morrowind I dont remember one time when a monster rampaged threw any town.

I agree with you, I think that many people (myself included) are still stuck in thinking of the limitations the Gamebryo engine had.

Most probably not, no.

Happy days are here again! *happy dance shuffle*

This would make me more excited, to be honest... no more "levels" of dungeons.

No as in, "No, that won't happen" or "No, loading screens are gone inside"

Also, in response to the people wondering about the chance of monsters going in and killing essential NPC's, with the addition of other NPC's able to take on the quest if the main NPC dies, and town guards, I think we
ll be okay.

They may decide to have it all one big dungeon, but most probably they won't for the interiors of things like castles. Mainly because sometimes the interiors would over-lap each other if they were in the same cell. Dungeons is a possibility, but again it wouldn't be able to over lap.




No as in there will still be loading screens.

The town guard have always svcked...At least at higher levels.