It'd be awesome, but impossible. I'll just hold out for TES IX

In the TES games the world has the different loading points so that it can be so big. Other games cannot have this same size because they don't use the same technique that Bethesda uses.

It's likely that the key limiting factor for a game of Skyrim's scale and scope is not hardware but budget. It goes without saying that by limiting your potential market to only those who have high end PC's the budget allocated to project would be reduced significantly.
Certainly consoles limit the game technically that is beyond doubt, more so due to their age, but they liberate it financially by allowing many more sales. A PC exclusive Skyrim would be graphically superior and maybe completely seamless but would likely lack scale/content not because of the hardware but because of the budget meaning less developers/artists/writers working on it.

I will happily trade a seamless world for more/better content.

Meh, for all the talk about Open Cities I still don't see what the big fuss is about. Load screens don't particularly bother me. If load screens help them make bigger and more detailed cities I'm all for it.

Open cities are great for stealth gameplay, in the Gothic games you can set up wonderful city breaks by luring beasts into towns and giving the guards work to do :goodjob:

What's the fuss?

We had open cities in Daggerfall and Morrowind. Arena didn't.....but Arena was pure DOS and -nobody- has the system resources to do open cities at that time. You could climb the walls to get into the cities in DF; handy when you're magic was depleted, and you were in a fight -outside- a city. All you needed was enough time to get up the wall far enough where you couldn't be knocked off, and you were home free.

It allows you to create -actual walls- as they would have been......in other words, with tunnels and towers and guard posts and all that stuff where you had walls that were thick enough.

It would make it easier to create log barricades, single stone low walls, 20' thick with interiors battlement walls.

Weather in the outside world would also be within the city.

This would permit destructable battlements, which would mean that sieges could be held. Mages with serious wood(en staffs) (like you, if you chose), could blast holes in the bloody walls....and have to deal with the consequences.

If you had an outdoor engine optimized for that level of detail, then you could code an -indoor engine-, which would let you have interiors as detailed as you wanted, and that you could walk into without pauses or lag (Unreal 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, etc). Separate maps for indoors that load as you approach a portal, then toggle over as you are portaled. Which would make functional windows possible, as well.

You would have a much more =organic= feel to things, as riders rarely froze at city gates and watched as some colored bar crept across their vision. Then they were suddenly within the city walls....

Without loading screens there will be less helpful hints and factoids about the game, and lots of angry gamers that won't be able to figure out how to play it.
"A shield can be used to block blows"

Seriously though I don't really have a problem with load screens, in out it does not bother me.

I think the surface world should be seamless with the only loading coming from dungeons ( then no more loading in the dungeon even if it has 6 levels ).

Maybe one day.

being a pc player i would love that!!!! but since the pc version is a xbox port with better graphics i dont see it happening before release. i do see it happening with mods in the future. look at open cities for oblivion. if this new midware their using is more flexible then it may allow it to be possible.

now if it was made for pc and then ported and optimized for consoles then i think they would have gone all out with such features.

Add a "don't care" to the poll. We talked about this earlier today in your other thread. How do we know the "loading screens" wont be seamless? What if they are kind of like the elevator rides in the original mass effect (which I actually preferred to mass effect 2's loading screens)? Those elevator rides were actually a loading opportunity for the system, but it never broke the immersion of the game by showing an actual loading screen. To fully answer the question, I simply don't care, and it wont reduce the fun of the game for me.

Bethesda said they want to make an open seamless world, with no loading screens for cities, however they said they can't do that on current consoles. TESVI will definitely be totally open.

This should be the counter to all those who think we want open cities just becuase we disliek load screans. I have no problem with load screens, but as the above quote states, open cities adds more gameplay, and gives the developers more stuff to play around with overall adding more fun to the game.

If this was on the next gen console then I'd imagine cities would be in the world cells, and houses and dungeons in their separate ones. Pc gamers will be able to download a mod at some point that does this, just like in oblivion. The question is, will it run smooth or be sluggish? My i7 and gtx275(at the time) ran it ok, but it was much smoother without open cities. Had the devs designed the game with open cities I'm sure it would have run better though. But then again oblivion svcked when it came to running smooth, gambryo engine maybe? It still stutters way too much even on an i7@3.8 w/ gtx570. This new engine hopefully will be optimized better and then the new open cities mod should run better too.

do i want a load free world of course i do. do i think it will be in skyrim hell no there just arnt any systems to handle a world of that size without load screens and still have it to where console users can play it at this time. wait til the next game and the xbox 720 are released and then we'll talk

My only problem with no open cities is the fact that jump and levitate spells will by necessity have to be excluded from the game . . . I miss my scrolls of Icarian Flight!

It doesnt matter what I want. The only thing that matters is what works for the game. If a seamless world with no loading screens is impossible with the tech, it doesnt matter if I want it or not.

I am 100% for open world and feel zones disconnect the zones.

They could load you over the edge of the wall if they wanted. They've said something to the effect of they don't want you having the freedom to just fly around; that it breaks their level designs.

Open towns would be nice, but it's not the end of the world, then again I would rather the towns be a part of the overworld than a wall surrounding each city.

I would love a 100% seamless tes game, but theres no way in hell a newer game could handle anything like that. Hell, I'm not even sure if Morrowind is. Not yet anyways. http://openmw.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

The newest games that are top notch simply can't. Technically it's possible but incredibly expensive and unlikely.

I'm disappointed. XBOX was greatly inferior to X360 but it handled Morrowind's open cities. Logically, we would be getting bigger open cities with all the new power. In Oblivion this didn't happen. I thought the optimizations will give open cities back for Skyrim but Todd Howard points next gen for that. With next gen, there will be more demands which might result in sacrificing open cities one more time. Only way to break the cycle is putting open cities in top priority.
Project Aedra, another open source Morrowind engine rewrite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdeoMeSiL-A&feature=player_detailpage#t=58s

Interiors are visible from outside. It is using portals to achieve that and did that even before it had a project name. Interiors in close proximity are being loaded in background just like cells. It isn't rocket science to avoid loading all of them at the same time because that would obviously cause big performance hits, so just load the closer ones. :lightbulb:

Here is the latest video showing the progress:
http://youtu.be/BM1Mp40427Y

An Open World game, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_C6TjwxbGI is 26 times larger than Oblivion, it has amazingly detailed environments(very large cities, traffic, rainforests, snowy mountains, vertical designs and gameplay). It looks amazing(volumetric clouds, object motion blur, day-night cycles, dynamic shadows, destructible environments). It runs on my ancient computer with no loading screens. And I use jets to travel so it has to load its details in very little time. In TES, with a snail speed, there is plenty of time to load things in background silently. Just Cause 2 is also a multiplatform release and it has special goodies(SSAO, soft shadows, CUDA water and advanced DOF) for PC version only. I think it is fair to compare it to TES, technically(not artistically). They also make the game the Hunter, another free roam open world game using the same engine.

I want to believe that PC version will be similar to Just Cause 2 PC version. Maybe cities can be open in PC version, that won't change how it looks. I think that is baseline of what can be done as a bonus for PC players. A PC UI shouldn't be a bonus, it should be a default.

It wouldn't be any bigger than it is now, seeing as they wouldn't be adding interiors. But that's a moot point, as it's not going to happen anyway.

@vtastek you cannot compare Just Cause 2 with Skyrim technically. The list of technical differences is huge. For one, the AI in Just Cause, compared to Skyrim, is negligible. The amount of processing that goes in to tracking all the non-respawnable NPCs (persistant) NPCs in Skyrim/Oblivion is HUGE. Compare that to the NPCs in Just Cause that don't actually do anything when they aren't on your screen, and don't even exist off your screen, in terms of the engine/processing, and there's one massive reason. Another thing is all of the objects in TES game that have physics. This again uses a lot of processing power. And (by the sound of it) all of those objects will be persistent in Skyrim too. Not to mention Just Cause 2 came out much later than Oblivion in the console cycle, and by the sounds of it in Skyrim you can travel at jet speeds without the loading screens in Oblivion.

So please have a vague technical understanding of how the two games work before you try and compare them please.

Regarding the open cities in Morrowind, the NPCs AI did not let them go beyond the city, and was considerably less complex than Oblivions. The way you post sounds as if Bethesda is actually making conscious decisions to make the game load a lot on purpose, without any thought for the "why".

AI in Just Cause 2 uses vehicles, they cover themselves behind obstacles, car chases or team ambushes are common. Destructible environments includes physics for every object and bonus destructible parts. But I also understand the differences. Like keeping track of NPCs outside of the zone(schedules that was seen in many older titles so I don't believe it is a big part of AI performance hit. Combat AI seems a bigger hit(and in Combat, all other AI work is being shut down).)

Am I not giving a head start for BGS for these differences? I give them room. I don't expect Skyrim to perform as good as Just Cause 2 in my old machine but at least it can look better(technically(not artistically)) or similar if it won't perform better.

I don't think they want more load screens in their games, I think they are unable to optimize it as much as other developers. Skyrim may offer no loading screens except interiors and closed cities. That's not a feat if JC2 is 26 times bigger with no loading screens. They have a new engine but still pointing the next-gen. I see a big error in that because what if next-gen demands more sacrifices? Open cities will be the first to go, like it did before. So I see having closed cities as a conscious decision: "in the end of the day, it is the same thing". I think it is drastically different experiences.

They admitted walled cities were because of console's RAM limitations. I understand the technical limitations and think they should open them for PC version. That's the least they can do. Of course that is if releasing a PC version is not the least they can do or all they can do at this point.

PS. It is not my fault that there are no other like TES. I'm doing my best here to find something for comparison. I think it is fair to compare it to JC2. GTA4 is very small and runs worse but it has many things going for it too(Euphoria and many many NPCs, weather, traffic and dynamic shadows and a huge city(wilderness is not as demanding as a city, technically.)). I chose the bigger open world game that also performs better. If you know something that can be a better comparison, let's here that one.
PPS. I don't want interiors to be seamless this time. Oblivion had walled cities so I only want open cities back. We can talk about a seamless world after we get back our previous territory, open cities.

It's possible, but It's not going to happen.

They could have open cities, but if they're too detailed, lower end PCs would still lag heaps or have to have awful graphics (and even then probably still lag). No loading screens might be nice, but for most people it's an impossibility. If your PC is fast enough, you don't have to sit through the loading screens entering a building anyway, because it loads near instantly, but if the buildings were all seamlessly into the world, you would have to load ALL of them at once, which would be a lot harder. Maybe in the future this will be more feasible, but right now, there's not much of a problem going into a building with loading screens anyway if they load to fast to even matter, and you'd need a computer that fast for open buildings to be plausible without a lot of lag anyway.

You still don't have a technical understanding of either game engine. The physical size of the game world has absolutely nothing to do with loading screens, and the Oblivion game world size was not even pushing the boundaries of the engine. It couldn't even see the boundaries. Yes, Oblivion was horribly un-optimized, but they got the console specs and such very very very late in the development of that game. You can't blame them for it being unoptimized. The physical size of the game world has nothing to do with why they closed the cities in Oblivion either. The AI in Bethesda games is vastly superior, and thus resource heavy, to pretty much every other game out there. Having closed cities was obviously a conscious decision, but the other option would have been to have smaller cities with less clutter and less people. If you'd rather that then it's probably best if you stick to Just Cause 2. When I talk about AI it's not just about how "clever" or "real" the NPCs seem. There's a lot more to it than that.

Opening the cities up for the PC version is not an option. It isn't far off from them making two separate games.