u mean the 10k guards yah those were pretty unique :thumbsdown:

Also the relative busy places when Radiant AI started to act weird.

10 people suddenly standing up simultaneously, leaving the tavern like they're living in a very strict communist country.
Or when you walk into a bunch of NPC's and everyone is saying hello to you at the same time and then immediately break up in 1 on 1 conversations about mudcrabs.

Don't really know what they have to do to fix it, but they should do something if they want more crowded cities or it will be completely absurd.

I think making npc's actually able to ingore the place and eachother some of the time would help a lot. It's almost scary that each and every singple person you pass states at you and says "yes? as if you are the most suspicious looking person in the world

just thought of something they could add. In fallout New Vegas if you go into the vault 21 hotel that is the only place in the universe that had people in three way conversations, i don't know why they limited this feature to just this palce. they should put this in skyrims cities.

inception?

I agree... I'm scared of them doing something like in DA:O, where the NPCs outside of the party were lifeless, had no AI and no scheduling. They just stood in the same spot the entire game. That's immersion killing, right there.

As long as I don't see "-insert city here- citizen" like in Fallout I'm happy. I would rather them use a random name generator - a different generator for each race/six- or something like that, and have the only conversation options be rumours. That's of course assuming they have a ton of people in cities.
I'm not really sure why that bothered me in Fallout so much. But it did.


Edit* Forgot the "why" in my last line.

I prefer to murder people important to the story to see what happens, and if the game is well tought or just like crappy oriental kiddy RPG.

Agree to the post above.

I would like to see many NPC's in the world, I am happy if most are ramdom creation by the computer but I hope that they have a random name generator built in so that each NPC's has a name and not just "Town's person" or "Bandit"

i prefer more named npc's. Maybe randomly generated names and races, class blah blah except certain characters. if u kill one they generate another to take his place.

I prefer having loads of randomly named npcs that sleep in inns(seriously they could have inns with 6+ rooms, thats 5 bonus npcs or more right there, why only 2 room inns???) or on bedrolls in stables (i dunno, ANYWHERE) and a bunch of unique npcs quest related and all, than JUST the bunch of unique npcs. I'd even prefer having random npcs just wandering around endlessly than empty cities like Oblivion (imo) had.

Yeah, because Cyrodiil was overflowing with population centers wasn't it.. it was just as empty as the Capital Wasteland.

I too would like to see assassin's creed style towns but I'm not holding my breath.

The one advantage to having fewer NPCs, is that it should be easier for Bethesda to go through and hand tweak each NPC so it looks more like its respective race. Hopefully they'll do something along the lines of what the Tamriel NPCs Revamped (TNR) mod did. It was amazing how much difference that mod made in the game. It gave the NPCs so much more character.

Having hundreds of people means tons of buildings.
And such a population could make it pretty hard to find your quest target.

I'm not really getting my hopes up for a big change in population density from Oblivion. I don't really want to sacrifice named npcs who can be communicated with for a bunch of nameless people with no home.

What I would like is perhaps a mixture of the two, at least in bigger cities. Where there's some sort of larger apartment type complex where the unnamed folks come from and there are still homes for the named NPC's in the world. I mean one thing I enjoyed in the last game was how everyone had their own little schedule, rather than standing in one place all day.

Overall though, the population didn't really bother me in Oblivion, I mean at least in smaller towns. The Imperial City though felt a little odd. I mean it's the capital of the empire, but with the technology at the time they could only get so many people living in this supposed hub of everything in the world.

THIS. Exactly what I was going to say. I get the argument that its cool that every NPC is unique in Oblivion, and I agree, that is really cool, but lets face it, even THAT isn't realistic in a certain way. The real world is chalk-full of people you will BARELY register as existing, even if you pass by them in, say, school everyday. They need a name generator, cause everyone needs a name, and maybe their topics of conversation should depend on area of the city their living in (i.e. they live near the waterfront so they talk about the smell) but otherwise if your going to have a huge city there needs to be whole crowds of people who just don't matter. They need to move though, not stand in one place. I hate to bring it up even though lots of people have already, but this is somewhere where the Assassin's Creed series excelled, and I REALIZE they're two different games in two different genres, but some of the innovations in AC are simply so good they're upping the industry standard, period. They need to move Beth, and the flow of traffic needs to feel like a flow, not a bunch AI's having pathfinding issues. They don't necissarily have to have a place to go, just a route.

Though, all of this is ONLY in the case of a big city in Skyrim. I don't really care if there is one or not. I felt Skingrad in Oblivion had a pretty big/crowded...ish feeling, and though i recognized that for a population their size a city like that would just be absurd, but really I just let my imagination fill in the extra dark ally ways and seedy pubs i wasn't seeing. Its not big deal either way.

What REALLY matters is that the NPC's you DO interact with need to be deep, not just feel like a quest-giving-station. Make talking to them important, maybe giving clues about their (or other people's) quests that really matter, and make they way you ask questions make a difference in the conversation as well.

i kinda agree with having few npcs.... but bethesda must work so that we dont have clones and more clones.... annoyng.... i ′d like to point out one specific game i like .... Fable 1 ( the only one i have played cause i dont have a console) in Fable 1 i rememmber one town... it was amazing... int he morning the children getting up from bed...having a breakfeat then going to school...in the afternoon they were free to play and then in the evening , children going back home to enjoy their dinner and then going to bed... in the evening we cold see a guard lighting candles all over the town...

in oblivion and (or even worse morrowind) npcs were like plastic manequins walkin all around same voices same faces doing the same things....in morrowind ill never forget that nord near Calderas or Balmora...he used to stand there day and night even if its raining... in rpgs like fina fantasy 6 thats normal....but now we have all these super detailed 3d models.. but their animation and behavior should match their looks...otherwise i a bizarre manequin world

sorry for my bad english...not my native language

Thats not what I meant. I was talking about the scenario, you know? A post apocalyptic wasteland?

Fable has since gotten rid of most of that. NPC's now tend to wander around town forever and ever and sometimes enter their houses.