This was one of the main things that broke up the imersion in Oblivion. There were hardly any people in the cities and it made them feel like a place to stop and pick up new weapons and things but the streets never felt alive. I rekon fallout had a good idea in towns like megaton, new vegas, westside where they had a bunch of unnamed NPCs living in a kind of comunity shelter building that would wander round and not do much.

It cant be to hard to put in a few more random people.

Also it was fun to murder people you new were not important to the story.

-Hopefully- this new engine should allow a vast amount of NPCs at once on screen.

i think the issue was oblivion had dialogues and names for almost every person you met in a town, while Fallout did not

Yeah, and the scarcity of the wastes also made it a bit more appropriate to be lacking population density.

If tomorrow when the screens are released they show images of cities like Assassins Creed I might just die on the spot.

The consequences of making a game like assassin's creed is that if you were to switch to first person you'd see how low the polycount is. The meshes look blocky in order to make the game run better with all those NPC's on the screen. It works better for 3rd person games because you're not zoomed in as much.

Luckily for assassin's creed it uses amazing motion capture animation and image metrics (for facial animations) to bring their characters to life, despite mesh constraints..

Don't get your hopes far to high

I wouldn't mind seeing more NPCs in the game, however, one of the biggest immersion breakers for me is games that don't have houses and beds for everyone you see in game. Every NPC should have a house and bed to retire to at night.

Although, Oblivion did seem to have way to few people for a city of its stature and nature, I felt most of the other towns were well done. I would have liked to see the spouses and children of the shopkeepers though.

More NPCs on a city means there will be a few unique NPCs. And I don't want this, I'd rather have every NPC unique like in Oblivion.

I'd like to see more sure, but honestly I don't want unnamed NPC's.. I didn't like the whole unnamed bandits thing either, but I can live with that.

If they did it right, I'd love it. But as others have said, I don't like how Fallout has so many unnamed NPCs that you can't have a conversation with. I'd rather have fewer NPCs who are more unique than a lot of generics.

Children!! babies!! teenagers!! How many games are there with only advlt men and women. Does every game need to have a sterile population?

More people is good and all, but more people= more voice overs, or at the very least more generic dialogue and voices present. Some people don't like this idea..so would you settle for more people and more generic dialogue and voices? or settle for better variety but less people?

I never knew that. So if you walked right up to the NPCs, they'd be all pixelated?

Well I'm hoping TESV has tons more NPCs so that modders won't have to make mods like Morrowind Comes Alive and Living Cities of Vvardenfell..... because it will already be implemented in the game.

I dreamed about skyrim last night for the second time. Once again i was deceived by the graphics but other than that... i was in a sewer and there was just TONS of skeletons so i was casting radius spells at them. the game seemed pretty cool in my dreams lol

Pixelated doesn't really have anything to do with the Polycount. Lowpoly models just means they have more sharp edges and less detail to the basemesh.

maybe instead of more un-named npcs they could liven things up with more animals ? where are the livestock and pets ? and what about herds or groups of animals instead of one or two deer fluttering around I'd like to see 5 or 6 running past me. There has to be someone in all of Tamriel with pet mudcrabs I mean sheesh. and where are all the birds ? I want to walk up to a bush or tree and get scared to death when a bunch of birds take flight...ok this might have gotten a bit off topic just thinking of an alternative for the people that want all npc's to be unique and talkable.

Only certain npcs should have a story background. Im talking about merchants, inkeepers, guld leaders ect. Every other person whos is wandering around does not even need a name, and only need basic dialog options like rumers, directions, lore, specific person and all that.

I like the idea of randomly generated characters. Also, sneak attacks with clubs should knock people out so your can rob them, but that's another story.



It was also not fun to have to determine which will be needed later in quests. Essential NPCs were also very annoying. Should have been killable to the player, unkillable to all else.

@DocMatrix:
There is one person, whose name escapes me, that has four pet rats in her basemant.

Agreed. I don't think the Oblivion cities seemed empty. At some times of day they were, appropriately so.

But at other times they were pretty active.

And I'd rather fewer unique NPCs than lots of generic ones.

yes I remember that and there were a couple people that had pet dogs, but in a brutal land like that you would think a lot of people would have big scary pet dogs and such for protection and comfort. It would also be cool to have guard dogs/animals warn you or attack you if you wander too close to their owner's home.

chickens, pigs, wandering around a village, roosters announcing sunrise, birds swooping down to eat something on the ground and swoop back up as you approach, things like that to liven up a town. Sorry I'm getting a little off topic but this post is about livening up the town...sorta...

I didnt mind the amount of NPC's in oblivion, maybe a few more would be nice but im not overly fussed.
What was immersion breaking though were the smaller towns that consisted of three buildings and four people.

That's one thing that always bothered me about TES. Where are the kids? SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN! But I suppose they are thinking of the children. If you don't have kids in the game you can't kill them. That's always been a taboo in video games. As for the low population in Oblivion, they were basically testing with Oblivion. They had a new AI system and voice overs so they had to cut back somewhere. It makes a little more sense if you think about that in Medieval times like TES is based in have a low population anyhow thought Oblivion had a little low population but it never really bothered me, especially since I'm pretty sure that TES V will have larger populations. I could care less the flaws in Morrowind and Oblivion as long as those mistakes are corrected as they move along and eventually culminate in the perfect video game of all time, which will most likely be a TES game :celebration:

Not exactly.. kinda like infernal said. Theres a lower poly count and sometimes (but not always) texture maps are either lower in quality or not present. You'll often see characters in games like Fable 3 or Assassin's creed 2 lacking good specular maps (defines the shine) where as your playing character always has some shine to his apparel.

Maybe another to liven up the city would be to have that background hum of converstion you heard in places like freeside and NV in Fallout.
Its just me personally but i like spending as much time in all the cities as possible.

that makes 2 of us