As someone who often plays a thief, and who prefers personality, stealth, and illusion skills I prefer cities.

I recently played Morrowind where I was a thief character and never left a town or city, taking silt striders from place to place. I found that so much more fun than almost all my other playthroughs.

People, culture, and theft are what I like in TES games, those are city things. I absolutely love cities and want one of a believable size. I probably wouldn’t complain if they didn’t even make the wilderness between their cities, but I'm not advocating that I understand how other people like the wilderness, and its good to escape guards out there. But I'm a city guy through and through.

I voted "More Wilderness", if I have to choose just one. That is, so long as there are camps, ruins, and cabins to fill it with. People like cities because they provide the majority of NPCs and quest - make the wilderness an interesting place to explore, and exploration will naturally follow.

Large cities aren't neccessary or accurate for a pre-industrial society where 90%+ of the population are involved in food production. The rare large city in ancient or medeval times like Rome, Constantinople or Cordoba required an empire to support it. The Imperial City might be that sort of size but most "cities" would be little more than market towns .

A city doesn't need to be massive, it does need to be bustling. Markets, busy docks, people passing through, could've made Vivec or the IC feel more like a real city than more real estate.

And for the next game I'd like much more wilderness, enough to get lost in, enough to feel discoveries were an achievement, and 1 big bustling city, plus several smaller but still lively cities/towns.

Please enlarge cities. Cities should be a MARVEL. The Imperial City really svcked and wasn't that believable (it worked because people are mostly alien to medieval cities but it could have been MUCH better). And actually, the way I see it, there need not be too much delineation between cities and wildnerness. For example, the imperial sewers could be filled with all manners of nooks and passages and baddies making it, essentially, an outside area. Quests could be weaved with the City areas. So maybe your mission is to assassinate a named city guard. Now you'll observe the guy making rounds at a quiet brothel in the docks. Maybe there could be private areas within the city to fight in; huge mansions could be a fun playground for quests or just general looting - whatever. Basically the City need not be just a place to rest and buy stuff from mercs.Cities need to be bigger and CONTIGUOUS (instancing) so that it APPEARS to be big. And how 'bout a more authentic design? Look at various urban regions in the world. Check out the Favellas, the cottages, the spanish terraces, the multistoried apartments and see how they mesh in with the surrounding environment. Look at the layout. Look at the verticality, the slopes, whatever. Basically all of these places exhibit a fairly unique character that essentially allow them to be tourist attractions.

Without a doubt I want the cities to be larger in the next game. I also want cities to be based on what real city would be like if if they are 'less gamie'

Bigger cites ARE
- Harder to traverse
- Take more time to get to where you want
- Spread out making questing inside them take longer.

But, I want to explore a city and to do that there must be places to discover and it must be large enough to be rich in content. In terms of scale I want Cyrodiil City to be 8x larger. But it needs to have more areas then just market/shops, arena, arboretum, temple district, Talos Plaza, and Elven Gardens. They need to add just a normal university, a manufacturing district, a middle housing, immigrant district, and a militray district

Then each district needs to be more complex. The market/shop district needs more shops but also two dozen open stall bazaar. The arena need gambling houses, brothels, and high end organized crime houses. The arboretum need to be a far larger park with park style activities. The temple district should have the temple, a city monastery, and a seminary college. The Talos Plaze distrcit with the rich people should have smaller upscale homes, mansions, and also walled compounds for the VERY rich. And the center of the city need to have far more city government buildings

A few large cities and way more smaller settlements

Ergo Morrowind over Oblivion

They need to add small settlements for sure. For me that what was always lacking in Oblivion. You had your major cities and a handful of small villages. They need to add more in my opinion, it might not be such a big deal with Skyrim since it has more difficult terrain and therefore harder to live everywhere. But the valleys should be filled with quite a bit of people considering that's where most live in Skyrim.

Exactly, and the villages that were in IV were boring, and all the same (i.e: Pell's Gate and Blakenmarch), they need to have more life, and quests.

If I ever get into modding, I plan to make a bunch of interesting small villages to Cyrodiil, just to give the place more life.

Loving the third question :goodjob:

I voted cities/exploring/or here/yes. I believe that cities are a crucial part of any game. A small city gives the idea that the world isn't that big, while a big one acts conversely. This (I believe) is due to the way the player interacts with a city; a city is something a player can familiarize with and associate real-life experience towards, giving them a better feel for this new world. But when you get a world that only has three or four book stores and one jeweler throughout the whole map...call me picky, but that is small, very small.

I expect the average city to be about 1/2 to 3/4 the size of the imperial city island, not the city, the island. Anvil felt like a village with two ships moored; as one of the central port towns of cyrodiil, I expected a bit more than that. The Imperial City was ok but it could use more, the graveyards were too small (you really expect me to believe that everyone in the biggest city in Cyrodiil excluding the waterfront used that tiny place? Seriously?) And as the biggest city in the province, my expectations are 3-4 of each different craft-shop, not one bookstore and one jeweler <_<

I like getting immersed in the cities, and feeling as if I'm actually living in this new world, but its kind of hard to do that when each city is smaller than a real-life district.

EDIT:


I believe there are already a number of mods that breathe a bit more life into the boring villages, try 'Kragenir's Death Quest', it gives each village and a lot of other a lot of more quests.

Indeed, just like the crows in Fallout:NV. I found those a nice touch, and it's always fun to watch them explode in a bloody whirlwind.

Well the cities was definitely way too small to be believable. The Imperial City didn't feel like the capital of the empire at all. The villages where even worse. 3 houses will never be a village IMO. On the other hand, the distance between the cities, villages, dungeons and other point of interests was also too short in Oblivion and in Morrowind it was even worse. So basically i want larger cities AND more wilderness.

The real problem ofcause, is the world scale. 16 Square miles is way too small to represent a whole province, especialy if that province also happen to be the largest in the empire. However, had they focused on a smaller region in Cyrodiil instead, the size had been fine.

But since i have to chose, i'm just gonna say more wilderness since larger cities with less wilderness is worse than more wilderness with smaller cities IMO.

Agreed. The next game should be at least 2-3 times bigger that the previouse, and the major cities should atleast be as big as the Imperial City was in Oblivion, with the capitol even bigger.