I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that despite being the second biggest city in Morrowind or Oblivion (trumped by Vivec), the Imperial City had nothing to keep interest. It just failed as a city in design terms, and thus I spent hardly any time there. IMO none of the cities in Olivion really got the full attention they needed. Here are some things I think would improve the cities, and should be used in at least some of Skyrim's cities.

IMPORTANT: From an anolysis of the map available, assuming that the cells are the same size as Oblivion (likely since they fit with Todd Howards summary of the map size), the city layouts are roughly the same size as the average Oblivion city.

-More compacted cities and less empty space. One surefire way to make a city feel empty is to have lots of open spaces. Even with them being the same size, they can pack a lot more into a city by having thinner paths between buildings. You could probably get 30-40 buildings in the space tha in Oblivion gave you 15-21. Bruma was the smallest city in Oblivion spacewise, but had more houses than some others. This also makes it feel more crowded, even if there are only a few NPCs there. Many of the cities in OB were more like suburbs or large towns.
-More streets. Even if they are short streets, making the player search around a twisted maze makes it feel much more metropolitan and larger. It makes it feel rather minute in say, Anvil, when I can go past every building in the city without taking a side route and can see the opposite gate upon entering.
-More NPCs. It may have been due to poor engine efficiency in Oblivion, hopefully it will be better in Skyrim, but there was barely anyone around in Oblivion cities. With extra houses, this should come basically by default, but also increase the average number of NPCs inside each home and put more beggars around (many people went without homes in medieval times). Also, make them go out more, so you see them wandering the streets, chatting more often.
-Make NPCs take part in activities. I am confident they will have this, better AI and some mention of festivals in the magazines. It will be nice to see NPCs get into (harmless) fights, children playing games, people working, NPCs actually going into shops and purchasing items (or at least appearing to). Also, things like market stalls outside on the street so that you can see it even at first glance.
-Spread out shops a bit more. One of the big reasons to go to cities is for the shops that are available. One thing that bothered me with the IC was how they were all in one place. It's fine to have a central market district, but also spatter a few shops (other than taverns and inns) around the city.
-Give every NPC something to say. It's not hard, honestly, and makes them feel more real. There is no good reason someone should put all that effort into designing an NPC with a home, schedule, stats, inventories etc. and then not give a basic bit of info on them.

So, yeah. What are your thoughts?

I agree with most everything you have to say, althought Im confident that many of those issues have already been addressed in Skyrim. Oblivion was a LOOOONG time ago. Plus just from what we have heard so far, its certain that at least a few of your core issues have already been resolved.

if theyre going to have crowded streets NPCs should react appropriately to being pushed (like in Assasins Creed) instead of being the brick walls they were in previous TES games

Well,they won't be quite as crowded, but I agree. Run into them fast and thereshould be a reaction, possibly even get into a fight if they're partcularly aggressive. From the screen of Riverwood, it looks like they will eb more dynamic. Saw one leaning on a railing and another leanign backwards against a wall.

EDIT: They should also have some AI to avoid running into you and others, and to move out of the way if you are walking into them (though if you persistently do it they should get pissed off!).

already in fo3 and nv. just another idle anim i think.

And also, put more farms and such outside cities. They are supposed to be capitals, so they should have an economy revolving around them. And more shops. Does anyone have to join a guild if they want anything other than the few types of goods available in their nearest city? There was only 3 shops a city in Oblivion.

- Euphoria
- Populated taverns like in The Witcher
- Ceremonials, processions, celebrations
- Public executions
- Open air market
- Merchandise being brought by carriages and unloaded in the storage in real time
- Faction guards patrolling in formation
- Couriers and preachers
- Shady quarters where the law is less present
- Nightlife, drunk/naked/singing people
- Houses, bridges, carriages, boats being built in real time, you can see the progress
- NPC's being arrested
- NPC's repairing or painting their houses
- Dead NPC's being carried to the mortuary
- Alternative entrances to houses (open windows, chimneys, basemants)
- More utility buildings: public bath, morgue, medic, brothel
- Ropes and ladders for thieves

I kinda doubt you'll see that. There's no way Skyrim will be able to do something that complex. But I definitely liek many of your ideas.

Hell yea that's what every respectable city should have!

I agree with your points, Dragonbone. That would help to make cities feel bigger, and certainly also more interesting. Narrow alleys etc. are great for atmosphere.

But I think for me, the reason that the cities felt so small was that there were only very few buildings that you interacted with. Or to be more specific, there were only a few shops in each town, for example. And most of the time, there was only one shop for one type of item. Or in the case of the Imperial city, they were all crammed into one place, and half of them were completely useless. Stonewall Shields was neither a specialized shield shop, nor was it in any way a competition to the convenient Best Defense.
So what does this all mean... well, it means that you very quickly get to know the one smith in town, or the one alchemist. The city loses its atmosphere of anonymity. Additionally, you don't have any choices. If you need to sell a weapon, there's no thinking involved like "which store is nearer", "which gives me better prices", "which merchant do I like better"... you just go to the one and only weaponsmith in the city. Not to mention that there were hardly any special shops outside the IC, and a lot of shop types had been removed, like Enchanter, Spellmaker, Clothier, Healer or Pawnbroker.

As for other interaction: There weren't any trainers except for the few select ones, while in Morrowind every guild had a couple of trainers, which made you interact with these guilds. I hardly ever used trainers in Oblivion because I simply didn't find the ones I needed; in Morrowind, there was a good chance of finding one. And of course, there were no transportation services, less "divine services" (in Morrowind you could go to either the Temple or the Imperial Cult) and no guilds that you visited in order to complete the local quests.

Morrowind did that pretty good. In Balmora alone, there were House Hlaalu, Thieves Guild, Fighters Guild, Mages Guild, Morag Tong, Temple and Imperial Cult. The last two are mere services in this case, but the others each offer 5 to 10 quests each, many of which revolve around the area of Balmora and its surrounding villages like Hla Oad and Pelagiad. That makes the city feel huge. There's so much to do, there are so many characters that you get to meet in the process. There are also lots of shops - too much to remember, plus the guild services which compete with these shops, you always had to decide where you wanted to go to, and all these available choices made it feel like a huge city.

Ah well, I could go on. The point is.. I think these choices and all these interactions are what makes a city feel big and bustling, unique and interesting.

Yeah, definitely. Shops should have different price ranges, more specific item types, more special weapons and so on. There should be certain advantages and disadvantages to each shop. I remember a mod for a town which I didn't get because it was buggy, but it had a soul gem shop. Why weren't there any soul gem merchants in the game?

It's probably a rare enough product (with a similarly rare customer base) that it's not economically feasible for a shop. An added service (if you know the right way to ask) at a regular magic shop, or a private service provided to well connected mages out of some rich guy's house maybe. Depends on how "common" enchanted items really are, for the "regular" population.


....

Yeah, some of the basic things mentioned about shops in OB ring true (like only using a few of them). But, for me, making it more tedious (more specialized shops, etc) wouldn't really change things for me. I just want to dump the loot as easily as possible. I'd still find just the fewest shops needed to off load junk (say, a blacksmith for the weapons & armor, a magic or alchemy shop for the potions & plants, and a junk dealer for anything else) and only use those. Getting less money per transaction would be less important than saving play time/convenience. (Similarly, if shops were spread out among the districts, say, of the Imperial City, I'd try to find the one or two adjacent districts that contained my "minimum" shops. Even with fast travel, running all over the place just to do basic chores and maintenance would get incredibly tedious very quickly.)

But, hey, maybe that's just me.

To demonstrate just how it looks with a more compact city, I am building a rough version of one (using the Leyawiin tileset) as a mod for OB and I'll upload it when I'm done.

I hope seedier parts of cities will actually feel dangerous to linger in with prositutes and thieves about. Maybe some random encounters with thugs. And yeah, I'd like to see some market stalls and children playing, some cats and dogs maybe.

Well dotn forget the imperial capital was designed to look somewhat rundown and past its prime. You could tell that best at the docks with all those deralict wherehouses. In some ways you could tell the city had been shrinking for a long time.

But the main problem with ob was imperials are freaking boring and have dull cities.

No, that's not just you. And I'm also in agreement with you that shops shouldn't necessarily be more specialized just to make the player run around looking for the correct one. However, you're missing the point I wanted to make.
What I thought Morrowind did well was that you could easily find shops where you could sell your junk - they were around in larger quantities than in Oblivion, and they were spread over the whole world (every village had at least a general store, the towns had a couple of different stores and the cities had many, many stores where some kinds of shops appeared multiple times). However, if you wanted to buy something (which was also a lot more important in Morrowind, at least early in the game) or if you were looking for other services like Enchanting (which was always an important service because the skill svcked), you'd have to know where you're going in order to get what you want. Over time, you'd memorize the locations of certain shops, and suddenly you find that usually, there's a shop that does exactly what you need really close to where you currently are. But this is only the case because you know many shops in one city that offer these kinds of services.

So in the end, my point was not that shops should be more specialized, but simply that there should be more of them in one town. Give them different names (e.g. pawnbroker / general goods store / tradehouse) and slightly different inventory, but place enough of them in the city to make the player think about his options.

I thought that the Cities in Oblivion was missing a little character. I remember that you would look at the forest and just say wow, but the cities just didn't have that wow factor that forest did in the early 2000s. I think that cities should be this rich cultural setting that makes you want to look around at all the details, make you feel like you are in another world all together.

I'll be interested to see that.

You pretty much summed up every reason why I (personally) found Oblivion kind of disappointing. Not to bash it or anything, it was good for other reasons, but there was just so much to do in Morrowind! I played that game for years, and never had to complete the main quest because there were just so many unique factions and side quests to be engaged in. Whereas in Oblivion to keep it interesting I've joined every single guild and gone through the main quest several times over.
Vivec was so complex on every level, from being able to free slaves in the lower cantons, to finding love letters in the planters on the top floor. They built on this in Mournhold as well, being able to get a pack rat or scrib for a pet was somehow fufilling :]

It's not really the size of the map that matters but how many interactable NPC's there are, and the ability to engage in unique quest lines or discover unique things about a particular location.
(The head of Scourge, etc..)

I doubt many people would like less complex cities. I for one would like teh capital city of Skyrim to be five times the size or Oblivions capital. More living sections where peoples homes are, a more complex civic-center where goverment builidng reside, and I for one would life to see a real 'university section' to the city with dorms, teaching halls, library, sports arean, and a sense of this being part of teh city as well as being ist own social space.

The biggest probelm these games face is they are always trying to make less space seem like more space. It is the crazy sense of scale they use to hide how limited things are that gets in the way in my opinion. Cities need to have a truer sense of scale teh teh rest of teh game. A stand of trees one hundred meters wide by 300 metters long can represent a forest just fine. But one street with two cross stresst CANNOT represent a section of a city. A few dozen single family dewellings cannot repsenst a housing district. Two ships on fifty feet of dock in a harbor isn't a port.

When I was a kid I used to take out teh same book from the library time after time, it was David Macaulay's City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction (1974). To me that was the best books ever written because it shows a city that would be appealing to walk within and live within. How woderful if TES could have cites like that that you could feel would work because it wasn't just 'bits' of a city should be but 'everything' a city needs. Could you get lost withing such a city? Sure...but that would be wonderful.

:woot: :woot: :woot: YES!!!!!!! :woot: :woot: :woot:

i agree, i prefer more complexity, i didn't like the imperial city very much, overall i loved oblivion, but i agree, i play wolfenstein, and it has a cool main city, cobbled streets, lots of alley ways and nooks and crannies, so i do want a more comlex city layout with a lot palced in.

[Link no longer available]
I did the city. From a brief overview it looks to be about 2/3 the size of Leyawiin, which had 22 buildings including the church, and this one has 34 buildings including the church. Therefore, it is probably around twice as dense. I probably would have been able to fit more in with most city tilesets, but Leyawiin has some bigass buildings. Keep in mind it's not done proffesionally, has little effort put into it, and only shows one aspect of my reccomendations for the cities. Still, what do you think? Does this sort of thing improve the city to you (Imagine I've added more vegetation, street vendors, NPCs, decorations, footpaths etc.)?

The city is marked on the map and ready for fast travelling on the area of land between the 2 rivers East of Bravil.