Those of you who have seen the PSM magazine, you will notice four windows in a single part of the wall surrounding Whiterun with the woman getting a view of the city. What could this mean? That'd be cool if it was actually a part of the exterior making it able to have contact from behind the window to the wilderness. Also attacking a creature from the window with a bow would be pretty awesome!! What do you guys think?

Maybe its a window for the guards as well, part of the guard towers (if there are any)

How big is this city compared to, say, Skingrad, or Leyawiin, in Oblivion? I really want to know!

Looks roughly equivalent to Skingrad to me, but it could easily be larger. The low angle we see it from isn't the best for determining size.

Unfortunately I think that those arrow slits in the wall may just be decorative, a solid mesh with a texture in the back that's just pitch black. Morrowind had them. However, it sure would be great if you could peek through them, or if "dummy" arrows shot out of them when an enemy nears, like a dungeon trap.

Attacking with the bow would be awesome behide cover just run to a city with windows and attack that extremely hard person/creature.

That's a bit dissapointing. Honestly, considering how "huge" they've been said to be, and the fact that they don't appear to have a single giant city like the IC or Vivec, and the fact that there's only5 plus the smaller towns, I'd be a bit pissed if they weren't at least twice the size of the average city in OB.

City size in Oblivion was wacky, because the walls surrounded a huge mostly empty area. If they were packed in with buildings like a medieval style walled city, they could have held four times the buildings and twenty times the population.

True, but going by Riften concept art and an admittedly blurry scan, I don't think they'll be much more packed in Skyrim.

This. Whiterun is a pretty packed mass of buildings. The area occupied appears from this angle to be about the same as both halves of Skingrad, plus the roadway in between, plus the castle. But, due to the angle it could just as easily be three times that size. Its on a hill, surrounded by walls, and the camera angle is about even with the bottom of the walls. The height of the walls is probably greater than it seems at first. One wall appears to be two stories tall, and other sections are as short as one storey. But since the whole thing is on a hill the walls don't really have to be too tall to do the job. Plus the city looks better with walls just low enough to show lots of roofs, as terrible as that would be in a real siege.

The castle looks more like an improbably huge mansion than a castle in the classical sense.

All the major cities were supposed to be equal to the size of the IC. I'll be disappointed if they do not live up to that claim.

Well that's because you've been believing everything you hear. Bethesda never said that to anyone. The only actual source that says that is an unreliable recount of information in other magazines from IGN. They even got basic things like the number of steps leading to High Hrothgar wrong. By far. They've been described as "massive", "big" and "huge" and that's it.

This.

If they are closed cities is it possible to "look out the window" at the game world and just an image of what it would be? And if you can shoot arrows and people in real time isn't that open cities? I DON'T under stand the technical aspects but isn't that why they are closed cities so consoles don't have to deal with all that info?

Really? I thought that was an official statement. I know well not to believe everything I hear but I did think that was official...I was prepared for disappointment on that front anyway it just seemed too good.

Okay, well regarding the size of the cities, the way I measure it is by number of buildings, since space taken up can vary greatly and isn't an accurate measure of content (eg. Chorrol could have had at least 10 more buildings easily if it weren't for those huge expanses of grass). Now, Churches included, I think I recall that all the towns in Oblivion had between 20 and 24 buildings. The Imperial City had a bit over a hundred, and the villages were tiny, which means there is enough buildings for roughly 2 1/2 to 3 Imperial Cities in Oblivion. For some reason, despite having a smaller team and extra details like the handplaced landscape, Morrowind seemed to have a bit more. If I recall, 38 for Balmora, 75-80 for Vivec, about 25 for Sadrith Mora, 20 or so for Ald Ruhn, 19 for Caldera(thanks, Br0ski), and the rest of the towns had between about 5 and 15. Given the larger team again, and having no longer to deal with the issue of new hardware, I had hoped we would see at least 40-50 buildings per major city, and about 25-25 in the smaller ones, plus minor towns with about 10. From this scan, it looks about 30 buildings, probably 40 at best, which is a little dissapointing, considering that from the map from the behind the scenes video, Whiterun looks to be one of the biggest cities.

Also, the grass looks much less lush than in the concept art, but I can mod that easily, I expect.

Caldera :wink_smile:

Snippets of trailer flybys seem to suggest that the buildings are far more densely-packed than they were in Oblivion. In addition to there potentially being additional wings of the city to the right off-camera and in the far back behind what we can see (the city may slope downwards or extend onto a lower hill out of view), I'm sure this screenshot is far from a reliable approximation of the entire city.

Also, I'm loving how the castle is more of a manor than a traditional fortification, although that kind of works against the story of the Old Holds in the PGE1. Reminds me of the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:Castle_wayrest.jpg, which I'd always admired in Daggerfall for how much more interesting it was than its rival cities' strongholds.