I'm hearing a lot of talk on here about the sizes, numbers of, and content wherein, of the cities of Skyrim. Especially in comparison to Oblivion's Cyrodill. Let me be your North of the Border travel rep and point out some things.

Skyrim cities take the belt when it comes to character. A lot of Oblivion storefronts, residencies, and general populace where copypaste background noise to fill in the spaces. In skyrim there is no space to fill, every nook and cranny is crammed with content. No person has no purpose. ie, no morrowind "commoners." There are family trees and relationships that exist way before you stumbled into town. You might notice that when the blacksmith dies jumping to your aid to defend his kin and his city from oversized flying iguanas. Every soul has a place they fit. Execpt you, and the kahjiits...

Skyrim feels like it has more history behind the cities, the people... even the war and racism.

And when you got a multitiered boardwalk lakeside city on one side of the map and on the other a city that is built into a moutain which is actually the opening face of a moria style dwemer ruin, well... compare chorral and cheydinhal.

One thing I miss though is specialty shops. Books, shields, staffs.....

The cities are more detailed than Oblivion, and they are certainly more alive. However, there's no real feeling of hugeness to them. Sometimes it's nice to have pointless buildings and NPCs, a la Final Fantasy, just to create the scale of big.

But I understand the TES model. They want living, breathing, AI driven NPCs with lives and things to care about more than they want the illusion of something far bigger. I think the TES approach, ultimately, is better. It will scale up in the end, years from now, when they have the hardware to do more NPCs and buildings in a City. Everyone else will be stuck trying to copy TES at that point, or using the model they already have, which will be old by then.

Still though, I think the cities could have been bigger even now. Just five more buildings in each one, with a random NPC that lives in there, with a random job at one of the other buildings, would have been really nice.

hey all I said was they were smaller, never disputed that they blow each and every city out of the water in Oblivion when it came to feeling and character, hell even Morrowind. its more palpable ;p

Same. Can't wait for a better cities mod for skyrim.


The NPCs talk about how bad racism is yet everyone loves me. :confused:

nah your fine i even agree, but there's been talk by folks who just want eleven Imperial cities scattered across the map, or even better fantasy GTA style cities...

They are on the right track. They are a huge improvement over Oblivion in terms of character and variety, now they just need to make them larger for the next TES game.

It's my opinion that the art design and atmosphere of Skyrim's towns and cities are the best in the entire Elder Scrolls series.

Markarth made me feel so small whe I first got there. Grante it was after I drank a bit too much but still lol. I'll take the immersion I skyrim cities over the size of oblivion ones any day

I'd like to point out that Skyrim cities are almost the right size for medieval-era cities. If they were, say, 25% bigger, they'd be proper medieval cities.

That's awesome. Bethesda have achieved something very close to realism- even with the constraints of disc size.

The cities are almost, almost perfect. They just needed to be a bit bigger and have a bit more interactivity/variety to them, and I'd have been in my idea of heaven.

(I do have to point out, though, that Skyrim feels tiny. The cities should have been more spaced out. Say ... 33%-50% more land mass would have been great.)

so i guess you wouldn't want apartment complexes and tramrails in the next ES? :biggrin:

Medieval cities only had 48 people in them?

Nah I understand what you are getting out. But you do have to remember that the cities in skyrim only have 5-7 houses in them. I would actually prefer more streets in the Skyrim cities that look a little bit like stripmalls, where people just piled up in living quarters like they really did in the medieval era. However, the problem with that is that it takes a lot of processing power to have all those NPCs actually doing something.

Bethesda wants to avoid pointless NPCs that just stand around. If you are going to do that, you can only have so many. Soon, their technology will improve and they can get more people packed into smaller living spaces, and it will feel much more real.

weird, I'm not really impressed with Markarth, to me its a hole with a single spire in the middle, and to be blunt for all its shine and luster its...lacking...don't know what but it is. for all the talk of silverblood your interaction with them is Minimal unless you get into a certain quest. meh...um....nah I got nothing on a city I really like, WHAT IS THIS LACKING FEELING I KEEP GETTING FROM THEM.

No thanks. Let's leave that stuff to FF. They USED to be able to do it. I wonder if they've still got it in them to pull something like FF8 out of their hat.



Yeah, there should have been more people in more cramped living quarters. That's the unrealistic part of it. I don't know if I'm the only one with this impression but everything seems just a bit oversized to me. And I'd have liked to see more shack-like, rickety structures, like the abandoned hideouts you'll find in the wilderness.

Still, very good effort on Bethesda's part. Can't wait for VI. They should be able to get them just right, then.

Edit: Gothic 1/2 did 'medieval' very well. They couldn't get the scale right, but everything else? Almost ideal.



It's the lack of people/interactivity/change. And what I mentioned above- the oversized-ness of everything adds to the unreal-ness of the cities.

I prefer the oblivion way. It makes them seem bigger.

I was just thinking the places didn't feel big compared to oblivion. Even though there was lots of empty space in oblivion cities, you just got the feeling that you were more safe in a huge city where you could relax. Whiterun and Markarth are amazing to be sure, it was stunning when I first entered Markarth, but does anyone else have the feeling that the cities are so narrow? The "roads" in skyrim cities feel cramped and narrow. Solitude feels like just two narrow roads with houses on each side! Markarth has the most narrowest stairs and paths, you'd think it'd be wider with such a terrible fall possible at the higher level! There's nowhere really in the city to just be alone with your thoughts or relax, aside from your house, which is, again, very cramped. I can't think of a single place in whiterun that would be nice to just be alone. Everywhere you are you are within a few feet of some fences, a priest, a shop, or a house!

Then again, the idea of Markarth palace being a giant dwemer ruin was wonderful. It really is quite vast in there. But I can't say it enough, cities like chorol, anvil, most of them in fact, were all so different yet quite spacious. How many big cities were there in Oblivion? 7 I believe, including the HUGE imperial city. There are 5 medium sized cramped ones in Skyrim. Windhelm feels like a dump to me for some reason, but I think that's cause I'm on the imperials side. And speaking of cramped, riften is just a cluster of people and houses, not to mention the bottom level of riften is just one narrow line of houses and shops. There are really only the 3 cities I like, and without all the guilds and different types of shops in each city, it really is much smaller and feels like there is less to do in cities other than the same old fetch quest.

Think of the division between the castle and the rest of the city. You'd think there WOULD be a big one since you can fast travel to the keep/hold of each city. Yet in Solitude, what SOUNDS like the capital of Skyrim since the High King lived there, the blue palace, is separated from the rest of the city by 1 guard and a few pillars. Contrast this to Oblivion where usually the CASTLE was separated from the city with tons of guards, entrances, and a giant hall/many rooms in said castle. Whiterun sort of has this going on, and Markarth as well. Maybe that's why Ulfric was able to kill the High King so easily! Was it cheydinhal that did it best, with the huge bridge leading to the palace? Spacious dining halls, barracks, prisons. All gone!

I wouldn't have minded so much no guild halls since there was one big college for mages, but that itself was quite unspectacular. The midden was an interesting twist, but wasn't used enough probably.

So 5 big cities, and winterhold is the Kvatch of skyrim I suppose? That place has, I think, 4 buildings. I don't know HOW they function with a jarl and guards, when the population is around 10 or less....

That leaves 3 other "towns" that aren't within walls. For some reason, I can never bring myself to like those places as much as either Skyrim's walled cities, or Oblivion's walled cities. Something about not being walled doesn't feel right. It does feel more natural and makes sense of course, but again, it feels like there's not much to do there, and no reason to stay in cities, walled or not, too long. Often they're as simple as 2 shops, a tavern, and the jarl's house.

Anyway, I'm level 75 and hundreds of hours into my character, loving the game. I just needed to vent this little bit since I was always a fan of big towns/cities in all types of games. Loved the feeling of spacious safeness with shops for everything and a largish population. People say there's less "filler" in skyrim cities? Yet there are those typical 3 booths of vendors almost nobody uses. What happened to random giant bookstore we would never use but would love to visit. And the imperial marketplace was a dream come true for the business inclined elder scroll gamers. There were almost more shops in that district than all of skyrims cities! Seems like a lack of variety in the choice of shops and buildings in cities.

Oh, another example of crampedness is the chapels. I can't measure, but I feel like Oblivion's chapels were at least twice the size of the ones in Skyrim. You could pinpoint them from anywhere in the city usually, but in Skyrim, you can't really identify where it would be. And when you go in, it feels dark, gloomy, and of course, cramped. Perhaps the spacious dungeons in skyrim compensate for the cramped cities, while the opposite is true for Oblivion. I can't give away any spoilers here, but there are some RIDICULOUSLY big "dungeons". But really, just needed the cities a bit bigger, few more shops, wider roads in them, and if you're going to sack winterhold yet still call it a city, improve the other unwalled cities! Even dawnstar probably only has a population of 15 or so.

dtmwerks

The medieval inspiration behind TES cities aside ... Skyrim is cold. There's a very good reason to keep things small and cramped. The smaller the space, the easier it is to warm and keep warm.

I think there might be two broad camps into which people might fit, re: Skyrim cities.

1) Realists. We like how realistic the cities are. We appreciate that they're appropriate to the region and the time and culture that inspired them.

2) Fantasists. We like cities that are over the top, fantastic, extravagant. We appreciate wonder more than 'propriety'.

Uh, do you have any reliable sources saying major cities in the middle ages were 25 buildings on 2 streets? EDIT: I had a look and I found one on population, not buildings, but anyway. http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm Now even if that's an average of 50 people to a single house (Whihc is probably not likely), a city in the middle ages would have 160 to 2,000 houses. If we assume 10 people to a house, probably closer to accuracy I'd guess, it's 800 to 10,000 houses. Assassin's creed cities are close to real medieval cities. TES cities are not.

Science, don't make me try to find medieval drawings of cities. I assure you the average medieval city was just slightly larger than the ones you see in Skyrim.

Population density and the size of dwellings needs to be taken into account. Also the fact that many people who did belong to a fiefdom lived outside of the city's walls. They tried to illustrate this in Skyrim with, e.g. the farms, mines, etc. outside cities, but the land mass of the game just isn't big enough to realistically depict medieval fiefdoms.

And yes, I realise I'm using the term 'city' loosely.