Is it true that most villages and cities have few people in them?

Well after playing the game I can say that the roads are almostcompletely empty. The villages and cities also have waaay too few NPCs.

It would be good if a mod increased the population by an EXTREME amount.

The roads are better than Oblivion, but yes, still a bit empty. The cities, on the other hand, are great! I think they're plenty populated.

I hope TIE will be created for Skyrim just like how it was for Oblivion... It helped a lot.

Skyrim capital has less than 30 people.
Major camps of Stormcloak and Imperial have 6 soldiers and 2 to 3 wounded, not a single battle or siege in the civil war, talk about less than impressive setting.

Small vilages are OK, but it doesn t scale properly...Whiterun mage say "Miserable little village"....But if you scale it correctly, the miserable is whiterun.

those settings are really less then impressive, Balmora is bigger than Skyrim capital.

No, the cities actually have *too many* people in them. (hint: where do all the guards and their families live?)

Likewise, cities are actually "the right size". IMHO it would seem impractical for the Nords to have built cities much larger than those they have.

The only thing that is 'off' is the density of buildings in the cities - it's far too low. (the majority of highly valuable land inside city walls is used for grass/roads/wasteland/gardens etc).

Anyway, not a real problem for me, and no real way to fix it either.

To the OP: things were barren even in Morrowind but luckily, in MW it felt like a thriving world because of the epic main story and the Great Houses political unrest that enveloped the whole island.

Regular citizens of Skyrim are easily out numbered by bandits 10 to 1, and that is before you factor in bandits respawning.

They don't respawn if you clear where they are.

Dumbo, what are you smoking? Too large? Are you insane? Why would it be realistic for the nords to build small cities? What the fk? Of course Skyrim isn't the most populated place in the world, but that's no reason to build small cities. That's a reason to build few cities.

PS: the Guards live in the barracks, their families are normal NPCs.

Lorca: TES3 is an overrated piece of crap - though the morrowind cities were very densely populated, and so were even oblivion cities when compared to skyrim.

Your choices are to few and your poll question to ambiguious, you say villiages and towns in your topic title and then in your poll you say Skyrim, so which is it?

There are a good amount of NPCs in cities, how ever I will say I feel there are very limited NPCs roaming the world.

More NPCs in skyrim ==> more NPCs in cities and towns. Where else could they, realistically, be put?

Errr, even if you clear the dungeon they're in they do still respawn, just takes about a month *in game*

If you actually run around find all the town npc's during the day then look from them at night they pretty much all have a dwelling. So there is basically one person/family per home so it's the exact right amout of NPCs per location.

In the middle ages it was usual with extremely crammed households.