When you go there with the companions, I believe Vilkas say this is the tomb of Ysgramor (obviously) and the original companions. Does this mean then that, in lore (I counted 50 in-game) it has 500 tombs?

A more important lore question, however, is that all the male companion ghosts sounded...elven. I would have fought that, at the time of Ysgramor, his army would exclude elves after the Saarthal incident? Is this just another gameplay > lore issue, because I would have thought it would have been rather easy to have a human race talking with the ghost effect - unless it is just my hearing.

Honestly, I think nearly every ghost in the game was given that oblivion elf voice. So, probably a gameplay thing.

Aye. You're looking way too deeply into what has proven to be a mostly superficial experience that is Skyrim.

It should have 500 or close too that number of tombs, some might have died earlier and not be burried there, some might have lived longer and be burried somewhere else.

You also have to remember that everything is scaled, so counting often gives a wrong number.

Skyrim is scaled down to 10%

This is also why there are 700 steps to high Hrothgar

IIRC Viklas also mentiones that the best of the 500 Companions are burried there, so go figure.

As for the voice I have no idea.

All the ghosts sound like Elves in Oblivion. Guess that's what happens in the afterlife then.

When do you think they will have the tech to scale to 50%? I'm guessing 6-8 yrs.

If you want to get technical, they could scale up the size of a game like skyrim now, but there would have to be sacrifices to detail. For example, the cities in GTA, Assassin's creed, and others are massive, but have few if any enterable buildings, lack unique characters in the environment, and NPC's don't have full blown inventories or other elements of the player character. Beth pretty much can't scale up it's games too much with it's current design methodology, because it requires the design of far too many unique areas, npc's, and interiors, and with only limited engagement with random generation tech during the development stage. (and that's not even considering the tech problems of scaling things up with their current engine) To scale things up, bethesda either needs to inject work saving methods into it's design process (random generation of large cities or areas during the design phase) or cut down on work with interiors and other areas. (no interior halves the workload when adding any building)

See also: Daggerfall. It's not that they can't make a larger scale, it's that they don't feel it's worth it. It'd sacrifice hand-crafted detail for more procedural content. Personally I wouldn't mind making it a bit larger than the recent games have been... procedurally-generated content can look really nice in the right hands, and I think the heavy down-scaling doesn't do these places/environments justice, but Bethesda disagrees given their skill and workforce.