A big problem with TES 3-5 is the lack of npc density in cities, towns. Cities feel nothing like cities at all, more like small villages because of this. Skyrim had some improvement on this but it was still bad. Riften, the "big" capital city is a joke. There are only a few npcs and they do nothing interesting at all. It's really immersion breaking.

In Hitman Absoltuion there's a "crowd system". It let's showing hundreds of npcs at the same time. Bethesda need to learn/steal/whatever and put it into the next game ASAP.

http://youtu.be/p7eKMuhppqw

I guess you should only expect that with a new game engine. Sadly.

Bluh... one of the major selling points of TES is that NPCs aren't just nameless clones, but fully-fleshed out characters with wants, needs, and desires that they act upon. Ditto for buildings- they aren't just props to line the city street- each one is a unique interior that you can enter and explore.

Cutting that in favor of bland crowds a la Hitman/Assassin's Creed/Saint's Row/RDR/Literally any sandbox game this generation would be a big disappointment to me.

A minor quibble - Riften isn't the capital of Skyrim. Solitude is.

Next gen consoles should help some, pretty limited that you can do with 512 MB, but as other say npc in TES don't work like this, I would rather have more depth in them, bring back the relation system from Morrowind and Oblivion.

Anyway even if an town had say 500 npc you would only see some of them at once unless it was some sort of event.

I agree

I don't think Skyrim improved on it at all.
Morrowind is like 1/3 the size of Skyrim and it had around 1200 npc.
Skyrim had around 900, I think.

I would much rather have a handful of detailed NPCs with their own Unique Dialogue, personalities, routines and AI. then I would Numerous NPCs who just stand there, or adding NPCs just to say "hey look at all the NPCs we have in this city!"

Not to mention that if you increase the size of the cities, you have to increase the size of the wilderness to match. And a larger map would mean more towns and dungeons. There's no way they could detail all that with the way they work.


What you'd end up with is basically a return to Daggerfall-style world design. Where they create the world at a more realistic scale, and then let procedural generation fill in the details all the way down to individual NPC stats and their available dialog responses. Speaking honesty, I'd actually be kinda interested in that. If they could manage to do it well, the atmosphere and sense of a living world would be unmatched -- it would be a very immersive and awesome experience.

However, that doesn't really fit BGS's modern design principles. The main devs that worked on Daggerfall aren't really around anymore, so it'd require a huge paradigm shift for the current team. And if they're not familiar with leveraging large-scale procedural generation to know how to take it to the next level of believability, they could easily botch it and end up with a dull and unimmersive world.