But that's still contradictory to the spirit of TES - to provide the player with a huge open world where you can do anything, talk to anyone and so on.

Hmm interesting, somehow Oblivion had useless dialogue and Morrowind isn't mentioned as having even more worthless dialogue. Mainly the extra dialogue was to make them seem more real, more aware of their world. Several people had dialogue that would be the same as someone elses but it would be greyed out let you know. In Morrowind, every person from every town had the same 13 dialogue options even though some of them had no way of knowing the same thing as someone on the other side of Vvardenfell. Also, these days we have ways of packaging high quality audio data effectively and able to extract it in a timely manner. Thus is the great thing with bettering technology. So now we will be able to have even more dialogue than before.

they could also fix the VA problem whit 2 disk like one disk install the core game and then the other install the VA. or they found a way to compress the files whit not loosing quality.

I'm hoping for more thought about population, as far as local populations go...I mean, in my opinion, Imperial City was pretty wimpy for the capital of Tamriel. I don't expect any metropolises on the level of the Imperial City but a few good-sized cities here and there, several towns in-between on the main roads and maybe some small villages here and there. I don't know much about Skyrim lore but it seems like it would be a territory with vast open spaces and possibly nomadic tribes.

in video games gameplay mechanic not equal lore in term of populations. if the lore said that 1000 people live in a town and there 45 people living in that town in the game in canon there still 1000.

I wouldn't want more people in Oblivion, lore or not. The game simply couldn't cope, and even the "grand battles" caused a heavy strain. If I have to choose between 20 people *living* in a town and 100 people *standing* in a town, I'll go for the living. Obviously we can't have both.

No generic NPC's. They've taken the time to make it as good as possible and their team is like, what, three times bigger than for Morrowind? No generic NPC's that just walk around like robots (imagine that combined with the Radiant Story if they can actually pull this off) and serve no purpose other than filling up space, taking up precious air to breathe from people who actually matter or otherwise I'd have to go on a mass killing spree to remove them (either by console or otherwise) that would put many dictators to shame. I expect to see more NPC's that do more useful things and have more to offer to the player.

Main cost of npc is not radiant AI or name and char info in database, it mesh and textures in addition to tactical AI.
It’s probably just a 1-2% performance to use generic respawning npc like Oblivion guards and bandits. Yes the coding become easier and it would be far easier to populate areas but a lot would be like Morrowind npc unless you give them complex schedule.

Double Post.

I disagree. While well populated and the people are grouped into sets to work for the game and the nature of how it's played it wouldn't be a benchmark. GTA IV and RDR would hold those spots for creating individuals that look vastly varied with a multitude of tasks and responses while populating a mass/specific area. It's actually something I was disappointed by in AC 1 and 2. The need for clusters is reasonable but they lack the variation.

Skyrim is a different breed. Past games I'd say the issues been Gamebryo not handling the engine or Bethesda being too lazy to tweak it enough to handle more NPCs in the screen. I'd venture cities to towns and small clustered settlements will have the appropriate amount of people.

if modders can add npcs in morrowind and oblivion such as with morrowind comes alive and TIE then there is no reason why they couldnt have done it. then engine wasnt the problem i just think there was a time crunch or some other development reason. considering the extremely short draw distances in oblivion on the consoles i dont think they would have effected them as much either since alot of times stuff popped up when you were practically in front of it.

PC's don't have nearly the memory restriction the console does and i highly doubt that either the Xbox or the 360 can handle much more than was present. You have to remember the devs are limited to 512mb of memory and that is 1/4 of what a PC can give.

I hate that in fallout...No nameless npc, I don't care if they have nothing of importance to the story everyone should have a name and a few greetings, how hard is it to get a couple of 100 people to hello, good buy, get this or that for me and don't forget "uuuhhhhurrghgh" ur killing me.
NO GENERIC STUFF

I think they should have npcs that have places to live and complex schedules and a more complete dialog. They also should have more npcs that are randomly generated with a simple generic schedule and a randomly generated name with a simple generic dialog. They could even create a system to generate the looks of the random npcs so that it would be constantly different to simulate a real population and they could have some unique responses that you get from these generic npcs that can lead to quests and other stuff so it won't be useless to talk to them. It would be easy to do the voices since there wouldn't be all that much dialog since they mostly have the same dialog per region along with some race dialog and then each race would have 2 voices. The AI would have them walk between a few different locations and maybe stop to look at a vendors stall. Also some could be standing around in a tavern drinking or eating and some would be looking at wares in shops. Since these would be randomly generated for the cell and disappear when they leave the cell the AI for the people in the tavern and shops would be just one action and the ones outside would have at most 2 actions so the resource usage would be low.

PS. These generic npcs would also not be kept in memory when you get far enough away (2 cells) and would be regenerated when you reenter the cell.

I just want to say one thing.


NO GENERIC NPCS

Totally ruins the immersion for me.

I wish they differentiated their products between Console and PC, so that the PC version could be made in a way that was worthy of PC capabilities, but it seems unlikely. :glare: