I thought Oblivion cities were pretty big too. In fact, i thought they were bigger than 90% of all Morrowind cities, with the exception of Vivec perhaps.

But yes, we need some interesting settlements. I thought Fallout: new Vegas did this quite well. There were lots of places, many of them pretty small, but they all had some interesting things to do.

As opposed to Oblivion, where any settlements outside of the major cities were more or less useless, outside of 1 quest they were involved in.

I think Morrowind did the best with towns though. Lots of them, a few big ones with lots of quests, and some with very little of interest at all, yet they still seem to be functioning towns.

5 cities sounds good to me. I'd really like the focus to be on these smaller towns and villages, as realistically Tamriel is a pre-Industrial society, and the majority of people would still be living in the countryside. For every town there would be 100 villages supporting it with crops and livestock - I'm not for a moment suggesting TESV should include such a massive number of villages, but the villages should still outnumber the towns by a fair way.

lol


not really

Oblivion's cities were so incredibly generic and static and boring, that I actually dreaded the times when I had to enter them.

I don't think Oblivion's cities were boring, I just wish we had some medium size villages that aren't completely walled in. There's no real interaction between the big cities and the countryside because they're in different worldspaces.