They could have made the cities bigger if they just added a bunch of no-entry blank house facades like most games do, but that would be against the spirit of the Elder Scrolls series where you should be free to roam anywhere.

Really you just have to use your imagination and not get too hung up with the scale.

What I do really like about the Skyrim cities though is that they have marketplaces unlike the ones in Oblivion. So there is a place where the npcs gather and pvssyr away which makes them feel more alive.

If you take a look at the graphics comparison that will answer your question. There is a reason Bethesda has to seperate cell their modern games. I always chuckle to myself when I read people say how they would like to see Morrowind with today's graphics. Well the first thing tha would need to go is the open cities.

So its a flash over substance thing?

No, its a technical requirement thing.

The actual size in area doesn't matter too much for me, but it would have been better to have more crowded cities in terms of buildings, with each house housing two families, one who lives on the upper floor and one who lives on the 1st floor with perhaps a bum or two in the basemant.
Even if the population increased x2 with just generic NPC's.

I for one expected them to do better.

Dungeons are often really big and populated though. I think a lot of ppl don't know how development work . For each thingies you want added .. they have added something else you enjoy. Good thing we have plenty of great modder.

You want filler NPC because city feel empty? So for this remove something else that you enjoy .. Like your favorite quest. Would you do it? Remove the dark brotherhood questline for a bigger solitude with empty house and filler npc. Would you do it? Remove 50 hours of game content for a bigger mountain. Would you do it?

Hmm?

Publisher and developer have something we call a deadline. Perfectionism it's only something that modder with a lot of time can do.

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that Riverwood is bigger than Morthal? I don't get why a major city is smaller than a village.

Because its at the beginning of the game.

Same reason why Vilverin is the best dungeon in Oblivion.

To be honest i think it's console hardware limitations (again) more than anything else, i just don't like talking about it. As a long time PC gamer it annoys me how we are being compromised, but at the same time i fully understand it.

Oblivion and Skyrim have more advanced graphics than Morrowind, but Bethesda were still limited to the PS3 and XBox360 hardware... so they had to make compromises. If Oblivion and Skyrim had been developed soley for the PC (as Morrowind was originally) they would never have had to close off the cities, and both games would've been even more amazing than they are today.

"But nobody would've bought them, because nobody buys PC games. Or maybe a couple of people do, and the rest either pirate the games or they don't have a gaming PC to begin with".

Fair point.

Fair enough lol..I did love Vilverin. It just seems like some backwards logic that a major city is so tiny compared to a village. But I guess in the grand flow of things it's not such a big deal. I also felt like Oblivion's cities were bigger than in Skyrim, it's most likely because they were in closed off cells though. I think I'd gladly take the closed cells of Oblivion if it meant bigger cities.

NOT AGAIN.

Skyrim cities are what your average medieval settlement would look like. They just didn't pack enough people or buildings into the cities to make it look realistic. (But then, even if our tech could handle it- and it can't- people would be complaining that it's too complicated to navigate the place.)

Skyrim is a really tough place to live. You have the cold, unforgiving climate. You have the monsters. You have the wars, international and civil. You have the bandits. Et cetera. Et cetera. If you think anybody has time to deal with all of those problems AND build gigantic civilisations, you're not thinking the matter through properly.

I'll also point out, yet again, that a lot of people live outside the walls of the cities, while still falling under the protection/control of the Jarl of their area. Wow, it's almost like Bethesda was inspired by the medieval feudal system ...!

FFS.

What do you think I started you young whippersnapper?

Fixed

Nobody gets my humor........

It was inspired by a stand up routine by Stewart Lee, Taxi Driver Argument. It was funnier when he said it.

From Bethesda (emphasis mine own).

ive noticed and it infuriates me you can also see solitude from morthal and not just the rock structure but the tops of houses and the blue palace

First off, I'd like to know what kind of biomes we have in the Province of Skyrim. If it's mostly tundra, taiga and/or boreal forests or not for example. I mean, some NPC's talk about how tough the land is to farm, so I imagine that the likely permafrost in the northern half of the province should not provide much for good crop yields. And then they don't seem to use modern farming practices so I doubt that yields can be consistently bountiful from harvest to harvest. So, in other words, the small farms that do exist in Skyrim seem to barely be enough for the population that we do see in the game.

And larger populations need access to clean water, and a sewage system that does not contaminate their main sources of water. Only Solitude and Whiterun seem to have both of those requirements in Skyrim.

Also, hunting game would not be enough to support the meager farms for a bigger population, and I also don't think we can replace modern medicine with magic (especially with the Nordic aversion to magic anyway) so even with a theoretically high birth rate, there too could, too easily be a high infant mortality rate in Skyrim (off-screen and in Lore, of-course).

Add that to what we learn with the warfare and type of culture the people of Skyrim have to deal with as mentioned earlier in the thread, I'm fine with what we got so far for settlements in Skyrim.




off-topic

By the way, what NPC in Skyrim calls the settlements "cities"? I can't remember hearing that off-hand, maybe I gotta turn on my subtitles and the province of Skyrim is pretty large! :shrug:
But seriously, it wouldn't really matter since a "city" can be difined simply as "A place or situation characterized by a specified attribute" (at least according to a Google search).

/off-topic

If you want an idea of a 'real' city in Skyrim, look to the live action trailer for this game. We see an unnamed city under attack by a dragon, and the Dragonborn confronting the dragon. It's available at the official Skyrim site.

The game world in Skyrim is very much scaled down. I am sure that the 'real' Skyrim would be far more larger and far more populated than what we see in the game. This trend is not limited to video games.

In the Lord of the Rings book, the city of Gondor was a massive city with an acropolis and a farming village surrounded by a wall. Due to budgetary considerations, only the acropolis was recreated for the film.

My feeling is that we interacting with those structures and characters that the Dragonborn would have interacted with in the 'real' world. The rest of the world, the rest of the world we don't see, is the world the Dragonborn didn't interact with. I mean, the city guards must be trained at a central school before being assigned to their posts. I think this school might be located in Solitude or another city of importance. Because this school isn't in the game, i am thinking that that he never visited the location, thus it's not in the game.

Though certain aspects of the world do niggle me, like how the boat docked at Riften wouldn't be able to pass the bridge further up the river, I don't let it drag my enjoyment of the game down.

And?

I think there are graphic mods for Morrowind to prove that wrong.

Oh my god, people will complain about everything.

The cities in Morrowind weren't that big. There was just a hell of a lot of copy and paste going along.
Oblivion's were larger but generic. There were huge, wide open spaces. You had some buildings, the same church, the same town walls in every single city. Not one city was really unique in that sense.

Every single city in Skyrim is unique. It's going to be obvious that some holds are more powerful than others, and therefore their capitals will be much larger (Whiterun compared to Morthal for example). While sure, Morthal and Winterhold look similar for example, the atmosphere of the places, the landscape, the people and the stories behind them are all unique. Then you have cities like Whiterun, Markarth, Riften, Solitude, all these look spectacular, different from eachother and completely unique.

They could have made the cities larger, either by making a lot more blank space or by adding generic copy and pasted buildings and NPCs. But that wouldn't be good for performance, and would just look [censored]. I disliked the Better Cities mod for Skyrim because it just seemed so overdone. Skyrim's cities and towns seem thought through, well placed and purposeful.

AND...these places like Dawnstar, Falkreath, Winterhold or Morthal are supposed to be Cities. Cities, not towns or villages, according to Bethesda. Now look at cities in Morrowind-Balmora, Ald Ruhn, Ebonheart, Vivec, and Oblivion-Anvil, Bravil, Leyawiin etc.

Your argument of 'most people live outside the hold capital' is not valid either as according to Bethesda the cities are supposed to be the most populated places. The smaller hold capitals are a joke. Not everwhere can be as big as Whiterun, Solitude or Windhelm but what happeed to the rest? Did they run out of time, budget or incentive?

-a- I didn't say 'most' people live outside of the cities. I said 'a lot' do.

-b- A capital is not necessarily a big or the biggest place in a region. It has several context-sensitive interpretations. It could just be the most prestigious, prosperous or powerful settlement in a region. But, if these are meant to be London-sized medieval cities then, yeah, Bethesda did disappoint. Whatever the case may be, my explanation makes more sense, so I'm going with my interpretation of Skyrim. Anything else doesn't really make sense.

-c- Incentive, most likely. Increased complexity for diminishing returns. A lot of people who are going to play a mainstream TES are not going to bother with intricacies and just want to kill things and level up.

-d- Mods will fix this.

Yeah, definitely too small and not as epic as they should be. The smaller non walled ones, are not even villages, and more like a small street with some buildings.