You have to always be thinking in scale and using your imagination. Whenever i'm playing I know in my head that cities like solitude or whiterun are nearly the size of the game world. And the imperial city even bigger.

Skyrim is actually hundreds of miles wide and long but it's impossible to design it like that unless it's like Daggerfall and randomly generated. When you go to riverwood they talk about a dragon coming to attack the town which is like a 30 second flight from helgen in the game world. Imagine riverwood is like 50km away instead.

That's how I play my TES games anyway.

Yeah, I concur. I hope to rectify this with the power of the CK. IF it's ever released. :rolleyes:




No it isn't.

1 to 1 scale is far too much to ask, but it's definatly possible to have far bigger areas. Problems are as follows:

1. 11.11.11
2. Consoles

I made a thread about this very topic not to long ago. I understand the “size problem” (something fishy about the wording there) involved in increasing the scale of a game as its graphical and scripting features grow ever more complex is very demanding of any system’s resources and often simply not possible with current technologies especially considering the aging platforms. At the same time; however, the complete lack of unique architectural design in four out of nine capital cities and all of the scattered villages and settlements, what amounts to almost half of the main structures in the game is simply appalling in my mind. The whole attraction of elder scrolls games is immersion in a fantasy world, I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t play an elder scrolls game for its combat or leveling system. So for me at the end of the day the simple fact of the matter is that Bethesda chose not to put forth the effort to add that little bit of detail that makes me feel like I’m in a handcrafted world and not some cookie cutter play pen with signs telling me what I can and can’t do. I also want to point out that Skyrim is better then Oblivion in most every way, just like Oblivion was better then Morrowind in almost every way, but paradoxically my enjoyment of each installment has lessened with each new game. Whether that is to do with my increasing familiarity with the TES formula or my growing older I can’t say, but I cannot help but feel this obsession with mechanics and polish has shifted focus away from the bit that always made TES wonderful, the world itself.

I'm going to hold you to this statement.
If I ever catch you wielding the proverbial ?Realism in a fantasy game?!? rhetoric against those like me who crave for a more plausible game world I'll be sure to punch you verbally with this quote.

A quote which I can't be bothered to dispute though I seem to recall my History Classes disprove you.

Im willing to put up with cities being divided into cells if it means more houses and NPCs. and I am willing to even sacrifice names with a replacement of (Windhelm citizen) . We do it for guards and soldiers dont we.
quantity over quality.

This. Winterhold is laughable, who believes the excuses the jarl comes with? We all know it's laziness. I mean HOLD capitals, Winterhold, Dawnstar, Morthal, Falkhearth.... what is a HOLD capital if it looks like a village from another hold? What is a HOLD capital if it doesn't have another village or farm in it? (Winterhold, Dawnstar) I mean, all holds should be comparable, if Dawnstar is so tiny, it should be part of the Solitude one.

What I wonder is if those four you name, except maybe Winterhold, before that tragedy of-course, (and only because Winterhold might have been a rather size-able settlement) are simply "capitals" for where they are geographically? I'd guess that having Solitude, Markarth, Whiterun, Windhelm and Riften as surviving major settlements to be plenty for the size of Skyrim. I'm guessing this, since the most common way to send information, seems to be by courier and I haven't seen them on horseback yet.

So I could see the King, before getting killed, sending those four Jarls to those Holds to run those territories from those "capitals" in his honor. It seems that the Jarls can easily be kicked out of their positions at any rate, so why couldn't a few be created by a King's whim and then inherited during the events that play out in the game?


It'll be sweet if we could be completely rid of a few of those essential NPCs in future quests, maybe through that radiant stuff I've heard about. :gun: