I didn't expect them to make every city as huge as Vivec or the Imperial City. That would have been very difficult without increasing the worldsize by a tremendous amount.
Still, I miss at least one big city of that size.

I don't think modders will be able to handle content creation for entire cities, let alone nations. The logistics for obtaining voice acting alone for enough NPCs to populate a small village would be hard enough. Maybe they could handle the raw graphics of building the structures for a city and populate it with random unnamed NPCs. But beyond that? You'd need a team of dedicated professionals. The only way I see that happening is if there is money to made in the steam mod marketplace.

Thats why Winterhold is the size it is.

But another province, Morrowind, it had towns the size of what is supposed to be a major city in Skyrim. So if you follow that argument that not all places are supposed to be as impressive and the Imperial City then you look at what was considered a tiny villiage in Morrowind has the same number of buildings and population as a major one in Skyrim it is still less impressive. Perhaps all provinces are not created equal...

That's right. We don't.
So we must assume things went by the way we expect them to:
People get marry. People have more than two kids.
Hence population increases.
Hence villages, towns and cities get bigger.

People not having TV for 200 x 12 = 2400 months would account for a lot of unprotected six and prolific breeding.

People going off to war
Natural disaster
People running farms outside of city walls
People leaving cities for elsewhere.

Yes, but to be devil's advocate, the Mundus is called the Arena for a reason.

The end of the third era had a lot of war and disaster ranging all the way up to the Oblivion crisis.
Not long after that a floating city began to kill and zombify people.

There is a lot of war going on all the time, there are a lot of reasons for a not increasing population.

Nevertheless, I had hoped for cities with more than 6 houses.

There is also of course always a difference between the game world and the lore world.
Im quite sure that in lore, Solitude is a whole lot bigger.

I'm replaying Morrowind (with all kinds of mods) in addition to Skyrim right now.

All I can say is MAN some people really see the past through rose colored glasses. Even with a ton of modernizing mods that add schedules and add NPCs to the world, the scale of it is much, much smaller than skyrim, and yeah Vivec is not so big and epic anymore, it's a bunch of pasted building with sparse NPC's roaming around here and there.

Morrowind has beautiful art and an amazing story, but in all the other places where people say it's superior they are IMO, talking out their asses and likely haven't played it in years.

Skyrim feels far more populated than either Morrowind or Oblivion..the only comparison is if you mod up Oblivion with a ton of mods that add traveling NPC's etc.

I wouldn't have minded if Solitude was a bit bigger, but honestly so far the game does a MUCH better job of having believable NPC interaction and city life than Oblivion or Morrowind.

Where are the abandoned houses, loads and loads of them them?
Nah, I applaud the effort to rationalize the liliputean size of Skyrims cities, but that ain't gonna cut it.

And I'd say if no natural disaster was deemed worthy of mention during these 200 years,
it wasn't that big of a deal.

Cities are glorified hamlets, dungeons are glorified caves, and the gameworld itself is a glorified park.

Everything needs to be doubled in scale for the next TES. At least.

There are plenty of abandoned houses in the game.

Have you been to the north? Winterhold was destroyed by a natural disaster that is mentioned in great detail in the game. There are abandoned houses in the northern holds, we must also remember that they are holds, not just cities, people live elsewhere than just cities.

Yes, but there is a difference between the lore world and the game world.
Of course in lore Solitude is bigger than what you see in game, a city like that couldnt even support itself if it was populated like it was in game.
Those people in that climate could handle one farm, that is it.

So what we are talking about here is not lore reasons why there are so few people, it has to do with game mechanics.
A lot of it I think is that we now have NPC's with their own AI, something unknown up to and including Morrowind.

Then there is the fancier graphics and voice acting.

Edit: and the 'Winterhold disaster' is obviously another Sutch city.
Cut due to time constraints.

Up until your last paragraph I was about to mention it's hard to notice there's acivil war going on in Skyrim.
Then you bring in the lore to game world difference.

The other side of the coin is I feel the world is oversaturated with dungeons.
So less dungeons, bigger cities.
It's a deal?

morthal has an Inn and an Apothecary...
this should not be considered a city
there are towns larger than this

why are they idiots? i might have preferred to start with skyrim. then I could be ignorantly blissful of how much better this series could have been

I'd love it if they were bigger BUT they can only make'em so big man.

Its not like Assassins Creed or something, everything is pretty interactive, not just background sets.

Yes I agree, why couldn't they have just placed generic houses/shops and increased the size by 2-3 times?

I for one think they could do better.

That's a peculiar train of thought.

I'm sure you enjoy text RPGs.

I say the same thing. We still have problem with almost 5-8 locations dotted on the compass. In the end, the dungeons just gets in the way and you start to only explore half of them.

I know, I replayed Morrowind and Oblivion after the announcement of Skyrim and I couldnt agree with you more. Alot of nostalgia goggles on in here.

There are a few things that contribute to people being more connected to Morrowind then either OB and Skyrim. First is the text based dialoge. In Morrowind it was easy to continuously follow and learn about the story because every NPC had a long laundry list of topics to discuss so at any point in time if you didnt understand some part of the history or plot you could re-read it from most NPCs. Unfortunatly in OB and SK the use of voice acting, due to the cost and mere storage requirements, dialoge options are greatly reduced. Second is no fast travel. In Morrowind the no fast travel really kept you connected to the world and required some strategy as to what you always had with you. I am not one that believes OB and SK shouldnt have had fast travel, as it is beneficial to those like myself that don't have a whole lot of time to sink into gameing but this is a reason I think alot of people don't get that connection as they did in Morrowind. Since I have finished the main quest and the guild quests that I wanted to complete I have just been using carriges and slowing down the pace and I am appreciating Skyrim so much more.

You can debate the size of the cities in Morrowind compared to those of Skyrim and Oblivion - different people will say different things.

For me the main reason Morrowinds cities felt more 'real' is the fact that you could just walk into them, you could walk through them, whatever you wanted. You could enter Balmora from the north or south gates, or you could come down from the mountains (across a few roofs) and drop into the city that way... it gave a feeling of complete freedom because you had complete freedom.

Elder Scrolls 4 and 5 - every city has a high wall around it, simple as that. You 'load' your way in or out from the gates provided or else you can't enter the cities at all. They are separate areas, completely shut off like an instance in an MMO, there is no feeling of freedom to pass through the city or enter it from any direction you choose.

Yes you could argue the high walls are a defensive feature, and that would make sense, but not every city should have it. It's an excuse not a feature.

I thought technology was moving forwards, so why are the games that use it going the other way?

Not every City has walls.