The only reason I can think of that they would have chosen it for would be that Todd Howard wanted a European style game but they didn't want to redo a province they'd only just done 2 games ago, so they twisted Cyrodiil into resembling it more. But I think it was a bad decision, simply for the fact that at their current developer resources, they did not have enough to do justice to the capital province. If they had waited a few more games, they would be amazingly rich and would be able to put in much more. The Imperial city would have felt like a real capital instead of feeling, at best, about the size of Vivec. Counties could have more than just a single town in them. There could be political and cultural conflicts that take a major role. But since they only had 70 or so people and 4 years, and had to work for new consoles, their abilities were limited. It just doens't feel right for the capital to be less populated than a barely hospitable island in just a random province.

I agree. Still, the game is fun to play. And you can rest assured that TESIII Province:Cyrodiil will do the Imperial heartland justice.

Yeah, Oblivion could have been better if they took more time with it or just waited a long time, but they didn't. I'm sure the team at Bethesda has spent way more time considering these things than any of the fans.

What about Skyrim? Is that good? I say it is, so I think they got the point and are moving in more positive directions. We might one day revisit Cyrodiil, but in the meantime, there are always PC mods to spice up Cyrodiil and the Imperial City.

I think Skyrim is a decent choice of province, although something a bit different after TES IV would have been nice. I was somewhat disssapointed in the lack of population of the world in Skyrim as well, but at least it's not trying to present something that's the entire metropolitan centre of the world. If Skyrim's cities were as large and numerous as Oblivion's, that would have been pretty good for Skyrim, but feels like it should be one county in the capital province (Which is also easily the biggest). Skyrim would have been better as TES IV, then have something unique for TES V and Cyrodiil after that perhaps.

There are plenty of other provinces to see. Just think of how amazing they could be!

...I know. That's not really what I was saying.

It almost makes you wish, they had done Skyrim first, the size of Oblivion's Cyrodiil regarding city populous, then the Imperial Province for TES V with current PC systems, upping the populations a bit, and trying to capture more of that "rainforest/jungle" feel. Of course, the Dragons look nicer on today's tech than they did (well, the one dragon) on Oblivion's engine.

I wonder if Cyrodiil's look was more of an art/design direction they took (more generic medieval/Eurocentric) because of Lord of the Rings being very popular around that time. They might have figured Legionaries in Lorica Segmentata weiding Ebony Dai-Katanas in the jungle would look too strange to be a successful art direction for the game.

I wish they had done Skyrim first, i find Cyrodiil much more interesting than Skyrim, I hope that some time in the future they decide to re-visit Cyrodiil and do it justice. Although i expect them to visit the other provinces before ever considering going back to one we have already visited.

Cyrodiil wasn't a bad choice for a province, it's just that they should have done what worked in Morrowind by limiting TES IV to the Imperial City Island. Instead, they tried to scale down the entire vast province into a tiny map barely larger than the small quarantined island of Vvardenfell within the still relatively small province of Morrowind.

Vvardenfell felt moderately large (like a moderately large island should), and you quickly learned that you were only seeing a small portion of the entire Morrowind province. The convoluted maze of ridges, waterways, and other natural obstacles left you with the illusion that everything was far apart, even when it was often just on the other side of that hill next to you. The map was surrounded on all sides by water, so it was easy to simply "wrap" the borders, making it impossible to get too far away, but allowing you the illusion of trying if you insisted on braving the Slaughterfish.

Cyrodill had no such restrictions, so you got to walk or run the full length of the entire province in just a couple of hours of play (or simply click your map to go there), making it feel far smaller than it should. The map was made in a "bowl" shape, so you could always see the Imperial City in the distance, utterly trashing any illusion of hundreds of miles between the far ends and the center. To make things worse, the borders had significant "no go" zones, where you got an anti-immersive warning "You cannot go that way", but the opponents could freely enter and pelt you from a distance.

The worst part about Cyrodiil is: we never got to see any of the infamous conniving, scheming, bickering, and backstabbing political infighting that the culture was noted for; in fact, the total absence of politics in the very heart of the Empire, especially at a time where there was a complete power vacuum ripe for personal ambitions, made it bordering on silly. The lack of industry (other than a small but decently done backyard winery and a few farms just outside of Skingrad), mines that produced anything other than Goblins, and the sheer quantity of abandoned farms, ruined houses, and abandoned forts made it feel like the aftermath of some war or disaster, not the setting for the start of one.

I feel like we never really got to see Cyrodiil, just some dserted and shrunken bad caricature of it.

I agree with this it really shouldn't have been in Cyrodiil, especially since the entire TES lore community went on a rampage because so much of it was inaccurate to lore.

The problem was not resources or choice of province. The problem with Oblivion was artistic direction and trend of gameplay. They could have set TES: IV anywhere, and with the same style of game/gameplay/plot writing, I wouldn't have loved it there either.

As much as I enjoyed Oblivion (my introduction to TES), (and I hope to get a new computer to get Morrowind with advanced graphics) I do feel that they could have done Skyrim way before they could have done Cyrodill.

Skyrim would have been an ideal "excuse" for a mainly combat-oriented game; Nords can be expected to fight. I expected about what we got. Cyrodiil, the heart of the Empire, on the other hand, really called for a deeply political "thinking" game, with a lot of dialog, hard choices, and unexpected turns of events. Instead, we got a simplistic and politically empty Cyrodiil with easy choices (when we got any), a straght-forward main plotline with a blatantly obvious "baddie", and a combat-oriented focus. The biggest gripe I had about it was the loss of a chance for something extraordinary and memorable.

It doesnt matter which province they would have made it would still have felt too small. Also just because they release more games doesnt mean they will get richer.

An average trading city in a harsh country with 100 buildings feels much more natural than an enormous capital of an empire, stated in lore to spread out across a plethora of massive islands with entire neighbourhoods resting on jeweled bridges, made to have 100 buildings.

Well, quite honestly, i don't think Bethesda could re-create what is in lore, so they did a decent enough job on Cyrodiil. Good points though.

When you read the books about the Imperial City, with its gleaming white stone central district highlighted by White Gold Tower, and its surrounding hovels and ghettos spanning the entire length and breadth of an island nearly 100 miles long, connected by a myriad of bridges to the crowded surrounding shores, and then see the city in Oblivion, it's jarringly "wrong". The white stone center was all we got (divided up into a half-dozen "mini-districts"), and all but one of the many bridges were long since collapsed and gone. The rabbit-warren of huts and hovels covering the rest of the island were glaringly missing, other than a handful of shacks behind the facade in the waterfront district. We did get Gobin caves and bandit dens, though, and wolves hunting in plain view of the city walls.

The game either needed to concentrate fully on the Imperial City Island to at least do it some sort of justice, or confine itself to one of the (large) counties where you would hear about the events in the IC, but not go there in the game. The size of the in-game IC would have felt about right for one of the major regional hubs, and the size of the map might have been enough to portray one county, but not all of Cyrodiil.

Maybe you shouldnt read that much into the so called "lore" and realize that the world in the books is not the same , nor will it ever be, as the one we get in game,.

Not interested in Cyrodiil. I think Oblivion did a decent job in representing it, especially the countryside. Video game cities are never going to be all they should be in an open world where it's not just pretty vistas but everything has to be tangible.

Decent job representing Cyrodiil compared to what? Its a total 180 from the lore.

I will say that I didn't miss the jungle landscape that much. But when one removes cities like Sutch, when the Imperial city is very poorly divided not because of scale issues that I think most people understand but because of engine limitations and the need for filler content and when the entire game design revolves around randomly generating exteriors, copy pasting large bits of interiors and using as little dialogue as possible in quests... Oblivon wasn't a bad game but doing it was too ambitious for the amount of resources used and the technological and engine limitations. Couple that with poor design decisions like the level scaling and you get a parody of the lore Cyrodiil

Woulda', coulda', shoulda'. It's easy to look back on it now and see the "mistakes" made on ES:IV but at the time they were developing it I think they felt the technology was at a point where they could tackle it. Developers are always at the mercy of technology and artistic trends, but a certain amount of "scaling down" is necessary when you're trying to make it functional in a game. Why single out ES:IV? Were they "ready" for the scope of Arena back in the day? Maybe not, they were just trying to offer gamers something they'd never seen before. All they can do is make the current game the best they can at the time and take what they've learned and apply it to the next game.

Gamers need to learn to temper their expectations with reasonable feasibility.

It's not the jungles that made Cyrodiil different. It was the garish custom, tattoo culture, the cults, ultra-rich merchants, ect.

Exactly. The jungle was but one part, the real loss is in Imperial culture.

Theoretically (although it isn't always the case), a company that is gaining popularity with each successive game in a franchise is going to be able to achieve more as they get more money, more resources, and more staff to do so. This would be a logical conclusion for the developers, and if they cared about believability and immersion in this respect enough, they would wait a few more games before doing the biggest and most populated province in lore.