I agree wholeheartedly. Bravil could have been a city at the poverty line, with skooma addicts sleeping on the streets and thieves watching the nobility who live in the castle from the rooftops, conspiring with each other for heists. A city where the people have no time for the chapel, and work odd hours to support themselves and their families, and are living in dilapidated, crowded and uncomfortable homes, usually with unsanitary conditions, muck and trash being simply thrown out the window and into the streets and alleys.

What was it instead? A town of regular, chapel-going people who just happened to live in crappy homes.

You could get around that by having most NPCs be unwilling to identify themselves to a stranger. They have names, you just don't know them.

I loved Ultima as much as the next 30ish gamer, but in TES 3 and 4, NPC uniqueness doesn't really contribute to the game. Minor NPCs don't typically add to narrative and only peripherally add to gameplay (I mean, they make life easier for pickpockets and homicidal maniacs). Their main benefit to the experience is in world-building, and right now having a large number of "extras" acting as scenery (through detailed animations and interactions, even if it's just a facade rather than some sort of super AI thing) is more conducive to that than having a lot of additional "actors" with minimal roles. Should be a small number of (well-done) characters and a large number of props. But it's just my opinion.

Cyrodiil is 500+ miles across.

This is why the scale in game seems so badly off. It'd have been better if the map had just been the imperial city (fleshed out more) with the surrounding towns and villages.

Instead we got an attempt to represent half a continent with a map of a few square miles: it's just stupid being able to literally see one city from another when they are 100+ miles apart.

Agreed, I hated when I could see the imperial White Gold Tower from wherever I went. I also din't like the few selection of clothes in the game.

I don't really mind some nameless npc's in TES:V. It could help on making cities populated. We ould have different people by the name of their rank soo guild halls could have:

Example:

Mages Guild - Alchemist, Conjuation Trainer, Warlock, Wizard, Mage Guild Leader and other stuff.

Fighters Guild - Guild Officer, Combat Trainer, Apprentice, Mercenary and more.

Imperial Legion - Sir [Insert Name], Knight, Sergent, Captain, Defender, Warlord, and so on.

See the point?

I agree with the sentiments about the distorted size of Cyrodiil. Either the game should have focused on the island(s) that contained the Imperial City, or else should have been made in a couple of seperate "pieces", linked by fast travel. Attempting to "represent" the entire province in a nutshell was a bad design decision, in my opinion.

There's got to be a better way of handling nameless NPCs than going by their factional rank. After all, would you know at a glance that any random person on the street was a member of a certain guild, and that they held a particular "rank" within that guild or organization? Generally speaking, I don't think so. You'd probably find out their name in a few seconds, but their occupation and rank would generally come AFTER that information. Of course, we could label them in a blatantly obvious manner, by race, manner of dress, or some other equally useless criteria that you'd already be able to tell at a glance, but I suspect that "Citizen" or some other bland and indistinct term would be the more practical approach.

I turn off distant buildings in the graphics options.

The 'pop up' doesn't really bother me vs seeing things close by that would really be 10s or 100s of miles away.

I felt like Oblivion gyped us when it comes to cities. I was expecting the smallest cities to be the size of the Imperial ity in terms of permanent population, with hundrends of random stree-goers most of the time. I also expected the Imperial city to be 8 islands connected by brideges, and have each island an bridge be a different community. But there was a recon...

there are quite a few hamlets in the wild in Oblivion, you just have to look for them.

But theyre all cut/paste of each other.

Every town in Morrowind is unique and has its own character.

All the non-walled towns in Oblivion are pretty much the same and the characters there offer no more than 'rumors'.. no unique quests or even shops. A shame really. I discovered one on the hillside between roxy inn and Bruma.. I was like awesome a hidden mountainside town but there was FA to do there.


Skingrad is the best town in Oblivion. its much better than the imperial city.

I think Bethesda has two reasonable options in order to make the cities make sense: either make the game the size of a small section of a province (like Morrowind, which only took place in Vvardenfell, or maybe even a smaller portion of a province) so it makes sense for towns to be relatively small, or make the game much larger, like Just Cause 2. Personally, I would prefer the first option, because everything is in walking distance and that means they spent more time on small details.

I'm so sorry for doing this, but I know the NPCs pretty well.

There's the Atius and Sintav Families, the Surille Brothers, the Count of Cheydinhal and his son, the Kvinchal family, the Family of Dunmer at Aleswell, the Dalvilu family, the Ulfgars, and probably more.

As for married couples, there are tons.

The homes weren't big enough to have tons of people in them if they were to have separate rooms though. I've run into that problem many times. I tried to make a home with tons of people in it, and I realized that even in big houses, you'd get a max of like 4 small rooms and then a few huge connected rooms that just seemed to be suited for kitchens, living rooms, and dining rooms.

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As for cities, I don't have much of a clue as to what should be done. There's tons of options. Ranging from creating tons of empty buildings and wandering NPCs, to spending tons of extra time to make the buildings and NPCs each unique.

I'd like to add that it would be awesome if the kinds of people, and amount of people could change during the time of day. You could get more shady characters at night, and more merchants/commoners/travelers during the day.

Meh, bigger equals more generic. I'd rather have a small town/city that feels like it is somewhat alive, than a large one filled with generic stuff and npc's to fill it. Morrowind's villages and towns seemed perfectly balanced to me. If they'd been any bigger, there would have been far too less wilderness in between them.

The one thing that does bother me (like others mentioned before me) is the lack of inns.

I do agree, I want to see a city so massive that I can get lost in it! Seriously!

That's what I loved about Daggerfall's cities, even if they were cookie-cut.

You'll notice in real life that if there are fifty houses on a street, there's a lot of similarities between them as they were probably built around the same time by the same group of people. If there were five houses on that street built by the same contractor, are they less generic just because there are fewer of similar items?

When you plan a city, you don't plan each building individually. You plan the vistas, monuments, nodes, parks, and generally the spaces between the buildings. If they put the major buildings in good places, you won't mind the average housing in between looking similar, because that's how the city should look.

While I did notice that there was a lack of villages and halmets in both Morrowind and Oblivion, it didn't bother me so much considering the scale of the map was that much smaller than Daggerfall, therefore there was less need for them. Now if Cyrodiil was made to scale of landmass compared to what it would actually have been in the lore, then there would have to be thousands of towns and smaller cities dotting the landscape in addition to the main cities which would definitely have to be larger in size. Hell the imperial city especially would probably have had a much more burgeoning population than the city of Daggerfall or Sentinel..

But with the size it was, it felt right with the perfect amount of wilderness, small hamlets, and inns dotting between each city. A nice mini Cyrodiil. Granted it would have been amazing to see all of the providence for what it actually ways, but Oblivion did a good enough job. Just sort of like "Yeah, I adventured to through the providence, visited the main cities, saved the empire from a crisis, and now I'm ready to see what else is out there."

And as for morrowind, it wasn't as though Vvardenfell was imperialized anyways. It felt much more natural with what was there.

What I notice, living in one of three houses built in the same year by the same people is that what you are talking about fades a bit with time. Originally, they WERE generic and identical. Now, the house to the south has a barely usable attic and a deck. My house has a second bathrrom and an extra bedroom off the back, and the house to the north is substantially bigger than either of the others. Of course, this depends on above average wages to occur, and requires room to make the additions.

On the other hand, the subdivisions around us? Not all identical, because they've gotten smarter. Now it's the same 5 houses repeated to make 80. VERY generic.

So I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that your "not rich but decently well off" housing should vary more with age, your rich people all need custom-built houses for the most part, and your poor people need generic shacks.

Easily represented by having several minor "variants" (porches, additions, gardens, shrubbery, different window trim, various curtain styles, etc.), and randomly applying those to some, but not all, of the houses during initial world design. In any given group of houses, most would have at least one distinguishing variation, if not several, and the rare few that had none of them would stand out as equally "unique" because of the lack. Better grade housing would require a bit more liberty and expense shown in the variations (and generally have room for more), where the poorer shacks would mainly differ by such trivial features as flowerbeds, window dressing, and other "cheap" features. The developers could then hand-place a few specific "exceptions", like a basic shack that's gotten a major addition.

A significant amount of basic housing (with varied "generic" furnishings) could be placed quite rapidly throughout the cities in the game after that, all of which would be fully enterable and explorable (not that there would be all that much to find in most), without looking like it rolled off an assembly line. Furniture, dinnerware, storage, and other indoor features could also be done using 4 or 5 "templates" for each style of house, with three or four minor random variations between those (one has a redware jar on a shelf, another has two green glass pots on the shelf, a third doesn't have a shelf, etc.). The combinations could be pretty close to infinite, and the occasional hand-made change would break up the sameness, although the vast majority would still fit a general "pattern".

I live on a street with a bunch of two-story, one-family homes. But a few have been redone to be two-family duplexes. Then, there's the person who'll paint the facade of his home purple, just to stand out. Then there's the loser who will smash his concrete steps and put up brick ones because he's retired and he has nothing better to do with his life than assault the rest of the neighborhood with smashing noises at 8 am.

Then, there's the fact that no two front doors look alike. And there are all the unique decorations we have hanging on our windows and displayed at our stoop.

If you make every building generic and identical you're being a good city planner, but forgetting the fact that it's supposed to have been inhabited by living people with personalities for centuries.

If TESV takes place in Skyrim, be prepared for much smaller settlements. If they adhere to Nord culture there will be small settlements populated my clans that usually hang out in one big hall and drink all night...much like bloodmoon. Theres some room for to deviate a bit with villages size of some cyrodil towns, but im not expecting anything huge.

I recall how, when I visited Hungary, most of the houses looked pretty much alike, but nearly every property had a totally unique style of fence.

A better balance is what is required. It all demands a delicate sort of touch.

I read that as "Nearly every property has a totally unique way of telling people to get the hell off their property."

It would be interesting if NPC's could be nameless until you interacted with them. Before hand recognizing them by class or occupation, depending on Perception, and having to track down NPC's via description. Afterwards recognizing them by the name they give, which may or may not be real, which triggers a streetwise check. In some cases a name could be given instead of a class via Perception if there is enough background (journal entry information) about the person, and likely for nobles.

Yes, exactly.

Except I don't understand this perception nonsense.

It did a "good enough job" if Cyrodiil was a small country or region. The kind of area you could imagine crossing in a day by horse. Or to put it in video game terms something like Hyrule from the Zelda series (e.g. the stereotypical 'fairy tale' kingdom).

But Cyrodiil is HUGE. It's half a continent. The distance from Chorrol to the Imperial city is hundreds of miles.