There is a lot of pvssyr about empty taverns, small cities and all that [censored], yes I call it [censored]. Id like to know whom here realizes tha Tamriel is a scaled world? As in the world is scaled back? Do you believe it actually takes five minutes to climb a mountain? Or that its realistic that two governing bodies (holds) are found within a stroll of each other. No my friends this is a SCALED WORLD. Everything in the world is representative of a larger mass. Nothing in this current world could actually, realistically function the way it does unless the world is scaled. How do towns of 20-30 citizens have a standing army of double the citizen size? Two farms and 12 cabbage cant feed 80 people for the next few months unless your Jesus or an alchemist or your frm WoW and can conjure food.

When there are 8 people in the tavern, they are representative of the towns true population. so if the town is scaled to one tenth the size and there are 100 townsfolk, there are actually a lot more people in that tavern. Each person would represent 10 people. Unfortunately, crowds and a magnitude of people that some players want just isnt totally feasible without breaking some sense of immersion. Yes you could insert 900 more people into the scaled town but they have no place to live, sleep, eat. How is Bethesda supposed to build a world like that? The world is scaled back to feel like it is a running world and yet so they can still produce a game in a realistic amount of time.

SO next time you see 6 people in a tavern, remember, that could be 30 people, that could be 60 people. Its a scaled world!

Yawn, nothing to see here.

/thread

It is indeed I've posted a couple of times on this topic. The world is scaled, the distances, the sizes, and also the time. So it takes you like 5 minutes to walk to the next settlement, but ingame time it's like an hour.

Yes, 6 people is really 30, that's science.

Yea, games aren't meant to be a realistic depiction of reality, even when they try to be "realistic". The world is scaled and so is healing from wounds. It would be no fun to have to walk for two hours to get to the next town, just like it would be no fun to have to lay up and heal for 3 weeks after being in a battle. I'm glad to not have to eat every 8 hours, not have to sleep, not have to go to the bathroom, blow my nose, change my underwear, drink water, etc.

IMO a good game will scale the world in such a way that it doesn't break the immersion...the game world works within it's own fictional boundaries of reality, which may not match our reality but works within it's own rules. Games are art.

I believe the actual scale is closer to 20:1. This is based primarily on the number of in-game minutes to real-world minutes, and supported by speculative application. Takes 5-10 minutes to go from one hold to another? Yeah, that's actually representative of around three hours.

I think daggerfall might be the only world which isn't scaled.

Would also be imagination.

F***in' magnets, how do they work?

It was scaled too small in many instances. The College having about 5 students is absurd.

IF that's representative of a 20:1 scale, then that would a total of 100 official students of the arcane arts in all of Skyrim.
I have to agree with you.

That's a scary ratio of ex-adventurers being shot in the knee before.

The college did say they fell on bad times after nearly destroying their hold capitol. It could easily be that many of their students have simply walked out, due to the political pressures from such an incident. Also, id assume a lot of their mages are abroad, although a lot of the NPC mages in Skyrim dont identify actively if they are with the COllege or not and stick to their studies.

Maybe Maiq knows the b*gger who's got the magic bow of knee-capping

Yep, that explains everything! I guess Balmora, Vivec City, and the Imperial City are just figments of my imagination and no scaled down Elder Scrolls game has ever been released before Skyrim.

So the next TES game will only contain one room, with a good guy and a (respawning) bad guy. The good guy will give you all kinds of quests, like kill the bad guy or fetch the apple from the basket in the corner.
But it'll look super duper awesome!

And when people will come to complain about the lack of content, an apologist devoted fan will come along and open a thread, explaining how this is actually a good thing, saying that it's a scaled world people! A SCALED WORLD!
Understand the concept!

This is a massive exaggeration, because the amount of content that Bethesda puts into this world just about eclipses most other games. You know that other RPG Gothic 4. That linear RPG. 13 hours. 13 hours of content. Skyrim, 100 hours of content. I am not being apologetic. I am saying that you cant seriously consider that Bethesda could re-create a realistic fantasy-medieval Holy Roman Empire with 1+ million citizens in it, all with their own backstories, quests, written and staged dialogue, NPC schedules, jobs...Should I even go on with the list?

Do you want to see the game in your lifetime?

It's not exactly new. Same is in Morrowind for example, and Fallout 3 etc. No need to start worrying about absurd conclusions

Haha nice try but guess what: we already know it is a scale representation and we still wish the towns were more populated and the roads busy.

the PC can handle much more npc and creatures but the consoles can't

Agreed.

The whole map of Skyrim is actually the size of a big city in real life.

"This is a scaled world"; no really?, I would never have guessed, thanks for informing us :spotted owl:

Now I don't expect the scale of Just cause 2 given the amount of content that Skyrim has to pack in, but I do expect to see double the population, this has not spoiled the game for me, but I'm grateful I've got the game on pc, I'm fairly certain there will be mods to increase the scale of some things such as population, I'm also looking forward to Open cities.

I think the OP made a valuable post here. I always took it for granted that it was a scaled abstraction, and had no problem letting my imagination fill in the blanks, but apparently this is new info for some.

Daggerfall was only non-scaled open-world game that I can think of anyway. And it would be completely impossible to do now, so...yeah.

Whole point: Skyrim would have taken far too long to produce had it not been to scale. So, be grateful that they found a way to handcraft their beautiful world in time for us to play it before the technologies they had been using to build it became obsolete.

The building count is already scaled back. That means the people should not have to be. If they are, that averages down to zero people in every household. The people who live in the available buildings being scaled is not a good design decision, the population is also scaled down in a way that ideally should fit the scaling of the buildings, so that they have a relatively similar amount of people populating the available buildings of a city as a real city would, just fewer people because of the fewer buildings. That's no excuse for making them lifeless and barely inhabited.