Speaking of "building high," one thing that hurt the Imperial City was perhaps that none of the buildings (aside from White-Gold Tower, of course) were built beyond 2 stories tall. The city was SUPPOSED to be patterned off of ancient Rome, where yes, high-rises did in fact exist. They weren't able to use steel skeletons to build them, but for apartment buildings, that wasn't necessary; their brick and concrete technology at the time (which clearly isn't any more advanced than what was saw in Oblivion) was quite sufficient to build tall, multi-floor apartment buildings. Heck, after all, they built tall CASTLES.

Hence, in a capital city, I might expect to see a few of them. And it wasn't strictly a roman thing; during mideival times, a lot of large cities, like Edinburgh, also featured these buildings, with up to 6-8 floors; they were devised as a way to still fit more residences within existing city walls.

Not all that much. Have you ever edited towns with the Construction Set? It's not a whole lot of work to place buildings, line up their contents, etc... making the cities larger would just take a little extra time, with a big payoff. The real time-consumer in Oblivion is that the devs felt they needed to have 8 cities with wildly different architecture, and hence had to make a unique set of buildings for each.

The only real challenge is making sure that the LOD scaling is good enough that it'll run well; in Oblivion, LOD scaling was pretty much non-existent; they had SpeedTree, then they had pop-up for everything else. I feel that they made huge gains there with Fallout 3, and should be able to apply those lessons to TES V.

Speaking of "building high," one thing that hurt the Imperial City was perhaps that none of the buildings (aside from White-Gold Tower, of course) were built beyond 2 stories tall. The city was SUPPOSED to be patterned off of ancient Rome, where yes, high-rises did in fact exist. They weren't able to use steel skeletons to build them, but for apartment buildings, that wasn't necessary; their brick and concrete technology at the time (which clearly isn't any more advanced than what was saw in Oblivion) was quite sufficient to build tall, multi-floor apartment buildings. Heck, after all, they built tall CASTLES.

Hence, in a capital city, I might expect to see a few of them. And it wasn't strictly a roman thing; during mideival times, a lot of large cities, like Edinburgh, also featured these buildings, with up to 6-8 floors; they were devised as a way to still fit more residences within existing city walls.

If you're up for some reading, I've got a http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14189/14189-h/14189-h.htm I'm not kidding though when I say that the Imperial City in Oblivion was the opposite of what it should have been. It looked like a planned retirement community, just without wheelchair access.

Maybe you can even rent a room in a apartment like building if your just the kind to stash goods and have a nap

Ironically I agree there:

It took me about 2 hours. If I was paid to do that everyday it shouldn't take me much more than 30-45 minutes per house.

If you're up for some reading, I've got a http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14189/14189-h/14189-h.htm I'm not kidding though when I say that the Imperial City in Oblivion was the opposite of what it should have been. It looked like a planned retirement community, just without wheelchair access.

What was that site about i dont get it

When I first went into the Imp City, I was excited then I walked through each district and I was thinking "wheres the city?

The thing that disappoints me about the Imperial City is that half of the city is inns and houses. The only districts I have really explored is the market, arcane university, and the waterfront. The rest is just....boring. Even the houses themselves are boring, it's like they made one house template, pasted it in every house in the city, and threw in some clutter.

Surprising, Vivec felt bigger than Imperial City. I guess Imperial City was more cramped. In TES V, the cities an towns should definetely be bigger, but not to the point where the buildings become generic and repetitive, as in Daggerfall.

Yeah, they have too many.

But I understand the patterns. It would make architectural sense for it to be like that in the Imperial City.

Yeah, it's because the Imperial City had apartments, not houses

Without reading all post within this thread, my thoughts are; the more graphic intensive games become the smaller they become.

No no, it makes sense in a retirement community, not a city. And much less the center of an empire.

I thought you agreed to stop talking. Especially when what you're saying is a repeat of something you've already said a half-dozen-plus times in this thread. <_<

I take it you've never played Morrowind; Vivec had its entire city built into 9 large "cantons" that were effectivley uniform buildings. http://www.uesp.net/w/images/MW-Places-ArenaCanton.jpg.


The three last TES games have all been equally hardware-intensive when they came out; that's something people don't realize when they just started with Oblivion. Remember that back in 2002, there was no Crysis, no Half-Life?, no Unreal 3.0, etc. Instead, cutting-edge of graphics came in the likes of http://media.moddb.com/cache/images/games/1/1/5/thumb_620x2000/profile2.jpg; the new "cutting edge" of Unreal Engine wouldn't show up with http://www.bytesizedreviews.com/Core/UT2003Demo/UT2003Demo1.jpg until AFTER Morrowind's release. Likewise, around Daggerfall's time there was http://www.club3d.nl/ThemaFiles/Quake1.jpg. So really, TES has never been trading anything for graphics.

I'll qualify that. No one noticed because of fast travel, and the packages were planned realistically instead of calculated for the player to notice. Also, NPC behavior involves some quantum mechanics-type paradoxes where observation changes behavior.

Traveling NPCs was actually one of the coolest parts of Oblivion.

I do agree largely with the sizes, though I'd note that most likely, the main difference a player would notice between settlement sizes is the variety, and for towns and cities, it'd lie in the range of services you could expect to find; real, major cities would have multiple inns/taverns/gathering spots, as well as being places you could rely on finding branches of major organizations, like the fighters and mages guilds.

As for village sizes, 4 is definitely rather small; from my playing experiences, Morrowind was better at good sizes, though not at the very small end; Ebonheart and Hla Oad didn't feel too lively, while Suran and Pelagiad got to be just large enough that they actually felt like real civilization.


Yes, my conclusion was that TIC felt smaller (in spite of having more buildings and NPCs) through having it all crammed in a smaller area.

As for Daggerfall, Daggerfall city itself isn't all that repetitive; the main problem, I believe, lied in how spread out buildings were, due to the block-based nature used. A lot of the areas felt otherwise rather unique, such as the "main street" of the city, (which covered the castle and a direct line in front of it, or 1/6 of the city total) and the market district right nearby. There were definitely a bunch of other sections that didn't feel repetitive, though the city, if done with more modern technology, could definitely benefit from being compacted into a smaller size, and perhaps losing some of the generic housing areas that had nothing really of note there. For those unfamiliar with the layout of the city, here's some links for comparison:

• http://www.uesp.net/w/images/DF-Daggerfall_City_Map.jpg
  
• http://www.uesp.net/w/images/OB-Imperial_City_Above.jpg
  
• http://www.uesp.net/w/images/MW_Map_Balmora.jpg
  
• http://www.uesp.net/w/images/OB-Map-Leyawiin.jpg

One more thing... less shops... yea it was nice to have seperated shops for everything but it just didnt seem real... in morrowind you had just a few shops and most of them where mixed stuff, in oblivion it just seems like shop overload