i would like some larger cities, that feel more alive (i dont know much about tech). If the cities maybe had more NPCs but there would be more of the ones like in fallout. There could be parts of the city were there are more non responsive NPCs that just live and dont really care about you. There dialogue could become more positive and negative towards you if youre the hero of syrim or whatever but they wouldnt actually talk to you.

In saying this i wouldnt want the game to turn into mass effect (which is a great game), where only the story ppl talk to you, but just more ppl that dont really matter. They could be helpful to replace people youve killed by just living in their homes, and if you kill one to take there house like in fable it wont make any difference. Unless youre caught cause that would svck.

They could also help like ive said by being involved in contracts like i suggested in the suggestion thread. Im not going to repeat wht i wrote but if you care you can find it near the 9 page mark lol. Ill try to briefly explain it. in assasin faction they send you on contracts like the writes in Mw, these contracts would not be involved with the story, and would not take as much time from the devs. It would be a mere go kill this guy, heres the why and where, hes an ass so wont talk to you, kill him. Then the story contracts would be more creative and move the story foreward. This could also help when you become master assasin, only the difficulty on the contracts would be way harder.

First of YES to bigger cities in ES5,
second off, i was suprised how similar all the cities in oblivion were, youre telling me bravil and chorrol have the same amount of buildings? Skingrad only has like 3 more than Bruma? Insane.

That's what i call the RPG minimum town style, every town has "the shop, the inn, the castle and 3 houses", while it was a bit more than that it followed the same principal and all towns where set up the same way so you barely had any variation. Just look back at how varied towns where in Morrowind and you didn't always find what you looked for in all of them, but that wasn't a bad thing, it was actually good for the towns to be different.
And bigger towns, you bet. In fact I wouldn't mind towns being so big it can take you a lot of time to even walk from end to end and actually live IN the towns a while.

I cannot agree with this more. While the Imperial City did have a little overlap (for example, you could get a sword at either Slash and Smash or... that old lady's place (name?), or general stuff at Jensine's, Three Brothers', or the Copious Coinpurse, the other towns generally had little more than the RPG standard: an armaments shop, a general goods store, a couple inns (the low one, the high one), guildhalls, no more than one alchemist (usually Mages' Guild, with Skingrad being the exception), the castle, the cathedral.

Vvardenfell's settlements, on the other hand, were veritable bazaars. Shopping for a sword in Balmora? You've got the Fighters' Guild and the Razor Hole, not to mention other incidental sellers of weapons. Armor? Fighters' guild again, plus that wood elf's place... what's it called? There were three general merchants: that one khajit, the pawnbroker, and the outfitter way off in the corner. Alchemy had three providers: the mages' guild (pathetic I can't remember her name), that high elf's place in the good part of town, and the Temple. Clothing could be had at the general stores, a little from Mages' Guild enchanter, and then there's the one that specialized in it. Loads of options.

And the same was true of the other House seats: Al'drun's outside merchants competeed with the Under-Skar merchants competed with the Imperial Guild Merchants. Saldrith Mora was littered with shops and kiosks. Vivec... I don't think we even need to go there. Options galore, even within a single canton (with the Foreign Quarter having the greatest variety).

EDIT: Come to think of it, the lesser variety could also have been deliberate both at an in-fiction level as well as the metafiction level. Where Vvardenfell was the wild frontier, Cyrodil is the rotting heart of an empire that is known to have guilds and cartels for everything. The merchants of the Imperial City were also organized into a professional organization designed to limit competition. It is unfortunate that the one quest that dealt with that issue painted the outside competitor as a villain (or rather, the unwitting accomplice of one). But its entirely possible that the lack of mercantile competition is due to a combination of a decaying economy and a cartelized market.



Well, I think the larger buildings were deliberate, showing how incredibly wealthy some of the cities' denizens were relative both to the poor folk of Oblivion, and the people of Vvarndenfell. And I don't accusing the towns of "flatness" is precisely true. Anvil was pretty flat, but the others had elevation differences, subtle in some cases, dramatic in others. Chorrel has a mild rise in elevation as you approached certain sides of the town, with the poor part in the lowest spot (typical, really). Skingrad had bridges going over those... what were those, anyway? Some kind of defensive fortifications? Flood channels? Cheydinhal was dominated by the castle on the hill. Leyawin, on the other hand, situated its castle in its lowest spot... strange, really, unless it was meant as a coastal fortification. Bravil was relatively flat, but had a river being channeled through it, cutting a deep ravine (some of those shops will probably have to be moved in future years). The Imperial City was flat, though that was probably a deliberate act of engineering by the people that build it originally (going all the way back to the Ayleids, at least). And then there's Bruma. I think that one caps it.

That is an awesome idea :goodjob:

Well i'd be very happy with seeing a market or bazaar in bigger towns but the way they did it is have a speciffic shop for each thing in every town, they all had a weapon/armor shop, a magic shop, a general trader and two inns. The thing was having so many shops just didnt fit on the SIZE of the towns, in morrowind it fit a bit better on Balmora and Caldera since they are "passing through" towns that would logically get a lot of traffic and potential costumers.

I posted this comment in the TES V Sugestions forum, but I think it fits in approriatly here.


"The cities I believe in the next TES need to move up a notch from those in Oblivion. I do appreciate the fact that each city in Oblivion had it's own culture and distinctive traits, and each NPC had a name, story and purpose. However, as result I think that destroyed what makes a city well... a city.

In Oblivion the cities turned out to be a little to small for comfort, very under populated, and very little going on in which the player can take part in. I mean I rather have more "nameless" NPCs with simple scripts of eating, sleeping, and doing some animation suppose to represent their work. If more focus would be given to the size and layout of the city, the quests, and the more important NPC's like the store clerks and the Counts.

I think Bethesda exemplified this in Fallout 3. Take Megaton for example, there are a number of poor residents simply called, "Megaton settler" who all live in a single house called the "common house", but as a result you get places like Moriarty's Saloon, The Brass Lantern, and Craterside Supply. Which, debatably, have more detail, background and use than all the shops and taverns put together in Cyridill.

Now I don't think that all "nameless" NPC's should be poor and live in a single house like Fallout 3, but perhaps they could be divided into economic groups. For example more poorly dressed "nameless" NPC's will live in several two-three story tenement buildings or ratty shacks, and will be given a laborious looking emotion to represent their work. while more middle-class looking NPCs would live in reasonable-looking two family homes and have some clerk animation representing their work and so forth.

By doing this I believe the focus would be put more on the NPCs that matter. I mean it drove me insane how little the Counts of Cyridill had to offer in Oblivion. Not only in the number and quality of quest they provided, but also in their background and their behaviors toward other cities and counts.

That and the size and layout of the cities made me a little disappointed. I mean could not help but to think that city of Leyawiin, by the look of its concept art and its finished product, was rushed in at the last moment due to time constraints.

I am not saying every city should be crammed with quests either, but give us something to do while we are there. I loved the freeform jobs and random events in Fallout 3 I can only imagine what it would be like if those were implemented in the next TES game, specifically within it's cities. Something like a drunken argument between a "nameless" Imperial resident and a "nameless" Nord hunter at the local tavern and you have the option of taking sides or breaking it up through persuasion.

I believe I have covered everything in my little rant there. I hope all you guys or importantly Bethesda takes this into consideration."


Now I just want to clarify a few things that I think people in the previous forum misunderstood or looked over. I do NOT want every NPC to be "nameless", unimportant and replaceable in the major cities. However, I would prefer there to be more of them if the quality of the layout and size of the city, as well as the importance of NPC's who do matter were to improved.

Also I would like to see more smaller settelments, with the focus of more detailed NPC's there. So it would create that more personal small town/village
feeling.

Although I would like to see cities larger, I am a realist and understand that it would be highly unpractical to make them size of those in Daggerfall. I mean its easy to say that Bethsada should make that big, but with todays heavy duty graphics I dont think most people's cumputers could handle it. Oblivion is still a challenge to run on most computers today.

Why nameless? They could all be name generated and have something to say, they wouldn't need voice acting.

The IC was enough to convey the "center" of the city, but there was no outlying edge to sustain it. The farms that should have covered the remainder of the Imperial Isle from edge to edge didn't exist. The caravans, the workshops, the warehouses, the sprawling expanse of hovels at the edge: not a trace. It's like center of the city was ripped out and dumped into an almost empty countryside.

There were at least half of what I would consider "barely enough" farms scattered widely around the province, but all except a handful of them were long deserted. There were mines, all over-run by goblins. There were forts, all fallen into ruin. It was like a shattered and defeated country after a long war, not the victorious ruling Empire that it was claimed to be.

Not all houses need to be "active"; as in FO3, some can be hollow shells that you can't access. There really do need to be a lot more of them.

thats what i admire about daggerfall its so big even know i couldn't get past the first level its like a gem on bethsda softworks crown and they should look up to Daggerfall and take ideas from it it would making the game experince so ****ing good

On that point, I agree. Services need to reflect the needs of that particular settlement/town/city rather than the needs of your character. No need for a pub and a general store if the 'town' only consists of two homesteads.

I would love for there to be huge cities, small towns and villages, medium sized cities etc. Would make the game feel so much more lively. Also, actual families etc. Not just 1 person living in a manor lol!

This is actually what I would consider to be the natural fate of an empire. Empires do great while they're still expanding and can include newly acquired lands in the payments to supporters of the empire. Once they reach their growth limit (and lets face it, the sea is pretty much the limit, as the Disaster at Ioneth proved), they have to support an increasingly rapacious governing class through heavy taxes (which are bad for industry, and by "industry" I mean farming and blacksmithing and such at this level of development), and currency depreciation (which is even worse). Given how much of a legion presence is necessary simply to enforce the Imperial order in the provinces (the Illiac Bay region was just about completely lost to the Empire prior to the Miracle of Peace), their pay naturally has to come disproportionately from the Imperial province, the only place where there's enough patriotic people who pay their taxes willingly. (It's a bit like the European empires of the nineteenth century; their colonial possessions never paid for themselves... but they had an expanding industrial base to make up for it. The Empire of Tamriel does not.)

Thus, the Imperial province is slowly ground under the increasing weight of imperial administration of the provinces, and heavy taxes drive people to abandon their farms and turn to banditry, occupying previously unoccupied ruins and caves, while goblins, who do not pay taxes, flourish in the voids left behind.

But it should have at least a few functional mines and forts. It makes no sense without it.

There was one mine that at least had been active until quite recently. It's the one that the Cheydinhal Fighters' Guild is called in to clean out, with the grounds littered with miners.

But you are right. There should have been at least one or two currently in use. I didn't explore mines much, so I don't know if there were or not.

As superb as some of the ideas hitherto discussed have been, Bethesda will ignore them. They'll hand us a finished TES V with six major cities, each with eight buildings apiece, and they'll blow their entire VA budget on another bigwig Hollywood name with a script totaling forty lines so that there are only two other voice actors to populate the whole game world.

I love such optimistic posts such as these. I mean you definatly don't give Bethesda enough credit for what they have done. Yes they have done c**p that I wasnt particularly happy about, but you know what they still made a great game and you would have to be blind to believe they didint listen to their fan base.

After Morrowind two of the biggest complaints about the game were its combat system and the lack of life in its NPCs. Guess what? In Oblivion both of those factors were overhaled, Bethesda before the games shipment, proudly and repeditivly advertised their overhal.

Now in fairness Oblivions combat system still needs some work, and the detail given to NPC's was, in my mind, what took away some detail from the cities. However, thats why these forums are here we can tell them these things. Many of the changed have already taken place, just look at Fallout 3.

Also, Bethesda has had two games now, and a number of uploadable content, to practice with their current graphics, physics, and AI systems. Somthing they didn't have after Marrrowind. So one would assume that the quality of their games will improve, as seen from Oblivion to Fallout 3.

Well, I give Beth credit, but, they seriously should make the cities a bit bigger.

The census population for Daggerfall was 110,000 in the 3rd Era.

Now, you have to figure, if it is in Skyrim, they will have to do it.

I mean, White Run, Solitude, Winter Hold- those are all large.

And, you also have Markarth Side, Dawn Star, Windhelm, Falkreath, Riften.

Then there is Karthwasten, and some of the other minor cities.

They should also put Dragonstar in there, because Skyrim owns half of it.

Diminutive cities were as much a complaint after Morrowind as they are now, and somehow they got even smaller.

If the ball keeps rolling the way it has, I doubt we'll ever have the vast neighborhoods you're anticipating, because Bethesda really doesn't care about delivering that kind of product. The Imperial City is a perfect paradigm of their vision: a tiny sliver of the sparkling jewel of civilization it's actually supposed to represent; big enough to be functional, but small enough to cram in a lot of polygons and shiny textures without overwhelming the video game consoles. It's not about making an experience massive anymore, it's about making it detailed--detailed enough to win accolades from the gaming press and Game of the Year awards. This despite the fact that there do exist other games out there that manage to be massive and detailed at the same time. Games like Assassin's Creed, although every time somebody tries to draw that comparison someone else on these forums shoots it down because "The Elder Scrolls isn't supposed to be 'that type of game.'"

Limiting all cities in Oblivion to interior cells was a lousy but necessary workaround to the shortcomings of the engine. Don't get me wrong, it was leaps and bounds better than Morrowind's, which still gives me less than 15 FPS in Balmora almost a decade after the game's release. Still, the fact that they had non-overworld cells wholly dedicated to conveying a city and they still failed to have more than twenty or so buildings in any of them strikes me as a tad underwhelming. For any of the imaginings espoused in this thread to be realized, Bethesda needs to come up with an engine that's capable of smoothly rendering one hundred buildings, along with all the assorted clutter and NPCs, spread out across no more than four exterior cells. It's a daunting feat for any developer, but given Bethesda's preoccupation with making everything shiny and polished, I have a feeling it's never going to happen.

More likely they'll "meet us halfway" on the city size issue and deliver a product that's not quite as good as it could have been, not quite as good as it should have been, not quite as good as what was promised, just as they did with Oblivion's voice acting and RadiantAI. My guess is cities in TES V will be slightly larger, topping out around thirty to thirty-five buildings.

So basicly you are saying that you want quantity rather than quality? You want 50 extra houses with nothing in them to do rather than having a smoother running game.

And you can't seriously blame Bethesda for Morrowind being slow on your computer. It works perfectly fine on mine.

At the end you mention someting about the game won't be as good as it should be. Well the game is as good as Bethseda wants it to be so just because you don't like it dosen't make the game bad.

In my opinion you should have also counted the university and the Prison...

Doing it in my head I guess they have together another 13 buildings (making the Orrey and the Tower two seperate buildings)

bringen the IC to 105 buildings... wich is quite big....

And with counting the Waterfront, did you count the Bloated Float and the Marie Elena, cuz in my opinion you shouldn't....

well lets hope they take a look back on there previous games like daggerfall

Daggerfall didn't have good cities , they were only big and randomized. Skip the random stuff and keep it hand made!

Is that the Orrery that didn't have a frickin key? I wouldn't count buildings that began as a blatant failure.
105 is pretty big, though. I'd count the boats - I'd basically count any existing entity that offers a separate cell.

I thought Vivec was larger than the IC, suppose it was down to the seperate cantons and way it was spaced out. Every room inside each canton should count as a building like in St Olms and the Great House cantons while buildings like the Temple and Palace should only count as one as they have essentally one purpose. The Ministry of Truth should also essentially count as a building if it wasn't counted as it is a part of the city even if it is a floating meteoite.