You misinterpreted what he was saying. He wasn't saying that Rome had only ten people, but rather that early humans got ten people into a group if they were lucky (i.e. a really long time before Rome). He was comparing Tokyo - a city - to what Rome - a city - once was. Tokyo is much more densely populated and houses much more people. Rome would only seem like a slightly-overcrowded city in comparison to Tokyo.

Except that TES wasn't set in 70,000 B.C. The human population actually remained quite stable, without the massive growth of today, until around the 19th century or so. It was VERY slow from around 300-400 B.C. to around 800 A.D, remaining very close to 200 million or so the entire time. Between then and around 1800 or so, it got faster, but was still pretty steady, taking around 1,000 years to get the 400% increase from 200 million to 1 billion. This compared to 170 years to get from 1 billion to 4 billion, another 400% increase, but accomplished nearly 6 times as fast, taking 830 years less. And then 124 years, or 8 times as fast, to get from 1.5 billion to 6 billion. So really, the population hasn't changed as much as they said; it's a much more recent thing, yet even in the 1700s, London, Tokyo, and Paris were massive cities.

Likewise, I think that for comparison, few could immediately tell the difference; once you get to that level of size, it gets too big for a person to adequately measure it. Especially when, due to lower skyscraqer technology, Rome would'dve had to be far more sprawling to contain its 1 million citizens than Tokyo would, which would make getting a grasp of its size that much more difficult.

A difference bethween about 5 people/sq mile and 6 993 people/sq mile is huge.
Similiarly there really is no way to tell the people of Tokyo that any city even in Daggerfall is bustling. On the other hand the early humans would have been very impressed with 10 people in a busy town. Even today I could find some granny in some forest who thinks 10 people in a town is impressive. Although I never tried to say settlements of 10 people is the only kind there should be.
On what time is TES set then? It is not 70,000 B.C, it is not medieval, it is not future. If it is not any real time, it makes all comparison with anything obsolete.

But to go further, if TESV does come to the next generation of consoles, all this talk is useless. Beth will have their new own goals and benchmarks on them.

Yes, those are the difference between largely uninhabited areas and a relatively dense city. But it's worth noting that Rome's current density isn't as high as that number today, and it was comparable to that during the Roman era; a lot of older European cities rely a lot on older, not-so-tall buildings, while a lot of Tokyo is far more modern architecture. (possibly in part because over half of the city, including almost all its center, burned to the ground during WW2)


I dunno who you'd be talking to, then. I found Daggerfall large, even though my expectations were set almost as high as Tokyo residents, due to my time in Chicago. (which boasts a metropolitan area of nearly 10 million, the official city limits covering about 2.8) One's expectations for a game world are largely irrelevant compared to where one lives, otherwise gamesas, all living in BosWash, would find all their cities utterly tiny.

Well all this talk about "reality in size and population" meet one flaw, at what point is it interesting to play?... towns that only have the most essential NPCs in them feel empty, those overlaoded with "useless" NPCs feel crammed and irritating... plus TES does NOT play in the real world, you don't really have to show the "middle ages" statistics... and you have other cultural influences too, again look at morrowind... the Dunmer towns where well developed and fitting for the landscape while the imperial towns where tiny and underdeveloped

The towns don't have to be as large as Daggerfalls but still they could do with resizing and most of all actually look like they where built into the landscape or actually grew... think of a quarter called "old town wall" which basically has the building built into a old part of the town wall that simply remain as a new wider wall was built around it

I want to see a couple large cities and one giant city with towns and villages strewn about acting like a sort of suburb.

I do agree with this, but think of how much work it would take for bethesda to do all that

They seriously need to sort out the sizes of places in TESV. Honestly, the Hamlets were OK, but the cites felt like vilages. I live near a tiny place called Wells in England. It's within the top Ten smallest cites in the world, yet it's much lager (at least 10x) than the Imperial City! They need to make these places huge, expansive. I want to get lost in them, actually have to ask for directions. The other thing they need to do is make them busy, the cites in Oblivion are dead! There needs to be a lot of nameless NPC's wandering around, buying, selling, chatting, thieves, drug dealers, store deliveries, horses and carts, everything you would see in a medieval city.

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.

just reading the OP.

Cities feel small, towns feel small, settlements feel, welll... sort of natural in most cases.
i walk into some cities and just feel wierd because i can see the other side.. it mainly has to do with what graphics are capable of these days and saving space etc etc.. but still, stuff just has a 'wrongness' to it because the scale is on the small side.

So you found Daggerfall large, but I can't think Oblivion towns are decent? Everything is relative.

But if TESV comes on next consoles I expect major improvements, if it comes on current I'm settled with current way. Rather than nameless filler NPCs and their houses.
I am not against having 100 people working on a corn field, smithing etc. But if it can't happen because of hardware restriction, I'm fine with the scale toned down.
1 farmer = 10 eaters, 10 farmers = 100 eaters, no major difference.

Vivic felt larger because of the pathways between the cantons. Thinking of the city cantons as east-west oriented because the doors faced that way; the pathways to get down to the sidewalk, the sidewalk to the bridge, the bridge across the divide, the sidewalk around to the next ramp, then the ramp up to the main level. They seemed big when you had to walk between them, but there wasn't very much inside each of the suffocation traps.

I don't know how you would go about counting the buildings anyway in Assassin's Creed. They made most of those cities using common walls, and rented out their upstairs often times. These buildings are also three and four stories tall with occupation on each level, in Oblivion http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Whom_Gods_Annoy was a commoner who lived in what should have been a nobleman's mansion. You can't compare the buildings quite like this between Assassin's Creed and TES games.

Towns aren't all that flat in Oblivion, Bruma, Cheydinhal, Skingrad, or Chorrol. You are correct though about how many people live in places, there should be a family of ten spanning three generations with servants living in each of those.

Don't lean on Balmora too much, there are strong examples against Morrowind's influence like Sadrith Mora. The Oblivion style is indeed to drop buildings here and there without effort.

I wouldn't call the cities tightly walled in that there was so much room available inside. Look at this http://www.uesp.net/w/images/OB-Map-Leyawiin.jpg compared to http://guidesmedia.ign.com/guides/772025/images/assacreed_maps_full_acre.jpg. In Acre they're making good use of the area within the walls by crowding things in for protection. As for Leyawiin, most modern suburbia is tighter packed.

A few comments:

• No, nothing is THAT relative; again, your whole preposterous "if 10 people is the largetst settlement, it will always feel like a bustling city" bit falls flat. After all, the Imperial City does NOT feel like NYC, Chicago, Tokyo, or even any remotely-decently-sized city; it feels like a fortress with a small town in it, hardly the capital of an empire.
  
• I'm hoping that TES V takes the PC as the lead platform, since console->PC games ALMOST always come out badly, yet PC->console games tend to come out the better for it, and more often push the envelope of the console's capabilities. (the only major exception to the rule that I can think of being KotOR)
  
• Even on the Xbox 360, there really isn't a limitation to town size. If you'd played Fallout 3, you might've noticed this.
  
• Also, given that with modern technology, it takes about 1 farmer to feed 100-200 people in the USA, 1:10 is unreasonably efficient. Closer to 1:4, or hence 25:100, might be better. So yeah, more farmers needed; a whole town can't live off of the small vegetable gardens you see in Oblivion.

Considering their society, they'd have eighty percent of society working farms anyway.

1. Why should Imperial City be compared with Tokyo or NYC? I ain't doing it.
If Chorrol has 50 people and IC has 100 people, IC does seem a lot more bustling, a capital city.
If most of the game world has 0 people, a city of 10 is the biggest, capital city.
In comparison I'd think most average American cities have 100 000 people. That compared to 10 000 000 NY makes NY again a bustling capital area.
London used to be a centre people of smaller places used to visit and be impressed with traffic and everything. Nowadays most Japanese people think London is very peaceful and historic "town".
Games might not be directly comparable with real life. Games are comparable with games though. Many people use the argument that bigger TES cities should be like the Liberty City of GTA. Wonder what people of Tokyo, and maybe the people of future's sky cities would suggest big TES cities to be like: "My city is bigger than the capital of game WTH?"
5000 NPCs might now sound impressive and satisfying goal, but once all games have as many, the sense of size and livelyness will be re-set again.
2. Agreed
3. :shrug:
4. I have said some improvement would be welcome. But if you add too many people of 1 kind, you need to add more of others, which leads in endless circle. Communities of 10 people have worked and still do. TES world is more developed, but most settlements in it don't have only 10 people. Even adding 5 more people to every city of Oblivion would make some transportation, some workshop, 1 more person working on fields and few other filling employements possible. Priority is to make the existing people work and act like people.
I also don't think the demand of food is the same in TES. The player never has to eat, most people only have 2 or 3 food items. In addition there doesn't seem to be seasons or empty crops ever. There are no toilets or crap anywhere either. Efficient digestion?

Still, if TESV does come on future PC and consoles, it might have 100 times more people who actually do their tasks in bigger cities and I won't object.

I hope that the cities are bigger with more NPCs. A lot more NPCs. And I'm for the opinion of filler NPCs, like Fallout 3, but perhaps even more of them going about their non-scripted AI business to make a city feel like a city. This doesn't mean I don't want fully detailed characters. I want tons of fully detailed characters with non-scripted AI as well, but if there are no filler NPCs, cities are going to feel barren.

You were making parallels. Like you just did. You asserted that just because a typical city has 50 people, 100 would feel like a bustling city. Well, as it happens, no one seems to actually feel that way in practice. That's what you've apparently been ignoring/failing to understand from me for the past several posts. That point being that no, it's not relative. It's not. Get over it. A cluster of shacks with 10 people, even if it's the biggest settlement in a huge game world, will never be a bustling city; it'll just be a sad wasteland of a game world.


To be honest, NYC's RELATIVE size to other cities has nothing to do with its perception as a capital. Simply put, it's its ABSOLUTE size, and the ABSOLUTE range of businesses and economy there. The latter is particularly important and can never be relative; If the entire economy of a city revolved around one industry like, say, aircraft manufacture, it'd never be considered a real capital of anything, other than aircraft. However, larger cities are naturally more diverse


Do you honestly KNOW that the Japanese think that? No, you don't. You're just making it up. (in part because I know to the contrary, from actually speaking with some Japanese) So please quit making things up.


The former part is somewhat correct but missing the point, the latter is incorrect, and both for the exact same reason I will explain here.

Game cities would have parallels to real life, but the only way they are not directly comparable is because of gameplay. While the typical big-city dweller is fine with a 30-minute commute by car to work, this just won't work with a game. There's only so big a city in a game can get before its size winds up making it too unwieldy to get around in. Hence, there is a maximum limit somewhere, (the maximum limit I hinted in the title, as I said "limits" not "limit") where a city is just too large to be really playable. People don't play games to do something that feels like work, and a huge city that acts as a safe zone like in the typical RPG can do just that.

This is the upper limit, opposite of the lower limit, where below that a city doesn't feel particularly lively. Contrary to what you believe, that lower limit is utterly not relative in terms of comparison with other settlements in the same game; though both were far smaller than their respective capital cities, most people feel Morrowind's Balmora was way more lively than any of the "cities" of Oblivion. This had entirely to do with the fact that Balmora was roughly double the size of Oblivion cities like Chorrol and Leyawiin. Making the city larger and more complex makes it harder to focus the entire thing in the mind, which in turn forces the mind to think at a different scale, hence making it bigger. It's not relative, it's absolute; things don't become relative by having multiple factors. In this case, the four biggest factors are likely building count, population size, area covered, and services available; ALL of them are pretty blatant linear scales from "small" to "big." And hence why Vivec feels bigger than the Imperial City is because while it falls behind in "building count," it trumps TIC in the other three areas. Again, where it merely relative, they'd both feel the same size, as they are both their respective capitals.

As for wanting to go past 5,000 NPCs, it won't happen; once you get to that number, if they're bland, then people would rather have fewer, more detailed ones, or if they ARE detailed, it will be too high a number to really count, to the point where people will over-estimate the number regularly, and they will think that there's no need for more because they are having trouble keeping track as it is.

Sad wasteland because that's not what we are used to. The first "cities" made 10000 years ago sure weren't considered sad wasteland, the alternative was to go back to the wild world. The small cities and countries are happy if they manage to gather even a few more people and business there.




Sure, capitals need more than people or 1 trade. Imperial City has all sorts of stores, art, now 1 of a kind arena, the temple, Elder council, Arcane university and all sorts of citizens.




Who are used to Tokyo traffic?
It is common sense that smaller and older is less interesting in the certain aspects. Sure, places like Rome and Athens have interesting art and culture, but the traffic and trade of today are not so impressive compared to today's centres. Small and quiet is small and quiet. Capitals have changed with time.
GTA3 was once a full 10 game, nowadays people think why they were even playing it. Final Fantasy 7 was once a full 10 game, it still holds much of the interest because of the design.



True the first part.
I certainly don't feel Balmora was lively. It was bigger yes, but people standing behind their counters or in middle of city never talking to each other and working even less than in Oblivion doesn't scream lively to me. I also feel Vivec is bigger because of the drawn out layout. Lots of corridors and ramps to get anywhere. Population is mostly static. Same services are offered by multiple people just because. Overall Vivec was the dullest big city of Morrowind. Then again, I think most capitals are dull.

I know that when I first got into Chorrol, I thought it is nice. With the few expections anyone could live there just fine. When I got to IC, I thought it is bigger and has more everything.




Once you have seen hunderds of games with 5000 NPCs, with time the technical/artistic quality will be near perfection too, people will want to go past that. If NYC can hold 10 million people, a game can too.

I agree that I'd like to see larger towns in TESV. So, how far do we go to make bigger towns? Would we rather have non-enterable buildings (like assasins creed or GTA) and much larger cities, as well as anonymous NPC's?

Personally, I think off-limits buildings would ruin the spirit of the game. One of the great things about TES was that you could go anywhere, there were no restricted areas (other than the places off the map.) Putting in buildings you couldn't enter would kill that.

Anonymous NPC's however would work. In real life, you don't know everyones name when you walk down the street, so why not have a load of random NPC's to flesh out the game, create busier street scenes etc. Another thing which I really think would make the games cities seem bigger is having horses, carts, carriages going down the streets. It would just give that extra feeling that things are going on, this is a working city, not just a playground for the player.

I'd be interested to know what others think on the topic.

Buildings are no question.

I don't agree with anonymous NPCs.
The game is RPG and different people want to see different people. In real life it just isn't much use or even possible to go chat with everyone. In RPG it should be possible, plus different character's might find uses for people and the people might have different reactions to different races. Someone should be able to know anyone.

I still think learning names/other info should be in. At first everyone is just "Orc" or "Dark Elf", you can learn they are "Miner" or "Fighter", you can learn they are "Grandmaster" or "Leader", and finally you can learn their names.

There's not a real need for anonymous npcs. They can do them the way they were done in Arena or Daggerfall. The learning names and info was included in Arena, you had to ask them their name. With a text based dialogue, no problems.

Well If TESV had larger cities then you would have to make the whole game world larger in order for it not to become stuffy.

kalle90, I'm politely requesting that after this, you leave this thread and do not comment in it further; I have come to the conclusion that your (rather inane, if truth be told) posting is, in fact, scaring away actual reasonable discussion. Instead, we have you repeatedly bringing up your utterly dead arguments over and over again, in spite of them being disproven a new way each time. Seriously, your whole bit about "sizes are relative" is utter BS, and everyone else here can see it, and everyone else posting is making note of this somewhere. So you're accomplishing nothing other than prohibiting actual discussion here, so your absence would be appreciated. You said previously that you'd stop, but you didn't; I'd appreciate your going back and honoring that statement. Thank you.


Simply put, they weren't cities. If you studied human history, there were no permanent settlements for the first thousands of years; there were hunter-gather groups that wandered about. Permanent settlements started AFTER those groups got rather large; hence there was no point when the largest settlement was 10 people. "cities" didn't start until human congregations got into the thousands, and by 8,000 B.C., when cities like Damascus were founded, their sizes were measured in the thousands.

So yeah, your point makes no sense on multiple accounts: the first cities then were larger than the entire populace of Oblivion combined, TES isn't set in 8,000 B.C. anyway, so you can't even use THOSE small-ish numbers for a base, and again, city sizes are not relative.


It has a handful. Again, re-look at my list, and question how fake the city really is; it's only a "capital" for adventurers, without the ability to actually realistically support its own citizens. There is no food industry, just a few taverns, and a surprisingly large number of shops that do nothing but deal in armor, weapons, or magic items.


You're comitting a fallacy there, trying to appeal to a "common sense," which in fact is utterly fabricated by yourself, at least as you're applying it. You're making an assumption, and making the mistake that because you assumed that, then it must be universally true. This is where generalizations, stereotyping, and prejudice come from, so it's not a good idea. The fact is that a city like Rome is large by ANY standards, including those of Tokyo residents.


Coincidentally, that's just how they acted in the Imperial City. "I saw a mudcrab the other day." And they did walk around in both games; they weren't static in Morrowind. To claim otherwise is falsehood.


When I first got to Chorrol, it felt SMALL. It was pretending to be a city when it really did feel like a tiny village; I should've have been able to meet everyone in a city in under 15 minutes. Simply put, no matter what you claim about sizes being "relative," (with as outrageous of claims you make about said relativity) the place simply wasn't big enough to even begin to shake that "cozy, small-village feel." Again, think on it: it's pretty ludicrous to think that, say, these "Tokyo Residents" you claim to know through "common sense" would be able to get that "cozy, small-town feel" in a city of, say, 500,000, (like New Orleans, which has actually LESS than that) even though Tokyo has a population 25 times that, about the same difference between the Imperial City and most of the tiny hamlets in Oblivion.


My point is that such a time won't arrive for a full-depth RPG, because there will be a reasonable limit to how much the player would be willing to deal with, ESPECIALLY with a compressed time scale, like Oblivion's 1-30 ratio. Because people don't have a full lifetime to spend with each game, they don't have time to deal with all the same waits they do in real life.


That's part of the whole idea; my two proposed sizes for TES V, assuming it's in Skyrim, are based on 1:30 and 1:12 land/time scales, respectively netting 240 mi? (20x12) or 1,500 mi? (50x30) of land area; the more modest, workable city sizes would probably fit better with the smaller world, though; the larger one would likely have to compensate by having far more than 8 cities; the next-largest 24 towns would likely have to be upgraded to cities themselves, with the 8 main cities being upgraded to large capitals.

You know towns in Oblivion had one problem which was pretty much the same Morrowind had... NPCs simply had NOTHING TO DO... most of the time they just stood there or aimlessly walked around only now in Oblivion they had a wider range of walking around and doing nothing... there where no WORKSHOPS in towns or places where they really did their daily work... it would be so cool to just see the smith go down to his shop, start up the furnace, heat metal, start beating it at an anvil, take the finished piece to a sharpening stone and finally put a finished weapon on a display shelf... see fisherman actually go in their boats and go fishing... all that was just missing in the game and you know what, stuff like this was in GOTHIC already... so why not here?

Like that towns could be realisticly bigger, have more inhabitants and actually feel populated

Yeah, Oblivion only made a half-hearted stab at that, with some farmers occasionally walking out to a field, taking out a hoe, and using it for a few in-game hours. More of that needs to be done; they can't all be socialites. And even the socialites never went to or held any parties. The lack of gatherings like that was disappointing.