Just a small note then.



Few years ago EU set the minimum population and density that are demanded for a settlement to really be listed as a city. Before that we used to have lot more "cities". Practically it doesn't affect anything.

Goodday

Yes that would really help with immersion and make npc's seem to have more of a life which will help make cities more feel more alive.

A bustling city will only work with a legion of anonymous, unimportant NPCs who can improvize their schedules, adapt to any situation, and fade out of existence when the player isn't looking. You can't do it when Alessia Ottus needs her own custom-built face.

Actually what it would need is NPCs from other towns travel between them... but you could realistically have "random NPCs", there are tourists, traveling traders, people on their way through and, of course, as every gamer knows... adventurers... all those people you meet once or maybe twice, then never see them again... hell the game could even calculate their travles, a traveling trader might follow the main road from east to west, stayin every bigger town for 2 - 3 days and every vvillage on the way for one day... after a month he finished his trip and is already in another province

EDIT:
Anothe rproblem with Oblivions towns... well.. the placement... draw a circle around the IC and it will touch all major towns except two... there really was no "nearer town" or "further town" and the IC was ALWAYS in the middle

Oh, you sure bet you can. One of the nice things about procedural generation-engines like FaceGen is that they CAN use a completely random seed value to produce a unique, yet logical-looking, result. In that case, just give the engine the limits on what faces can and cannot be, and then just feed it random numbers and it will provide random faces for people. I'm pretty sure that aside from a handful of major characters, they were all done this way.

Similarly, most of the data on NPCs could be produced in this manner; randomized skills tied to their class/level (which the Construction Set does on its own already) a naming system like Daggerfall's, and that just leaves you to randomize their clothing, and give them a schedule, home, and dialog options. With a little bit of work on an "editor engine" for that, it shouldn't be too hard to just assign them ownership of a house and its contents, assign them a workplace, set up their schedule... Perhaps a minute or two total if done right. Then just repeat a few hundred times, and voila! - instant set of not-so-anonymous NPCs. Of course, getting their DIALOG past the whole level of either Oblivion's "I saw a Mudcrab the other day" or Morrowind's "I'm a Google-esque search engine," might be a bit harder. Might require either more clever voice-acting work, or scrapping voice-acting for unimportant townsfolk.

Yes, the randomly-generated with non-scripted AI would be amazing. Imagine, some of the random NPCs are naturally thieves, so they will go around and try not to get arrested from thieving, though it would be cool if they are arrested at some times.

A surprising number of Oblivion NPCs have inter-town travel schedules. No one ever notices, so of course the system is broken. It may have something to do with the MQMartialLaw AI package that goes into effect.

Alessia Ottus was handcrafted. She doesn't need her own name (when was the last time you ran into a subway station full of acquaintances?) and AI schedule, when it all be turned over to a procedural system that treats NPCs like ambience drones to improve the player's experience. Individuals are not important in a city, and the ones that are can actually have a personality and characterization next time around.

True. No one ever noticed the feature, it;s broken anyways so it isn't really worth it.

I actually thought about this, and one thing I thought would be cool would be that characters with enough prestige (or money) should be able to invite local people of importance for say, a feast at their house. If you spend all kinds of gold for the best in game wines and fancy cheeses, you're reputation with them goes up. As a result of this, maybe you get the go-ahead from the steward to re-open the old mine outside of town, generating a new source of income for you.

In order to do this, you'd already need a residence, fancy clothes, and probably servants (Imagine those unsightly beggars in Oblivion, and being able to offer them 3-5 gold a day to be a servant, give them some clothes and a cot in your basemant)

Assassin characters could use this to lure targets to a spot where they are vulnerable, either to direct violence or poisoning.

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.

Yes more social activities to do with npc's to raise their disposition and to make it feel like your actually friends with npc's and more job type things like mining.

Not to bring Fallout 3 into the discussion (especially not if the topic is the size of towns...Fallout 3's towns are miniscule) , but from I can tell after spending quite a bit of time playing the game the generic NPCs that populate Megaton (and a few other locations, but not all) seem to be randomly generated everytime you enter the town's cell. That may or may not be the case, but it always seems that way to me. Of course these NPCs are largely useless beyond making the town feel more populated, but I do wonder whether something like that could work in a TES game in order to create the sense of scale that's otherwise missing from Morrowind and Oblivion. Obviously that couldn't happen if the intention is to give every NPC a personal background, but for the purposes of illusion it works nicely. I actually prefer the way Fallout 3 handled the miscellaneous NPCs since it seemed to give Bethesda greater incentive to make the NPCs that weren't generic more interesting and unique.

Of course I'd want to avoid the option of adding a bunch of buildings just to make the settlement feel larger, especially if those buildings serve no other purpose (which is why I'm wary of bringing Assassin's Creed into the discussion as before in this thread :stare: )

I think a huge factor is density. Oblivion's density was okay, I never felt like any town was "empty" but they definitely could have included more NPCs just because you had very common type people living in huge houses, and you constantly saw the same 4-5 people walking back and forth. So basically, a few more NPCs per house would be good, but we ultimately need more houses as well. At least for a town to feel very alive and realistic.

Vendors in the streets need to be brought back. that gave us a reason to actually be outside while in the town, not just holed up in one building or another. and small crowds around the vendors would add to the lively feel of the place.

One of the reasons that the Imperial City feel small compared to Vivec is just the amount of stuff to explore there. In TIC every shop had randomly generated junk, and there were no hand place items to find and steal. In Vivec you had tons of shops, some with the cool stuff, some not, and all kinds of vaults and shrines.

One of my favorite MW memories is getting a quest from some drunk Nord in a random tavern inside Vivec, and what I found in the closet there as well. Completely random, totally epic.

Those shops were pretty large, and I think they should largely get away from just having a staircase out in the front of the shop for the owner to go upstairs for the night. The ceiling heights need to be addressed as well, eight feet is reasonable. They've gotten too high. Dig in a foot or three here and there, make sure most every building has a dirt floor, stuff like that. There were dirt floors in many neighborhoods in Kansas City up into the 30's and 40's (urban planning knowledge). Then the issue of how many people live there. When London was the capitol of an empire there was overcrowding to the point that prisoners had more space in their cells than many of the citizens. Make a back door in the shop space that goes to the workshop and the stairs to the upper floors, rent out floors three and four to others.

They were mansions compared to what they should have been. One peasant in Leyawiin deserves a 12'x20' shack. Not that they should intentionally let very many people live alone in buildings. Everyone has families they have to depend upon with many generations as needed. I believe though that the cities would have to be designed before you say that you liked the design of them.

You may not have heard, but medieval cities were very often intentionally designed to be confusing to get around. This was so the defending army had better command of the situation and the invaders would get divided up and sidetracked. You won't mind the design of the city though because it will have unique looking streets, vistas, pathways, edges, nodes, landmarks and such. If they let you ask average citizens for directions again, you'll have little trouble with it.

Visible growth is a good thing to add, and obvious useage of materials that were scavenged from other things or buildings. You know that they started ripping down the Colosseum for every building project that came along? I guess that's a bit better than the pope's idea to turn it into a wool factory for prosttutes, but it illustrates the point that things change.

It is obviously not all due to console gaming good sir, have you seen Assassin's Creed?

Yes, people of all kinds and sorts. Take a look at the tax records from medieval or renaissance cities if you'd care to see some of the job types. Piss Prophet comes to mind.

Darn right. There are many buildings and people all around me in that I never interact with directly, but I enjoy having them there. There must be tax bases, infrastructure, enough supply and demand to keep the businesses in business on the six days a week I'm not buying things there, and so on. If you don't have the base, you shouldn't get the infrastructure.

Good things to point out, all those. There should be tons of farmers, and a hell of a bureaucracy in the towns.

One of the big problems is that travel is only done by a single person. There are no caravans. It's too sparse; another reason for more NPCs, so there can be more on the roads, since roads are perfectly linear, so more NPCs means the more often you'll run into them.


The NPCs don't need to be treated as "fade out" objects, and in fact, are better if not; remember that their purpose is not just aesthetics, but functional as well, for those who happen to be thieves or assassins. Why have a procedural system randomly generate NPCs each time, resulting in something the player will notice soon enough, and not just use said system to generate a bunch during game design? This will result in the NPCs being a LOT more believable, and likewise, make things much more interesting through this uniqueness... Such as, of course, their own homes.


TBH, this is where I think the game might push a bit into The Sims territory if it did that. I'd rather that the player could just attend them, most likely uninvited. Thieves need interesting things to chase after, you know? Especially if it involves a group of socialites in the capital city, who have a party every 5-10 days (week on average) at a random selection out of 3-5 possible venues. By eavesdropping, you could find out, and use that to your advantage to rob drunk partiers while they're unaware. I'm reminded heavily of a certain level from Thief II there. And in that case, it'd provide reason for eavesdropping WITHOUT needing tons and tons of voiced dialog; just a small handful of lines, with portions that can be swapped around. "The party's at ______ on ______. You coming?"


Of course they'd serve a purpose: properly, you'd be able to break into them and rob them blind.

This is, in part, why I'm not advocating Daggerfall-sized cities; not that they're entirely un-doable, but rather, because it'd be very hard to make each worth existing. It had a lot of houses that said "this house has nothing of value" if you tried to enter it.


That's another thing. Street venders help eliminate that issue with no one being outside when you looked, which seriously hurt liveliness in the city.


The lack of placed stealing items was a major problem. Worse yet was the fact that even NON-EQUIPMENT loot was leveled, so that you could only get crappy gems worth nothing if you were a low-level thief.

And the people standing in corners or under an overhang having a pre-scripted conversation in Assassin's Creed contributed more to the realism than the randomized conversations from Oblivion. They also populate the street pretty well. Or just have some folks sitting at tables outside the tavern.

Yeah, the "random" conversations were utterly useless in Oblivion, and TES V shouldn't bother with any NPC-to-NPC conversations that don't have meaning. Like above, I mentioned the sharing of plans... Conversations should take HEAVILY from what's on the NPC's current queue, and what they'd already done. Again, dialog lines would be done in snipets so that they could be arranged block-by-block to create whatever was desired. Here's an example for an NPC interrupting another on their way to doing something, with swappable phrases in parenthesis, in a (example/type) format:

• Baltham Grayman - Oh hello (Ajira/name), how've you been? It's been (at least a week/relative time length) since I last saw you!
  
• Ajira - (Ajira is/"name+is" if Khajiit/I'm if not) doing (good/condition). I'm just now (heading to the store/current AI destination) to (get a ceramic bowl/current AI goal).
  
• Baltham Grayman - Oh? How's that?
  
• Ajira - (Ajira/name or "I") (accidentally broke mine/randomized "factoid/reason" for task), so (I need to get one/genericized line used to describe AI task again).
  
• Baltham Grayman - Well then, sounds like you're (pretty busy/randomized phrase with the exact same meaning)! It was good (seeing you again/randomized pleasantry phrase). (Have a nice day/randomized farewell).
  
• Ajira - You too.

Just that template could be applied to virtually ANY interaction under similar circumstances; just by swapping some context/AI-sensitive blocks, you can fit it anywhere. And by having just a FEW lines where you can swap them randomly with others that mean the same thing, you utterly prevent them from sounding repetitive. This would certainly add a lot of liveliness to the game, allowing for flexible conversations without the need to record a whole lot more voice than Oblivion did; imagine NPCs actually TALKING to shopkeepers, telling them what they'd like to buy.

The only potential caveat is that differences in tone of voice would be hard to accomodate, as blocks of speech, to fit in a template, would all have to match their respective tones. In that case, though, the lines themselves would likely change to match the change in tone, so that could just be a whole new template.

Conversations aren't too courageous to undertake? I'd almost prefer an ambient hubbub (where justified) with a few simple, disembodied snippets playing above it all.

Yes, but that doesn't well befit a game where every NPC is supposed to have a place, so that towns serve a purpose as something other than a cheap backdrop to get quests from a guild or buy supplies from a store. Rather, I very much liked Morrowind's example, where everything was something to be examined, and you'd find something there.

Another thing that would make cities seem larger is having competition between shops. Rather than having one shop for weapons, one shop for armour etc, have 2 or 3+. Make it pay to shop around, to explore backstreets and alleyways to find a small, modest store whose prices are much more reasonable than those of the pricey high street sellers.

Also, have buildings outside the walls. Slums, shanty towns perhaps, but neighbourhoods outside the protection of the gates would give a more natural feel to a settlement.

They don't have to be slums outside the town, just less dense and not built as high.

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.