I think something a lot of us notices is how large (or small) a city or settlement in a game is; if it's tiny, it might feel quite backwater, or even quite away from REAL civilization. Likewise, the larger cities give a better feel of said civilization.

Something I've noticed is that largely, on average, cities have gotten smaller with each game since Daggerfall. This makes me wonder... Exactly what are the lower (and perhaps upper?) limits for a city to where the feeling of what it's SUPPOSED to be just don't match up with how they try to portray it? You can't exactly throw an inn and a single shop down in the middle of nowhere and expect players to feel that what you've got there is a bustling city. No, there are various different levels of settlement:

• Homestead/Camp - The smallest, this is often only a single real building, with possibly fence, one or more lean-tos, stables, or open storage, and likely farm fields accompanying this. Or in the cases of semi-permanent camps, this likewise has abotu as much. One thing is common: you won't really find much in the way of services here.
  
• Thorp/Hamlet - The smallest size of actual, multi-family settlement, with just a few buildings, but enough to classify as "civilization." Generally, you can find an inn/tavern, and possibly a small general store.
  
• Village/Town - A mid-size settlement, this feels different from a Hamlet in that one might find the services more expected of civilization, like a blacksmith, or possibly even a guild outpost.
  
• City - A large settlement, often walled, that will feel quite extensive. One can count on finding just about most services you need here.

In order to accomplish each sort of size, you need to have more buildings and NPCs. Taking a look over the previous games, I went ahead and actually counted the number of buildings in each game's main settlements, looking over maps. In some cases of very large buildings (like Vivec's Cantons or a lot of the buildings in the Imperial City) I counted individual, distinct establishments separately, of the kind that would appear in separate buildings were the city of a more "typical" design. I didn't count guard posts build into a city's walls, and I also counted any relevant forts/castles as a single building. I only bothered counting the 3 main capital cities of Daggerfall, (I mean, I honestly don't have the patience to coun anything else) though for the later two games, I included everything that the game put forth as permanent civilization; those that each game made out as its major cities are in bold, and names are colored by the game they appear in; green for Daggerfall, tan for Morrowind, and gold for Oblivion. Note that for Daggerfall, I include only the three "main capital" cities of the three main kingdoms, as there are around another 100 major cities, and some 900 towns and villages.

So to put it forth as an open question, what sizes does everyone feel would be proper to get each sort of "feeling?" This isn't DIRECTLY about TES V, though as this is a TES forum, and this pertains to it as well as critique of existing TES games and other RPGs, obviously discussion relating to TES V would be relevant as well.

• Daggerfall - 523 buildings.
  
• Wayrest - 439 buildings.
  
• Sentinel - 307 buildings.
  
• Imperial City - 92 buildings. (came as a surprise to me; feels smaller than Vivec. Number does not count Prison or Arcane University.)
  
• Vivec - 74 buildings (15 Foreign Quarter, 12 Hllalu, 10 Redoran, 4 Arena, 13 Telvanni, 8 St. Delyn, 7 St. Olms, 5 Temple/Palace)
  
• Balmora - 38 buildings.
  
• Ald-Ruhn - 31 buildings.
  
• New Sheoth - 26 buildings.
  
• Leyawiin - 24 buildings.
  
• Skingrad - 24 buildings.
  
• Sadrith Mora - 23 buildings.
  
• Bravil - 22 buildings.
  
• Bruma - 22 buildings.
  
• Anvil - 21 buildings.
  
• Cheydinhal - 21 buildings.
  
• Chorrol - 21 buildings.
  
• Caldera - 19 buildings.
  
• Raven Rock - 19 buildings.
  
• Gnisis - 17 buildings.
  
• Mournhold - 17 buildings.
  
• Vos - 15 buildings.
  
• Dagon Fel - 13 buildings.
  
• Maar Gan - 13 buildings.
  
• Seyda Neen - 13 buildings.
  
• Pelagiad - 12 buildings.
  
• Suran - 11 buildings.
  
• Tel Branora - 10 buildings.
  
• Tel Mora - 10 buildings.
  
• Khuul - 9 buildings.
  
• Skaal Village - 9 buildings.
  
• Ald Velothi - 8 buildings.
  
• Bleaker's Way - 8 buildings.
  
• Border Watch - 8 buildings.
  
• Ebonheart - 8 buildings.
  
• Split - 8 buildings.
  
• Hackdirt - 7 buildings.
  
• Molag Mar - 7 buildings.
  
• Tel Aruhn - 7 buildings.
  
• Hla Oad - 6 buildings.
  
• Aleswell - 4 buildings.
  
• Passwall - 4 buildings.
  
• Blankenmarch - 3 buildings.
  
• Deepwallow - 3 buildings.
  
• Fellmore - 3 buildings.
  
• Hale - 3 buildings.
  
• Highcross - 3 buildings.
  
• Pell's Gate - 3 buildings.
  
• Water's Edge - 3 buildings.
  
• Weye - 2 buildings.

The drop is massive from Daggerfall to Oblivion. I think that that should mix Daggerfall and Morrowind. Having massive cities but also having multiple towns and whatnot. I mean, the "Imperial City" wasn't that impressive. I really do need to play Daggerfall though...

Actually, something that surprised me in my findings was that the drop from Morrowind to Oblivion was nowhere near as big as I thought; none of the major, non-capital cities in Morrowind were even twice the size of any of Oblivion's major cities. Another big surprise was to find that the Imperial City actually had MORE establishments than Vivec; I think, in that case, the layout of Vivec, with having outdoor cantons, and the interior plazas/waistworks/canolworks made it feel bigger, while the Imperial City was heavily compacted into a tiny area, with each district smaller in area than each canton of Vivec, in spite of having more buildings/establishments. Also, I just realized that I forgot to even COUNT the waterfront district of TIC; I should fix that now.

But yeah, part of it, I think, is the area taken up; Vivec is around 5 Morrowind cells in width north-south, which is about twice the width of the main walled portion of The Imperial City.


I guess I should make myself clear; Daggerfall had more than 3 cities. It had a CRAPTON. The estimate was around 1,000 that range from hamlets to cities. They appear to have a minimum of around 10-15 buildings, but go up from there to actually even more buildings than Sentinel. (Sentinel has a HUGE open area around the gargantuan palace, and all other cities cap at around 70% of the area of the 3 capitals) Likewise, there's somewhere around 2,500 homesteads, roadside inns, and temples located out in the wilderness. By my estimate, around 100-150 of those settlements would classify as "large cities," having walls, and generally 200+ buildings.

Obviously, including any serious portion of them in the list would've made it prohibitively long.

There needs to be kind of a bell curve. While there will be more small settlements than big cities, the overall number of buildings should be about evenly distributed. And you probably won't have more single house homesteads than you will small villages.

Homestead/Farmstead: 1-3 buildings
Village: 4-15 buildings
Town: 15-30 buildings
City: 30-150 buildings

The difference between town and city is hard to see at lower populations, but generally a town is more isolated and cities are closer together, with small cities as satellites around larger capitols.

Yeah, I know. I guess I just need to play Daggerfall ^_^

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.

Bigger than Oblviion and Morrowind, but much smaller than Daggerfall. I mean, Daggerfall city in Daggerfall was absolutely too large and filled with redundant houses.

it was probably because of the style the IC was made, everything was very tight and close together, plus the houses where huge compared to the number of people living there... generally it was odd how many houses onla had one or two people living in it, did you ever see somethign resembling a family size in a building?

Anyway here's part of a post from another size related thread:

Towns definitely need to grow a bit, they seemed like like villages while the villages where "two or three houses in the middle of nowhere"... make towns at least 2 ? 3 times bigger than they are and actually vary the building style a little, not everyone builds by plan but by what they have... villages could reach from 5 to maybe 15 houses and they could vary on what they are built about... villages in slightly more remote areas are most likely more agricultural or depend on the local flora and fauna, those on major roads might depend more on trading and have more shops

On a side note farms should ACTUALLY look like farms, every house having a little patch of land where they grow plants (and maybe actually get mad if you just take them) and maybe have a bigger field somewhere close (another advantage of large environments)

This sounds pretty good, to be honest. I'd like to see a scale like this in TES:V. Much bigger cities in the next game.

What about:

Homestead/Farmstead: 1-3 buildings
Hamlet: 5-10 buildings
Village: 20-30 buildings
Town: 35-50 buildings
City: 65-80 buildings
Mayor City: 85-100
Capital City: >150

Though the basics are the same.

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

Comparing raw numbers of buildings is not realy that interesting nor insightful. The OP does raise an interesting and important point though; how do you make cities and settlements feel credible.
Both Morrowind and Oblvion failed in that regard. Vivec was a dissapointment when I first entered it. The imperial city was aswell.

To be fair, TES games focus on other things. It's unfair to compare a tes city with Assassin's Creed for example. But that does not mean cities in a tes game can't be done in a credible way. Cities in the Gothic series for example were done way bettter.
Personally I would like to see a city so big and detailed that it surpasses the entirety of oblivion's exterior world. Not seeing that happen tho. :shrug:

Thanks for taking the time to do this! It gives us some great starting data for discussion.

While I agree that Daggerfall might've gone too far with the size of the cities (at least Daggerfall itself--Sentinel might feel the most "real" of any Daggerfall cities) I much prefer blocks of generic buildings to Oblivion's non-cities.

I think more than building number, Bethesda needs to pay attention to building design and layout. Look at your numbers for the Imperial City--while there might be 92 establishments, in terms of actual physical buildings, the number is probably closer to 15 (not counting the waterfront). These few buildings are packed closely together, and there's never any chance to get a good view of the whole city, which might have made it seem bigger. At any one time, you're only looking at about four buildings. If Bethesda had done 92 individual buildings in the IC, with a layout that paid attention the way the capital of an empire might actually look, the results could have been very different.

With the Imperial City, we're meant to believe that an ancient city has made due with those same 15 giant buildings in that same unchanging layout for three thousand years? Most cities grow up organically, and a little effort to reflect this in the game design would go a long way, even if the cities stay on the smaller side.

I actually think the Shivering Isles cities felt more like real cities. They still didn't have many buildings, but to me they felt much more organic and "lived-in" than anything in Oblivion. The city layout was meandering and a tiny bit confusing, just like a real medieval city might be.

I thought Balmora actually felt small (but not cozy, so it was kind of awkward throughout the game). I'm not asking for anything on the scope of Daggerfall, but ~70 buildings per "city" would please me.

50 would be the ideal for an average sized city. If a city is big and has stone walls then make it 100 and provide different areas for poor and rich people. Don't pack houses all in the same manner. Arena cities felt more realistic than Daggerfall cities because you have small dirty roads forming alleys together with large stone roads and houses packed in groups. Oblivion did it right, but the very small size of it's cities really hurt immersion.

Actually, it's interesting and quite insightful for anyone who's actually played the games. That was the whole point; people have all gathered their feelings of how "big" a city seems, and can readily voice it. (as you did yourself) However, by providing some numbers, it does help provide some starting point to gain insight on how a city's size works as a factor to how "lively" it feels.


I'd actually point out that the cities of Assassin's Creed aren't as large as you might be thinking; one curious revelation I came to was that after a certain point, cities start actually feeling MUCH larger than they are; the number of buildings in each of the cities in Assassin's Creed is actually comparable to the capital cities of Daggerfall. I'll actually go through and give a count, and provide it shortly.

As far as 16 square miles of city... That's more land than the entirety of Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto IV. The entire map for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is 36 square miles... But remember in an Elder Scrolls game, your maximum ride has only 1 horsepower, not 300-500.

[edit]I actually gave up on an exact count; what maps there are available are NOT very good for telling buildings apart, but my count for Jerusalem, with all 3 districts combined, came up to around 410.

I checked the screenshots posted before and noticed 2 major problems with oblivions towns:

1: The houses are simply to big, they dont look like places people built to just live in their, those are mansions... and then there's at max 2 or 3 people living in there, those would be big enough for a family of 10... a "regular" house in Oblivion is about as big as a mansion or guild hall was in Morrowind
2: The towns are to flat... every town in oblibion was flat for one reason, it couldnt peek over the town walls... in contrast look at Balmora with was built in two hill sides

Another problem is they layout, again looking at Balmora it looks very structured but still natural, all houses go along the river and aligned in 4 streets, the houses in Oblivion look like they have been tossed there with no real thought... all this plays into how the cities feel so bigger doesnt neccessarily mean "feels bigger"

Yeah, the town arrangement was a major problem in Oblivion. As was the whole fact that each one was tightly walled in, and arranged so that you couldn't really see over, let alone MOVE over, the walls. It was a horrible mistake done because gamesas apparently had no idea how to do LOD scaling at the time; it looks a bit like they kinda fixed their problem with Fallout 3, so hopefuly Oblivion becomes the last such games with its cities like that.

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

I'm feeling this. Sounds good.

The idea of not wanting buildings to become repetitive was brought up in this thread. I think cities should have various landmarks and stand out points, but in most real cities buildings in certain area's of the city often do look largely the same. So some repeating styles would be appropriate in my opinion.

I actually think the number was fairly close, but I know what gives that impression...you have Rindir's Staffs and Stonewall Shields...these too specific stores that don't even carry any items worth buying after level 2. I generally hated the way Oblivion did shops...Each f'in weaponsmith had their own clever name and little intro speech...it was insipid, asinine, annoying, and a bunch of other words. I really dug Morrowinds names, which were simply the shop owner's own name and a short title, usually some obscure archaic title, like alchemist, apothecary, clothier, outfitter, smith.

You got a point there I never played dragerfell so its hard to understand the drop of size, but yes the cities should be bigger, I think a average size city shoul be about 80 bildings and 200-250 npc..

Well it was also on the size of the towns... with a town that size i'd expect maybe 2 shops and a inn to sleep not 5 shops and 2 inns per town... as said before they should really differ it how they wanna set up the towns... if they have one going along a major street THAT can have a lot of shops as they have a lot of people traveling through... also they should really think of making actual market distruicts with small shops, sales tents and the like... btw shops in oblivion felt far to huge too, i remember that smith in Caldera who had his shop in the back entrance basemant of a larger residence, that felt more authentic... or the shops that actually shared their sales space like two different shops in one

It depends on what city you are talking about. The houses in Leyawiin seemed a plausible size for the average person or two; they weren't mansions by any means. The houses in the Imperial City, to me, felt more like apartments. However, the Imperial City itself is a more well-to-do and desirable locale than Leyawiin, and so the size of the houses seems much more reasonable and appropriate. Regarding the design of the cities, I actually quite liked them. I thought the sporadic nature of Bravil and Leyawiin seemed much more realistic than a purely symmetrical city.

In terms of size, I would like cities somewhat larger than those in Oblivion, maybe about 50-100% larger. I don't want all of the cities to be so incredibly large that it takes several days playing the game before I get familiar with them. Also, pushing for gigantic cities would make them feel insipid. It would feel like being lost in a sea of pointless NPC's, whose sole purpose is to simply show that the city is big and serve no constructive purpose to the game. Now, if cities were to have a lot of things for me to do in them, I would have no problem with them being huge. Hell, push for a thousand buildings if they aren't just there to flaunt the size of the city.

Ah, come on. Don't even tell me you didn't like Rindir's introduction speech! "You're in Rindir's Staffs. I sell magical staffs. Imagine that!"

I actually liked the idea of all these different stores. I wouldn't want there to be a monopoly on certain goods in every town. What if I pissed off the owner, and he would sell me his stuff for jacked-up prices (actually, I like this idea: if you do something to irk the storekeeper, he/she won't sell to you anymore or will sell things for a much higher price)? However, I don't think that there should've been - what, five? - inns throughout the Imperial City. That seemed a bit ridiculous and overdone.