Most of the traverns where alive in Dagger falls.You had women of the night,thugs and assaians in the bars of daggerfalls.Also you can run quest for bar keepers and if you failed it.(By giving the item to a different NPC the bar keeper will hire thugs to kill you.)

oh, here is something i want to see that is AI based.
bring back quests that you can only get by eavesdropping on a conversation.
bars are the best place to listen to strangers conversations.

example
"-that son of a lich stole my whole stash of drakes, i was saving up for the holiday, me wife and i love sujama but its rare here in skyrim. i was going to surprise her"
you could investigate further by listening to the responses of the other npc, you find out who he suspects and you do a little diging around town or in the tavern.

option for completing the quest:

• steal the gold and keep it.
  reward yourself and no hit to reputation
  
• steal back the gold and give it back-
  good reputation with the town plus a reward
  
• kill the guy who stole it and keep the gold and his gear, depending on how stealthy you were reputation stays the same but your personality takes a hit-karma system maybe?. plus you got the gold.

you get caught and you lose the gold get bad reputation and go to jail-no exeptions for murder but you can pay of your theft fine.

[edit]
there are other ways of doing this.
find the guy and report him to the guards
sorry if i come off a little dark, thats how i solve my problems in game XD

This sounds like a great idea. Nords seem to be based off ancient Germanic culture and those guys practically invented taverns! I can see it now - Wandering through town on a cold night with a heavy snowfall and stepping into a tavern with music, men sitting by a roaring fire getting drunk, women are dancing, towns people are stopping in on their way home from work.
2 things i think that would make the tavern system great:
1) Be able to get drunk yourself. I don't mean like Red dead redemption where you stagger around, fall over and then 30s later you get up and are fine, i mean it should take you longer and also last longer when you are drunk. Sure still make us stagger and fall down but then we want to get up and keep drinking! Maybe even if we drink too much we pass out and wake up out in the street or in a random place around town and some of our (non unique) items have been stolen/losy. I think the biggest thing though would be if we get drunk it should be for most of the night. No 30s benders here. Once you're gone you'll be staggering and slurring til the sun comes up or you'll have to find a bed and sleep it off.
2) Make the taverns busier on a friday/saturday night. I'd be super stoked if we had this one. Maybe the older citizens or the alcoholics would have a quiet drink and a meal during the week but just imagine how much you would actually look forward to the weekend in this game if on a friday night half the town came to blow off steam after the working week. That's when it'd be all happening with the bands, card games, bards telling stories, fights etc. I can imagine just playing through the game always keeping an eye on the date thinking "Oh man 2 more days til i have to find a town so i can get drunk and party with everyone, I need to finish this quest quick so i gots me some drinking money!"

Oh, you mean that kind of alive.

Sorry, I was afraid you meant they might have teeth and things....

:wink_smile:

Pulling a weapon should scare most people.

I'm crossing my fingers for something like this. I can only imagine...THIS is what I want as well.

:biggrin: That's because for once we all agree with what could be great in a tavern.

Taverns surely wash our differences away.

Yeah a crowded smoky tavern would be kick ass. They really did seem super lame and boring in oblivion now that you mention it.

I liked the way R* handled the bars in RDR. Guys sitting at tables playing poker, drunkards, girls, it all worked. I think Bethesda really just needs to make all the towns more lively in general.

Pipe smoking? Lol

Caius Cossades had a pipe in his house back in Morrowind

Basically, all I want for a tavern has been already said,and basically I remark the concept of being them alive.

The Witcher has made it, their taverns feel alive: musicians, people eating, drinking and talking loud, the fire under the pot almost makes you smell the food, the bar maid is catering, a few men are fist fighting and you can challenge them, smoke, gambling, in a word it's a tavern.

I quite like to see some http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ooj25_j3k1E&feature=fvwrel plying their trade.

Hearing the music and seeing people play while entering a tavern would certainly add a lot of livelyness. An quick search brings up quite a lot of cool stuff for a tavern.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_tORtmKIjE a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFx0njHLRH8.

Agreed! However there was one tavern in Oblivion - can't quite think of the name - where there was actually like alot of excitement and bustle going on. You would see alot of adventurers going in there, and they would sometimes even get into fights. I did like that tavern!

in the game play trailer there is a "what looks like to be a nord" who is playing some sort of musical instrument in a tavern which i thought was cool.

I think one thing that newer games are having implemented, are these very bustling/lively environments. For the longest time in games, the player has always been the center of the universe, and it was very easy to tell that npcs were just visual ambience to whatever else. I would suspect nothing less from Skyrim than the best, living, upbeat social settings that a game has ever had. After all, this is the land of the Nords, and everyone knows what happens when the big viking men go for a drink at the tavern.

Um....No?

I want the world to become alive, I could give two squats about what the taverns are like. If the game is realistic and alive, the taverns would be also.

Personally I dont spend much time in the taverns, especially not for extended periods. Id much rather be doing a quest or exploring a ruin. Again, I want the world as a whole to seem real. Its stupid to ask for realism in taverns, when this is a small, tiny, miniscule aspect of the game. If the whole town feels alive, who cares about the taverns. I agree it would be nice, but Id hate to see the taverns ultra realistic or alive, then walk outside and see a mediocre town that seems artificial, and deserted.

Unless of course by 'becoming alive' you mean the tavern literally animates itself and becomes a living, breathing, entity. You could go from town to town slaying taverns. Now that sounds cool.

How cool would it be to enter a tavern after a long trek across a cold and snowy region. Imagine the snow swirling everywhere and you enter a warm tavern with a fire lit and people dancing, playing music, sitting at tables eating and drinking. Please Beth...

I think they should just call it The Elder Tavern and make it a game about going to bars and getting drunk and dancing.

Yeah they always kinda svcked, hopefully they'll fix that in skyrim.

hey dude, even though you don't care att all and thinks taverns are lame, very many other fans really like taverns and the many possibilities they can add into the game. Like many unique quests, a good place to
get info, listen to nordic music. A place where the player can have fun and think, hey this is cool! I don't see the problem you have with that :S I really don't

Nords are the life of the party. This is the perfect time for Bethesda to fix the taverns

Im just saying that this aspect of the game needs little consideration when compared to the 'big picture'. The goal is to make the whole game alive, so it would make no sense for the taverns to be alive, and the rest of the world dead, or vice-versa. For that reason, its silly to specifically ask for the taverns to be more realistic. Of course I want the taverns alive, they are part of the game arent they?

Things I want to 'become alive' (whatever that means) -
Houses
Buildings
Churches
Castles
Ruins
The wilderness/landscape
The towns
The prison
The taverns
The shops
The caves


And so on. So should I start individual threads asking for each of these?