So, the prestigious college of Winterhold.

It has a lobby, a reading room, and an office. Oh, and two human storage areas.

It has four or so students, and few more faculty members.

most of the time, faculties can be found in their respective rooms, drinking some mead.

In the mean time, students can be found in the lobby area, practicing their magics... at the windows! (This I assume is a safety hazard no doubt)


Now I know that everything is Skyrim is a scaled down version of what they actually are in game lore.

For example, I know that the province of Skrim is suppose to be the size of the state of Washington (or something like that), but is scaled down in game for obvious reasons.

and I'm sure in lore, the college is really quite prestigious place, only scaled down for gamer's convenience

However, I think the current size of the college is really too small.

Sure, small size means that I can find all the NPCs I need in just a few steps, and that's all great, but it has its downturn too, and a big one.


The downside of the small college is that the scene is nowhere near believable, and when the world is not believable, I have hard time immersing myself into the world.

When the immersion is broken, I no longer feel like I'm roaming the great land of Skyrim. Instead I feel like I am seating on a chair, playing Skryim, in my room, which is much less exciting than roaming the lands of Skyrim to be honest.


So I hope, in the future, Bethesda would make things a little bigger.

Maybe that means more generic student NPCs and more time getting lost in the college, but that's just fine in my opinion.

I don't mind there being bunch of NPCs with no quest for me, just occupying space, because that will make the experience much more believable.



This also goes to the cities and villages, though they were much better in comparison to the college of Winterhold. I think the size of Whiterun would be fine for average cities (like Morthal and Dawnstar), but cities like Solitude, and Whiterun still needs to be bigger in my opinion.

Build HUGE majestic college

Plop in a handful of people

Nail'd it.

Well there was that whole most of Winterhold city falling into the ocean bit. Made it an unpopular place.

Really? But it looks so big from outside...you're saying it's smaller than Oblivion's Arcane University?

Current gen, lol.


Large environments were dropped in favor of unique environments. I prefer it this way.

Why am I arch mage after like 5 quests? And why is the radiant quests for the College so diverse and varied, while the other guilds are not?

The Arcane University was, IMO, even more underwhelming - where did all those unnamed apprentices live?

I don't think the size of the college was technical issue. Afterall, cities are much bigger without any technical difficulties

We don't have powerful enough hardware for games of that scale.

nvm

the reality of console memory limitations :laugh:

Arcane Univercity was only a small part of the mages guild and it still had at least 3 times as many people in it!

nvm

Because of college of mages is so believable in the first place =p

Sooo hardware is to blame for the size of a location in the game... right. Any excuse to bash something.

Oh and save your breath, don't care for any reason you might have to validate your claim.

Throughout the whole Winterhold College Quest line, I was half expecting and half waiting for Harry, Ron, and Hermione to burst through the College gates, blast [censored] to pieces, mount broom sticks, and fly off into the Blizzard. I'm telling you man, College of Winterhold is the fail version of Hogwarts.

Of course it is. It's not that they couldn't make the college the exact size it is in the lore, it is simply that they couldn't create an open world to match. The only way to do that would to have it span several disks and add a lot more loading screens.

And what exactly was I bashing?

Hogwarts is probably bigger than Skyrim.

You have surprised me sir, not at all what I was expecting. In the regards to number of disks and loading, I agree.

not really, magic really isnt really popular in the land of the nords and everyone is dying from the civil war, and the people who actually studied their probably died from their experiments all the time I mean when they go looking for missing student they dont even bother with detect life spells so magic is just unpopular and dangerous

This is one of the reasons I'm so happy I'm a PC player. A year from now, in my sixth or so playthrough of Skyrim, I'll have a worthwhile College of Winterhold, populated by dozens, adding greatly to the sense of immersion.

It's a school for mages. I'm sure they just create their own pocket realities for the different classrooms. It saves on space, as well as costs.

Did you think he was referring to consoles having worse hardware than a PC?

They lived in the walls XD. I believe there was in fact a bed for almost every mage in the Arcane University... not that I would like to live in a room with 6 or 7 other people... but that's what they do.

I was expecting console bashing and the like (using the consoles as whipping boys), I'm perfectly aware that the hardware in a console can't compare to cutting edge PC hardware.