I read somewhere (or Todd mentioned it in the interview, can't remember) that dragons can 'breath fire down the street' or something similar, so I hope that means that cities will be open. I mean, it'd be odd and unrealistic if you encounter a dragon in the wild and it chases you and you escape it by going through a city gate ala Oblivion and you'd be safe, even though it'd be super easy for the dragon to just... fly over the city wall and roast you.

Todd said that every exterior will be one place, or something on those lines

I'd like to see mostly open cities, but there should be at least some that are walled off.

Maybe we can have the cities open but the castles in a different cell?

Niker

Honestly I don't see how it's going to be possible for the consoles to render cities/the outside world at the same time.

They don't have to. Occlusion culling, away! :bolt:

I could imagine some of the cities being walled (though still part of the exterior worldspace and not completely hidden behind its walls), considering Skyrim's violent past. Many of these cities were probably built to double as easily defendable strongholds, after all.

Additionally, Bethesda hopefully has some render culling software at this point (or at least some automatically generated portals for it) so I could theoretically run Skyrim on my ancient PC better than I could Oblivion. I hope.

That's true, but Nehrim takes a lot of power and RAM. My computer is quite powerful and can easily run Oblivion at highest settings, but Nehrim does lag in the main city. It would be harder to achieve this for large cities on the consoles.

Nonetheless, I do hope at least most of the cities are open. From the look of screens and concept art so far, it would appear that Markarth and at least part of Riften are open. Markarth has to be, it's in a canyon, so you'd be able to go over the borders and you don't want that sort of glitch like when you go over the walls in Oblivion. Also, at least part of Riften is open to the water, so that must also be open.

With all due respect to my favorite gaming company and my favorite game of all time, as far as optimization goes, Oblivion's engine is feces. They can do better, and they definitely have with the Creation Engine. I reitirate. Occlusion culling, away!

Windhelm literally has a river running through it... has to be open.

http://riftwall.com/images/skyrim_text.jpg West coast.

I hope some have walls but are still open. By this I mean that if they do have walls, of any sort, palisade or stone or what have you then the gates are open adn you can walk in. And at night the gates close. Towns without walls would of course would always eb availible to enter.

Ah, but so did Bravil.

EDIT: I see your point. This river is a transport route, so you can't have walls around it.

There could be floodgates.

No it doesn't. The other map has an outline of the city and it's just next to the river, not on it.

I hope so. I'd really like to have really intricate environments. I am dying for more screens/concepts of the cities.

All cities, most of them? You must mean will any cities be open?

WoW doesn't have walls... why should Skyrim? I know that the graphics aren't $00P3R 1337 in WoW, but Azeroth is [censored] huge and that surely makes up for it... or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass since I know nothing of programming or game engines or anything. Also, Morrowind did it no problem and monsters didn't wander into town either (at least from what I could tell).

I know that theres a scree cap of the PC waling though some city, or maybe its a town, and you can see mountains and what not in the background and no walls. I would like to think that towns are open. It's not an impossible feat.

Its hard to know for sure, it really depends on this new engine and what it can do. I'd put my money on cities being open, but buildings, ruins, and caves haveing their own cells.

There's talk of a city built on a mountain side, right? Wouldn't that have to be open for it to, ya know, look like it was built on the side of a mountain?

Or you could have a city with a wall AND OPEN GATE.. open cities mods ftw.

The Total Conversion Mod "Nehrim" has the Mod with open cities all and that issue is all fixed up in Nehrim. It was so natural to walk into the cities without loading them that I didn't even notice it until I got to the top of a city wall and looked out and saw the whole world and thought "Hey, Oblivion can't do THIS, what's going on?" I did some research and found out there was a Mod for this, and they used it Nehrim.

So what is more jarring? Seamless, natural open-sky cities, or cities that make you pause while you wait to load them in, breaking immersion? I didn't even notice there WAS anything different for long time, but in Oblivion the first time I got to the Imperial City I was like "What the ----? MW didn't even do THIS!" and then I hated that feature.

Plus, how will the dragons be able to attack the cities in any real, convincing, and authentic way, if there is a false ceiling to the world. What, they just teleport over the city and begin their rain of destruction? I suppose they could, but I'd rather hear the cries of the people as they look out the city walls to see the dark shape on the horizon coming in slowly for its kill. That would much more dramatic and fear inspiring.

Well nehrim was designed around PC hardware primarily medium/high end pc's. Skyrim is being designed around 256mb's of ram, and a geforce 7800...yeah. Now if they went at it with; "hey what can we do with dx11, 6gb's of ddr3 ram, a 64bit os, a dx11 video card using 1gb's of vram, and a i7," then good times, but they are not luckily there is BF3 for that sorto stuff.

I prefer open cities. It does make sense that for defensive reasons some cities would be surrounded by walls. But I feel that they should still be open (like you should be able to jump over the walls and land in the city). I don't think cities should be inside their own cells.

I thought the game is based on the 360?

Red dead redemption doesn't load cities...

Niker

Placing cities in their own cells almost certainly has nothing to do with computer hardware or NPCs getting slaughtered by monsters. The Open Cities mod proved back in 2006 that PCs could handle open cities without a slowdown. And NPCs in opened cities do not die with any greater frequency than they do in closed cities.

I believe Bethesda removed cities from the game world to comply with Microsoft's frame rate requirements for the XBox. And I further believe that taking cities out of the game world was the reason the game was delayed four months.

Why not have the same loading pattern than Morrowind?