Well I wanted to see what people think of how populated Skyrim was. Morrowind was pretty heavily populated which fit for it and Oblivion was sparsely populated which fit it well too. Now I see a lot of people say that Bethesda was just too lazy and didn't populate Cyrodiil that much but the truth is that it's not a well populated land, you can read about it http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:2920,_Second_Seed_%28v5%29. Morrowind as you know has the well populated island of Vvardenfell. So what do you think Skyrim will be?

I think Skyrim will large open spaces but with multiple large cities and populated with many decent sized villages and ruins.

"As she trod the road, she thought to herself how strange it was that such an uninhabited place as Cyrodiil had become the Imperial Province, seat of an Empire. Even the Bosmer in Valenwood must have more populated forests than this Heartland wood."

I'm not quite sure about the source you are using, but considering that Oblivion takes place in what should have been one of the most populated provinces of the continent, I am one of those people who think it should have had more people in them. These cities were supposed to be immense in lore, yet you could count the number of people from different races in each city, doesn't sound like the 'Heart of the Empire' that people thought it would have been before release.

Oh and in terms of Skyrim, I haven't read up on the lore yet, though my prediction would be that it would be quite heavily populated within the cities, especially the ones closer to the south due to their proximity to the border. Towns should have at the very least 20 people living in them, not the three people that looked like they were some people lost in the wilderness that oblivion had.

I don't know, you'd have to ask Bethesda.



:celebration:

Assassin's Creed has yet to be surpassed in terms of a believable population for a cityscape, as we can we see in this screenshot posted in another thread:

http://0.tqn.com/d/compactiongames/1/0/N/j/1/assassins_creed_2_scr010.jpg

However, the fact they're taking Gothic's approach and giving people things to do other than just wandering around, like chopping wood for instance, will bring another layer of realism to every settlement.

They should add nameless NPCs in the towns like Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

Also considering that prior to Morrowind (the game), Vvardenfell in particular (and most of Morrowind itself) was pure ashy wasteland, I also don't quite see where you're coming from. In in-game terms, Vvardenfell was also only recently opened for colonisation about 20 years before TES3 kicks off. So the extent of population there was actually pretty mad no matter how you cut it. Similarly, I'd argue that the sparse population of TES4 failed to do justice to the advanced, continent spanning Empire that was supposed to be the home to.

TES5 will be as populated as Beth choose to make it. I'd hope they'll include numerous small settlements, and it sounds like with the addition of lumber cambs and farms and whatnot for their AI system to play with, the place will seem a lot more alive.

Oblivion is great game and all, but I'm always under impression that something awful happened during development, like thunderstruck or something that fried the main disk so that they had to use months old backup and finish it with haste to meet the deadline!

IMO and many other people's O, Cyrodiil was scarcely populated and had too few villages, hamlets and towns. But luckily, if the statement in GI is true, Skyrim developers recognised and corrected that.

As long as there is a healthy population of mudcrabs and other things to kill, I will be happy. As for you're question though... hopefully there will be in the hundreds of people at least in the towns/cities.

The source is a book in game named 2920, Second Seed (v5). It is the heart of the empire but is not well populated.

No, It would not be TES if they did this.

Yeah, generic NPCs that you can't begin dialogue with is not TES. Thus, it will never be as populated as AC and it doesn't need to be. After all, after all the warring within Tamriel, the population is bound to have taken a hit lol.

This seem very likely, while its nice to have every NPC named and unique, its just not realistic if you want to create believable city environments. I don't like Assassin Creed approach(Two worlds 2 also uses it) for rpgs as the people are so fake, you can't talk to them, they only walk in circles, etc. Though I am sure the approach could be improved, right now I am thinking Fallout methods makes sense and is the most likely. And you can interact with them, more so than Two Worlds 2/Assassins Creed, and they even have limited schedules like in Megaton there was a house were they would sleep.

Oh and Cyrodill esp the capital was definitely underpopulated. Shivering Isles on the other hand was a Ghost town, the main city was a joke, it was lifeless. Morrowind was also underpopulated, Vivec was a Ghost town, now MW with Mods is full of life, add COM and MCA and there are over 1500 NPCS added to the world, Vivec becomes a real city!

Also to the OP I find it odd that your against nameless NPCs and say there not for TES, but you list Daggerfall as the best TES game? Almost all npcs in Daggerfall are generic fill in characters!

That source is 1300+ years before Oblivion took place.

So? It also was 3000 years after Alessia rebelled when that entry was written and yet it was still sparsely populated. It just seems like the Imperials diffused into the other provinces instead of settling in large numbers in Cyrodiil. Probably an attempt to keep the memories of slavery at bay or to keep their hold on their empire.

At best it is one woman's perspective from many years ago. There is nothing to say her perception of Cyrodiil was correct, or even that her experience in that area was typical of Cyrodiil as a whole. The UESP wiki also mentions Cyrodiil as having a densely populated central valley.

At any rate, the lack of population had a lot more to do with the game engine than with lore. Whether Skyrim is heavily populated or not will likely depend on whether the Creation Engine can handle more characters.

It's true that the gamebryo limited the population but this book was most certainly written to explain off why it is so sparsely populated. Bethesda was very clever in this respect *tips hat*

Edit: Actually I went to the UESP page and looked up Lore:Cyrodiil and I don't see where it mentions it is densely populated. I might have missed it when I skimmed over it but it might be another section of the site.

Assassins creed character were lacking a lot in detail, yeh they look fine from the character's perspective but when you get closer they just svck

Sorry, it's here: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Provinces_of_Tamriel

Thank you for saying that. You're right on the money, also thank you for your OP it's right on. To answer the quest I do believe that Skyrim should have a large population on the roads, in the woods, and in the cities.

I hope they leave lots of empty land, so that modders can make villages and towns.

They don't need to, just make more NPC's with different names like in Arena/Daggerfall.

Well that document is obviously written before the time of Tiber Septim because it was changed from a jungle region to a temperate region. Also, it's not wrong, the central valley is densely populated. The imperial city and all the inns and little villages surround the Imperial City in the central valley. But the rest of Cyrodiil is far between each town is mostly uninhabited. Oblivion had it right, but it was just missing the sheer number of people that inhabit the cities. Something that will probably be fixed by a new engine and knowing the problems from Morrowind and Oblivion.

the real problem is the disk space as VA take a of space from what i hear.

The audio files were quite large, but given the number of characters who shared dialogue and voices, this should have been easy to overcome. Generic dialogue was everywhere in the game.

Generic dialogue is why the towns should mostly be populated with nameless NPCs. I hated all the worthless dialogue and lack of diversity in Oblivion. It's better to focus on 25% of all NPCs instead of giving most of them very bad dialogue.