Everything in Nirn is scaled down. This applies to the 1/30 time scale and reduced distances between POI to avoid long periods of inactivity. Likewise, a city has to be scale similarly, otherwise it will be disproportional compared to the rest of the world.

:facepalm: :facepalm: :facepalm:

Does nobody get that Skyrim is SUPPOSED to be smaller than Cyrodiil?
Comparing the biggest city in Skyrim to the Imperial City is like Comparing New york with the capital of Sweden.

Why can't you get that? To have bigger cities in Skyrim than in Oblivion would be illogical.

We have a winner folks.

"Why is small backwoods town smaller than major metropolis? WHY BETHESDA WHYYYYYYY?!"

Ha ha, same here. I spent a huge part of the game initially at Whiterun doing local quests. I just assumed it was a small village and that bigger things lay ahead. Imagine my surprise to discover Whiterun was one of the larger "cities".

i thought all 5 of the main cities were very good and unique but all the smaller towns(especially the buildings in the towns)were very samey.

Impressed in terms of atmosphere, art direction, credibility. Disappointed in terms of size.

Stop the hyperbole. None of us are asking for Imperial City sized cities. But some might just be a little bit more bigger.

This. I dont think I want cities too much bigger. Sure it would add to immersion factor, but to make it actually valuable and more immersive, theyd need to have much more content pertaining to the extra buildings. And frankly, in this technological state, I wouldnt be up for that if its going to result in lower framerate and longer load times.

Because Oblivion has already been scaled down to the point of being outright ridiculous (the lore mentioning naval engagements on Lake Rumare? Heh...). So it's only fair to assume that years later and with improvements in technology and the engine it would be possible to get something a little less immersion breaking. The fact that past incarnations of TES svcked in this regard is no excuse for the current incarnation not to try and do things better.

i agree the towns are small, but also i like to talk to every person i come across thinking they may have a quest to give or some useful informations. if i walked into a town with 50+ people id be like wow its gonna take me forever to talk to all these people. so im like half and half ont hat. i wish they were bigger for realistic purposes but at the same time i dont. also with the cities being as small as they are when i read books in the game and hear people talk of these massive battles its hard to imagine because im like where are all the people that join these battles.

I haven't played a thief yet to properly assess peoples living arrangements, but in a medievally setting of extreme cold, it would make sense for multiple people to use one house as its easier in terms ofl abour and wood to heat one building then 12 separate ones.


Windhelm is the one that throws me usually. Its prettymuch just a castlekeep, with the mercantile elements of a town randomly shoved in about, then they forgot about building a village below it or something, so all the dwellings got pigeonholed into one wall.

And theres nowhere near the amount of farmland around the cities that you'd need, only Whiterun even comes close. Though thats true of RPGs in general.

And Winterhold doesn't seem to reflect the Collapse. There's no ruins along the cliff edge, or down poking out of the water. No streets leading to the edge, or anything.

Thing is they're holds, so the town may be small but there is a big area around and towns like Riverwood are PART of the Whiterun hold. So instead of just being all put together, it's spread out.

I see no issue with it.

I expected much larger cities and far less dungeons ...

Morrowind and Daggerfall are 10 years old games ... yet there has been no improvement in that regard despite the machines having more than 4 times the memory , cpu power and hard drive space of the time .
Morrowind ran on the 1st XBOX which had something like less than 100 megs of RAM ....


Skyrim is a very good game , but the ridiculous size of "cities" is a huge disappointment for me , especially since they advertized big cities .

I disagree with people saying you can't make big cities and have all buildings accessible , it is possible , it's just that Bethesda wanted to focus on dungeons instead , they wanted more action based gameplay compared to those 10 year old games in which the RPG aspect was more emphasized

What would you think if in 2020 , games don't evolve in size and depth ? I have more than 200 hours of Skyrim now , so i love the game obviously , people wouldn't criticize the game if they did not like it and want it even better ... Hopefully the next TES will be focused on larger cities with lots of NPC and urban quests , not only on dungeon crawling

Gee....we really needed you to enlighten us.

1. 200 years have passed. People procriate. Settlements grow bigger.
2. So because Oblivion cities were themselves smallish every TES game from now on will be forever bound by such anachronic limitation?
That's like saying TES XII character models should bear the same poly count, just so consistency can be kept.
Right.

You are clearly enlightened, O Wise One.

My point was that it's silly to compare the size of Skyrim's major cities to the size of Morrowind's small to medium cities. The problem with Skyrim is not that there exist smaller towns, but that the major cities are not actually major.

Which is a silly justification. The number of settlements within any given hold has no bearing on a discussion concerning city size. The hold could be a million miles wide and thousands of villages, the hold's capital city would still be inexplicably small.

Despite the heated debate, I hope the folk responsible for http://elderscrolls.filefront.com/screenshots/News/28608/7 do the same for Whiterun, I'm going to check it out myself once the CK is available, but it would be a very large project.

I can agree with almost every single word in your post.
Keep posting. This board needs more like this.

What's disappointing is that the average dungeon is several times larger than the average building, so they wouldn't even have to sacrifice that many man hours. If we could get ten additional buildings in each city and had to sacrifice have as many dungeons/bandit camps, I'd be all for that.

Yes, Markarth and most of the Dwemer ruins are huge sucesses.
But
Whiterun is on the bland side of things and Collee of winterhold has the lamest architecture.

Can you name one RPG that has lots of denizens - unless they are literally generic standing poster people? Fallout New Vegas... maybe.

Even Baldurs Gate 1&2, Witcher etc. had a fairly sparse amount of people.

I actually LOVE Solitude, Windhelm, Markarth and Riften - each felt unique and well done to me.

J

It's Skyrim, it's a different place.

Some of them are alright, others (Specially Winterhold and Dawnstar) are strangely small.

Unless you have some evidence that "city" in the Elder Scrolls universe actually means "town" then I'm going to go ahead and assume "city" does in fact mean "city".

You can't just hand-wave away valid complaints by saying, "Fictional universe! It doesn't need to make sense!"

It does need to make sense, but in the context of Tamriel Skyrim is a different place, a remote, cold, harsh land full of people who hate outsiders.

I'm not bothered by the space-compression.

Which has nothing to do with city size. Morrowind was a different place. A remote, blighted, harsh land full of people who hate outsiders. It still had a range of small medium and large cities with significant populations.