Agreed. The size makes sense from a practical game play perspective. And I enjoy walking through them as well. It's the context that throws me off a bit. The story, bolstered by the NPC conversations, suggests proud, grand cities, known far and wide. But it's 8 guys and a park bench (exaggerating, of course). Standing around listening to the Stormcloaks discuss a siege of Whiterun, I kind of want to be able to chime in and say, "Seriously, Ulfric, there's 12 guys in town and I'm buddies with 6 of them. You and the fellas take a nap, I'll grab Whiterun real quick for the glory of whatever, and I'll meet you back here for beer."

So, the gist of my question is -- why try to squeeze a city of supposedly grand scale into a game, given the hardware limitations? And the answer, for some at least, is that they have no problem extrapolating out and accepting the cities as they are. I'm on board with that for the most part. I like the shops and houses. Especially in Skyrim, where the cities themselves are characters of a sort. But one could imagine a great, epic, open-world, fantasy RPG where you can wander all over creation and never find much more than a few tents thrown together with 8 or 10 people sitting around a fire. No cities for the sake of having cities; just something that works within the limits of the hardware more realistically.

TBH if the next one is elsywer or valenwood, the villages will probably be nomadic travelling camps.. so the issue wont be there ;]

yea but 12-18 non guard people living in each town, aint that a bit small?

I'm not sure if computers would ever be up to the task. the closest any games got to a living city feel were the GTA and Assassin's Creed series, but then again at the cost of a lot of filler buildings that can't be entered. Daggerfall had the right amount, but alas the NPCs were mostly 2d cut-outs

I like Skyrim as is right now. Albeit maybe with a few more generic NPCs lollygaggin' about for guards to arrest

I actually think that most cities are forced while some seem real. Whiterun seems to be the most realistic while Riften doesn't. The NPCs also kinda need more lines. I find it too often that a random guy will call me his "favorite drinking buddy" while across the country a random drunk will call me the same thing. 1st of all, I only drank once and that was with Sanguine, and not with anyone else. Towns or "Cities" as they rather be called, have useless NPCs who only give you the same one-liner infinitely. The Ratio of people to homes differs greatly from town to town and I believe that the town buildings are okay in quantity but its citizens need to be evened out. Anyone else agree?

About the same as Morrowind. Oblivion had a few more in some towns, but not much really. Of course ignoring Cyrodill.

I drive through towns in Colorado that even today don't have 12 to 18 people living in them.

This is a point that is overlooked all too often.

I agree that there needs to be more citizens per house, however it shouldn't be more people with the sacrifice of them having meaningful dialogue. There is already far too many npcs in Skyrim who will just say "hello" or "huh?" when you click on them.

Honestly, I'd like to see much larger cities. I'm not worried about having to be able to go in every building. Just a handful. Have the rest with no actual interiors. That way you can do main avenues, tight narrow streets, and actual quarters. That's just me though. I was always a fan of the Thief series, and some of the city streets in Thief are interesting. Mind, those games were built around one city for the most part. We don't need anything that scale. But a few sizable cities would be better. I do find the "cities" in TES to be nothing more than quaint villages. Solitude has the only real feel of a city, though that's just because of the later period style dressed stone. Whiterun and Windhelm next, Markarth . . . well, it's in a class of it's own. Very interesting. But even it could stand to be larger. I think the little settlements like Falkreth and Riverwood should be the size of Whiterun.

Yes, nothing breaks immersion like a building with a door seemingly painted on

Saying cities in Skyrim is a no no. These places like whiterun, falkreath, windhelm are called holds.

A hold is basically a small walled area where only the closest people to the Jarl of the area are allowed to live and some of their military presence. Look at what you have to go through just to get to live inside one.

You have to think of it more like Riften is only the political heart of the rift.

If Beth makes the cities small again I've one thing to say: no problem Beth, just make enough convenient empty world space for the modders to make extra houses/villages. Oh, I almost forgot, I hope you'll make a realtime editor for TES6.

The extents to which some of us are willing to rationalize what otherwise would be deemed as unsatisfactory.

It's great to point out the cold weather and the rural nature of Skyrim in defense of small cities.
Let's go with this thread then.
Would cities self-sustain with this population? Would they be able to function properly, to provide all the services and goods in the right ammount, at the right time?

Hardly.

Point #2.

SIze is relative. Contrast Solitude's population with, say, Riverwood's.
What's the ratio? Is it credible?

Hardly.

Bigger cities, fewer dungeons, wider gameworld.

With Crowded Cities and Better Cities combined there were probably up to 45 or 55 NPCs and bigger, fuller cities on a much less optimized engine, and that worked well on what is not 3-year old consumer hardware. Let's not imagine we can get a massive city like in AC but it can definitely get better from here. The reason is console limitations mostly. I'm impressed greatly by what Skyrim managed in the end though, in a year or so opinions about limitations will be a lot less strict.

Its my main gripe with the game and something I would gladly trade graphical fidelity, ~20% of the dungeons or increased loading screens for.

I do like that cities now have orbiting farms and mines though.

I think you misunderstood me. I would much rather have skyrims smaller cities and amazing gameworld than huge cities in a less inspiring environment. The hardware has limits, i think Beth got the best out of the tools at it's disposal, this game is breathtaking.

Some people just expect too much.

bethesda really needs to abandon this idea of scheduled NPCs and all that jazz, because the advanced AI really limits what towns can be. Most NPCs should just be flavor; they wander around, mutter the occasional noise, and not much else. Its far more realistic for towns to have a bunch of people you dont know than it is for 12 people to have breakfast every day.

i say this because nothing can excuse the paltry size of the cities in skyrim. if bethesda knew the limits of what they could do, they could have set this game in a specific rural area of skyrim, used more "flavor" npcs, kept you out of the major population zones, added a giant ruined section to every city and said dragons killed most of the citizens... anything. your building a world ffs, you have to be aware of the limits of technology when taking on such a massive project and account for the elements of scale you know you cant include. instead of carefully crafting the world with the tools at hand, bethesda just looked at how many pretty things could be on screen at once and twisted every other aspect of the game to make room for that. If you can only have a city of 12 people and 4 buildings... dont f**king make a city. make it a small section of a city. make it a farm. use what you have to build what you can: you dont try and carve a marble statue with a jackhammer, and you dont try to make a fully-formed city with xbox360 technology.

The scale of all most of the buildings seems off... smaller...

The only city that is comperable to the cities/towns in Oblivion is Solitude.

Anyone else notice there's no Bath houses or toiletries ?

For the folks who say the towns are too small, you should perhaps do some study of the history of architecture, or visit ruins.

The "bigger" cities in skyrim generally fit the bill of such places I've studied and/or visited, as do the villages.

The lack of facilities is moot, really. I don't feel like walking in on NPC's doing the dirty work, sorry.

As someone said above, city size doesn't seem out of character for the climate and civilization in question. Nords are just boastful and what they call a city in the Empire would be a hamlet. But the design is ace each town city has its own architectural style and I find that impressive. As for bath-houses, ummm, it's a little chill out there... Saunas perhaps would be more appropriate or thermal water developments in the relevant areas... And toilets... Nords and bears...

To be fair, Vivec was not hard to move around in.
There were gondoliers that could take you to any canton stationed at every canton, Almsivi intervention brought you to the temple district.
Because Morrowind wasnt as boxed-in and limited as later games we could also jump or fly any place we wished.
In Skyrim we would constantly have to walk up ramps every time we wanted to go to a higher floor.

One thing I don't miss is all the waiting screens while traveling from one part of the city (or cell) to the next, as it was in previous "huge" cities like New Vegas and the Imperial City. So in that respect I prefer the Skyrim style, with smaller cities/towns with just 1 cell for the city (town), where you can reach any store without going through extra waiting, and 1 cell for the castle. Yet a compromise could be ok too, with say 3-4 cells in a medium sized city.

I didn't expect huge cities in Skyrim anyway though, as I'm used to northern territories IRL. :wink_smile:

Yes!

Imagine Whiterun with 100 people, and the only ones that really pay your character any attention are the ones we've already experienced in-game. How awesome would that be? It's all about sleight of hand, Beth. Try a little harder, why don't you?

My refrain: Gothic did it more than a decade ago, with far more limitations. Yet Skyrim can't even match its accomplishments?

The holds in Skyrim are much more believable than previous games because they actually have visible economies. There are blacksmith working the forges outside, people chopping firewood, breweries, grain mills, many, many more farms, hunters and fishermen all over the wilderness, etc... compared to oblivion, you have to wonder where all those people in the imperial city got their food from. Skyrim's illusion that these people are actually doing things to survive and earn a living when you aren't around instead of just staring at walls is much more convincing than Oblivion's was.

They do still kind of small though. In most towns the guards seem to outnumber the citizens.