I guess I've been playing games too long, and have become used to how they tend to be, because I don't really have any problem with the way the Skyrim ones are. (Winterhold, perhaps) Didn't really have any problems with the Oblivion cities, either.


But, then, judging by the bitterness and negativity that's all over people's responses, I think I'm somewhat glad that I don't share their opinions on the topic - it seems like a very depressing way to live, being seemingly unable to enjoy anything without having to tear it apart. :shrug:

Major Holds are nice. Minor holds were just thrown there because the deadline was approaching, so they copypasted them all.

For the minor Holds to have Jarls who send you to recover objects so that they can restore the city to former glory is quite pathetic.

:)

I find them fairly convincing...I like the added touch of the farm lands spread out on the outskirts of each hold, especially whiterun's layout. I always feel bad for the farmers...the dragons are gonna eat them first.

In Daggerfall It may have svcked to walk from one end of the massive city to the other but thats because its realistic. If you were to try to walk through any real, large city you would get pretty tired and bored there also. If you had a horse it wouldn't be bad at all, same with daggerfall. Also the fact that you got bored in Cyrodill is due to the fact that most of the buildings got zero attention besides their basic layout. If every house was built on and individual level and made special more like skyrim, the massive cities wouldnt need to be boring. They would each be unique and interesting. Its all about what the creators choose to do and how imaginative they are.

Also the fact that every "major" city has some rich family running some part of it is very gimmicky. It was cool the first one or two cities. After you realize every city has one...you just want to slap bethesda right in the mouth.


edit: Vivic was a large city only because it was broken into huge blocky sections that you had to walk between and wait for loading screens to navigate around. The giant blocks and multiple levels were used as a ploy to make it seem larger. Daggerfall had truely large, completely open cities.

Ignorance is bliss, just keep smiling :thumbsup:

the cities need to be a little more full maybe like 10 more people in the cities would be good cos the city is made up of guards than anything else

Honestly I don't buy this excuse. Skyrim is the cradle of human civilization in Tamriel, the center of the First Empire of Man and the strong arm of the third. Skyrim is not a backwater by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm sorry to disagree, but that would kill one of the things that I love about TES: the most daring atteempt at verysimilitude: the objects are actually there and have physical properties, the buildings are actually there and can be entered...etc...

I want to see Travaler NPCs in the towns and farmers in market place buying gods. And mabey bigger Inns where more pepole can sleep or small camps outside the towns.

if you keep calling these very small hamlet/villages cities,they will use it to make the same tiny towns all the time.

you dont walk into one end of a city and then take a few steps and end up at the other side.

this is another of those arguemnts that makes no sense,we all have the game,we can all see the size of settlements,its not as though its debateble about the size.

typical american co,bastardising words from thier actual meaning to something else with the reason being to croupe money.

its a chicken
but it has 4 legs

its a many legged chicken
but its eating a chicken

its a cannibal four legged chicken
but everyone else calls it a fox

well the thing about foxes is they are actually chickens
no they are not

stop flaming me
i am not

yes you are

etc etc

Skyrim cities are terribly small, winterhold is the biggest joke, even if half the city collapsed, Why are half the remaining houses burnt down too and why would the once former capital of skyrim have only 3 actual buildings left excluding the college?

Oblivions cities at least felt like small towns, Skyrim's cities all feel like villages and they really do feel and look that way.

yet "thousands" died in the great war
count the NPCs living there, you barely come to 1000, if they do not have invisible families, they just couldnt support the "loses of the war"

the "civilization" in Skyrim is nothing compared to Daggerfall and still way too small compared to Oblivion

A big town like the Imperial City would be "overkill" for the rural area of Skyrim, but the hold capitals should have at least the size of Skingrad. The point is TES itself... its open world game, simulating a fantasy world. A part of this is the civilization, even when you never go there. Actualy think about it, what is the size of the town you live in RL and how many streets do you personaly know? How many do you cross on a daily basis?

When I first entered Cheydinhal or Skingrad, I explored the town and from then on I only went go one street, but when I entered the town, I felt civiliaztion, I feld safety, I looked left and right and saw buildings and people, it was nice. Skyrim feels like Fallout... a large deserted world.

Blackreach -> City.
Whiterun, Riften -> Towns.
Windhelm,Solitude -> Castles and Keeps.
Winterhold, Dawnstar, Morthal, Falkreath -> Villages.

If I think like above they are convincing.
Well.. but farms are really farms. They delivered it.

If cities were assasins creed big then we'd expect a new crime system to go with this! I mean.. who would recognise you in a city of thousands?


And yes.. cities should have been (even with console hardware) at least 4x bigger (so should the farms and skyrim in general). Cities arent even that intensive. It's places that use lots of effects like the ragged flagon or dungeons with streams in!!

I was kind of thinking about this last night. If I remember correctly, the cities in Morrowind/Oblivion felt HUGE and massively populated in comparison to Skyrim's "cities"

I hate to break it to you but Skyrim is a scaled down game, not a real country with real cities. If you count the streets and houses in games like any of the GTA-series and compare the numbers with the numbers of the cities they are based on (L.A or New York) I have a feeling there just might be more streets and buildings in those cities than in the games. But I do agree that the cities, erhm, towns, in Skyrim could be bigger.

Anyhow; have anyone noticed that the mountains in Skyrim aren't really as tall and big as real mountains?

:huh: Seriously? Sadrith Mora had around 25 buildings. Ald-ruhn had something around 30, but even more in side the crab shell. Balmora had around 40. No idea how many Vivec has, but I've gotta imagine it's more than Balmora. Skyrim's cities might compare to something like Caldera, but they've got nothing on Morrowind's major cities.


EDIT: On NPCs, , most buildings had at least one character. A lot had many (like the taverns and guild halls). So you're looking at at least a few to several dozen NPCs in these major towns. And what Morrowind really had going for it here, was "REDUNDANCY!" (note the scare quotes). There might be several different armor and weapon dealers, a couple pawns shops, a few enchanters, a couple clothes vendors, two or three general merchandisers. It made it feel real, instead of a theme park where there is one building for each service.

I find the cities (Whiterun and Solitude) pretty big, even if not accounting for scale down. I mean, local excavations of viking communities doesn't shout "Big massive City" at all. Just look at Iceland communities, even today they're not exactly metro's. Imagine these settlements "back then", and I don't think they should be so big as some suggests. For me, although I like big towns, the current size seems to fit the theme of the game pretty well.

First, they're really villages; let's be honest. Whiterun, is supposed to be the hub of skyrim as described in several places. Whiterun svcks. Four shops and those stupid vendors that have 50 coin on them. And how many houses? 6?

Second, if they are cities, where are all the people? Seriously, you can practically count them on two hands. Very disappointed with this aspect of the game.

Tamriel ,according to the back of the Arena box, should actually be the size of Australia. So yeah, Skyrim is just massively scaled down.

I said most, not all. Morrowind was set in a more populated land than Skyrim is. Same with Oblivion. The cities should be bigger in those games. Other than Markarth, most every city in this game is about the right size for what it is and where it is.

Not convincing at all. There are probably more bandits, vampires, rogues mages ect. in existence than there are NPCs in town, counting guards. While most cities have very solid art design (Markath is beautiful), they are too small and simply aren't populated enough to feel real. I mean, the dinky little [censored]hole of Flotsam in Witcher 2 is bigger and has more NPCs than the supposed grand, massive capital of Solitude.

Oh, and about the hardware limitation excuse, Assassin's Creed can show dozens of NPCs at once on consoles no problem. They even react to most actions the player do, and far more realistically than Skyrim NPCs might I had (granted, the non plot important ones aren't persistent, but who cares since most Skyrim NPCs have no personality anyway?). So it's far more of an engine issue than a hardware limitation. I wager the problem will be lesser when (or if?) Bethesda finally abandons creaky old Gamebryo.

If you look at the wiki and do a quick count there are over 75 named NPCs in Whiterun. That's a lot. The problem is that most of those people are restricted to their building and that there are so few buildings. During the day every NPC is occupied so nobody is walking the streets. They would have been better off using generic villagers to add some activity and more houses even if you can't enter them. I mean, Megaton in FO3 felt more alive. The problem, as someone already stated is that every NPC is accounted to do one thing and there's basically only one of every type of store (if that) in each city which makes it feel more like a fantasy themed park rather than a living city.

Whiterun is supposed to be huge. It used to be called the Imperial City of Skyrim. I know they can't put thousands of NPCs in the city but they most certainly could have given it a more bustling, living city feel. The same goes for all the cities.

Sounds to me like "Do you prefer Morrowinds 6 big cities and 40 settlements, or Oblivion/Skyrims 9 big cities?"

I like the 40 settlements and 6 cities.