What is the virtue of a game world consisting of sparsely populated villages masquerading as bustling towns? Don't get me wrong - I enjoy my first stroll through a new open-world VG city, especially a TES city, as much as the next guy. But of all the stuff in a game like Skyrim that demands the player suspend disbelief and fill in the gaps with his or her own imagination, the "city" of 13 residents, 4 houses, a couple shops, and a temple wears thin quicker than most. The technological limits are what they are, so I'm not asking for more citizens or activity, necessarily. I am just wondering if those 13 NPCs couldn't be inserted into a more convincing environment.

An abandoned city being re-settled by a small group of determined homesteaders. A group of survivors left in the wake of a plague. A small religious cult isolated from the rest of society. There are any number of creative and interesting excuses to have a group of 15 or 20 folks gathered in some corner of the world just waiting for your dual glass dagger wielding elf to wander by. And, of course, there are examples to be found in Skyrim.

Of course, you couldn't tell the stories Skyrim aims to tell, complete with warring jarls and property-owning thanes, without rough approximations of towns and cities. I understand that and accept it as part of the language of TES. This isn't a criticism of the game that has eaten every second of my free time since 11-11-11. And I would certainly rather see the processing power devoted to other pieces of interesting content rather than town folk filler that are little more than props that grumble, "Sorry, too busy to talk. Gotta get this arrow out of my knee" as you walk by.

How 'bout you? In your next open-world RPG/adventure game, would you prefer conspicuously under-populated cities with furnished homes to rifle through, a smithy and a chemist, and a few citizens-in-need to send you on errands to retrieve lost heirlooms? Or would you be willing to forgo the great halls and majestic manors in favor of more modest settlements, camps, trading posts, drum circles, hunting parties, caravans, acting troupes, or outposts -- anything that you would actually expect to consist of only a couple dozen people?

My answer is, I'm not sure.

I'm a little disappointed with the city size as well. Whiterun is pretty impressive and detailed in the sense that it has farms around it and some guard towers, which lends it more of a city feel than most of the others. But aside from that you would be hard pressed to describe them as anything other than walled villages, towns at best.

One of the cities was actually described officially as being "massive" I'm not making that up. After seeing Whiterun I assumed this massive city must be Solitude, so I travelled there, alas it was not so. But yeah I was playing this game waiting to encounter the massive city and never found it, was quite disappoint.

I'm disappointed by the lack of bigger cities. You have Morthal, Falkreath, Dawnstar and Winterhold all being tiny villages.
Winterhold was the biggest disappointment for me. It feels like they just used this "great collapse" as an excuse not to make it bigger.

The towns... Um... colonies... are real small. Too small.

Riverwood has three homes and an inn... A mill with only one worker, owned by an owner who doesn't work. Sven, an archer-guard, Sven's mom, Hadvars Uncle and Aunt, some kids, a drunk guy, and two people running the inn and two running the trade-shop. (I think only the drunk lives at the inn?)

That is hardly a colony, not close to a town, no-where-near being a city...
I didn't count the people in Whiterun, but there seems to be several dozen. (Most are inside buildings.)

They could use some more traveling and working non-interactive NPC's.
- Fixing roofs
- Fixing fences
- Laying stone
- Standing around talking
- Sitting around doing nothing
- Leaning on walls
- Guarding things
- Plowing fields

I know they have people doing these things... but like one in each town... (Some creative work could have given the illusion of more activity, without causing the game to stall.)

Seems the issue is all related to displaying too many people, with CPU killing animations. However, the game is more like reality... Look outside... how many people do you see? They are all inside, or at work, telemarketing cell-phone-service and auto-warranty-extensions...

Someone will make a "lively-town" mod, for those who have computers that can handle it, with the desire to fill towns with more useless people. I know I will! (I like malls.)

I do find the cities more believable, i don't know why. They just feel more alive.

As for winterhold, I bet 10/1 odds that some time warp DLC will be involved

I been in smaller towns rl... I kid you not 30 minute drive from me is a town population 12 it has two houses a post office and a general store that is also a tavern.

The main reason the cities are the sizes they are is NPCs. You get too many of them in a cell, it can chug.

TES cities have never really been that big. Well, they were in Daggerfall and quite frankly, it svcked to walk from one end to the other. Vivec was an example of a big city that was just hard to get around. I think I stated this somewhere else, but if they city gets bigger, to what end? In Cyrodill, there were a lot of buildings I just walked past and never went into more than once. And, that was just to see if there was a reason to go into that building. If they grow the cities and it results in just having more buildings to walk past going from A to B, that would get tedious after the initial, "Wow, a big city" reaction. Skyrim seems just about right when I walk through their towns.

So, content would need to be added if the building count increased to justify the extra buildings. Even then, I am not sure I would want most of the cities to be much bigger.

3 ruined houses didn't feel like much of a "great collapse" to me. When I first got there I thought "oh, it's a little [censored] hole of a town that's falling apart." Then I read all this lore about "the great collapse" and thought "Wow, you guys are whining about a few wrecked houses? Quit being lazy and fix them..."

All the rest of it up to that point I'd just shrugged off. Skyrim felt like a sparsely populated rural northern climate. I was good with that. Winterhold just didn't feel like it had been "ruined" though.

I didn't get the swallowed by the ocean impression until I heard about it either

I feel that they were too small :/

Welll, some classes like say a pure thief are a fun class to play in a big city. Daggerfall was a great game to play as a pure thief, since you could live in a city for a month or more easily before leaving to find a building you hadn't rifled for loot.

Skyrim is more of a hacky slash dungeon crawler, doesn't offer up RP options for every archetype. Imo Thief and Mage roleplay is a little overlooked in this installment of ES, but that's fine really since it's going with a more Warrior viking focused vibe, and I'm on board with that.

I think they're "realistic", if the climate and location is taken into account. Maybe in TES VI we will see huge cities. But they're nice, i like the cities. On the other hand, the villages seem to have been copy-pasted mostly.

Yeah, ever since TES chose "handcrafted" instead of "randomly generated", cities have felt small. It's the only gripe I have with Morrowind which is my favorite game ever.

Skyrim is no better or worse than Morrowind or Oblivion on the matter, I believe.

So small, it's like skyrim is full of a bunch of villages. these are not cities, and few seems to live in them.

I know what the OP is getting at.

1) Winterhold is a little silly - once it's that size it would just be abandoned FFS!
2) There should be more houses for NPCs in pretty much every settlement. I don't really mind if I only go in them once or never. In fact, they could be permanently locked as far as I'm concerned and with randomly generated NPCs strolling around (to a degree obviously).

I do appreciate there is a size constraint with the hardware though, better that it doesn't lag so much.

But I also think there are some cool cities. Solitude's awesome, and while it (as with the others) could do with more houses, I never really get the impression that it doesn't have them, not sure why. Whitreun's cool too.

I have no real problem with the city sizes, sure I wish they were larger & had more NPC's in them... But honestly, it's just less space for me to have to run back & forth to get to whatever shop/npc/home I'm trying to get to.. I already hate having to run across Whiterun or Solitude...

My only real dissapointment is Winterhold.. It's marginally larger than Riverwood lol.

Like others have said.. To what end?

If there is already one of each type of shop, a Jarl's house, garrisson/barracks, with 6-12 houses, each with 2-3 NPC's living in them, complete with quests & there own dialogue options.. Not including gaurds...That is perfectly fine by me. I'd rather have actual NPC's than just walking Zombies.

I could tolerate other cities being smaller if at least Solitude had been impressive but it's pathetic like the rest.

I have to agree with this.

Vivec was just a pain to find your way. And Imperial City? I walked through it once then fast traveled to where I wanted. Skyrim cities just seem like the perfect size for me to actually enjoy walking through them.

I agree. I really felt... underwhelmed by the size of the cities in Skyrim and the lack of NPCs. I think Whiterun is fine, and Solitude isn't too bad either, but I was really looking forward to at least one big city. Thinking back to Oblivion, I really enjoyed being in the Imperial City. All of the houses, shops, buildings, and NPCs with schedules made the city fell really alive (or at least it felt that way in the Market District).

Somebody did a building count and Skyrim was the same or bigger than most places in Morrowind.




That is because Skyrim is a land of small villages. It is a rural area in the cold north, not many people do live there.

This.

I'd much rather have small forts or settlements, a la Gothic, than the towns-masquerading-as-cities. I wish TES:V were clear about whether Skyrim cities are supposed to be medieval-era London big, or medieval-era Jerusalem big. I'm leaning toward the latter, because the bigger towns- Whiterun and Solitude, and Markarth to a lesser extent- are almost as big as Jerusalem was back then.

What bothers me is that in-game these cities are so hyped up, before you even reach your destination, that you can't but be disappointed.

I wish we had some way of knowing whether the cities are supposed to be about the size they are now (or slightly bigger), or whether they were supposed to be much, much bigger. That's the thing that bothers me most about this topic: not knowing whether the cities as they are designed are intentional or a compromise.

I.e. I'm not clear in my head how I/my PC/NPCs am/are supposed to react to them.

This, this is a bad excuse to make tiny cities.

More convincing than Oblivion (style wise) but still not convincing enough (population numbers and environmental awareness wise)

There's hardly any people there. Oblivion had better cities, Fallout New Vegas is the best. Randomly generated Strippers, drunk soldiers, thugs, body guards, people recognize effects you have. Vegas blows Skyrim out the water on cities. Hell, Daggerfall cities felt more real and everyone is just a 2d picture!