Well, here we are 5 years after the release of Oblivion. I'm sure we've all had some incredible memories with the game. My question is do you think that Bethesda was able to capture what you'd expect from the capital of such a sprawling and ancient empire, in Cyrodiil and especially the Imperial City?

1st time yes, never player a TES game before and didn't know what to expect and it was memorizing. But after 50 hrs or so it was rather meh, not enough culture or activity although Better cities and fcom had turned it into what I expected

I was disappointed. Of course, I come from playing Daggerfall and Morrowind considerably, in the past. I'm not sure which NPC even says it in Oblivion, but one of them mentions that the IC is "the biggest and best" city in the empire. Looks rather small to me and not quite as grand as I would have expected.

Not really. To me it feels more claustrophobic than grand.

Absolutely not! It should have been how they described it in the first Pocket Guide! Province:Cyrodiil for TESIII is making it the way it should have been. Applause for the P:C team!

Nope, not by a long shot. It wasn't grand, it was miniscule. But then again, that's probably due to technical restraints. The game would be much heavier than it already is if the Imperial City was actually large.

I know that the entire province of Cyrodiil was chosen in order to give the Oblivion Crisis the magnitude it needed, but I think too much of Tamriel was chosen for the setting of one game. The game map is about 8-10 square miles. Not even the entire City Isle could fit in that much space if you wanted to stay close to the scale of Tamriel.

It makes me wonder. If the City Isle encompassed an entire Elder Scrolls game, most of the detail would have to been with the city. Although I think it would be awesome to explore the city as such, most players would probably be turned off by the fact that >60% of the game took place in one giant city.

So yes, I was disappointed by how the Imperial City was portrayed when compared to what has been told and read about. But like I said, Bethesda would have to have made the entire game just on the City Isle to capture that lore.

You stole it right off of my lips.

No, absolutely not. The IC was small, drab, sparsely populated, and plain; clean-cut, it looked like it had been built in the last year or two. No history, no grandeur, nothing at all what the center of the Empire ought to look like (and how it was described in in-game books). The docks didn't look like the beating heart of the Empire at all, they looked like my town's boat launch for our pond. Cyrodiil had a few small hamlets that it called cities - hah! What a laugh. That's why I used the Better Cities mod and other town/city expansion mods, to make the cities more vibrant, full of life, clutter, history, and signs of industry.

1/ It`s their creation and their capital so they can describe it in game however they like. :mohawk:
2/I do think capitals should have more people and buildings than that -Its more like a very ornate village :nope:
3/Hey-It`s a game-Does anybody want to spend an hour walking out of the capital to get to the nearest dungeon?They`d have to bring in trains if you couldn`t fast travel. :banghead:

Vanilla IC is OK in its way. Modded IC can of course improve on that. Could Bethesda have done better? Of course.

IC, like so much else, is limited by the size of Oblivion's Cyrodiil. Adding in a city of the size needed to do an Imperial Capital justice would eat up too much of an already too-small game-world. Would I prefer a larger Cyrodiil with correspondingly larger cities? You bet! Do I think the current IC roughly matches the scale of Oblivion's Cyrodiil. Yup.

If it had been the awe-inspiring flyby of the Imperial City that we see when we start a new game..... More people.

Like the architecture. But, yeah, its not really a city per se and where are all the people?

But then again, like someone said, its just a game. I suppose.

I'm going to be hung upside-down by my ankles for saying this, but I'm glad Bethesda decided not to make Cyrodiil a jungle when they made Oblivion. On a personal level, I hate jungles. I would have hated trudging through miles of jungle. I much prefer the deciduous forests, rolling grasslands, snowy mountainous landscapes and swamps they created for this game. I'm also not much bothered by the lore aspect. Bethesda has continually changed lore. And they will continue to change lore in the future. More troubling to me than turning jungle into deciduous forest is Solstheim, an island that suddenly and magically popped into the world without anyone ever having suspected its presence up until that instant and whose position on the map conflicts with all known maps of Tamriel up until the moment the island materialized. How did Ebonheart magically move from mainland Morrowind onto Vvardenfell when they created Morrowind? My feeling is: it's Bethesda's lore, they are free to do what they want with it. If I don't enjoy their games I just won't play them anymore. Life is too short for me to worry about stuff like this.

That said, I do not experience a whole lot of awe when I explore Cyrodiil or the Imperial City. To clarify: I enjoy exploring Cyrodiil, but I can't say I feel awe. To me, Cyrodiil feels too confined, Cyrodiil feels like a giant bowl to me. Being inside a giant bowl does not inspire much awe in me, to be honest. As others have said, the Imperial City districts felt way too small and underpopulated. This is particularly unfortunate because Bethesda placed each district in its own worldspace - there could easily have been more districts and the existing districts could have been larger and made much more interesting without negatively affecting framerates. They blew it.

The positioning of the Imperial City on the Imperial Isle do not feel quite right to me also. A major city such as that would have much easier supply routes in and out of the city. As Alaisiagae mentioned, these are not the bustling docks of the capital of an empire. Renee Glade, in an earlier thread, asked, "Where are the ships?" and that's a very good question. I just don't think Bethesda created a plausible capital city when they created the IC.

This sums up my thoughts on this subject rather well. I also felt that Oblivion for the most part was botched, it could've been a lot better. I was more awe-inspired by Vivec in Morrowind than I was by anything created in Oblivion anywhere.

It has already been explained quite well that Bethesda failed with regards to the Imperial City because they made the place too small. There are seven inner districts, only four of which have any real population to them, and three outer districts, although let me say that the Waterfront being rather limited in scope due to technical restraints is a valid excuse for this game.

Essentially, all the work that Bethesda put into making this game feel big... in the end, it just backfired on them. Sure, being able to see for miles is quite an achievement, but it also makes it easier to see just how small the world really was, especially since Cyrodiil is entirely situated in a giant valley and is largely flat (save for the mountains to the North). Because Cyrodiil has almost no rugged terrain whatsoever, it becomes very easy to travel from one side of the world to the other quickly, and because almost no attention was paid to the up-close details with the landscaping, it encourages the player to travel fast because there is so little to see up close.

But in the end, if the question is about what sense of grandeur Oblivion had for the Imperial Capital, my answer is there was none. The Imperial City was just too small, but at the same time this was largely because the devs restricted what could be done to the city by the inherent design of the game. What was really needed was a larger population.

I never really understood why so many forts were all so close together and always in shambles. They just felt kinda thrown in like there was a backstory to the heartland elves each one was its own independent colony. The human ruins were just random and were long abandoned only to become refuge to necromancers, marauders, vampires and never really went any deeper than that.
The white gold tower always gave me the impression of being a massive world wonder though.

On the other hand, there's no excuse at all for it being situated where it is, behind non-navigable shallows, so that no ship would ever be able to go anywhere at all.

I think Bethesda forgot about the existence of the waterfront when they were designing Leyawiin. That was my first though going through that area, too: "how in the world do these giant galleons manage to sail through a teenie tiny stream like this?"

My comment was mostly geared twoards the fact that on PC, the Waterfront always runs at about 15-20 FPS despite everything.

Nevertheless, I've got my load order all set now to where the Imperial City looks its part much better, and has a decent population of meaningful NPCs, too. I'm still not sure what to do with the textures; though, every single replacer I've seen so far makes the IC look much cleaner when I want it the other way around.

Considering I really had nothing to base it on, I was okay with whatever I got. I wasn't particularly in awe when I first got in though. Not the way I was when I first stepped out of the sewers, or entered Weynon Priory, or entered Chorrol.

It could have been bigger but I'm sure there were technical reasons also to make it the size that it is. I would have not wanted it to be one big city and a small area outside.

That's one big reason I like GTA San Andreas more than GTA IV. Totally different type of game than Bethesda's games but same reason for me liking one over the other.

I'm not concerned about the size of the Imperial City. I can suspend my disbelief. I am willing to accept a smaller-than-full-scale Imperial City if it's interesting. We make little concessions like this all the time when we consume art. The problem for me is this: If the Imperial City had been built full scale it would still not be interesting.

Smaller than full scale I can overlook, blandness I cannot.

Not really I wasn't really impressed wel ofcourse the 'video' in the begin was pretty nice, specially that guards where walking over walls, but than that is the only time you see them doing that ...The towers don't connect to walls a shame ...

I actually must admit I have been playing roleplaying games in the 90's and I was by than more impressed by 'realistic' cities than the Imperial City ... Ofcourse one of the pro's now the city is a bit more divers ... But it could have been done better I have been playing lots of Baldur's Gate II, If I make a example of a city like Athaklata the capital of the Empire of Amn, the Imperial City is a joke in compairing to it ... Now I must say you couldn\t visit all parts of that city, and many buidlings you could't enter but still that was a real city ...

Including, A graveyard district, a real graveyard district, a government district, a temple district, a slum district with illegal slavery, a true harbour district, and a merchant / noble district ...

All this districts the imperial city lacked ...

Now for my whine I really love Oblivion, and play it a lots but the cities specially the imperial city could have done better ... And yes I can life without the fact you can't enter all buildings, or you can''t visit the wholl city without 'fast traveling'

But than I growed up with other can't of gams than open games.

Not that there is anything wrong here, but I guess I'm the total opposite. Even if having no countryside is a heavy price to pay, I think Oblivion could have been played inside the IC and plane of oblivion exclusively, and the IC could have been enormous, convincing, grand, and diverse (same for the plane of oblivion). I have never liked these scaled down worlds. People go on about how big morrowind and oblivion are; whatever... they just weren't around for Daggerfall.

I was totally new to the entire franchise and I mistakenly thought that Cyrodil was the empire and the Imperial city the capital. It was only after I found out Tamriel is the continent empire and that Cyrodil is a province that I felt the Imperial City was not what it could have been. But don't get me wrong, I thought it was really really original to have a massive circular heavily walled city protected by a surrounding lake that creates a water barrier. My only wish is that there had been a lot more NPC's in it. I also wished horses and some form of ridable carriages were made to go from point to point. The Waterfront was too small I thought. It could have had a few more houses, a bit more bustling with activity and downright dirty. More ships could have been made.

To make it all short, I think the city's concept was really good. All it needed was the heavy bustle!