People still defend Bethesda

People still defend Bethesda.
Even Ubisoft can make cities that are alive and real in size compared to Bethesda. Doesn't that tell you something?

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no one defends bethesda here

nor even jewbisoft cause everything you may see in their trailers will just be in the trailers alone

How many inconsequential no-name NPC houses would you have had the devs waste their time on?

Not saying Skyrim isn't overrated, it is, but this is a stupid thing to be upset about.

There have been plenty of cities in RPGs with even less than 11 houses, but better content and NPC direction. The problem with Bethesda is they focus on world building, but suck at it.

A town can be as simple as four houses and an Inn, if you actually have something meaningful in there. Whereas a place like Riften has a dozen houses, a pub, a thayne keep and etc. But what is there to do in there? Listen to annoying NPCs talk for hours and then steal their books. Wow, such fun...

...

yea yea houses and you can enter those house and interact with objects in those houses

there's a case to be made for smaller "cities" and not having no name npcs

pfffhhhah yea let's discuss open world video game design on Sup Forums

>Blizzdrones in full force the post
Idiot. What about something like pic related?

Half the npcs in Solitude are inconsequential, unless you haven't at least tried to play the absolute shitfest that it is. Funny thing is people keep eating it up.

Also WHY shouldn't they make the cities larger with inconsequential NPCs.

Do you think that everyone you walk past in a city would want to talk too you or have the time of day to have indepth discussion about life and their problems? If you view Skyrim as an RPG and don't realise what i'm writing makes complete sense, you're a retard.

I want you to imagine Todd Howard schooling the pleb who made that image.

You think that was not a design choice that was made at some point probably early in development?

>Also WHY shouldn't they make the cities larger with inconsequential NPCs.

Because Skyrim is already 80% pointless NPCs and buildings. That's one of its biggest problems. Why do you want them to add more?

I understand you realise the flaws if you're the user above, but excusing shit because its shit is stupid.

The game SHOULD have more npcs and buildings, but it SHOULD have done better with those that aren't. So don't argue the point that "Its already shit, why do i want more shit" but instead argue "It's shit, i want it to be good by doing this"

Am I suppose to know what that is a map of?

lolno, ubisoft cities are boring and feel like a themepark.

skyrim's cities had a cool aesethtic but i agree they were too small and needed to be bigger but not crazily bigger. endlessly walking through a city when you just want to sell some loot is tedious and not fun.

luckily we've got mods.

youtube.com/watch?v=UztnB91xaWg

Hold up let me give you guys this thing you need it to play Skyrim

Not him but you clearly don't get his point, he was saying there's no reason for every npc to have dialogue. Better to have a large city with pedestrians you can't talk to (you don't even have a reason to talk to them) than a walled "city" with 6 houses in them and 12 npc's that have (uninteresting) dialogue. See Novigrad vs Solitude.

I got Skyrim as a gift back on the 360. I was actually surprised by it until after I got to whiterun or whatever and realized that the game's big "cities" were just a handful of huts.

They're both equal amounts of cancer.

Bethesda just deserve worse for ruining Fallout.

No, you're supposed to have an actual brain and realise that it looks like a medieval city, and its size is something that Bethesda should be leaning towards for its major holds.

Final Fantasy XII is what you get when you have huge cities, but can only go into a handful of buildings and talk to 3-4 people. I think that's just as bad for a different reason.

There are literally just empty building models that you can't explore and non-interactable crowd in Ass Creed games.

Novigrad and Beauclair were utter sex. Bethesda got btfo by CDPR with Witcher 3.

For what reason? I don't see any reason for wanting to enter literally every house in a city and talk to every person on the street, do you do that as well in real life?

>people still make this thread

It's 2016, how long can you carry that butthurt before it destroys you?

It has architecture from at least four different cultures, that were all relevant at different time periods.
What fucking medieval city had a Greek style temple, a mosaic dome temple, a standard European castle, a marble pool of some sort, and a fucking Italian style tower? Its a hogpog of random shit dreamed up by some moron that doesn't understand time periods

Baldur's Gate, brosef.

Because 10 pointless npcs make a city feel empty while 100 makes the city actually feel alive because you can make them do mundane shit like work a field or fish or sit around in a tavern getting drunk. Not every person in the world has to be important or a quest giver and the pointless people doing pointless shit makes the world feel alive which is something Bethesda can't do.

You people are either being completely ignorant or are cancerous. I refuse to believe people don't understand this.


The point that's being made is this (I'll keep it as simple as possible for you);

The cities in all Bethesda games don't feel like cities. They're small and are more relatable to villages/hamlets. These places in the LORE of Elder Scrolls are described as big, bustling and full of activity (being major strongholds of ports). Yet we don't get that feeling when exploring them.

Furthermore why WOULD you speak to everyone you might. Why WOULD you enter the house of a family/strangers on your quest. If you want to argue 'Well you should', then dont expect to find anything worthwhile (Even Skyrim with its lack in size suffers from this).

The point is i'd much rather explore a city much like this or at least have cities with inconsequantial npcs so it at least FEELS like a living city that was described in the lore and what we SHOULD expect to see from a seasoned world building developer.

That is literally not a problem in an rpg though. It's not a requirement for every house to have a purpose. Logically most shouldn't. What is important though at the very least is the illusion that you are actually in a city and not a fucking hamlet like in the OP.

But have you bought Fallout 4 yet?

i will say this, Diamond city is so bad it actually makes Skyrim's cities retroactively better.

>rpg codex shitters still trying to do damage control after abysmally bad DLC expansion of witcher launched

But it felt like a city, rather than the essentially identical little showpieces in Skyrim.

How about no?

How about they do it the Elder Scrolls way small sized "cities" not necessarily grounded in reality.

Every single house needs to be open to the player in TES therefore you have a smaller population of named npcs right. These named NPCs have a schedule, a job , a quest for you and you'll probably remember most of them.

>I don't see any reason for wanting to enter literally every house in a city and talk to every person on the street
Plenty of RPGs do it. My favorite thing in RPGs is being able to search barrels/crates/shelves/cupboards/etc for items or clues. And it just feels like a waste when game developers spend hundreds of hours making a city look good, but then there's nothing to interact with and you just run past everything.

>do you do that as well in real life?
Its not real life. Do you compare every single thing in a game to your real life experiences? If that's the case, you should stop playing RPGs and go play a German simulation game.

>Bringing a Witcher is shit arguement into this thread
Why? Go back to the Witcher Threads and shitpost in there kid.

Blood and Wine was very fun tho

>How about they do it the Elder Scrolls way small sized "cities" not necessarily grounded in reality.

I've spotted the Bethesda fan boy!

>hese named NPCs have a schedule, a job , a quest for you and you'll probably remember most of them.

Brilliant, please tell me more.

It is probably to do with their engine limitations. Actual cities according to TES lore are much bigger. I doubt Gamebryo can handle cities like Novigrad from Witcher 3.

I am hoping TESVI to have large cities.

I like Bethesda as a publisher, and even then their track record has some massive holes in it.

Honestly if the options are tons of bethesda style cities or very few/one but large towns ala Novigrad i'd rather have the latter. Novigrad's still smaller than it probably 'should' be but it feels like an actual fucking town actual people made a city out of. Bethesda cities are so painfully functional abstraction it's getting hard to ignore. diamond city is too goddamn tiny for these 'upper balcony' elites to be a thing, ever.

The lore and the games aren't the same

You really think a country with 200 or less citizens that takes 12 minutes to walk across would be having a civil war?

But isn't Skyrim's whole gimmick that everyone talks and every building has an interior and whatnot?

Sure, disposable pedestrian NPCs add to the realism of the city somewhat, but the thing I remember most about Skyrim wasn't the story or the setting. It was a random dragon attack on a town that killed the blacksmith and a couple sidequest-key NPCs, so I kept reloading my save and trying to kill this dragon while keeping all of the townsfolk safe so I didn't lose quests and gear.

If the people in the town were multitudinous and disposable, moments like that wouldn't happen.

Is the setting's veracity worth giving up the "total interactivity see that mountain you can climb it" thing that makes Skyrim what it is?

They could work around this by splitting the city up though right? There's probably ways around it but bethesda is just a lazy developer.

I understood your point perfectly. But you need to stop claiming I'm ignoring your point when you're ignoring my points.

>Furthermore why WOULD you speak to everyone you might. Why WOULD you enter the house of a family/strangers on your quest.
This has been a staple of RPGs since Ultima. And many people play RPGs to do this exact thing. I understand you don't care about it. But you aren't everybody.

And if you care so much about the scale of the world over actual gameplay, then there's plenty of games out there for you. Skyrim was just bad because it tried to have both a huge detailed world, but also make everything have a gameplay trigger. and purpose. And so it ended up not pleasing either side.

TW3 is overrated as fuck and CDProject's lies in trailers were obvious since day 1. Still a great RPG though.

My childhood.

Rome you fucking retarded amerilard

If Bethesda uses a new engine which engine should they use?

yeah let's not kid ourselves, their trend has been to go even smaller still. Diamond city is one of the most pathetically tiny cities they've ever done, and it's still it's own magic cell outside the rest of the world.

our luck they are more likely to try and recreate Daggerfall's random town layout and make 'radiant towns'

"it just populates!"

I'm not a Bethesda fanboy at all user

I'm just saying maybe you think you know better but you really don't. There's a reason why Bethesda does it this way there's always a design decision to be made.

>implying they will ever change the engine
They will use it literally till the end of time and beyond. Why create a new engine when you can make more money by using the old one?

It's not like anyone is forcing them to use Gamebryo. Don't know whether you meant it as an excuse or just a reason, but I've seen people say it as if it was totally out of Bethesda's control.

They won't

this was for

Gamebryo

Wouldn't an actual city be the size of the entire map?

exactly oblivions imperial city while still small felt reasonably sized and when it came out i even managed to get lost before i discovered fast travel

>Rome
>Greek style temple

>Blizzdrones
When was Blizzard brought up even once?

Why would you want to run for 15 minutes through a city and not interact with any NPC or building? You could play Assassins Creed for that. You obviously don't know the very basics of game design. If you make a huge city with only a few NPCs and buildings, you either need to have big flashing indicators to get people to go to those places or it becomes a shitty hide and seek puzzle for the player. And after spending 10 minutes not finding the next quest trigger, the average player will just quit the game and go sell it to Gamestop.

Skyrim already had too much empty space and pointless NPCs. What you're suggesting they do would make it worse.

Skyrim painfully draws back the amount of interesting interactivity to streamline everything due the engine. the problem is that while it seems more impressive to have a town of 12 people with 12 exact houses, when the game starts acting like it's the biggest, most impressive city it starts creating disconnect.

Novigrad is smaller than it probably should be for true scale, jsut like beth cities, but it 'feels' like a huge city because of it's scope, and even having fully visible districts and obvious changes in the area. you can't enter ever building in novigrad, but you feel like a lot of people live there even if you rarely see all of them.

>he hasn't been to witcher threads

>tfw no video game city has topped Novigrad.

Bethesda hired some new game engine programmers and graphics programmers just after Fallout 4 release. So there is still hope we might see something new in the next Elder Scrolls.

Where are you Todd, I can smell you. I'm not buying your Fallout 4 or your Fallout 4 DLC. Fuck you Todd, you lied again.

>You really think a country with 200 or less citizens that takes 12 minutes to walk across would be having a civil war?


Literal autism here folks.
You're defending a bad point in a games design even though you know it's bad. Why?

The lore and the game are the same fucking thing since the law comes from the games!
Hate to sound like a CDProjektShill but look what they did with the Witcher Lore (Based on books, not their own made up universe like Bethesda) yet still managing to make a huge city that felt life like.

How does he get away with it?

A modern one yes, not one for that time period.

what is so special about it?

Actually the Imperial City is in Cyrodiil
Im surprised people on Sup Forums get confused like that

>You obviously don't know the very basics of game design. If you make a huge city with only a few NPCs and buildings, you either need to have big flashing indicators to get people to go to those places or it becomes a shitty hide and seek puzzle for the player
>Gameplay should not get in the way of progression

This generation in a nutshell.

they will NEVER use a new engine, they are so unable to use a new engine they would sooner suicide pact than try. even the normies have caught on to it and every single time they try to pretend they made a 'new' engine, but all they ever do is change everything around' the core engine

every single time he says it's a new engine, he always least renders, lighting, everything ancilary tot he engine, they never touch the core scripting system

Because you're supposed to feel immersed in the world? That's the point.
How am i meant to feel immersed in a game that doesn't even represent the lore its based off on properly?

>Even Ubisoft can make cities that are alive and real in size
>Ubisoft

Are you by any chance retarded?
Both are terrible devs. Seriously just play something else.

>It's not a requirement for every house to have a purpose.
I don't think you understand what kind of franchise the Elder Scrolls became after Morrowind and forward.

Dragon's Dogma's starting town felt bigger than that shit.

Design decision?


And that was to make Cities into hamlets? Right? And make all the NPCS in those cities interactable, but completely forgetable and uninteresting.

So basically they failed on both counts?

How many of those buildings can you enter? How many NPCs can you speak to?

>I am hoping TESVI to have large cities.

That's never going to happen because every single house needs to be open to the player.

One large city that's a maybe

>And if you care so much about the scale of the world over actual gameplay, then there's plenty of games out there for you. Skyrim was just bad because it tried to have both a huge detailed world, but also make everything have a gameplay trigger. and purpose. And so it ended up not pleasing either side.

I agree with you on this.
The issue i'm saying is as you've said yourself some RPGs (Not all of them, don't like) focus on making everything relevant. But can you tell me which ones in recent times that aren't 2D based have suceeded in this?

What if they just made the whole map just one giant city, and the game takes place in that?

How can you tell wether thats a greek or roman style temple in the picture? Roman is basically pimped out Greek anyway

>america education

>How am i meant to feel immersed in a game that doesn't even represent the lore its based off on properly?
You realize its a game and it has limitations. Are you the kid who complained an SNES game didn't look as good as a movie?

and you forgot

How many objects in those building can you interact with

Skyrim cities are a joke compared to Novigrad, it is true user. There are tons of building that you can enter. You can talk to every npc.

Witcher 3's engine is superior. It loads up the city/stuff in the background while you are playing.

honestly i think part of it is their cutting back so much it's really starting to work against their very design ideas.

design idea wise diamond city sounds awesome, but it's execution is so godamn purely functional it makes it even worse.

>Are you by any chance retarded?
I'm talking about Assassins Creed you idiot, and i'm not defending them you spaz. I'm just saying as shitty as they are at least in Assassins Creed i felt like i was in a moving city.

Dragon Quest VIII is a 3D RPG. And every single area has NPCs and searchable items that were relevant.

But aside from that game, there are few games which have ever done it well. Even modern Zelda can't do it. Skyrim had an even bigger scope. It couldn't make 350+ NPCs and every single bookshelf relevant to the world it tried to create.

>You realize its a game and it has limitations.
Your point is clearly irrelevant and you know i'm right.

As i said before, if i can feel like i'm in a city and get immersed within that city that the game is basing said city on it works. I also love how you're trying to go on a tangent with a childish insult.

Good attempt, heres the (you).

I'd say you can enter about 20 buildings at all times + `30 that are opened for story reasons at some point. People's private homes are closed because why wouldn't they be, and you're a witcher not a thief so you have no business going in there
You can speak to 20-30ish npcs

It was bigger sadly.

it's not super great sometimes though, and it clearly seems to assume loading south to north. if you fast travel to that center market, the swordsmith due south won't be in his shop unless you meditate once, but he's always there if you approach the city from a southern entrance

>Your point is clearly irrelevant and you know i'm right.
Your point is clearly irrelevant and you know i'm right. Make a stupid deflection and you'll get one right back.

>Plenty of RPGs do it
And that makes it acceptable?

I also love searching for clues / items as long as they make sense in the game world. If developers made every house in a city (and not bethesda cities but actual cities) entry-able I'm sure it would be a waste of time for the developers, time they could have spent on designing interesting dungeons and locations with good level design instead. Also if every house was entry-able I'm sure you would start seeing patterns of copy pasted and re-used models very quickly, I doubt developers have the time to make every house unique.

Same with npc's, what would you rather have: 100 npc's with shared voice actors you can talk to and deliver a few lines or 5 interesting characters in a city with each their own backstory and character progression. Which one of the two takes more time to make? You can clearly see why Bethesda went with the former option.

Actually, there are only 7 houses in Solitude

Weirdly though, this image labels three houses as one

oh yeah, also you can try talking to every npc but they most likely won't have a reason to want to talk to you, and every enterable interior you enter without any loading screens

About half of them can be entered , all NPCs can be talked to , but only select ones have dialogue options , the others just giving quips and one-liners.

Yet it still has tonnes of variation.

But most of those "Houses" are Hotels or shops. It's almost like you never played, and took this picture as fact...