Why are the cities in Skyrim just tiny village communities with 6-7 houses...

Why are the cities in Skyrim just tiny village communities with 6-7 houses? It ruins the immersion for me and makes me feel insignificant

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Gamebryo

Because Todd lied

Too much effort to make each capital unique and lively so why not just copy and past a bunch of them

A mix of Bethesda being incompetent and hardware limitations for the last console gen

Because TES is a heaping pile of shit

Just play Witcher 3, it's still flawed but at least it has an interesting world + city(s)

youtube.com/watch?v=9DA5TrlFefQ

You can't have GTA-sized cities if you want to be able to enter every building and have hundreds of non-static objects around, especially if you're working on PS3/360 hardware,

because having giant cities wouldn't be conducive to the gameplay. They wanted you to play in the entire area of Skyrim not in just one or two cities.

Because Bethesda chose to go the fucktiny-hypercompressed-world way of developing their games after Daggerfall.

Also tech limitations, they chose to upgrade certain things that made it impossible to make huge cities with the tech at the moment

But their laziness is also something to factor in I guess

I think the cities in Skyrim are fine. Big enough to have everything you need while not big enough to take too long to get anywhere. They also look fine on the ground. They only look "small" when you act like a Sup Forumstard and fly up in the sky so you can take an aerial photo of something that you're not even supposed to see from that angle. They look fine on ground level.

Except The Witcher 3 is not a sandbox, has no game changing mods, and is only about 150 hours long if you finish everything.

Not to mention The Witcher 3 only takes place on small open hub lands and not a huge section of land like Skyrim. There's less than a handful of actual cities in The Witcher 3 with no immersive features

This.

/thread

>Except The Witcher 3 is not a sandbox
Yeah it's an actual game instead of an empty playpen for children and autists

Fuck off Bethestard. How exactly is Witcher 3 not a sandbox? And 150 hours of quality content short for you?

>There's less than a handful of actual cities in The Witcher 3 with no immersive features

Novigrad and Oxvenfurt (or whatever its called) alone are several times larger, more immersive, with 100x more unique quests than all of skyrim's "cities" combined.

"Huge section of land" is incredibly misleading considering the world is actually hilariously small, and even for its size doesnt really have much of interest to explore. Who cares if you can "climb that mountain" when theres nothing to find on top or around it?

I suppose i understand the "sandbox" thing but it doesnt feel like a "real" world when there is no content.

Pretty much this.

Novigrad is huge but fucking empty. There are many buildings and NPCs but you can go into like 50 houses and there are zero interesting things to find. Same with Oxenfurt, it's just smaller. Novigrad is fuckhuge the first few times you see it but at the end of the game it's just tedious and boring.

(You)

You just described cities in Elder Scrolls games.

I agree its the weaker part of the game compared to velen, but between several notice boards that contain quests/witcher contracts, the half-dozen or so random side quests that pop up throughout your time there, the multiple main story/major subquests that take you around the city, and all the merchants who you can also play gwent with, it really does blow TES out of the water. and on that note it generally is one of the best implemented medieval cities that i can think of in vidya like this.

Get over yourself you retard. The newer Elder Scrolls games are known for cities where you could enter every house and everyone besides guards is named. Now take The Witcher 3 where Novigrad is fuckhuge but 99% is essentially fluff.

>people saying tech limitations when dragon's dogma does big cities flawlessly

>The newer Elder Scrolls games are known for cities where you could enter every house and everyone besides guards is named.

thanks for the laugh

?

He's right though. At least for Oblivion

Holy shit, now this is autistic effort i adore.

So what is exactly is in those houses that makes it so different than TW3? It's all fluff. Who cares if they give the NPCs names with pointless dialog.

As usual, TES fags slurping up Todd's diarrhea and thanking him for it.

CDR made one big city in The Witcher 3, Novigrad. So everything that is interesting happens in Novigrad. All the hamlets around are really uninteresting and boring. People complain about radiant quests in Skyrim yet happily accept that 80% of Witcher quests are fetch quests or witcher contracts killing monsters.

>There are many buildings and NPCs but you can go into like 50 houses and there are zero interesting things to find.
jeez you don't say. it's almost like houses that regular people live in are uninteresting.

youtube.com/watch?v=oSVEQSnAbcU

novigrad is amazing. i haven't been to a city in a game that is so coherent. novigrad has amazing design, it's gorgeous, there is an amazing mix of industry and thoroughfares that just makes sense. heck you end up spending quite a bit of time in the outskirts before you even go into the city itself. you also get that transition from farmland to small outlier villages to the outskirts to the city.

never once did i feel like "oh, i wish there were collectibles for me to 100% by exploring every house :^) " because i'm not a fucking idiot like you

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about or played any TES game. TW3 just had one big city where more stuff happened instead of 7 separate cities.

Kek I love the bizarre shill answers

Look, I don't want to get into a position of defending TW3 and being labeled a "fanboy" because i could make a big list of things i didnt like about that game--but to be clear, you really cant compare even basic shit like witcher contracts to the radiant quest system. Even the contracts were clearly hand crafted with their own characters, locations, backstory, etc. So I suppose you can ultimately call it a "fetch quest" but by that definition virtually every RPG quest that involves killing something is a "fetch quest'

Please suck more polish cock dude. If you love TW3 and are being a fag about it it's okay but please don't shit up every thread like usual.

You can't do whatever you want or play exactly how you want

>play game for the first time
>care little about how big the city is
>find quests
>kill
>loot
>return
>find shops
>forget the rest of the town existed
Honestly bro, your own autism is to blame here. No one wants bloated shit to walk around and dozens of useless NPCs getting in your way of quest givers, shops trainers and Lydia.

Spend some time working at Walmarts layaway zone for a few weeks to get into the habit of false promises and not giving a shit and messing with a computer

quite a lot of the quests are mechanically uninteresting but they were written so convincingly that i was looking forward to the next character that would get introduced or what little twist would be put on the next tale. i was looking forward to seeing how geralt would interact with people because the animation was so well done that i was enjoying just watching the way their faces moved when they talked.

notice how radiant quests in skyrim have none of these.

there were no fetch quests in tw3. you don't know what a fetch quest is. and holy shit witcher contracts in a witcher game, don't you feel smart complaining about that

OP complained about skyrims cities being shit. Since TW3 is also an open world game, it's a logical comparison. While he probably went over the top, it's clear that one game did the "open world" thing substantially better than the other. TES just relies on casuals + autistic dipshits to lap up their garbage no matter how bland or feature-less it is.

>makes me feel insignificant
you don't need the game for that, friend.

It would have been good if there were a lot of these small hamlets instead of them being capitals

Skyrim isn't a sandbox either. Sandbox isn't synonymous with open world. Sandbox games are things like Minecraft, Sims or Crusader Kings where you have no goals and it's all about what you want to do.

If you took the quests out of Skyrim it would have less content than your average early access survival game.

Play divinity original sin if you want good towns.

Skyrim with its nords and nordic culture is prominently family based. Families would likely spend most of their life living together under the same roof, with the main focus of the community being the mead hall/tavern/inn and open markets. Enlisted peoples would live in barracks, with heavy shifts and sleep cycles to keep as much personal space as possible. Remember, land in cities and towns arent owned by individuals, they are essentially leased to them via the jarls who expect them to pay taxes, work the either the land or provide a service, and operate as citizenship, while the jarls are interned to operate as vassals to the empire. Land is literally more valuable then housing in nordic culture. Land has any number of potential uses that benefit the community as a whole that housing blocks access to. That's why the citizens of skyrim are jammed into packed housing. Essentially its an in between, resting just above the serfdom of feudalism, but lacking the some of the personal freedoms and property ownership of Renaissance are life styles.

I know right. Why cant Skyrim have buildings and skycrapers like in real life?
Oh yeah thats right. It's a 3D medieval game that already performs horribly due to extreme usage of resources.

So Witcher contracts consist solely of switching on your batman senses and slay some generic monsters who hit a bit harder?
Granted, the first witcher contract with the noonwraith was interesting as it actually taught you something about the monster. Beyond that it's just applying oil, more abysmal combat and you've finished it.

I don't get the hate for Skyrim cities on Sup Forums.

you appear to have mistakenly posted on Sup Forums when you actually meant to post on /r/games

As someone who actually enjoys Skyrim, I do understand it. The cities serve their purpose in the game, but they do look very small, empty and bland.

>Not to mention The Witcher 3 only takes place on small open hub lands and not a huge section of land like Skyrim
Really? I don't recall much about Skyrim but I'm fairly certain it's about as big as Velen+Novigrad, and Skellige is quite big in itself too.

Narrative scale vs game scale. Remember Summoner on the PS2? It had a nice big city in it.

A big, ugly, hideous, boring, EMPTY city. It would be easy (but time consuming) to make a game of extreme size but it ultimately would not be worth it as it would just be generic nothingness. I would rather have a small and interesting town than a massive empty clusterfuck where I have to spend ages walking from A to B.

If Skyrim had massive cities that had tons of houses you could enter, people would be saying "The town sizes are an improvement over Oblivion, but they are empty and devoid of all life".

I prefer the open-world zones of DA: Inquisition and Witcher 3. It allows the devs to craft really unique looking locations without having to worry about how they blend with other areas. It's all about concessions. We'll never have a game like Daggerfall ever again, but Novigrad comes close to replicating the feeling of ONE of the cities in that game, and that's the price for fidelity.

>Not to mention The Witcher 3 only takes place on small open hub lands and not a huge section of land like Skyrim. There's less than a handful of actual cities in The Witcher 3 with no immersive features
desu Bethesda should be doing this if they aren't doing Daggerfall generation of territories (though modernized of course)--immersion completely ruined with the current style

Don't worry guys surely Bethesda will get it right in TES VI

SURELY

>it has an interesting world + city(s)

kek
Copypasted world and you cant even interact with 99% of the shit like in TES.

In TES if I so want I can get inside someones house, steal a broom, walk all the way to the other side of the world, and throw that broom in the open ocean.
That kind of freedom you can only get in Bethesda games.

I'd rather play Skyrim that the Witcher 3.

It's pretty easy when there's about 20 houses in the whole game, two differents brooms skins, and no matter where you are in the game the ocean is at most 15 minutes away.

You heard it here, folks. Flotsam simulator. 10/10.

>people defending Bethesda for their shit terrible cities because they're not 'bloated with useless NPCs and the thing you only really care about anyway is the shops'
Modern gamers, ladies and gentlemen. This is why we can't have nice things.

Nice blog post you humongous faglord

>what is a example

Holy shit I knew Witcher fags were retards but you doesnt even have reading comprehension?

>In TES if I so want I can get inside someones house, steal a broom, walk all the way to the other side of the world, and throw that broom in the open ocean.

Is this what the people who have thousands of hours in Skyrim do in it?

This looks fucking awful

Both systems are terrible.
I'd say devs should just implement randomly generated parts of cities with generated NPC names and dialogue.

Shit engine, shit programmers and shit devs in general.

After seeing how CDPR did the Witcher 3 cities, i'd rather they take note. Not everyone needs to be a fully interactive NPC.

Just stop playing this garbage and try the Witcher 3 if you haven't already. It is pretty much a better Elder Scrolls game and way underrated by Sup Forums in general.

Say what you want but this game can be maximum comfy, especially if modded correctly.

In PGE 1 there was reference to Skyrim's sparse population and small settlements.
However I think that was because there were nomadic tribes of Nords that travelled throughout Skyrim.

>Not everyone needs to be a fully interactive NPC
There's a very popular Skyrim mod that simply adds a bunch of NPCs to cities that sevre no purpose other than being there. No dialogue, no interaction, they just tell you with varying degrees of rudeness that they don't want to talk to you.

Honestly if Bethesda want to know how to make a better game they should just look at what people add to Skyrim with mods

Now try having Sup Forums understand this

>Mods will fix it XD

Sure Bethesdtard.

Despite being a shit series Ass Creed has the best cities of any modern game. Its cities feel like actual cities.

I'd rather have a marketplace with a shitton of people walking around who you can't interact with than 5 people awkwardly standing next to their tiny stall..

>If you take the majority of the content out of the game it barely has any content

No shit you fucking sperg

Good job on completely missing the point.

I think it depends on what you're playing the game for. When I play MMOs, I hate big capital cities, because you're thrown into them at an early level, like level 10 and there's all this shit and so many NPCs, but there's nothing you can really do there.

You finish the quest that sent you there, the quest giver then tells you to fuck off to your next zone and you leave. You come back a few levels later and there's still fuck all you can do. You eventually come back at cap and realize, 90% of the area is pointless and everyone just stands in front of the AH/Marketplace. From a gameplay perspective, capitals in MMOs are shit.

But in a game like Skyrim, I do try to immerse myself and pretend I'm in the game and forget that I'm playing a game. Immersion goes straight out of the window when you see the capital of the freaking region being smaller than a quest hub in a MMO.

I just started playing it a few days ago. It's pretty fun.

I got the point im saying that last part of it was fucking autistic.

Nope, but if they want to do it, that's what they'll do it

Simply because this game is one of the few that gives you that much freedom, that's the best thing about Skyrim

But Skyrim 's cities are much more in detail the anything from TW3, and you can interact with every NPC in skyrim's cities, unlike TW3 where they nearly all of them are completely useless.

Judging by how much you love to call others autistic it seems like you're the one who might have case of the autisms.

Skyrim's cities are completely devoid of detail. It's people standing around saying the same 3 lines over and over again and house interiors that look the same no matter what part of the map you're in. Occasionally there's someone chopping wood or something but that's it.

But they are more interactive, yes.

>you can interact with every NPC in skyrim's cities
Like woman who tells you she runs a stall and man who tells you he works in store, all with the same voice actors using the same voices they used for everyone else

Interactivity isn't a selling point if you do nothing with it

>a game from 1996 has more realistic cities

>No one wants bloated shit to walk around and dozens of useless NPCs getting in your way of quest givers
yeah that's why Expanded Town's and Cities and Interesting NPCs are such unpopular mods

oh wait

if fo4 is any indicator then the next tes is gonna be fucking pathetic design-wise

why would you want a "realistic" city in a video game. these are supposed to be video games, not autism simulators. i'd take skyrim's cities any day over lolhueg simulations.

hint: armor is going to be 1 perk tree

>realism =/= autism

why not both?

gothic 1 and 2 had towns a thousand times more interesting, varied, and coherent than skyrim. and those games came out almost a decade before skyrim did.

At least the 64-bit executable seems to be running city expansion mods much much better than the old Skyrim. I got no fps drops whatsoever with open cities and JK's Riverwood.

i don't believe you. markarth, solutide, windhelm, riften, etc all have a very distinct visual style. and i've not played gothic but i've seen plenty of screenshots of gothic 2 cities and they don't look interesting or varied like skyrim cities.

So whats different in this new re-release of Skyrim? Did they just make it look slightly more pretty?

The Creation Engine was initially made in 32 bit. As such, you could only use very little RAM. Special Edition fixes this, and as such you can now do things like have 100 man fights so long as you have 8+ gigs of RAM.

Of course, the real thing that holds Bethesda back is their insipid "EVERY CHARACTER HAS TO HAVE A STORY" ideals. I really don't care about NPCs unless they give me a quest or are a quest NPC, but Bethesda is convinced that every Elder Scrolls NPC needs to have a unique name, a unique house, and so on. As such, they will likely never do what The Witcher did and make a big city with lots of NPCs in it to make it feel alive. This is also why I think that Bethesda is not a lazy company, in spite of what every body says, but a poorly managed one; the lead devs seem to have a vision and try very hard to stick to it, but their vision is poorly thought out and implemented in bad ways that hurt the game.

Slightly worse actually. No hardware AA.

Markarth and Windhelm were the coolest cities. Solitude was a cool idea and the exterior with the rock arch looks good but inside the walls it's fucking shit.

Dawnstar was also a pretty nice mining/port city.

actual lighting, lots of new grass, new water/snow shaders, updated engine, rain/snow occlusion, new shadows.

it's for people who didn't already own the game

So they made it look slightly more pretty.

i love markarth and can't wait until all of my favorite markarth overhaul mods are ready for SE

It's a trade-off. Do you want every NPC to be unique - even if its just a few lines of colorful dialogue - or do you want a massive city?

Look at Vivec in Morrowind. The city is impossibly huge, it's magnificent. And yet, the vast majority of NPCs in the city say the exact same thing.

>Do you want every NPC to be unique

No. Do it like New Vegas did.

Yes, because the "real" world has a hidden cave with fancy treasure or important world history on top of every mountain.

That's really the problem here. Skyrim gave you a world that has tons of verisimilitude, when what people really wanted was a starry-eyed fantasy world filled with fanciful and weird things.

right. that's what remaster is. it's also mainly for console fags. remember: ps3/xbox ran the game at like 600p resolution with no grass and other things. now consoles have (some) mods and a much prettier game than they had in 2011. pc players won't notice much of a difference apart from new lighting and better load times. but we got it for free so who cares, it's a welcome improvement for modding.

youtube.com/watch?v=T6EjcESYIXk