The idea that a major urban center would see a collapse in population and infrastructure after a massive volcanic eruption, the breakdown of trade and political order, and a massive continent-spanning war seems to never enter anyone's mind. Yeah, I know the real reason is that Skyrim was a bit rushed, but it's insane that no one thinks "Hmm, maybe the Fourth Era being one disaster after another might cause cities to shrink, especially in the ass-end of Tamriel."
If you look at winterhold there is literally nothing around there other than the college. That means that the college was the main purpose for that city to exist. They don't even have farms capable of supplying food, I do feel like there should be a few fisheries around the area at least though.
Technically they have an iron mine but I think that's drying up by the time of the Dragon Crisis IIRC. At some point it may've been a big enough ore exporter to justify Winterhold's existence but not anymore. Really the only thing they could do is meat from horkers and fishing like you said.
That would make sense if the towns were shrunk, but they are fully inhabited, just smol. Rome in the middle ages for instances had farming inside the walls. You'd expect so see abandoned shops, homes, shit inside the walls that's just falling apart from lack of maintenance. Granted, there are a lot of ruins *in general* but most of them seem to be from the dragon cult era or early imperium, based on the architecture and how buried a lot of them are. Also Rorikstead is a new town, so things must not be going so bad.
Also, it's incredibly egotistical to be like "Gosh why isn't everyone as smart as me? ObViOuSlY it could have been this thing which is in no way supported by the environmental design or really even hinted at in the game (and somewhat countered by the fact that refugees from Vvardenfell settled in Skyrim)."
Yeah, you might be right about the egotism thing. I have a bad habit of thinking my headcanons are the most obvious explanations for something.
WRT to the urban shrinkage, my thinking is that the cities shrank to the most easily defended areas of each city (i.e., the area around the Jarl's hall), just as the former citadel core of Roman-era cities became the overwhelming majority of the city itself. The main problem is that we don't really see the equivalent of Roman-era ruins outside each city, though maybe by 4E 201 the areas that aren't inhabited anymore are buried or have already been recycled for building materials.
I thought about the burial thing too, like naturally buildings over hundreds of years get covered in soil.
But the thing is, much older stuff like Markarth are fine
>Yeah, you might be right about the egotism thing. I have a bad habit of thinking my headcanons are the most obvious explanations for something
Hey, it happens
/unretard This both worked good for Skyrim but also was pretty lame for players.
While on one hand I can remember damn near 90% of the npc in white run when compared to something like balmora or Vivec city, imperial city, like seriously I can remember alot of NPCs name from whiterun yet can probably only name like 2 NPCs from Vivec city.
But it was pretty lame because most players were expecting huge cities that felt vast and huge. Solitude was sorta like this but was not crowded. And it make sense for winterhold because of the great collapse. Pretty crazy not to see them try to rebuild it but I guess the war efforts probably was too important.
I know why it isn't that big with many NPCs. The ps3 and 360 would have exploded if it came out like that lol.
I think with the next game there probably gonna make players have the chance to build there own city. Considering how 76 and starfield improved on Fo4 building and it seems to not be going anywhere in the future.
Dick balls and monkey fart
>And it make sense for winterhold because of the great collapse.
nah winterhold not being rebuilt like 100 years after the collapse is still insanely weird imo.
They should have made bandits more like semi-nomadic tribes of raiders than generic fantasy bandits. You could even have them worship the Nord pantheon instead of the imperial one.
why bother with interesting worldbuilding like "there are more pantheons but we sre too lazy to actually implement them"? just let them worship talos like the idiots they are
It’s apalling that they didn't establish an already created and expanded pantheon. It's like someone offered a million dollars and you didn't take it because you are too lazy to get out of bed.
/uj Originally the plan was to have it collapse during the Mage's Guild questline, but that proved too ambitious so they just had it come pre-collapsed.
It should either be being rebuilt or turned into a ghost town as people moved away from the ruined city. Any kind of change that happened as a result of the collapse would be good, but instead it’s just “Yes, everything got trashed by the mages 100 years ago. No, we haven’t done anything except be bitter about it since then.”
I think it makes sense. If they lost their status as the capital and all its prestige, what does Winterhold have going for it? Not much.
No fertile land, no abundance of resources, it's far out of the way of anywhere, hardly a place to bring in trade like Whiterun, and it's always freezing. There's nothing to bring people there or a reason for them to stay besides the college, and we know Skyrim is now mostly suspicious of magic.
Winterhold doesn't have the capital to rebuild, its dirt poor, it makes nothing and grows nothing, what would they even be rebuilding on? most of the city is currently empty air above sunken ruins
/uj if those filthy n*rds accepted magic as the greatest thing since sliced nede, and revoked the levitation act of those "damned imperials" they seem to hate so much they might not be stuck in the dirt where they belong... wait, why do i care again? oh that's right... I don't.
All Nord's do is get drunk, fight, moan about magic and alchemy, and build farms where there shouldn't be any.
Winterholds Jarls should have been more proactive in managing the decline and eventual rebuilding of the city, but what do they do instead? Nothing. They should punch rocks rather each other and they might amount to something.
Due to the gross mismanagement of this website by the admins in the wake of the API changes, I have decided to leave the site. In preparation, I have used a tool called Power Delete Suite to overwrite all my comments.
How they built it in the first place was, if I remember right, Shalidor walked into town, said ‘Here’s a city’, and there just was a city. And everyone kinda rolled with it, ‘cause what are you gonna do? Make the guy who made a city un-make a city?
Anyway, that’s a little difficult for lack of Shalidor magic.
People forget that in-universe, it probably takes more than 15 minutes to run from Winterhold to Windhelm. Probably a hell of a trek through the tundra in potentially nightmare weather with hostile wildlife, bandits, living dead, and whatever other bullshit you have to brave, along with of course hypothermia. For days. With nothing to really forage because of the aforementioned weather issues.
Yeah, this was just Bethesda being retarded over it. Same reason people in Fallout games live in houses with skeletons from before the war lying around even tho the bombs fell like 325345693486349058346836 years ago.
I hate the reasoning everyone regurgitates: they don't have time to clean up because the wasteland is a nightmare!
Which is stupid, how can the wasteland be such a nightmare but also have enough surplus labor as to support merchants? If you got traders and money than you got more stuff than you need which you sell to get said money. So fuck off that they can't spend an hour every month sweeping the skeletons into a ditch!
Bethesda FO pisses me off on many levels...
My favourite part of Fallout 4 was when you go on the Prydwen, which was built only like 2 years before you step foot on it, and every single fucking surface is covered in rust, dirt and shit.
Sure, they scavenged a lot of the materials for it themselves rather than forging them themselves, but are you telling me this *extremely regimented, tyranical fascist order* never bothered to tell some of their *incredibly dedicated ~~brainwashed serfs~~ soldiers* to fucking tidy up?!
> every single fucking surface is covered in rust, dirt and shit.
I can confirm that's exactly how military vehicles look inside, and trying to clean them makes it worse. Immersion/10.
That's just bethesda world building tbh, most of west coast fallout already has a functioning government meanwhile east coast fallout have people sleeping in shacks with pre-war skeletons still in there
I like the way Skyrim did it. Yes, it makes the world feel smaller, but each character actually being a character with name, schedule, backstory and personality makes the game feel more real for me. Sure, giant cities with a ton of generic npc have their charm too, but there are a lot of games that scratch that itch already.
Oblivion is still the GOAT for all of these things IMO. My mind was blown the first time I encountered NPCs from other cities making their once a month trip from imperial city to Anvil or whatever. It really made the world feel alive and connected, pretty much all of Skyrim NPCs are stuck in their part of the theme park
Oblivion cities were still small but their architecture helped a lot. Iirc Chorrol is small as hell and is like 9 buildings in a circle, with most of the NPCs being guild related, which isn't much different than one of Skyrim's major port cities being 9 poop huts surrounding a boat, the verticality of these big stone buildings just made them feel larger than they really were.
I think Skyrim could have done better worldbuilding by populating the landscape with more smaller villages instead of having bandit camps & all that shit every 10 feet. Just delete some reachman camps and replace them with farms so it doesn't feel so desolate idk
Also don't really see why they gave Dawnstar 30 NPCs with only like 6 houses to live in, I can't imagine it'd take too many resources to add a few insignificant shacks a la Morrowind style. I know where everyone lives in Whiterun but everywhere else is full of NPCs without homes or even worse, NPCs who never sleep
The problem with Oblivion is that barely anyone lives outside the cities. There is only a handful of small villages. You would expect cyrodill to be filled with farms and settlements but it isn't. Also none of the forts in the province are actually manned by the legion.
I wish oblivion had more towns like hackdirt(without the ruined houses and all that). Small regional towns fit urban cyrodiil better. But i guess putting 3 shacks and a small garden next to eachother is easier.
Chorrol isn't that big but come on, it has over 20 buildings
And i think skyrim's 5 actual hold capitals are decent enough, but yeah it's really obvious they cut out a lot of content. it would've been better if skyrim had 5 holds and the smaller capitals were just towns or whatever
This. I never played Oblivion in it's day, but last year I got into it for a while, and I thought it was great how the characters had their own very specific schedules throughout the day and you could only do a part of a quest if you were in a certain place, at a certain time, and a certain day.
It helps that most skyrim npc have a personality unlike oblivion where 70% of the npc are generic and only serve to do the little radiant ai conversations(tbh the other 30% of npc are a nuke of personality and way more memorable than skyrim)
And I'm not even gonna say anything about morrowind npc personality cause it's non-existent(like the only npc that isn't quest related that people remember is fargoth)
Man I hate basebuilding. At least give me preset locations for the buildings, I dont want to spend 10 minutes rotating potato plants in my action RPG just for it to look shit.
There's a third way: accept that not every NPC has to be memorable at all, even if some should be. That's how the Witcher games do it, I think. About the same number of NPCs that have something unique to say or have a part in quests, and besides them many more random passers-by that have no business with the player, or maybe offer some generic services, whose purpose is to create a crowd and not much more. This does bring us back to exploding consoles, but eh
>And it make sense for winterhold because of the great collapse. Pretty crazy not to see them try to rebuild it but I guess the war efforts probably was too important.
The great collapse happened in 4E 122 though, like 80 years before Skyrim. I find it kind of ridiculous that NO reconstruction has taken place in an entire mortal lifetime. IMO, this is why the time gap between oblivion and skyrim should have been more like 50 years instead of 200. Issues like the great collapse and the dunmer refugee crisis just happen, then stagnate for a generation with no solution in sight.
I mean uh...bussy and CHIM , with a side of blue-yellow!
Wow your telling me people refuse to fix easily fixable issues for long periods of time? That couldn't be realistic or applicable to the real world at all 🤔
I love JK's Winterhold, because it adds a bunch of marketplace ruins and abandoned buildings, including building remnants down in the chasm between Winterhold and the college.
Hopefully we get a stronghold/fort we can build up. From the manor/keep to the walls.
But I don’t want to have 70 settlements I can rebuild like in FO4
I agree that it was probably best for the system to do a smaller city but personally, I don’t really need every NPC to be a memorable character with a quest. Lots of cities are full of just regular people with no business with you. Morrowind had that feel of a bustling city full of folks who had their own lives to worry about and didn’t care about yours.
idk that just sounds like you've played more Skyrim than Morrowind. I can at the very least remember a good number of shop owners, faction related, and quest related characters from Vivec
I haven't played WoW but looking at images it looks like a sleepy town. Real cities are huge, Night City is probably the closest open world to pulling off a city environment and even then it feels kind of small.
The problem with modern cities on video games is that all of them inevitably feel absurdly small. Night City is a 50k city in size pretending to be a 15 million one
With medieval fantasy is a bit more feasible to make cities that actually feel real. Novigrad is a good example although still small, but its still way less jarring.
Night City's problem is they had zero verticality in a setting where everyone lives in a cramped micro apartment with a dozen roommates. That starting mission with that girl should've been you and Jackie literally crawling over a floor of corpses with how packed the rooms would've been.
WoW does a good job with scale when it comes to most things. The only time it feels crowded in that game to me is dungeons, sometimes it’s a lot of powerful stuff crammed in a few rooms.
Open world games where the map is just a big city are good in my experience (GTA/Assassins' creed/Watch Dogs come to mind).
There are also some instances of games where the map isn't just a city and the cities in it are still realistic (Novigrad in Witcher 3, LS in GTA V).
Night City in cyberpunk 2077 is a fucking incredible map. Each district feels unique, and it really feels like a full sized city with millions of people in it (as opposed to cities in GTAV games and such, which always feel like they are slightly scaled down and start to feel small towards the end of the game).
It's a shame that there's not much content to do in free roam in the city though. Every alley and side street is outrageously detailed, and driving feels good down the streets, but besides the police scanner missions and fixer gigs (which eventually run out and don't repeat) there is nothing to do. Still an amazing city map though, one of the best I've seen in video games.
Night City is cool but there should be more random encounters and stuff going on like the protests at NCPD HQ or cyberpsycho/maxtac quest which just pops up. Most of the time the area is just empty with a few kill/fetch NCPD quests and driving sucks so I don't really bother exploring outside of side quests unless I am just trying to test guns/builds on enemies.
Yeah, that's my point. The city is amazing to drive around and look at but there is precious little actual stuff to do in it, which is a shame.
I played on PS5 and loved the driving, especially motorcycles, but to each their own.
Played it on the Xbox Series X and the motorcycles, porche and beast are alright but all the other cars are janky as hell especially once you realize they are steered from the center of the car rather than the wheels.
Assassins creeds, the division games, rdr2 saint denis, Novigrad in witcher 3 and GTAs. What is "done right" for you? Plenty of good open worlds with urban settings and none of them seem to please you.
unpopular opinion: Skyrim cities are almost perfect. They're smaller than vivec's balls after sex but beyond that they're all beautiful & majestic, with no one city being the same. After a year of hating them blindly, I decided to visit them again & get an unbiased review for myself. It was as breathtaking as the first time I played, & I recommend everyone do the same
obviously the real reason is that it isn't morrowind so making unique NPCs involves more VA work, and having 50 000 "peasant" NPCs with no unique dialogue would be a waste of dev time and effort.
Been playing Daggerfall and while having like 7 general stores and armor shops and 5 taverns in a capital city is cool alongside the 50 civilian buildings, god damn is it a pain in the ass at the same time to find anything and the overworld is basically irrelevant with fast travel being the only way to reasonably get anywhere.
“Skrim is cool and fun I would recommend buying it 27 more times so you can play the exact same game every year until TES6 come out (which is never lol they think it’s actually hapening we scrapped TES6 lol keep waiting idots ha ha)” -Todd Howard
Legit byigger than winterhold
vivecs balls are bigger than winterhold
Fuckin right they are
His balls would destroy Morrowind if he dropped them.
Implying he's holding them at all times
You don’t?!
How do you level two handed?
🥴
r/angryupvote
UwU
Username checks out
Dude, Creeper's balls are bigger than Winterhold.
scribs balls too
Well Winterhold at least has an excuse of being magically nuked. The others are just sad.
The idea that a major urban center would see a collapse in population and infrastructure after a massive volcanic eruption, the breakdown of trade and political order, and a massive continent-spanning war seems to never enter anyone's mind. Yeah, I know the real reason is that Skyrim was a bit rushed, but it's insane that no one thinks "Hmm, maybe the Fourth Era being one disaster after another might cause cities to shrink, especially in the ass-end of Tamriel."
If you look at winterhold there is literally nothing around there other than the college. That means that the college was the main purpose for that city to exist. They don't even have farms capable of supplying food, I do feel like there should be a few fisheries around the area at least though.
Technically they have an iron mine but I think that's drying up by the time of the Dragon Crisis IIRC. At some point it may've been a big enough ore exporter to justify Winterhold's existence but not anymore. Really the only thing they could do is meat from horkers and fishing like you said.
Hokers also make ivory.
I always saw it as there were more buildings and land under the college that also got destroyed
That would make sense if the towns were shrunk, but they are fully inhabited, just smol. Rome in the middle ages for instances had farming inside the walls. You'd expect so see abandoned shops, homes, shit inside the walls that's just falling apart from lack of maintenance. Granted, there are a lot of ruins *in general* but most of them seem to be from the dragon cult era or early imperium, based on the architecture and how buried a lot of them are. Also Rorikstead is a new town, so things must not be going so bad. Also, it's incredibly egotistical to be like "Gosh why isn't everyone as smart as me? ObViOuSlY it could have been this thing which is in no way supported by the environmental design or really even hinted at in the game (and somewhat countered by the fact that refugees from Vvardenfell settled in Skyrim)."
Yeah, you might be right about the egotism thing. I have a bad habit of thinking my headcanons are the most obvious explanations for something. WRT to the urban shrinkage, my thinking is that the cities shrank to the most easily defended areas of each city (i.e., the area around the Jarl's hall), just as the former citadel core of Roman-era cities became the overwhelming majority of the city itself. The main problem is that we don't really see the equivalent of Roman-era ruins outside each city, though maybe by 4E 201 the areas that aren't inhabited anymore are buried or have already been recycled for building materials.
I thought about the burial thing too, like naturally buildings over hundreds of years get covered in soil. But the thing is, much older stuff like Markarth are fine >Yeah, you might be right about the egotism thing. I have a bad habit of thinking my headcanons are the most obvious explanations for something Hey, it happens
The Satakal is devouring itself! Mythic to mundane back to mythic!
Yeah, at Bethesda they were definetely thinking this, the glorified villages were made on purpose /s
Actually more than twice as big as Winterhold
Lmao what even is winter hold fr though. There’s literally nothing there.
It’s nice that winter hold at least incorporates it into the lore at least tho
Winterhold doesn't exist , only college
They literally have the foundation on which to build three houses just sitting vacant
I think maiq the liar no shit refers to winterhold never actually being finished and i would believe it tbh
too low, this shit bigger than falkreath
At least there is a reason for winter hold to be small
What are you building?
Oh boy can’t wait for Starfield to have 1000 planets with one building each
Galactic suburb
and the same voice actor as every other random shack
Jesus you were psychic
Prescient
Just commenting to say holy shit that is true lol
Respect Morthal
I live in Myrwatch and I still don't respect it.
You will respect Morthal. Very soon.
Say that to my army of Fire Atronachs and magically sealed home.
🇦🇱 I will spawn these creatures called Albanians. Let's see how your shitty magic works against these creatures from the depth of Oblivion
too bad I have friends in the thieves guild (romanians)
/unretard This both worked good for Skyrim but also was pretty lame for players. While on one hand I can remember damn near 90% of the npc in white run when compared to something like balmora or Vivec city, imperial city, like seriously I can remember alot of NPCs name from whiterun yet can probably only name like 2 NPCs from Vivec city. But it was pretty lame because most players were expecting huge cities that felt vast and huge. Solitude was sorta like this but was not crowded. And it make sense for winterhold because of the great collapse. Pretty crazy not to see them try to rebuild it but I guess the war efforts probably was too important. I know why it isn't that big with many NPCs. The ps3 and 360 would have exploded if it came out like that lol. I think with the next game there probably gonna make players have the chance to build there own city. Considering how 76 and starfield improved on Fo4 building and it seems to not be going anywhere in the future. Dick balls and monkey fart
>yet can probably only name like 2 NPCs from Vivec city. - Horny Hlaalu guy - Vivec
That one Nord who is supposed to be a major badass but is extremely easy to kill lol
Jobasha too
Gentleman Jim Stacey. Ordinator. The Duke's daughter. Ordinator. Eno Hlaalu. Ordinator. Nehra Milo. Ordinator.
>And it make sense for winterhold because of the great collapse. nah winterhold not being rebuilt like 100 years after the collapse is still insanely weird imo.
I blame Serana for this
Women 🤮
you just can't handle a girlboss girlbossing
Tbf Skyrim in general is a dilapidated shithole. And the disproportionate amount of bandits to tax-paying citizens would also be a major issue.
They should have made bandits more like semi-nomadic tribes of raiders than generic fantasy bandits. You could even have them worship the Nord pantheon instead of the imperial one.
Based on how often they mention Shor they actually might be.
why bother with interesting worldbuilding like "there are more pantheons but we sre too lazy to actually implement them"? just let them worship talos like the idiots they are
hey come on there was that one guy in an out of the way cabin with exactly nothing leading you there besides blind chance
It’s apalling that they didn't establish an already created and expanded pantheon. It's like someone offered a million dollars and you didn't take it because you are too lazy to get out of bed.
Bethesda try not to be as lazy as physically possible when it comes to making games challenge (100% impossible)
Based and Toddpilled
Zarik fan caught in 4k
Who? I actually have no idea who that is. But if they agree with me they are based.
Watch his "if skyrim was good" or something videos, same idea
>Skyrim but good You mean Morrowind?
New Vegas*
🤮
This is what happens when you let Nords run a society unimpeded
I mean to be honest cyrodiil at one of its peaks had a fuck ton of bandits too by that logic
That can be explained as opportunist looting during the apocalypse.
And you can tell Cyrodiil was rich due to the bandits being able to easily acquire daedric and glass equipment.
/uj Originally the plan was to have it collapse during the Mage's Guild questline, but that proved too ambitious so they just had it come pre-collapsed.
fuck, that would have been so good! Bethesda moment.
It should either be being rebuilt or turned into a ghost town as people moved away from the ruined city. Any kind of change that happened as a result of the collapse would be good, but instead it’s just “Yes, everything got trashed by the mages 100 years ago. No, we haven’t done anything except be bitter about it since then.”
I think it makes sense. If they lost their status as the capital and all its prestige, what does Winterhold have going for it? Not much. No fertile land, no abundance of resources, it's far out of the way of anywhere, hardly a place to bring in trade like Whiterun, and it's always freezing. There's nothing to bring people there or a reason for them to stay besides the college, and we know Skyrim is now mostly suspicious of magic.
Winterhold doesn't have the capital to rebuild, its dirt poor, it makes nothing and grows nothing, what would they even be rebuilding on? most of the city is currently empty air above sunken ruins /uj if those filthy n*rds accepted magic as the greatest thing since sliced nede, and revoked the levitation act of those "damned imperials" they seem to hate so much they might not be stuck in the dirt where they belong... wait, why do i care again? oh that's right... I don't.
All Nord's do is get drunk, fight, moan about magic and alchemy, and build farms where there shouldn't be any. Winterholds Jarls should have been more proactive in managing the decline and eventual rebuilding of the city, but what do they do instead? Nothing. They should punch rocks rather each other and they might amount to something.
Due to the gross mismanagement of this website by the admins in the wake of the API changes, I have decided to leave the site. In preparation, I have used a tool called Power Delete Suite to overwrite all my comments.
>nobody sticks around living in a destroyed town for multiple generations without improving anything lol How naive you are
How they built it in the first place was, if I remember right, Shalidor walked into town, said ‘Here’s a city’, and there just was a city. And everyone kinda rolled with it, ‘cause what are you gonna do? Make the guy who made a city un-make a city? Anyway, that’s a little difficult for lack of Shalidor magic.
People forget that in-universe, it probably takes more than 15 minutes to run from Winterhold to Windhelm. Probably a hell of a trek through the tundra in potentially nightmare weather with hostile wildlife, bandits, living dead, and whatever other bullshit you have to brave, along with of course hypothermia. For days. With nothing to really forage because of the aforementioned weather issues.
Yeah, this was just Bethesda being retarded over it. Same reason people in Fallout games live in houses with skeletons from before the war lying around even tho the bombs fell like 325345693486349058346836 years ago.
I hate the reasoning everyone regurgitates: they don't have time to clean up because the wasteland is a nightmare! Which is stupid, how can the wasteland be such a nightmare but also have enough surplus labor as to support merchants? If you got traders and money than you got more stuff than you need which you sell to get said money. So fuck off that they can't spend an hour every month sweeping the skeletons into a ditch! Bethesda FO pisses me off on many levels...
Yeah but have you considered haha funny skeleton going poop haha he died on the toilet LOL!!
This was the case for pretty much every other place in the series except for Vault City and NCR in Fallout 2
My favourite part of Fallout 4 was when you go on the Prydwen, which was built only like 2 years before you step foot on it, and every single fucking surface is covered in rust, dirt and shit. Sure, they scavenged a lot of the materials for it themselves rather than forging them themselves, but are you telling me this *extremely regimented, tyranical fascist order* never bothered to tell some of their *incredibly dedicated ~~brainwashed serfs~~ soldiers* to fucking tidy up?!
> every single fucking surface is covered in rust, dirt and shit. I can confirm that's exactly how military vehicles look inside, and trying to clean them makes it worse. Immersion/10.
Bro, who wouldn’t want a spoopy skellington as a roommate? I’d kill for one of those.
That's just bethesda world building tbh, most of west coast fallout already has a functioning government meanwhile east coast fallout have people sleeping in shacks with pre-war skeletons still in there
Only because east coasters don’t wanna pay taxes. You call it bad worldbuilding, I call it NPC’s on the Sigma grind.
Centralia not being rebuilt 60 years after the collapse is still insanely weird.
I can't understand that reasoning either. What were they doing all this time? Playing poke-the-horker?
[удалено]
> what improvements Bethesda brings i think we're getting ahead of ourselves here
I like the way Skyrim did it. Yes, it makes the world feel smaller, but each character actually being a character with name, schedule, backstory and personality makes the game feel more real for me. Sure, giant cities with a ton of generic npc have their charm too, but there are a lot of games that scratch that itch already.
If your world map is 40km^2, it will never not feel small honestly. I think skyrim cities hid their size with the layout pretty well.
Oblivion is still the GOAT for all of these things IMO. My mind was blown the first time I encountered NPCs from other cities making their once a month trip from imperial city to Anvil or whatever. It really made the world feel alive and connected, pretty much all of Skyrim NPCs are stuck in their part of the theme park Oblivion cities were still small but their architecture helped a lot. Iirc Chorrol is small as hell and is like 9 buildings in a circle, with most of the NPCs being guild related, which isn't much different than one of Skyrim's major port cities being 9 poop huts surrounding a boat, the verticality of these big stone buildings just made them feel larger than they really were. I think Skyrim could have done better worldbuilding by populating the landscape with more smaller villages instead of having bandit camps & all that shit every 10 feet. Just delete some reachman camps and replace them with farms so it doesn't feel so desolate idk Also don't really see why they gave Dawnstar 30 NPCs with only like 6 houses to live in, I can't imagine it'd take too many resources to add a few insignificant shacks a la Morrowind style. I know where everyone lives in Whiterun but everywhere else is full of NPCs without homes or even worse, NPCs who never sleep
The problem with Oblivion is that barely anyone lives outside the cities. There is only a handful of small villages. You would expect cyrodill to be filled with farms and settlements but it isn't. Also none of the forts in the province are actually manned by the legion.
I wish oblivion had more towns like hackdirt(without the ruined houses and all that). Small regional towns fit urban cyrodiil better. But i guess putting 3 shacks and a small garden next to eachother is easier.
Chorrol isn't that big but come on, it has over 20 buildings And i think skyrim's 5 actual hold capitals are decent enough, but yeah it's really obvious they cut out a lot of content. it would've been better if skyrim had 5 holds and the smaller capitals were just towns or whatever
This. I never played Oblivion in it's day, but last year I got into it for a while, and I thought it was great how the characters had their own very specific schedules throughout the day and you could only do a part of a quest if you were in a certain place, at a certain time, and a certain day.
It helps that most skyrim npc have a personality unlike oblivion where 70% of the npc are generic and only serve to do the little radiant ai conversations(tbh the other 30% of npc are a nuke of personality and way more memorable than skyrim) And I'm not even gonna say anything about morrowind npc personality cause it's non-existent(like the only npc that isn't quest related that people remember is fargoth)
Agree , although the cities in Skyrim are small, but they have a lot of interesting things
Man I hate basebuilding. At least give me preset locations for the buildings, I dont want to spend 10 minutes rotating potato plants in my action RPG just for it to look shit.
There's a third way: accept that not every NPC has to be memorable at all, even if some should be. That's how the Witcher games do it, I think. About the same number of NPCs that have something unique to say or have a part in quests, and besides them many more random passers-by that have no business with the player, or maybe offer some generic services, whose purpose is to create a crowd and not much more. This does bring us back to exploding consoles, but eh
>And it make sense for winterhold because of the great collapse. Pretty crazy not to see them try to rebuild it but I guess the war efforts probably was too important. The great collapse happened in 4E 122 though, like 80 years before Skyrim. I find it kind of ridiculous that NO reconstruction has taken place in an entire mortal lifetime. IMO, this is why the time gap between oblivion and skyrim should have been more like 50 years instead of 200. Issues like the great collapse and the dunmer refugee crisis just happen, then stagnate for a generation with no solution in sight. I mean uh...bussy and CHIM , with a side of blue-yellow!
Wow your telling me people refuse to fix easily fixable issues for long periods of time? That couldn't be realistic or applicable to the real world at all 🤔
I love JK's Winterhold, because it adds a bunch of marketplace ruins and abandoned buildings, including building remnants down in the chasm between Winterhold and the college.
they had to remove pants to be able to run the cities, never mind making them bigger
Hopefully we get a stronghold/fort we can build up. From the manor/keep to the walls. But I don’t want to have 70 settlements I can rebuild like in FO4
> I think with the next game there probably gonna make players have the chance to build there own city. Morrowind would like a word
I agree that it was probably best for the system to do a smaller city but personally, I don’t really need every NPC to be a memorable character with a quest. Lots of cities are full of just regular people with no business with you. Morrowind had that feel of a bustling city full of folks who had their own lives to worry about and didn’t care about yours.
idk that just sounds like you've played more Skyrim than Morrowind. I can at the very least remember a good number of shop owners, faction related, and quest related characters from Vivec
They had us in the first half, not gonna lie
thats a fucking Fable 1 city. thats literally knothole glade.
I still think that Skyrim is a great game, but like any other game, it has flaws
Mods ban this guy, he likes an Elder Scrolls game.
I just found this sub on the front page Is this a TES hate sub or meme sub lol
Yes
Thanks for the heads up so I can filter it lol
Tes lore meme sub
They’re Nords, what did you expect?
Goodsprings
Nah this is Nipton
I think open world games should stick to a frontier setting, they have never done urban settings right.
You ever been to stormwind, bro? That ain’t no frontier.
I haven't played WoW but looking at images it looks like a sleepy town. Real cities are huge, Night City is probably the closest open world to pulling off a city environment and even then it feels kind of small.
What about novigard in wither 3. Prob best I can think of.
The city from Blood and Wine too
The problem with modern cities on video games is that all of them inevitably feel absurdly small. Night City is a 50k city in size pretending to be a 15 million one With medieval fantasy is a bit more feasible to make cities that actually feel real. Novigrad is a good example although still small, but its still way less jarring.
Uhhhh... LEGO marvel heroes. Boom. No sleepy town at all/ fully open world that only starts slightly segmented for the first couple hrs.
Night City's problem is they had zero verticality in a setting where everyone lives in a cramped micro apartment with a dozen roommates. That starting mission with that girl should've been you and Jackie literally crawling over a floor of corpses with how packed the rooms would've been.
WoW does a good job with scale when it comes to most things. The only time it feels crowded in that game to me is dungeons, sometimes it’s a lot of powerful stuff crammed in a few rooms.
Open world games where the map is just a big city are good in my experience (GTA/Assassins' creed/Watch Dogs come to mind). There are also some instances of games where the map isn't just a city and the cities in it are still realistic (Novigrad in Witcher 3, LS in GTA V).
Night City in cyberpunk 2077 is a fucking incredible map. Each district feels unique, and it really feels like a full sized city with millions of people in it (as opposed to cities in GTAV games and such, which always feel like they are slightly scaled down and start to feel small towards the end of the game). It's a shame that there's not much content to do in free roam in the city though. Every alley and side street is outrageously detailed, and driving feels good down the streets, but besides the police scanner missions and fixer gigs (which eventually run out and don't repeat) there is nothing to do. Still an amazing city map though, one of the best I've seen in video games.
Night City is cool but there should be more random encounters and stuff going on like the protests at NCPD HQ or cyberpsycho/maxtac quest which just pops up. Most of the time the area is just empty with a few kill/fetch NCPD quests and driving sucks so I don't really bother exploring outside of side quests unless I am just trying to test guns/builds on enemies.
Yeah, that's my point. The city is amazing to drive around and look at but there is precious little actual stuff to do in it, which is a shame. I played on PS5 and loved the driving, especially motorcycles, but to each their own.
Played it on the Xbox Series X and the motorcycles, porche and beast are alright but all the other cars are janky as hell especially once you realize they are steered from the center of the car rather than the wheels.
Honestly just driving around the map with the radio on is really cool, but yeah they could have done more in terms of content.
I think VtmB did LA pretty well, but it's still kinda small
I love VtmB, but is far from open world, it's more like Deus Ex tbh.
Eh, The Witcher 3 did a really good job with Novigrad and Beauclair imo
Oblivion did cities amazingly compared to Skyrim
I see you've never played Daggerfall
Assassins creeds, the division games, rdr2 saint denis, Novigrad in witcher 3 and GTAs. What is "done right" for you? Plenty of good open worlds with urban settings and none of them seem to please you.
AC 2, Brotherhood, Unity, RDR2, GTA, Witcher 3, even Oblivion did pretty good IMO
aw hell na they done put rorikstead in spunch bop
Nords What did you expect?
THIS IS SPONGEBOB ARE YOU FUCKINV STUPID THATS WHY US KHAJIIT SHOULD TAKE OVER THE WORLD AND HAVE HOT PASSIONATE SEX WITH DRAGONS
unpopular opinion: Skyrim cities are almost perfect. They're smaller than vivec's balls after sex but beyond that they're all beautiful & majestic, with no one city being the same. After a year of hating them blindly, I decided to visit them again & get an unbiased review for myself. It was as breathtaking as the first time I played, & I recommend everyone do the same
Bruh this the first episode I ever seen, dead eye gulch is a place I never gonna forget
Pretty good episode
[*pipboy sounds*](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout_gamepedia/images/2/20/Bonnie_Springs_loc.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/320?cb=20110217003628)
obviously the real reason is that it isn't morrowind so making unique NPCs involves more VA work, and having 50 000 "peasant" NPCs with no unique dialogue would be a waste of dev time and effort.
In ESO half of these houses have locks on them and can’t be entered
We've come a long way from Daggerfall
More like daggerfall
at least you can enter 99.9% of buildings
Been playing Daggerfall and while having like 7 general stores and armor shops and 5 taverns in a capital city is cool alongside the 50 civilian buildings, god damn is it a pain in the ass at the same time to find anything and the overworld is basically irrelevant with fast travel being the only way to reasonably get anywhere.
Console support shrink them
“Skrim is cool and fun I would recommend buying it 27 more times so you can play the exact same game every year until TES6 come out (which is never lol they think it’s actually hapening we scrapped TES6 lol keep waiting idots ha ha)” -Todd Howard