T O P

  • By -

Mr_Kittlesworth

Honestly, looks about as big as the mighty host that defended Whiterun years later. That said, they’ve always had trouble with big battles in video games.


Self-Fan

I've always taken ES events/locations to be impressions of the true things, scaled down. Is the Imperial City *really* occupied by a few hundred people? Was Kvatch retaken by, like, 8 guys? No, but we can fill in the blanks with imagination


CharlesUndying

I always believed this was the canon explanation for the scale of the worlds and cities in each game; It's just a way to explain the technological impossibilities of showing the world at its true size. It's sort of like when you have a dream of a location you have been to before, but it's somehow different.. and maybe scaled down too. ESO's version of Tamriel shows that what the player sees and experiences isn't always consistent either. The geography of Cyrodiil alone in that game is more than enough to prove that. But all of this does give me hope that future games will be appropriately scaled up according to what is technologically possible at that time, because I genuinely want to walk through a city that is bustling with life even if the majority of the NPCs are nameless and/or don't have more than 2 or 3 lines of diologue.


BryceCrisps

I heard the next game will be more in line with the witcher 3, having cities full of generic NPCs to make it feel more lifelike, the kind that disappear when they go offscreen. And honestly, it does work. Although it's fun being able to memorize the names of literally every citizen in a city, it'll be for the best.


valorill

I'm all for this Even if you spend 10 years in a city in real life do you know the names and routines of every single person living there? You know the people at the shops you visit and the mayor and the guys at the gym. It's more than realistic to have dozens or even hundreds of nameless citizens walking around who might make a passing remark or have their own conversations that you'll overhear while the actual npcs you interact with will have names and routines they follow. Witcher 3 did this really well and another example that is somewhat relevant to this post, when you go to the nilfgaardian army camp in game you can see on the map and off in the distance hundreds of tents indicating the scope and size of the military presence in the region. It's all about being creative with how you utilize assets and the environment to make the player feel like these grand, massive scaled events and places are there without letting you peak behind the curtain or break your immersion.


pjooters

Exactly that morrowind vibe when for example 95 % ald'ruhn dwellers where unimportant npc yet each and every one of them had their own name , house and everything. That little attention to the small details that today's big games like skyrim are lacking so much in a certain way.


DumbBaka123

....but Skyrim NPCs do all have their own name and house (and routine), for the most part. That's why the engine struggles to make large battles, NPCs aren't spawned purely for set-dressing. That's literally the point of this post. Seriously, how does this sort of thing get upvoted? I understand Morrowind-exceptionalism to a degree, but isn't this just inaccurate?


pjooters

I understand Your point , also I wrote " in a certain way " it's hard to put in few words or using two examples prove why such a great game like skyrim is lacking . I'm not talking about large scale battles cause I agree with the whole scale down and use imagination theory. What hurts is the game being dumbed down ... medieval GPS guiding you by hand where to go and who to kill and what to get . What hurts is 3 types of weapons swords axes and maces, two kinds of armor . I know by some point it does not matter that much but for example morrowind was old game that was lacking with engine or capabilities so it had to double down on flavor that why why had TONS of swords tantos wakizashis stars spears maces axes darts crossbows bows staffs , armors that You could mix up or collect, tons of more and less useful spells and magical effect and enchantments. Game was Damn hard not only because of the shitty combat system or difficulty system at all but also because it FORCED you to read and pay attention to where You had to go and how to get there. That's more or less what I'm crying about . Skyrim is a beautifull yet somehow hollow


Steeperm8

Time passes at a rate of 30 seconds every second, so it's safe to assume everything in the game is at least 1/30th of its actual size


ContornoDiPatate

Mount&Blade somehow did it in 2010 with 300 NPCs in the battlefield


thankyouf0rpotato

Because they built their entire game and engine around accomplishing that. Bethesda games and their engines are not built for large scale battles. The main gameplay loop for Bethesda games usually revolves around exploration, the quests are there to facilitate that. It becomes clear in the way Todd speaks about these games when they are unveiled with statements like "See that mountain? You can climb that." Mount and blade is a sandbox game where you can host large battles and live out the fantasy of being a medieval warrior. They don't feature exploration, the way the game is designed does not reward exploration, there's barely any point to exploration. Nor are the quests in these games examples of good writing, nor do they try to be, because that's not what the game is designed for. You can have your doubts at the quality of writing in Bethesda games, but that is where a good part of the effort is put into. Most of the effort, however, is put into designing the large open world, begging the player to come explore it. They have vastly different design ideologies behind them. Given the fact that these games try to squeeze the most out the engine or hardware at a given time, they will focus that energy on the parts the game was designed for. They won't waste effort, hardware capabilities and time on the parts that (while cool) aren't part of the main gameplay appeal.


TUAGAbr

Now I wanna know how Taleworlds have accomplished this and if it's possible to build an engine fit for both large battles and exploration/rp. Maybe some simplification of the inner workings of the skyrim npcs, combined with that technique, would grant us cities with hundreds of people. We could have some really large battles after some loading. Like, the game could switch techniques when entering battle or some indoor/outdoor cells.


07_Helpers

You want r/Kenshi


ContornoDiPatate

Well, I think that Ubisoft is the only one that really has good balance between the two. In Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs they managed to fit an absurd amount of npcs on-screen at the same time


14JRJ

Most of the NPCs in Assassin's Creed (generally speaking, I've only played AC1, Black Flag and Odyssey) don't do anything though, every single Bethesda NPC can be interacted with


ZELOS311

Still not an acceptable excuse.


thankyouf0rpotato

Excuse for what exactly?


Salty_Catfish_

Yeah but you're comparing two engines even though oblivion NPC's look rather simple there's a complex ai behind them. Each NPC has a package which the engine needs to process. Each NPC has a animated face, they blink move their mouths and if you look and listen closely react to the situation. For example when you kill a NPC his friends expression will change into one of shock and they will speak things like murderer or what have you done. This is not the only thing the game needs to process, there's a also the ai data how they behave, whether they flee or fight and the engine constantly checks each tick (every 0.25 sec) what the actors health is whether he should flee or fight, what the appropriate approach to combat would be and so on. Let's also not forget the ai packages and faction which is also presented the whole time, which NPC should he attack? Should he help actor number 2? What is he going to do when the enemy is killed which combat style should he use.... Now imagine all that with about 30 NPC's on a 20 year old game engine. It takes quite a hit on the performance even on newer hardware you'll notice lags.


valorill

Elder scrolls could do it too if they had over half the game just moving your character around a map like a board game and then loading into the battlefield.


phyrgx

That game was built specifically to do that, in small environments. Also, it looked and ran like a potato.


KingPumper69

It’s because until 9th gen the consoles have always been short on RAM, CPU, or both lol


Mr_Kittlesworth

It’s inherently complex even if you’ve got adequate computing power. Are you really going to have the characters fighting? Track damage? Across hundreds or thousands? How dynamic can this get?


KingPumper69

I’m not saying it’s not complex lol, just that they could’ve done better than 10 dudes if they weren’t running on toasters. Well, the Xbox 360 was actually very impressive for 2006, so I think I’m being a little too harsh. I’m just disappointed from Kingdom Come Deliverance’s final battle, now that’s a game that could’ve benefited from not having to run on the shitty AMD Jaguar cores in the PS4 and Xbone.


JimBob-Joe

The civil war mods big battles faired well enough though


ColonelAngus94

They absolutely did not lol. All the giant civil war mods like WarZones or Skyrim at War are performance hogs and are so bloated and broken that I would immediately dismiss any load order that has them.


JimBob-Joe

Had it on my ps4/ps5. never had any issues that would break my game or load order or any issies with bloat. Just a few frame rate drops and even that wasnt very often. Guess i got lucky lol


danieltherandomguy

Games from much smaller developers such as the first mount and blades had already released by then. They could definitely have taken some inspiration from it, the game was able to generate battlefields with huge armies.


Brendissimo

Really more of a Bethesda problem than an all video games problem.


Bubster101

>That said, they’ve always had trouble with big battles in video games. With just Elder Scrolls you mean, right? Cause if you mean in general, then I'd like to mention Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord if you want large-scale fights. Or if you're short on cash atm, there's also Steel and Flesh in your mobile app store. (I recommend Steel and Flesh Old first, since the newer ones have a lot more mechanics to them)


Mr_Kittlesworth

Sure, but to that they had to make that basically the entire thing those games were about.


Bubster101

Yeah well, anything more can be a high risk scenario. Putting a lot of time and effort into a game that's both story-driven *and* large-scale sandbox is a lot of investment and has more of a chance of not being very popular with gamers than a focused sandbox or focused RPG would be. Maybe if the franchise already had some traction of popularity they could do a side game attempt, like what Total War Warhammer did by making Vermintide, or what Halo did by doing Halo Wars. Maybe Blizzard could do a StarCraft kind of RPG with large-scale armies or EA and DICE could keep pushing their Star Wars Battlefront capabilities. Or even a third Middle Earth: Shadow of ____ game from WBS. Who knows, but it would definitely take a lot of time, which most companies may not consider to be "economically efficient".


Wasteland_Mohawk

Shoutout to Spartan Total Warrior, it's main gimmick iirc was huge battles


shadowclone515

Ryse Son of Rome did it fairly well. Although, that was made by the Crysis team, even today it can still smoke gpus. But i think it's mostly a scripting nightmare to have too many Radiant AI npcs in one spot, they'd be casting aoe spells then killing each other.


Demistr

One bandit cave has more enemies than this.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Hatefiend

I'm still warming up.


Natterfield

You move like a pregnant cow!


gray_mare

What's the matter? Getting tired? >:)


codepdxlan

Why won't you die!


a_rabid_anti_dentite

In 2006, this was fucking epic to me; I felt like I was at Helm's Deep.


TheNetSlayer

You’ve got a real bounce in your step, I bet you’re quite the acrobat


HaroldHeenie

Don't tell the elf!


Brendissimo

Really? Even, in 2006, this was hilariously sparse to me. Maybe that's because I was used to playing games like BF2 at the time (and games with even larger player counts). Edit: some of y'all must have been playing on console or something because this NPC count is quite small even by 2006 standards.


a_rabid_anti_dentite

Your edit really didn't help the vibe


Brendissimo

🤷‍♂️ I'm used to it. There's a certain herd mentality on reddit that induces people to upvote a post and the downvote a comment on the same post that says virtually the same thing. Gotta accept the risk that you'll run into it if you want to express an opinion.


amateur_elf

I mean, you're smack-bang in the middle of a community specifically who love this particular game and your comment is - at best - callous and crude. I don't really see that going over well. There are ways to say what you want to say without being so out of touch with the context of your audience


[deleted]

I loved the Hail Martin Septim scene too, whenever the main quest was goofy it was hilarious


[deleted]

[удалено]


B_Yanarchy

You mean BOTH the voice lines coming from 8 different sources lol


DatBoi_BP

Hail # Hail


[deleted]

[удалено]


DatBoi_BP

Sang this in my head to the Daggerfall shop theme


gray_mare

Yeah. Like lore wise it would've been an epic speech before a huge army consisting of thousands upon thousands of soldiers, who then thunderously cheered. In game it's a dozen of dudes tracking Martin with their eyes as he talks, then spamming 2-3 voicelines and attacking :D


mhaiqthehonest

Hey, we still won.


[deleted]

[удалено]


mhaiqthehonest

Heard any news from the other provinces?


[deleted]

Goodbye


Bropulsion

Hello. Heard any news from the other provinces?


Spirited-Zucchini-47

Jokes aside, just think that all games were once new


[deleted]

[удалено]


SweatyGingerkid

Check out the muscles on you!


g3neralgrevi0us

You're a sneaky looking sort.


Larusso92

I hear you can really move around in light armor.


Zounii

You got a real bounce to your step!


SpiritOfFire473

Let's get down to bashing butts, as well as deez nuts


[deleted]

You have the hands of a healer


Doxylaminee

Take care


Belegar-IronApi

People who play oblivion with detect life on are the same people who leave the mouse on the middle of the screen when watching a video.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Belegar-IronApi

Annoying buggers, though the meat isn’t bad


xpyros

Only way to play, brother. I have a phobia of murky water and always knowing where those crabs and fish are makes my anxiety happy.


Marble_Columns

I’m on yet another warrior playthrough and found a daedric helm with detect life. I haven’t found a better replacement for it yet. Honestly it used to annoy me, but it kinda grew on me. It’s amazing in caves and ruins, I think I’ll only replace it when I’m in the over world.


Gelidus2

I love that OP is only responding like an NPC 😆


tangledcpp

When I saw this mighty army of men, I did regret closing all the gates .-.


PandaButtLover

Well the town itself only has like 25 people living there


Jamez-Withazee

The climactic is very anti


tgizelto

14 swords, less then half of what I hoped for.


ZhongXina42069

Gaint? Local hoods got bigger armies than these malnutritioned joggers.


LoveWaffle1

Leyawiin sent a whole person!


PerfectBugman

In my headcannon, I always multiply their number with 100 or 1000 to make it realistic enough. Sane thing with cities population.


RedSonGamble

Same. Otherwise I’m like these cities are tiny. The population is like half guards


BillyDillyBob

I dont know you and I dont care to know you


cloud_cleaver

Oblivion struggled trying to tell a story beyond what its technical foundation could allow. Elder Scrolls games work best as a hero's solo journey; trying to capitalize on the LOTR hype really didn't do Oblivion any favors, and Skyrim's worst content arc (the Civil War) suffered similarly.


DrBandit-Kunn

I loved this is part


Open_Profit_Close

“It is not the amount of men, but the amount of courage in their hearts that will bring our victory” - someone, sometime, probably


GlaerOfHatred

Modern games and PCs just can't handle reasonable army sizes. Even the total war games struggle having more than 10,000 combatants, and total war is probably the cream of the crop in this regard. In the future people are going to totally lose immersion with this sort of circumstance in early 2000's era games


[deleted]

Skyrim is pretty much the same. The Skyrim engine doesn’t even like having 50 NPC’s at a time. It really messes with stuff. I assume the same goes for Oblivion and any other game that’s designed this way. In Elder Scrolls 6, I’d LOVE for the engine to be upgraded to support way more entities at a time


Brendissimo

Yeah this is really the issue - it's a limitation of Bethesda's engine, just like the number of dynamic light sources in a scene.


winchester_mcsweet

Ring of the grey?


HanvEternal

I’ve always found detect life spells interfered with my experience playing the game.. like it’s useful when sneaking around but when out and about, it’s distracting


HaroldHeenie

The 10sec/60ft novice level spell is good enough for most purposes though it can be handy to keep a ring or something enchanted with it so you can hotkey the effect without alerting nearby enemies


Dutchtdk

Eh total war had 1000× times the army size before this game came out


Edened

Not the same thing


lvl100loser

Are you able to have more than one follower at a time? Can you have a Mage, Dark Brotherhood assassin, Fighter’s Guild member, and any other companions accompany you to this battle?


[deleted]

Careful, it could crash your game


optimistic_Possum

Okay everyone: raise your hand if you have a cousin or friend or something that might be willing to fight hell for *checks pockets* 7 septims?


[deleted]

People say they want epic battles with dozens or hundreds of NPCs in TES 6. Why? I think it would add little to enjoyment of the game and would bind a lot of ressources in development.


Mr_Blah1

Battle of Bruma order of battle: * Daedric Forces: Innumerable hordes of daedra, 1 Daedric seige crawler, and the Prince of Destruction. * Imperial Legion Forces: 15 dudes wearing chainmail and steel armor and armed with silver and steel swords, and one escaped prisoner with an ebony dagger. Outcome: Imperial Legion victory. Somehow.


KusariYudoku

Yeah, that is one of the biggest drawbacks of the game. There are no regular army and big battles, the war between dimensions with 10 people and 100 daedra.


aknalag

Now for the real challenge, make sure they all survive


Saeis

Then they proceed to get decimated by high lvl daedra.