Space for the sake of space is boring.

the cities were always scaled down in the single player TES games, Whiterun was supposed to be nearly twice if not 3 times as large. According to several books there are dozens of bars and taverns in whiterun, but all we got was the drunken huntsman and the bannered mare. They need to be much larger to a MMO, it would be sad if they were the same size, especially when cities in Guildwars 2 were so massive.

Ofcourse the cities were scaled down. According to the lore, EVERYTHING, is bigger than in the actual game.

The hole town dont have to bea open from start, area can bea closed by dif reasons and can bea opend later as other closed areas. quest and guild/plater house areas.. a the sims/sim city style...maybe...

i meen as long as you knowe its more off the town behind the closed gate you will get the image of a big real town.

yes and that a big problem whit all espec mmos. when its 10m betwean the 2 rival camps... and if you are enemy whit both off em you cant hardly walk betwean them whitout both part join up and spank you..

Anyone know if there will be villages with NPC's guarding them? I'm assuming so, but the 'content' lists I've read don't seem to have info on it.

edit: to elaborate, enough guards to actually protect against higher levels. I say this, because unfortunately, there won't be any PvP in the starting zones...and would like to see some world interaction with these village fights; more than just players killing each other.

yes the guard have to bea somthing betwan extreamy hard and imortal so they cant bea farmed as on most oter games. Maybe a city guard cant bea beater then the elite hero as the player are but insted off endless reinforsments they must be imortal like. After all they are on youre side in the war...

By static sign posts I mean an NPC standing on the same exact spot 24/7 with a neon green name over his head that says "Hi I'm only here so I can spew a quest monologue at you if you click on me!"

If they can only do small and pathetic instances they should contact Blizzard for the state-of-the-art 2004 engine they used to make big cities integrated seamlessly into the world.

I think that they will be realistic medieval size, one thing that bugs me in MMOs is when a town that has a few hundred residents in lore is no more than a pit-stop in-game, eg Goldshire

It's not just MMOs that do this. Look at Skyrim, the cities should have been much bigger than they were.

There is cities in mmo's and then there are cityyyyys. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di3H9HMScYw

i agree. the capitols were all fine. hell most people complained that they were too big so they started allowing multiple vendors to sell the same thing. i also agree that the other towns were far too small. 2 buildings do not make a town

Now if only they were not large entirely for the sake of being large. They were a pita to navigate and in general were nothing but wasted space.

I prefer larger citys, even if it is just "wasted space", just make sure there are npcs wondering them. It great for wondering and makes the world feel that much more alive.

I know huge is subjective, at least that is what my wife tells me, but I don't think a huge city should be able to be crossed in less that a minute. EQ and WoW had HUGE cities. It took many minutes to cross a whole city in EQ and at least a couple of minutes in WoW, when walking.