First of all i want to say that i love skyrim as a game and that it is in many ways superior to oblivion.However from the very first hours i played the game i was dissapointed with the size of the cities if u can call most of them that.Just look at Falkreath for example.Its almost the same size with riverwood.Morthal is about the same size with most of it being a swamp.Winterhold is not even a town.But i guess it is justified with the whole great collapse incident.Dawnstar is just like they took the anvil port and added 3-4 houses in it and called it a city.Whiterun the city described as the best from some npcs could be described as a town and i dont think 6 houses count as district.
Most people will justify the size of the cities by saying that the game takes place in skyrim a cold wasteland where mostly nords live.Morrowind was a province where mostly dark elves live but still balmora for example is bigger than whiterun.
The other 4 cities of skyrim are somewhat good.Solitude at first looks big but after spending 5 walking around u have seen it all.The market area is nice but the residential one looks haunted.
I liked Windhelm for its atmosphere.big walls and plenty of streets.this one looks like a proper city.
And last but not least Markarth and Riften were pretty good compared to the rest.Riften was big enough and behaves like a city.The market is crowded people walk around the streets and at night the taverns are full.
As for markarth i liked the city because of its unique dwemer architecture.It still could have been better though.
All of these cities dont compare in size with most oblivion cities.I remember the first time i walked in Leyawin Skingrad and cheydinhal i got lost and had to use the map.And these cities are not described as huge in lore.I didnt expect Bethesda to make cities like Imperial City in skyrim.that would go against lore.But cities are too small and it makes skyrim look like a deserted place.And the irony is that people complained in Oblivion that Cyrodiil lacks settlements and now Skyrim has a lot of big enough settlements (riverwood rorikstead etc) but cities are small.Bethesda needs to find a middle ground.Also people need to stop using imperial city as a size scale for all elder scrolls cities.Technology is advancing.If they could make solitude the size of imperial city i would be cool with it as long as it had depth and a satisfying population.I would use the bigger city of the game to judge the size of the other cities lorewise.
Whats your opinion on the cities of skyrim and generally the whole world scale?

The cities in Skyrim are actually bigger than the cities in Oblivion. If you take the time to really compare them carefully, it's pretty easy to see. So overall I'm happy with Skyrim's cities. Of course when I say Skyrim's cities are bigger, I'm talking about the walled cities, not the little "cities" like Winterhold and Dawnstar.

Whiterun, Markarth, Windhelm, and especially Solitude, are all fairly good sized cities. Personally, I didnt much care for the multiple cells of the Imperial City in Oblivion. And Vivec in Morrowind? Forget it. You really want to run all over the place or take Gondolas just to complete a simple quest or visit another shop?

It takes like thirty seconds to cross from one end of Vivec to the other on foot. Less if you have a decent levitation spell.

So your ideal world would be one house on a giant island. All the quests need to take place on that one house, god forbid you might need to walk a little lol. What makes your statement really odd is that quests in Skyrim purposefully send you to the other side of the world for the most worthless fetch quest, so you would rather have that than a walk in a nice big city…odd.

I accept that they are reduced in size to mostly include locations of importance, but it always makes me a bit disappointed when looking around any city in Skyrim and realizing that they don't have enough people, infrastructure or services to realistically function on even the most basic level and that the 'jarl' rules over a population that wouldn't even classify as a tribe, more like a big family. Or thinking about the fact that civilized, ordinary citizens are outnumbered by bandits, evil necromancers, dangerous undead, hostile creatures and mad cultists by like 5 to 1...it's a hard life in Skyrim indeed...

5bandits to 1friendlies? Where did you find so many friendlies?

In Morrowind, until you get the Boots of Blinding Speed (stupid fragile things have 50 health) you walk so slowly. Oblivion and Skyrim have vast improvements on movement speed, and the addition of fast travel and horses. Guild Guides cant take you everywhere, and you can only have one Mark active at a time, and you have to trapse all over the place to get the Propylon Indices. I can use effective use of Recall and Intervention spells and get across half of Vvardenfell in 5 seconds. What annoyed me about Vivec was the levels. Its either casting several levitation spells, or going up and down through the waist works to get from the lower levels to the plazas. 30 seconds? I dont think so, and I use levitate spells constantly in Vivec.

I'm not saying I want a tiny game world, I've been playing RPG's for almost 20 years, and I love them. I just think there are a few logistical issues. I love the expansiveness of these games, but if I'm going somewhere, I want to see and do something. I've mentioned in multiple posts that I do not do the MQ in Oblivion. I do guilds, side quests, random dungeons, exploring. And I love it. I just can not get immersed in the MQ.

It would have been awesome if it was the size of washington dc in Fallout 3.

I am not sure I would enjoy that lol. Nah they just need to be 2-3x their current size.

If any of you ever made your own mods, the reasons for the smallish "cities" would quickly become apparent: because it takes freaking hours to make a house and the NPCs to inhabit it. The outside is relatively easy, as the main body is from a stock of such things. But then you need to tweak it by adding stuff to make it appear closer to unique. But the stuff inside takes ages, unless you just want to clone the inside of one house to another - which would then produce a load of complaints about all the houses looking alike. When you've finally finished all that, you've got to create the owners, give them packages etc. Now you've got to test it all. And after all that, you don't get any extra money. So think Law of Diminishing Returns, and you should understand. Yes, I'd love to see cities populated by hundreds of NPCs living in hundreds of houses, but it really would be vastly time-consuming. Fallout3 is an unfair comparison, because most of it as actually just blocks of texture - very little is inhabitable. And lots of dummy houses wouldn't work in Skyrim.

I don't mind the size of the Skyrim cities in general. I'm just wondering how a "city" with slightly more than 5 buildings and no more than 10 total residents becomes a hold capital. Winterhold and Morthal in particular (haven't been to Falkreath), should be considered villages, rather than cities.

It may take time to make buildings and cities, but it also doesn't help that Bethesda rushed the game. An extra year could have made a difference. Games this big need their development time.

You haven't played MW for a long time.

The first time I saw Whiterun (even though it was Rohan) with all that was going on outside the city wallls, I was very impressed. Then all the cities were pretty bog standard/disappointing. From all the pre-release hype surrounding the cities I was expecting something grand and epic. I would have preferred less/bigger cites that offered a lot more rather than smaller/more.

Are you kidding? It takes about that long to run the length of a single canton, and that's without trying to navigate it's weird twists to get to the right place.
It is. Physically it's not dramatically larger (though still is larger), but that's because the buildings are a tiny bit smaller and more packed together. There's 38 buildings in Balmora, and I think 19 in Whiterun. Whiterun is largely empty space filled with rocks, or sometimes absolutely nothing that makes you feel a building should really be there.

I certainly expected to see bigger cities considering they were marketed as massive and there were fewer than Oblivion, yet every one of them was smaller than any Oblivion city. The logic. Escapes me.

That wasn't a city though. It was an urban wilderness. Towns/settlements in FO3 were pretty small and in FONV only New Vegas was a decent size but had an excess of loading screens.

On this note, the houses DO look alike inside. I've done a little playing around in the CS, many of the different houses in different towns using the same exterior model are just copy pastes of each other. Yet it took me all of 5 minutes to completely rearrange an interior for my own town in progress. I didn't have to start from scratch or anything, just move a table here, a bed here, change the position of this light source. Easy to have a little variation even if some of the clutter is the same (but in different places).

It might be possible, but then you'd have to have a bunch of houses with doors you can't open and unnamed NPCs wandering around. For a game where you can actually explore the entire city, it's a pretty good size - in other games they might only let you into one section of it.

Or they could have done something like San Andreas, but even that had only 3 cities and not much to do in wilderness.

In my experience, most cities in Skyrim are small, but stretched. The cities contain few, but rather free standing houses. This way the developers create the feeling of bigger cities then they truly are.

i don't mind the cities as much, i kinda wish there were more side quests in cities though.

Techincial game limitations means we have a long way to go before we see cities with the kind of busling community that existed in say, Roman times in Londinium or elsewhere.

It`s just too much to expect for now so I`m never surprised when I walk into a Skyrim city and I`m through in 2 minutes. In fact, I`m impressed they`re as big as they are now compared to before.

Maybe in 10 years.

There's also the fact that large cities tend to be repetitive. Don't get me wrong, I spent ages in Morrowind attempting to build huge bustling metropoles. I would love to see a sprawling city in a future TES game. But it doesn't always add a huge amount game-wise. Instead on one blacksmith, you've got five. Ok. There's ways to make big cities interesting, but previous ES games haven't always found them.

I don't mind the cities just the way they are, they are mainly quest hubs anyway so keeping them relatively tight is an advantage imo. Then once you are off exploring the transition to the wilds makes them feel more expansive as you wander.

If you have terrible speed or acrobatics scores, you may end up taking a little longer. Given how the skill system works in Morrowind, and players' propensity to jump everywhere, it pretty common to have decent levels in both. If you have even a moderately competent acrobatics score, you can just start leaping off the tops of cantons. Almsivi Intervention will blast you straight to the other side in a second. Obviously, entering the cantons will take longer if only due to the load times involved. Actually moving around Vivec is pretty quick. I mean, it's a big city, but it's very dense. Unless you don't know where you're going, it won't take very long.

In any case, what you really seem to be complaining about is movement speed. This is a wholly separate issue from city size/design. It's weird to say you wouldn't like a city the size of Vivec in Skyrim because the movement speed in Morrowind wasn't fast enough.