What do you think? Or will the capital city lock like a minor village?

I'd hope they'll keep capitals locked like most villages.

(Yes, there will be Capitols, no idea how big they are- I assume the ordinary size of capitols of most MMOs)

Yes that just the problem when they lock like minor village whit +- 3 houses or so...

Oh, no I'd assume they're bigger than that. I personally don't know any MMOs of which capitols have been that small. Do you consider World of Warcraft's capitols big/small?

I would guess that Mournhold would be about the same size it was in the Morrowind Tribunal expansion. I don't know about the other two capital cities though.

Take a look at Oblivion and Skyrim. Their major cities/capitols were HUGE! The small villages usually were comprised of 5-20 houses, and the tiny hamlets were I think what you are referring too, 1-3 houses and maybe a tent or two.

They've already said that most places would be somewhat recognizable, the culture, the size and scope, and that most ruins you remember will be thriving new areas to explore.

I guess that the size of the cities/towns reflects the quasi medieval setting, where anything with a cathedral, library, university, or castle was a city.

Judging by the maps from that video that was leaked the major towns look to be quite large.

yes OK the capital cities are a bit bigger but a normal city is normally not bigger then some houses.

OK stormwind and orgrimmar was OK but was more as a small town/big village but the other 4 was quite small. spec the elves and cows.

yes 5- 20 houses = a village not a town and def, not a capital

If you want to see some well done capitol cities, check our WAR. Altdorf was pretty big, to the point where I got lost.

They have to keep it fitting to ES games. Pretty simple.

Divinity's Reach in GW2 is huge. I hope when they patch in the Imperial City, it isn't pathetic like Oblivion's.

I beleive they said all the major towns and cities will be in game. Not all at launch since not all of skyrim, daggerfalls, marrowind, ect will not be the complete map. That is to come at later dates and the towns and cities in the missing areas will be added at later date after release. If I remember right, I think that in many cases the towns and cities will actually be larger than in the ES games.

You will probably have the main Bards Guild, Mages Guild, but you will also probably have some local version as well. Im not sure how the servers will handle 50 thousand players in the guild building at one time. So will the towns and cities in the ES games be in ESO yes, but expanded.

My fear is big cities will be instanced away and be filled with static sign post NPCs.

Eh. Skyrim 'cities' were actually tiny with maybe 50 people, and buildings to match the ridiculously small population. All told the entire _province_ had housing for maybe 500 people. It was fine for Rorikstead, Dragonbridge and the like, but Solitude, Markath and Riften were shamefully small and underpopulated. They could have at least done some background tricks to make it look like there was more to the cities.

Oblivion was a bit better, but could have stood to be bigger.




Personally, I'd prefer instanced to small and pathetic. Not entirely sure what you mean by static sign posts, but I hope to see several hundred npcs moving about, regardless of whether or not they're quest givers or shop owners.

There should be NPCs, especially during night, theres alot more guards.

If theres something to say about from that leaked gameplay video, thats not the case. Zones are HUGE. We know though theres personal instances like in SWTOR, but they are minimal.

I do think they are small compared to some MMO's.

In the lore of TES the capitols are generally HUGE, when I read an in game book talking of whiterun the other day, it was much MUCH larger than what we see in skyrim, and since this is an MMO, I expect the cities to be MUCH larger than they were in the single player games. Otherwise they will be way, way too cluttered with people.

Here is a map taken from the introducing Elder Scrolls Online video that shows Mournhold , so going by that picture it looks like the city's are going to be fair sized , hopefully at any rate.

[img]http://i1303.photobucket.com/albums/ag160/andy_smith9/mournhold_zps2f15e74c.jpg[/img]

Hopefully at least as big as the GW2 capitols. Anything less would seem cheap IMO. Hopefully the size of SWG's sprawling cities.

Cities were never big enough in TES games, they never felt like major cities, not even IC. They worked with what they had but with for an MMO you can go a lot bigger.


That image scares me, it makes Mournhold look like a little ring village with a tower in the middle when Mournhold is only a district within the massive city of Almalexia...so yeah. Hope they didn't forget about that.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Almalexia_(city)

I can't believe nobody's made mention of this but it's called CAPITAL! NOT CAPITOL!

Daggerfall did a good job.

Sadly, I doubt they'll be much bigger than standard TES games. IIRC, they said early on that Cyrodiil is going to be roughly the same size it was in Oblivion. Which kinda stinks... they could make the whole of Tamriel the size of the Daggerfall region as it was in Daggerfall, and it'd still be a marked improvement over that.

But who knows. Plenty of early information has been wrong or back-tracked on, that there's no real way to tell until we can experience it ourselves. I just hope I don't feel like a midget while running through the cities.

I don't really want the cities to be huge though. It wouldn't feel right considering they were never that big in the single player games. It would just be odd.