I guess what I mean is, I was just playing Oblivion and I had just got back from a small adventure, pillaged a few caves, went through an oblivion gate in Chydenhal and got some great loot and now I was back in the market district of the Imperial City. I went to my normal vendors to sell my different items, Slash and Smash for my swords and weapons, Stone Wall shields for my deadra shields I picked up, Red Diamond Jewelry for the... well Jewelry and the other shops.

I feel that Skyrim feels so... empty without that feel. I mean you pretty much have to go to a general goods store to sell everything but armor who you go to a blacksmith for. The cities just don't have the same feeling as they did in Oblivion. Is that just me? Do you guys miss having to go to different shops to sell your different goods?

I also miss the disposition and haggeling from Oblivion, it made the shop keepers feel more alive and not like they were just robots who's only purpose was to buy your stuff. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I felt the cities were quite weak and impersonal in Skyrim. Solitude has a criminally poor shopping district and a single inn. Leyawiin beats it by a mile.

I think it's that Oblivion's cities were supposed to be actual cities, scaled down, whereas Skyrim's feel like they were designed to be villages.

Yeah, Whiterun should be bigger, the graveyard in Falkreath should be bigger, Windhelm and Solitude need to be twice their size, Lake Honreich [Spelling?] In Riften should be bigger, Markarth should be bigger because the Dwarves lived there along with the machines, everything else is okay i guess

Skyrims cities felt empty... but honestly being from Canada and having been to the smaller towns up north.. yeah.. it's empty... so I can't fault Skyrim for designing cities, essentially in the middle of arctic tundra, to feel empty... they SHOULD be empty.

I absolutely hated the Haggle slider. I used a mod to get rid of it. I am ecstatic that it's gone in Skyrim.

As far as the Imperial City is concerned: while, to be honest, the Imperial City is my least favorite city in all the Elder Scrolls games I do miss having many shops to buy and sell in. I think there's a nice variety of shops in Whiterun. But Solitude, Windhelm and Markarth should have a few more shops, in my opinion.

I definitely have to agree with you. In general, Oblivion felt more alive. Yeah, I know, that's probably not the popular opinion, but it's my opinion.

I can't really put my finger on what it was...maybe it was the addition of NPC disposition? It may've been shallow, but for me it added a lot. It truly gave the illusion of making ties with citizens.

It also helped that you could talk to every single NPC. They wouldn't just spew some random message. In Skyrim, certain NPC's don't have a function beyond saying one line of dialogue, over and over. In addition to that, I felt like the interactions between NPC's in Oblivion was much better than in Skyrim. I haven't forgotten about the random, sporadic, non-sensical conversations that could occur. To be quite truthful, I think they added charm.

Cyrodiil felt kinda cultureless to begin with as did most of Oblivion. Sure there was a place for light armor, heavy armor, shields, spells, and general goods, but that was 200 something years ago.

You can't expect things to stay the same forever, can you?

Its not a fair example, but think about how different things were 200 years from today! One might argue for the better or worse, but its definintely not the same. You'know?

PLEASE DON'T GET ME STARTED ON GURADS... to late... The guards in Skyrim svck, they are pointless. In oblivion and past games they gave you directions, rumors and other things, in skyrim they give lame one liners and are just annoying.

and another thign while talking about Skyrim not being alive, I can't really remember random citizens talking to eachother randomly in Skyrim, not sure why I can't remember it but I do remember them doing it in Oblivion, jsut walking and than hear one say "I was walking down by the river last night and saw a mudcrab, I got out of there as quick as I could" and the other replied "Oh I stay as far away from those monsters as I can" and it felt alive but in Skyrim I can't remember that happening, I remember one lines being spewed out at me which got annoying when trying to mine or just admiring the mists rolling over the mountains in Whiterun...

City? What cities?

Until they start being on the scale or "city feeling" of Assassin Creed's smaller cities (Like Forli in #2; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THMx1sADMuw) or something like Gran Soren in Dragon's Dogma (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgJN2S3rnvM) I can't remotely consider the ones in Oblivion or Skyrim as cities. They are villages, some with walls and in a separate zone and some in the wider world, still the size of villages though. Very disappointing. Hopefully for their next game they will actually make decent sized cities and, arguably more importantly, make them actually feel like busy, lived in cities, regardless as to their size.

I don't miss the feel of the culture-less stark white feel of the Imperial city, or any city in Oblivion. you have to SQUINT to see any semblance of variety in regional culture for Oblivion, and try to come up with your own conclusions about them :/