The old engine really struggled with more than a few NPCs on screen at one time; the capital city of the empire in the Market District had like six NPCs... A Market is supposed to be the busiest part of any city.

But with the new engine... whats the population like in Skyrim? Are there more NPCs around cities etc?

The engine does not look "new" to me - The graphics appear to be upgraded but the issues with the GameBro internals are still present.

The same as in obvilion.But like some towns in obvilion were desert.Next to the Imperial city,there was a town with like 5 people in the max.On skyrim a town can have like 20 people.

slightly more, but not noticable ... it breaks immersion if a "huge city" only have less than 100 npcs

It has more, yes. The engine is now a lot better with NPCs. Even 10+ NPCs won't harm your framerate, while in Oblivion just having two would half your FPS.

Skyrim can handle an upwards of about 25-30 NPC without issue, type SKYRIM, and Large Battles at youtube and look for a series that is pitting large number of NPC's against each other with no lag this isn't a new engine in any sense of the word, but it sure as hell has better coding/

Doing the Civil War questline felt refreshing, because of all the Stormcloaks just begging for death. If it were Oblivion, there'd be 2 of them at a time :/

It really feels the same to me. Some towns have alot going on and others are just as empty as ones in Oblivion. I do notice that there are more people overall, when you take into account houses, mills, etc that are on the outskirts.

I also definitely notice the lack of races in some towns, espeically with the Argonians that are camped outside like gypsies.

It`s pretty much the same as Oblivion. There might be slightly more people, but it certainly does not feel like a dense population at all.

Even when we get assaults in battles, the game can`t produce even a dozen fighters without vanishing most of them to make way for more. i`m pretty sure the PC can manage more but because this is console-centric it is limited.

It's about the same, I think.

I'm pretty sure that the Market Distric of Dragonsreach have 5x times more people than in Obvilion.i think that wasn't possible to make the cities bigger like in the LORE.

oblivions population is pretty much 100% certified dead, dust and bones, or ash in the wind, skyrims is not......yet....

Welcome to running at 2FPS!