Once again, sadly, xbox.

The 360's now frankly pathetic hardware means we won't see an 'epic' TES game until next gen.

I would assume that real life can render more details flawlessly without so many glitches. I mean there are glitches in real life AI, obviously, but I think having more people on your street is much easier to accomplish than that many people in your game. There was a mod for Oblivion that added up to 50 more people and random thugs, robberies in the cities, and the game absolutely hated it for the most part. After that I can see why they choose to keep it simple with the number of people. If your machine can handle it, then a mod maybe, but it makes a big difference when you add a ton of people and all the extra AI that comes with them.

My point being that you may be asking too much. Think about all the unique responses that have to be formed and that many more people with miscellaneous requests that really aren't worth anything

Very true. I've already heard the same guy that does Farkas also do Dirge in the Thieves Guild and several other people in a matter of minutes when fast-traveling from city to city

It's absurdly less populated than the previous installements of the series. Period.

I used to be good at math, then I....well, you get it.

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110414101242/assassinscreed/images/5/59/Ezio_Auditore_da_Firenze-Brotherhood.jpg

http://youtu.be/7gIjEdCootY

Heh. I suspect that it'd be a problem on several account : the AI schedules might make the game exponentially unreliable, there's the "fully-voiced" problem (well, unless you're willing to really have the exact same voice saying the exact same thing accross several NPCs), hell, talking about clones, don't know if it's even do-able to generate tons of unique faces for that many NPCs.

Till then, I suppose we'll have to do with tricks like crowding some gathering places - taverns, marketplaces.

Why is it that so many on this forum, when opposed to an idea, immediately jump to the most extreme opposite end of spectrum or complete worst case scenario?

There is such a thing as a happy medium.

I think the size is perfect.
It compliments the landscape and sparse feel of the game.
Also remember large amounts of the population (mostly male?) have been killed in the previous war and against the thalmor.

The Bandits could dominate Skyrim if they really wanted.

As the seat of the Imperials in Skyrim, i think Solitude is a bit too small, as for the general population, i think they got it almost right.

I mean come on, they are suppose to have most of the legion set up there, if you put all the soldiers there, it would be like Assasin's creed. You would have to gently push your way through. And the word legion, i don't think of 10 soldiers practicing on dummies and arrow-targets.

Why do people keep talking about this? The population of the planet today, and the population density, is NOT representative of most of history. Arguing that a game set in a fantasy world designed to emulate the past is not like today is ridiculous.

The population of the planet today: 7 billion
The population of the planet in 1650: 500 million (that's 7.1% of the population today)
The population of the planet in 1000: 275 million (that's 3.9% of the population today)

Source: http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm

So if you wanted something similar to the year 1000 take 100 people, kill 96 of them . Or going the other way, 20 people = 480 (roughly).

Not to mention the difference between Urban (new style of living relatively speaking) and Rural and/or hunter/gatherer (the traditional options).

Just use console commands to add NPCs. I populated some open plains with Giant Dwemer Centurions and Giants and the game still ran fine.

I haven't tried populating a city yet though. Anyone try that yet? If so, how was the NPC dialogue and how hard was it to get character variation if any?

I assume everyone smart heard about the dragons and left before I got there. The 30 or so remaining thought "Pffft, dragons? I can take them" .

I guess an increase in numbers would be nice, for world building purposes, but I imagine it makes immersion harder - lots more people who would continue to not interact with the PC in any real way (like extras in any number of RPGs), but since they are meant to appear to act a little more realistically they all need somewhere to go to sleep (unless numbers of them just disappear for the night), which means a lot more homes...

TES likes trying to make even extras with no plot or quest connection kind of individual (faces, names, homes for them) - I like this attention to detail a lot and wouldn't want to see it go.. Unfortunatly it limits numbers a fair bit. I think I'd like some kind of middle ground - I don't want a city full of cookie cutter A. Citizen's just wandering about, but it would be nice to encounter cities and towns that feel like there is a city/town life.

Wait, wait, wait...

Matt (Lead Skyrim Artist):The armor system is very similar to Oblivion's. The main difference is that the upper and lower body armors, the cuirass and greaves, have been combined into one piece. This helps create armor styles that have the look we needed for Skyrim. In most of the Nordic designs we created, the upper armor would completely cover the lower armor, making it unnecessary. We get much better visual results combining those pieces, and it renders a lot faster too, so we can put more people on screen, so that was an easy tradeoff for us. We can also make a lot more armors now, so the number and variation types are more than we've ever had.

So I gave up my greaves and yet still...

I lkike Skyrim Cities...

as noted... overpopulated cities in games just makes it harder to do the stuff you came to town to do...

sell your [censored]... craft some new [censored].... rest up... and boogie out to hit the next dungeon.



Any old school PnP players out here? How often did the DM go into detail about 200 random useless NPC's?

It's just clutter.....

If they were to add tons of people... I'd want it done right. I certainly didn't expect fully populated and sized to scale cities in Skyrim....

Its not just the cities, but the size of Skyrim as well. Ever tried walking cross country? There is a whole lot of nothing out there in the world. Can you imagine if they made a game that took you 3 days in real time to walk to the next city? Can you imagine the response you would get when you arrive in that city and try to offer random people to help random people?

I like the design of the game, you just have to pretend its bigger than it really is.

Its also quite funny when you think about the fact that bandits outnumber citizens 1,000 to 1.

hahaha

It's true, cities are one of Skyrim's weaknesses - especially some of the lesser hold 'capitals' that are hamlets the size of Riverwood. Remember over the summer, how we thought that instead of Oblivion's 8 moderate cities we would get 5 big ones? It's a shame how that didn't happen.

Whiterun's alright, but Solitude definetely needs more people, and Skingrad-style alleysways (it has so much unused space! Unrealised potential...), and don't even get me started on Morthal, Dawnstar or Falkreath.

Making larger cities would be problematic for several reasons.

1) That's more disc space for all that extra information and it's potentially larger save files because most of those people could be killed (something for the saves to remember) and they could be pickpocketed (more to keep track of).

2) More for the hardware to keep track of when in walled cities and when in or near open communities. It not only has to keep track of who is there, where they are, and what they are doing, but this also means far more for the hardware to render graphically.

3) If we expand the urban environments, both for cities and the villages, the map will end up being primarily urban environment with little countryside in between unless they then dramatically expand the overall world. This would again mean much more disc space and much more development time. While it would be nice for Skyrim to be thirty miles across from east to west and twenty miles from north to south, this isn't a realistic expectation and very few game worlds are of that sort of scale, at least not during the era of 3D gaming (not meaning "3D glasses with stuff popping out at you" but as in "not sprites".) I don't know how big Skyrim is in terms of miles, but Liberty City in GTA IV was something like two miles by two miles, or four square miles. I believe Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire were a bit bigger, but I don't believe they were several times bigger. My home town is roughly two miles by two miles, and it has a population of just over 6,000 (six thousand). Seriously, few games have enormous game worlds. Maybe World of Warcraft....

4) Bigger isn't always better. I remember when I used to make my own levels for Duke Nukem 3D and issues that I ran into with that. For one thing, I'm typically incapable of doing anything small, so my levels were always enormous and the first one I completed took me over an hour to get through, and I'm the one that made the friggin' thing. This was for a game where a player could rush through a level in under a few minutes and even a player taking their time, messing around, and thoroughly exploring would still finish a level in far less than an hour. While my enormous levels may have been neat for me, I couldn't help but suspect that others would feel that it was overkill.

Another big thing that came up, and an important one in game design, is that scaling things realistically makes for bad level design. If a player was to make a shopping mall level and have it the size of a real shopping mall, or an airport the size of a real airport, it would mainly be a big empty space that the player has to run through for great amounts of time. If cities in Skyrim were enormous, I'd end up entering one for the first time and find myself having spent the next five or ten hours simply exploring the city without having done much of anything interesting, and most of that city would likely add basically nothing to the game aside from just being generic filler. Having a hundred houses sounds neat until you go through all of them and find that 95% of them have absolutely no role of any kind in any quest and have absolutely nothing to do in them aside from perhaps looting all their dishes and cabbages. If I start a quest at one end of town, and it involves me going somewhere on the other side of town, it would be great if I didn't have to spend the next ten minutes running there; running through countless city blocks of filler.

In video games, sometimes less is more.

That is some very amazing math...I wasn't aware that you could do that and still function without life support.

I'm not too concerned with the amount of people. It's not crowded, and NPC's wouldn't seem as unique if there were huge amounts of them.

I have to just shake my head at people who think a small village is better than a virtual city just because they don't want to hear generic NPC speech. As if you talk to everyone you see in a real city,....

Hopefully in the next Elder Scrolls game, they can create that feeling you get when traveling exotic places of coming to a new city. Reading about Conan approaching the City of Thieves or Arya Stark wandering into the docks of Braavos is an iconic experience of fantasy that the Elder Scrolls would be a perfect format for introducing. World of Warcraft in 2004 had great examples of this, and Assassin's Creed really kicked it up a notch. Just imagine making your way through a mountain range and coming upon a rocky path overlooking a city on the horizon, one hundred cook fire's smoke trailing off into the sky,.... It's always been one of my favorite experiences traveling Asia and Europe in the real world, and the Elder Scrolls could pull it off.