Having now traveled to most villages and towns and around the wilderness some, I get the distinct feeling that more individuals live on my street than in all of Skyrim.

The capitol city of all Skyrim and home to a East Empire Company trading port, Solitude, has three shops and a few stalls? How many people actually live there? 20? 30? And half again as many guards? Are you serious? What about some LIFE?

Living in Skyrim is hard. High deathrates and such.

Clearly, they should create 4 instances of Grand Theft Auto sized cities and populate them via Assassin's Creed techniques.

Ya that was a little disappointing... maybe next TES

I understand what you mean but the city can't be packed to the brim with people tripping over each other. I'm loving every minute of it but this game can't take much more with all the glitches it already has plus not too many people are interesting to talk to anyway. You can't add another 1,000 people to Solitude 'cause that also means they need a house or inn to sleep at

Unsuccessful troll is unsuccessful.

So you want every city to be the size of an actual city, with a realistic population, and all inhabitants having unique dialog? That's a ridiculous expectation for any present-day video game.

If they don't have unique dialog (or, worse, have no dialog at all!), then that's just as unrealistic. And yes, I know there's already a lot of generic dialog. Making more wouldn't be any better.

I think there is some room between where we are now and "people tripping over each other." I wouldn't say we are anywhere NEAR the latter... right?

Mother of god...

Having some little "suburbs" with a spattering of NPC houses and more common shops and such could add quite a lot of depth to the cities. Everything now feels like someone was just filling out a checklist for what constituted a city.

New post, same stuff.

The world of Skyrim is scaled by factor of 20. So 30 people in Solitude x 20 = 1,800 citizens.

30 X 20 = 600

I wasn't that good at math either!

yup..........i dont know why they didnt look at the layouts of most MMO cities. they seem to be much more representative of a real city that a few houses, a wall and a castle. obviously you could fill it up with random npcs to flesh it out more. there were mods for morrowind and oblivion and both fallout games that added extra npcs to the game world and they added a ton to the environment. unfortunately this is a case where consoles simply cant keep up as we saw in the craptacularly tiny fort battles.

lolmath?

What? Are you serious? 30(20) ≠ 1800

It's been like this in every TES game ever. Oblivion cities seemed to be larger only because they were flat and spread out whereas Skyrim cities are built vertically with less horizontal space.

Except Daggerfall, Daggerfall cities were huge and populated with tons and tons of people. But you know what? They were boring. I would rather have small cities where everyone you could talk to had something interesting to say, and the cities were different, instead of hundreds of bland NPCs that didn't really serve any purpose other than to exist and give the illusion of life.

And they couldn't even pull off Daggerfall scale anymore, with the way games are now. Unless you're willing to wait 10 years and have a few hundred gigs of extra hard drive space for only one game...

And 30*20 is 600. Just googled it...lol. 30*60 is 1800...

Well, OP, sounds like you already answered your own complaint. Stop playing Skyrim and go play with the people in your street. You might try posting your future adventures on facebook though; because I'd hate to read that boring bullsh*t here.

im not a fan of big cities for two reasons:

1) ive never seen a video game pull it off successfully because most of the time each section of a city contains something you need and it takes a long time to walk to each section.

2) instead of spending the minimal amount of time fixing up my char. (vendoring, enchanting etc.) i end up spending lots of time walking around, so i like everything in one spot.

Now if devs could put MULTIPLE blacksmiths, vendors, etc. in a big city to where you dont have to walk a mile to get to a blacksmith only to walk another mile to get to an enchanter then that would be awesome, i wouldnt mind having a huge city to add to the immersion.

Skyrim cities >>>>>>>> Cities divided in 4 parts / instances...

the vast majority of npcs in skyrim and oblivion were boring as well. you only get a couple lines of dialogue except with quest characters. id rather have alot of random npcs that simply ignored you or told you to stop bugging them or something just like you would encounter in a real town. as i mentioned mods like TIE added several hundred npcs and it did wonders for fleshing out the gameworld. as far as size/scale is concerned ive played some MMOs that seem to have it down fairly nicely. they obviously arent to scale but because they have to deal with 100s of players they are 3 to 4 times larger than TES games and they seem much more real. even two worlds 2 had a much larger city than anything you see in skyrim and they had a much smaller budget and team.

Things were better before people starting chanting for the Dark Brotherhood...

Skyrim is cold and mountainous, of course there are less people there than in Cyrodil.

If you are in the USA, Cyrodil is basically North Carolina to Skyrim's West Virginia.

Charlette has more population than the entire state of West Virginia. North Carolina has suburbs larger than the biggest cities in West Virginia. West Virginia is colder, more mountainous and difficult to travel, and also has much better scenery.

What is my point? Skyrim's cities are a pretty realistic size considering everything, and even when considering the scale compared to Oblivion I think they are pretty realistic.

I think people may fail to realize one thing. How many people decided not to live in those cities and become bandits and take over remote locations? Apparently a majority of Skyrim's inhabitants are just A-holes, so the way I see it, there are plenty of people in Skyrim.

I like Solitude it is a okay city.

But i feel some of the villiages are to small, they can use some more NPCs.

If you're complaining about repeating voices with 70 actors just wait until the city has 1,000 inhabitants.