So people felt like the Imperial City was like the heart of a massive empire ruling an entire continent? I felt more disappointed with that than I did with Solitude, but I got over it...

Actually, many capitals are by the sea. Assuming the country has shoreline. That's due to trade trade ports, so Solitude and Windhelm seem good locations for a capital. Better than Whiterun that is far away from everything.

On topic, there's nothing like the Imperial City, but the rest of the closed cities are pretty comparable. The open cities are too small for cities, and Oblivion had bigger villages than Winterhold.

I'm hoping a Better Cities mod for Skyrim

The city sizes are appropriate for the scale of the game. When you look at them on the map the areas they occupy look preportionally like real cities on maps of real countries. The picture of Oslo above is a good example. If the shorelines in Skyrim were that large then large cities like that would fit. This is like the complaints about there not being 7000 steps to High Hrothgar. There can't be 7000 steps because that would be as tall as a real mountain.

Morrowind's cities aren't physically very big places either. You can see clear across Balmora and a huge part of Vivec is taken up by empty space on the outside of the cantons.

False

I also disagree. The shacks of Bravil look nothing like the stone buildings of Skingrad. And Bruma is very "Nordic" in appearance. I thought three was a good variety.

That said, I like the Skyrim cities too. They have a very similar architectural style (despite the comment above) but that's the way it should be given that they are all "Nordic".

As far as the size, it makes sense for them to be a little smaller than Cyrodiil, since Skyrim is meant to be more rural.

Skyrim has bigger villages than Winterhold, that's the whole theme behind Winterhold, being small and destroyed.

Solitude is bigger than Ebonheart. And Windhelm is larger than Balmora. Whiterun is much larger than Ald'Ruhn, when you take the surrounding farmland into account.

People are GREATLY understating the size of the cities. No, they aren't smaller than individual cities.

The populations are smaller, yes, as are the number of buildings. However, in Morrowind, buildings were less than half the size they are in later games. Furthermore, Morrowind's cities were more heavily populated than Oblivion and Skyrim's because the lack of NPC schedules required a NEW NPC to be used everywhere you'd expect to find someone.

They could've built up the outskirts of cities a bit more with peasants, farmers and traders and their stalls, huts and shanties. The actual cities could have been reserved for the higher classes like nobles and knights, as well as more up market shops. Would also be good to have had various travellers coming and going.

GTA is not really a fair comparison, and i'm no apologetist for the half assed job done in skyrim btw, GTAs game was suppose to be in a city the size of skyrim, skryim is suppose to have cities that include dungeons and other sites to explore.

They attempted this somewhat in some of the bigger towns like whiterun, markarth and solitude, but because of the platform they choose to build this game on, they have limited resources to work with and most of the things that would create immersion, just got left out.

Yeah, i quite like the activity outside of Whiterun. Even though it is quite limited.

Dude that would be lag hell. You think the performance is bad now lol.

No they're not. In oblivion at least every family had their own house some what and there was lots of houses. Now there are barely 5 individual houses tops. And where people sleep is beyond me. Why does nazeem sleep in the Durnken Huntsmen. WHy is there only ever one tavern in each town? The Cities in Skyrim are much more diverse yes. But I don't get the feeling that they are more 'lively' or bigger at all. They feel like embelished settlements. That's the walled cities, the unwalled cities are barely bigger than the villages they rule over.

Stores, quite realistically (For the time period represented) are also fully-functioning homes. As for Nazeem... I have no flippin' clue. Maybe he thinks they offer better security, instead of him sleeping somewhere obvious where the Player Character can kill him?

Nazeem's wife kicked him out after she caught him and Balgruuf misusing Dwarven Oil.

"Check the Jarl's backside, that's usually where he stuffs himself these days..."

How are they more diverse than Oblivion? Like I say, I like the Skyrim cities, but don't understand the assertion that they are more diverse. I don't see that. In Oblivion you had a Nordic city, a water front sea commerce city (Anvil), a stone gothic city (Skingrad), a slum drug infested city (Bravil), etc, etc. I do like Skyrim cities but don't see why people think they are more diverse than Oblivion.