Skyrim seems to be pretty lifeless in many places.

Visit a tavern at night. There's a barkeeper, 2 or 3 visitors, no life at all. In one tavern there are even background noises of crods speaking, but I watched everywhere: the crowds are not there. Only a few people.
College of Winterhold. It looks huge from outside. Inside you'll see a few staff members and about 5 Students.

I mean Skyrim is great and I love it, but way too few npc's and interaction amongst npc's.

You can add more generic npcs by using console commands or use a mod.

I wonder what Skyrim would have been like on hardware a few years from now.

"You can even play msuic and have bar brawls break out in taverns"

Liers.

I've gotten into a few bar brawls

They're not lieing, you can actually do those

Yeah, you can request a song and find someone to brawl. Now if only we had inebriation effects.

what command???

not the interesting part, music but if someone would like an idea for a mod (which i could never use for my xbox, but would gladly toss the idea out there) make a composition system similier to that of the online mmorpg "mabinogi" it is pretty awsome when you get to learnign how to make music on it (i can only make lillium though )

Prettier faces. Better lighting. Same size crowds.

There's a lot of NPC's. I think you are expecting too much from a current generation game.

pcs now = consoles a few years from now


we shouldnt have to imagine

So how long before we have AI equivalent to humans and bustling cities? Within my lifetime I hope...

since oblivion beth has spread themselves too thin trying to make NPCs more lively. at this stage in technology, its best to do what most games do to make cities populated and thats to have a buttload of NPCs with simple scripts, instead of 5 NPCs with whole damn weekly schedules. they seem to be unaware of the uncanny valley effect: if you focus this much on a few aspects of human behavior like scheduled activities and individual lives, all its going to do is make us notice everything you fail to address like their insane speech patterns and vapid, empty lives of sitting at a table for 6 hours then going to sleep, waking up, and standing in a corner for another 6 hours. make them walk around aimlessly and occasionally spout something, and nobody questions it; thats pretty much all we ever see our fellow man doing anyway.

Player.Placeatme [insert Npc base ID here]

457FC places a generic Wood elf male. Just replace the C in the end of the ID with some other letter for different race and gender.

http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Console_Commands_%28Skyrim%29

Um.

Dragons?

Maybe crowds of people don't want to be out at night, even just to go to the inn.

Also, civil war? People are dying man. This is no time to celebrate!

Look around at the game lore and you'll understand why people aren't on the roads and there aren't huge crowds.

Blasphemy! It's always time to party down! In fact times of great strife are when the need to celebrate reaches it's peaks!
Look at America's Civil War, do you know what we got out of it? That's right, Thanksgiving became an actual holiday.

God Bless Abraham Lincoln!

Witcher 2 did taverns right.

One word.... Daggerfall
It is true, though. This generation of games have been developed with an extra side of laziness. Early generations had depth where this one has graphics.

Daggerfall, lacked MANY things Skyrim has since had to fill space with. I can't believe you actually tried to compare Daggerfall NPC's with Skyrim. I don't mean to be rude but...that's silly.

It's not that, but newer games have so much more [censored] to go through to get anything in the game. All these graphics come at a big price, voice acting a huge price also. It's not so much a limit of their ability, but of the technology. You can only do so much, if you want more NPC's be prepared to sacrifice some development time that could have gone to something else. Modern technology costs a hell of a lot to use, unlike the smaller simpler technology of yesteryear. An example of this is Dwarf Fortress, now that has TONS of stuff to do. But look at the cost of developing that much features, the bar minimum one could call graphics and sound. It's largely text based, but there's just so much in the world that it's gigantic. Perhaps one of the biggest games around. I would say game developers are crushed for time, there's just only so much manpower and technology to do this stuff.

I'd love to see Skyrim a little bit more populated. I doubt the NPC population reaches 200.

Daggerfall had a lot of NPCs (and also homes to buy, many more in most cities than all of Skyrim combined) and it's not current generation. Quality over quantity, I guess, but a there were a lot of fleshed out NPCs in that old game as well.

I think the difference lies in current generation games needing NPCs with hair that blows lovingly in the wind and that scratch themselves when standing around in pants you can tell are linen or leather. Me? I'd rather have the quantity.

yes ES:VII will rock indubitably

you have to figure they will bounce between elder scrolls and fallout, game to game

imagine... graphics out the yinyang, facial feature animation that makes la noire look like dog crap, environments that make skyrim's world look like the map in super mario world, combat as tight as a top tier fighter, a story like the godfather, and being able to start forest fires with fire spells...

Hahaha, you wish. It's going to be the same NPC's standing around as always. Just add an additional layer of brown, blur, and bloom and your good to go.