CONSOLES RUIN EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Skyrim has a smaller population of named NPCs and a significantly smaller building count than any other TES game. I can't think of any good reason why, except that they perhaps made some major screwups and had to start from scratch, depleting their time, or that they spent far too much time dreaming about how cool dragons and dragon shouts would be.

I only play this Skyrim series. Does other (previous) series have lower or same graphic quality than current one?
probably this is the trade-off.

Morrowind has lower graphics and Oblivion has slightly lower (in cities, it's not really noticeable except that the textures look a bit more natural in design and more things have shadows). Still, I don't think this is really an excuse for smaller cities and fewer NPCs, they could handle a bit more, and especially more NPCs, who seem to run very efficiently on this engine (eg. huge battle scenes). It certainly isn't an excuse to only have 5 cities of any substance and have the rest be a crappy little village with 15-20 people. If they made 5 of those, making 4 more wouldn't make anything run slower.

Oblivion had way more NPCs on the same consoles. Or should we forget that and just blame MS and Sony?

It only has a little bit to do with consoles and load times. Assuming everyone ran a supercomputer with infinite speed, the battles would probably be somewhat larger, but we still wouldn't see realistic populations in cities.

Why? Because it's boring. This is a game focusing on combat, adventure, and excitement, as such they scaled down the cities from what they acutaly should be and only included things that you would care about as an adventurer. If you had to wander through countless blocks of poor homes and useless shops to get where you wanted to go you would be longing for the game to be as it is now.

Do you have a GTA game? If so, boot it up and instead of taking a car, walk from one side of the city to the other. Then tell me how exciting that was. That's what TES would be like if they included "Realistic" cities.

Like alot of other people said it's the limitations of the Sega Megadrive version 2's hardware.

360 FTL

Well oblivion worked fine for me...

I swear the small town of Flotsam in The Wicther 2 had more people in it than any so called "city" in Skyrim ask yourself.

TO everybody talking about hardware limits: adding NPCs to Skyrim would be hard for that reason, but it's not console's fault, it's Bethesda's decision of keep using the very same old engine of Fallout, Oblibion and Morrowind. They may have changed the engine, realized something different, more immersive. To make an example: cities in Assassin's Creed are fantastic, lively and immersive: it really -seems- to visit a middle age city. Whiterun with a big castle and 20-25 dwellings is not immersive, your never feel like visiting a city.

But you've seen the huge battle scenes in Skyrim. Oblivion slowed down a lot for me with the 10 NPCs and 10 daedra in the battle of Bruma, yet Skyrim can run what appears to be 30 odd people at once with no sweat in any of the battles in the civil war questline. Yet the streets are emptier than in Oblivion. Surely they could add a few more NPCs. Adding buildings might be a bit more troublesome (Though I'm no expert), but some buildings seem to have a bit of unnecessary detail anyway. I'm sure a few more wouldn't be the end of the world.

I thought the speed bottleneck in modern games was the graphics card.Lots of NPCs is surely more of a CPU task so can hardware limits be the reason for the emptiness of cities?
2 Worlds 2 is absolutely teeming with people so if there is lag it must be down to the game engine.

The imagination statement plays a big part, but on top of this, we're looking at a land that has recently been ravaged by war and is now involved in another fight between the Empire and Nords. The villages, towns and cities are damaged, the people depleted, I always thought everything was just right.

If I entered a city full of people, yet, I could only speak to a select few, or only a handful actually provided quests and decent information I'd be frustrated to death trying to find anything or anyone of use.

Personally I feel there is restrictions on processing power. Remember everyone who owns a PC doesn't have the quickest rig in the world. I went for the PS3 version of Skyrim for this very reason. You have to be able to provide a game which hits a wide range of users, it needs to provide immersion but not overwhelm. I love wondering the wilds and finding caves and areas to explore. If you tripled the map size there would likely be hours of pointless wondering which resulted in complaints.

I feel sorry for Bethesda here, they have tried to meet the middle ground and provide as much as they can with the technology and time restraints set upon them. If I'm honest, I think Skyrim is fantastic and really enjoy playing it. That's all that matters to me, they're not trying to recreate reality, just provide a great game world with the tools available at the time.

Man... Ultima.... loved those games, and I often refer to TES as the new generation of the Ultima games.... your brining back good memories for me.

'If I entered a city full of people, yet, I could only speak to a select few, or only a handful actually provided quests and decent information I'd be frustrated to death trying to find anything or anyone of use.'

If there were a lot of extra people,surely it`s the job of the interface to tell you which ones you should talk to!Long empty paths without people..If they`re going to have small populations why are the pathways so wide and long?I get a bit tired of climbing all those steps from the Whiterun stores to the Jarls residence,passing about 6-7 people on the way.
It`s the same with dungeons-Having linear corridors and having to refer to the map when arrows appearing at each turning would make more sense.
These are failures of the interface-A massive city with a massive population is possible if they get the interface and controls right- It`s worked with other games.

I think it's all matter of opinion. From my point of view why should you need an interface to show who you can talk to? You'd then have lots of arrows floating around cluttering up the screen and experience. What's the point in having these extra NPCs if they are just purely for aesthetics?

I don't totally disagree with the original request, having more people would be nice. But only if there was a specific point to it. Instead they should maybe add the sounds of business and pvssyring going on in the background to give the illusion more is going on.

Slightly larger cities with more people would be nice. Or at least the option to have a city grow...

With regard to population, it would be cool to have a few quests which give you a team to work on a location (like the Bloodmoon Colony quests). I am mainly talking about starting an archeological dig at one of the Dwemer ruins or having the Legion/Stormcloaks take over a fort of the players choosing. This would take too long to develop though, since everyone would have a different choice. And it is mentioned the Legion is spread to thin as it is, since the main strength is needed elsewhere.

An example would be after completing certain radiant quest being able to take over Faldar's Tooth, make it the main seat of Riften, and be able to expand the city along the road.

I think they have a higher quality standard.

Bethesda could have made big cities like Dragon Age or the Witcher by planting lots of empty building facades all over the place and generic unnamed npcs. But from TES games we expect all city npcs to be unique and every building to be enterable.
Morrowind could also have more because most of the building interiors were poky, the average Balmora or Vivec home had just enough room for a bed, chest, shelf and table and that was about it. And the npcs had no AI and just stood planted to the spot. So it was easier to mass produce homes.

Hate to break it to you, but there are no huge battles in Skyrim. The civil war questline? Those are not huge. Maybe bigger than Oblivion's but that doesn't make them huge. If you want to see a huge battle, go play Mount and Blade with it's 250 soldiers battling it out.

I don't think there's many that would disagree with you here, It just ISN'T realistic for the current hardware, especially with the graphics Skyrim kicks out...

From a technology standpoint, it's easy to render lots of NPC if they are the same (for example guards or soldiers) -- this is mostly a problem with DirectX on the PC. Otherwise, it will be about as efficient as the shadows. PC users know what I mean. When it comes to the consoles, it's a matter of RAM. So the PC and the consoles have completely different reasons why lots of different NPCs is difficult for the hardware.

With that said, I know for a fact that [at least my] PC can handle more unique NPCs in towns. At least a handful more would be OK. And I look forward to the mods that make it happen.

as far as why...its the consoles fault. Im not gonna say its because of thier outdated 5 year old technology....im saying its the actual console users. PC games USED to come out FIRST on PCs THEN came out on consoles, normally about 6 months later down the road and they would have to cut content lay back the graphics BUT im guessing that massive amount of [censored]ing and complaining of WHY they had to wait 6 months later...MUCH MUCH later for PS users and not just talking about Bethesda games. Im guessing they got tired of the consoles users whinning and [censored]ing that the companys just said [censored] it to quality just push it out there so we can get our money and they can shut up.

Yes Oblivion had more people on the street....but did u EVER see them all go into battle at one? I remember the last oblivion gate battle lagging the [censored] outta PCs computers at the time and the 360 was much worse.

Mods hit the nail on the head, way I see it, we console users very rarely [censored], and not saying all PC users do, BUT, your answer is mods, us on console don't have that possibility, should be happy with what they get. And with the creation kit been free and all, more the reason to quit the moaning about the game Bethesda gave us.

Sorry, but I don't believe that it's the modder's job to fix Bethesda's game for them.