Well then base it off Jorvik. This is a fantasy game, the cultures don't have to (and usually don't) align exactly with a real culture, they have freedom here. The lack of size in the cities just means less content and less impressive locales.

What's hilarious about this argument is: if Bethesda did implement a 'true' city, with 50 or so people in each cell, 100 houses in the private living area, and dozens of shopkeepers...people would complain about how long it took to find someone's house for quests. They'd whine that the NPC's didn't each have a backstory and original dialogue. People on consoles would go NUTS because the cells took forever to load and the lag would be insane.

The lesson is: Bethesda can't, and never will, satisfy everyone. Never.

....But the NPCs of Skyrim DON'T have backstories or original dialog.

I certainly wouldn't. I mean you have the marker on your compass and map to tell you were someone lives, even if it had no more quest content, doubling or tripling the size of cities would be great. Of course if it made it lag badly then it's understandable, but in my game, the cities run as good as if not better than most of the Wilderness (I checked my framerate), and there's probably more detail in some building modelss than is necessary, so I hardly think making them a little bigger would hurt. Also, they have massive battle scenes now, so lots of NPCs shouldn't be an issue. I'm not saying they should dilute them to the point of Assassin's Creed, but having a few people without quests tied to them is no big deal.

Who cares? Seriously. This idea that if they do things better there will still be people with problems so they shouldn't do anything better, is stupid.
NPCs already don't have a backstory or original dialogue in the majority of cases. If Bethesda can't optimize their game then they need to dial back on fluff graphics features, not cut actual content.

I think they could have made huge cities by reusing a lot of objects, as the earlier TES games did. Those buildings and cities saw a lot of repetition. At least, we have to applaud the uniqueness of the just about every setting in Skyrim.

Question is, will they try it? I think the failing if there is any failing, is that what value is there in being a hero or whatever, if there are few people in the world to theoretically take notice. It is simply to much isolation where there shouldn't be. I'm not saying it should be populated like an assassin's creed city, it would drive me nuts to get across town. Even if there were fake doors and non interactive NPCs it would make it somewhat more immersive.

Yeah, Dawnstar, Morthal, Winterhold and Falkreath are so much more unique than any 4 of the cities in Oblivion, what with how many architectural styles they have.

According to this message board, yes. In real life, no.

Didn't they use the word 'big' themselves and every damn other source talked about massive, epic, huge etc?

Hmm, that's reverse from my experience. I can stand at any point you care to name in the wilderness and do a smooth 360 degree spin, but stand at one end of a walled city (Markarth, Solitude, Windhelm, Whiterun, haven't been to Riften yet) and look at the other end and things start to chug a bit, dropping the FPS down to 20-25. That may have to do with a painful lack of blocking volumes (to borrow a term from the Unreal engine) in the game. Even though I can't see through walls and buildings, the game tries to render the far side of them anyway. The reportedly-CPU-bound lighting may also have something to do with it as there aren't many torches in the wilderness.

I'm pretty sure massive was their own words, but people have embelished with things like "bigger than the Imperial city" and stuff, which I was constantly trying to correct those who would listen on. People just love to believe misinformation... God, I remember when someone refused to believe that what we now know is Solitude really was that. They were positive it was the small village of dragonbridge, and Solitude was going to be way bigger.

The only cities I checked with this method were Whiterun and Solitude. I guess it could be my computer, but for some reason, when I was in Whiterun, the only place where my slowdown was worse than in just the tundra outside was when I was looking down from Dragonsreach.

I would suggest maybe they try to do too much in the game. How do you balance an open large world, that really isn't that large, with many cities and towns in it. Perhaps having only 1 large city and a couple small towns would be more appropriate to scale. I will still enjoy it, but I hope they can find a good balance in the future. I hate to roll my eyes when the jarl says they will do whatever to protect their people, and I immediately think, "what people? you mean the six guards I passed on the way to this "palace"". I'd be willing to have longer loading times if necessary. I'm never in a huge rush.

That's the problem though- read your own post- "fake doors" would drive TES fans UP THE WALLS. They would literally go insane. Read the posts complaining about the handcrafted dungeons- Skyrim has some of the most beautiful, unique dungeons I've ever seen and people are complaining because "the loot is all the same" or "they're too small and there aren't enough passageways". Seriously, there's been dozens of threads.

There is NO WAY, ABSOLUTELY NO WAY Bethesda could EVER make a 'massive' city without cutting corners by populating it with NPC's that don't interact, houses that have no loot, etc etc. And people would lose their minds- "Beth makes the most boring houses ever!!!111 Every house just has chairs and apples and crap!!! The same books are in EVERY HOUSE!!! Bethesda doesn't make role playing games anymoarrr!!111"

You see what I mean?

They are in a no win situation.

Morrowind had loads more houses than Skyrim. Loads. Without fake doors. Nobody complained about them. Why now is it so hard to make them?

Loads? Really? Are you talking just Vivec or what? Also, yes, people complained about them eventually because they suffered the same fate- every house had the same things in it. Once the newness of the game wore off and the large bugs were knocked out, there was a LOT of complaining about how repetitive stuff was in the game- it's just hard for people to accept that about what is considered the pinnacle of the TES series.

Morrowind also didn't have to worry about random AI movement and scripting of NPC's in those cells, as well as DRAGON ATTACKS in town.

Why, Why would it drive people nuts to not be able to enter every door in a town. You have to sacrifice somewhere, so its either have a major city as the whole map, or understand you can't go everywhere, or have a longer loading time to have a larger city to go everywhere. I wouldn't expect them to make every NPC interactive. That's insane. Just like how I don't interact with every person I see. I am not complaining about the dungeons. Frankly I would expect to see a lot of the same stuff in houses, and enchanted weapons should be fewer and farther between. I find it odd that every chest i open or person i kill almost always has an enchanted weapon, not very special anymore. I'd expect it to take me along time to get one enchanted weapon or search a lot of places to get decent treasure. I am so tired of young peoples need for instant gratification. That is what has ruined these games.

Yes. Yes. No. Vivec had about 85 buildings. The other big 3 had about 35. There were towns in MW as big as the big cities in Skyrim (building count) and at worst, about the size of the largest village (Riverwood). There were something like 20 of these towns/villages. Morrowind had loads more buildings than Skyrim.

Umm... you people do realize that Skyrim is supposed to represent a COUNTRY? RIGHT???

Last time I checked, the"country" of skyrim was 16 Square miles. Manhattan alone is 23.7 square miles. If you wanted a truly massive city, then it would occupy at least a quarter of a map... no thank you!

IMO, I really like the size of the cities. There there to get quests, shop, store things, and have random convos with NPC's. I'm not a fan of a lot of filler. If I had to trek 5 miles down the road just to go from one shop to another and see a lot of inaccessible houses along the way, that would get on my nerves big time!

In response to your question, I direct you to the response someone gave me just a few posts up. Do you see that people COUNT THE BUILDINGS? Yes. They count them. I'm sure they also know how many NPC's are in each town and what the ratio is for how many of them give quests.

People. really. are. this. intense. with this game. Which is why I said what I said- there's no way, with the level of detail Bethesda puts into the graphics, AI, etc, that they could build a city on today's coding good enough for the fans without crashing everything but the top 10% of gaming systems. Unless they cut corners. But people count the buildings.

They count them...

Well the best information I could provide you about that is the big cities are still in mine and other peoples heads. Given a month many will be realized through the Creation Kit for PC users, and console owners will either have to wait to see if mods will be allowed or invest into a better gaming computer. Oh and if post angers anyone because they feel everyone should be happy with the vanilla release or the game is flawed, then you should know besides their size all of the cities all of the cities function very well and need no real fixing (not including towns, cause some of them have some problems). It's just the choice of a select group of people to want more houses and npc's in the main cities that could not have been added due to hardware limitations on consoles and older computers which they wanted to be able to play the game.

The cities in Oblivion had more buildings and it was fine 5 years ago. In that 5 years gaming systems have improved, as well as coding. There's no reason they should be getting smaller.

I love how you keep responding to my posts, refuting my logic while completely ignoring random AI scripting in the game and dragon involvement, which I mentioned two posts ago. Good times.

I wouldn't class them as cities, they would just about make it into the town category and even then...