Even at the size it's at now it's barely got any content.
Making it even bigger would be pointless.
I've never once played Skyrim and thought to myself >You know what I need, a bunch of extra empty buildings and filler npcs to make this feel more grand
If the size doesn't come with more meaningful content it's pointless.
Who said there should be more empty buildings with meandering NPCs? OP isn't offering a solution, just recognizing a problem. Good for you if your immersion isn't broken by wandering into a major city that's the capital of a region and it's just a fricking hamlet. Mine is. Even the very biggest cities like Whiterun and Riften would barely qualify as villages.
Why not scale back the story and lore to the actual game world? Why not call them villages and have the game take place outside of the major cities? Why not have the game take place inside one major city or small county with various districts and parks?
OK then why not go one step further and remove all graphics from the game? Delete all textures and have everything represented by low-poly wireframe meshes. No animations either, every time you swing your sword you get an audio cue to tell you if it hit or not.
Why not? Because it would be moronic, that's why. Immersion is an integral part of video games and has been since they existed. Yeah I enjoy Skyrim just fine but that's because I mentally block out whenever they say "great city" and instead view it in a scale that makes more sense in my own head cannon.
I would actually like to see a return to menu based abstractions for cities/guilds/hubs etc. walking around a town trying to find quest NPCs is pure time wasting anti-fun game design.
Off the top of my head I can remember >Vaermina quest >Dark Brotherhood quest to kill one of the mine owners >Fetch quest for a boat captain to find some void salts >Fetch quest for the smith to find a book >Ring of pure mixtures quest
Doesn't the dude who opened the museum comment on how little it has? The only memorable display were the shards of Mehrune's dagger, which was how I discovered the quest for the Daedric artifact.
I heard about the museum from a random traveller on the road. "oh Dawnstar has a museum blah blah blah" and my expectation was something completely different from that little shitty shack kek.
Even at the size it's at now it's barely got any content.
Making it even bigger would be pointless.
I've never once played Skyrim and thought to myself >You know what I need, a bunch of extra empty buildings and filler NPCs to make this feel more grand
If the size doesn't come with more meaningful content it's pointless.
You can tell this is a zoomer who started with Skyrim because the Imperial City in Oblivion had 5-6 times the amount of "useless" residential buildings as the largest Skyrim cities, but they still added to the sense of scale and importance of being in the fricking capital city of the world.
the main city in witcher 3 was so big that the thought of having to go in every house, explore it all and check box the content made me turn off the game, I never went back.
It was great for what it was. If I were to be satisfied with making something myself there would be all different buildings with something to see in each. Something like 3D sexvilla 2, it has some of the best interiors and exteriors. Runs on anything made in the last 20 years probably. OpenGL, lots of tearing. Homes should pretty much just be one big empty room so you could play VR and look around. Stand in a corner to take an elevator or a train. Combat has replaced exploration as the main incentive in games, that needs to be fixed.
Bethesda hasn't made a single good game in their entire existence, such an overrated company. They were only relevant for their technical know-how back in Morrowind days.
Oblivion is also one of my personal favorites, and a game I come back to quite often.
And like them or hate them, they resurrected Fallout, and Fallout New Vegas is also one of the best games of all time. Maybe they didn't directly develop it, but their actions directly caused its development.
Where does this moronic "franchise revival" idea come from? The license deal was announced so soon after Van Buren's cancellation that there's zero chance they weren't causally linked. New Vegas was just them picking up where they left off.
FO would be a dead and forgotten franchise other than for a handful of autists had it not been for Bethesda. Sorry, kid. You can also stop pretending to have ever played the FO games before Bethesda bought them.
I liked the cities in Morrowind and in Oblivion. They keep regressing though. Skyrim's cities would have been fine if they had been 3x the size (at least). Markarth for example... fricking amazing. Just tiny as shit. Wildhelm and Solitude also had huge potential but were just too small. I think Whiterun and Riften were fine, and Dawnstar is clearly where they started running out of time and money but still called it a "city" when it's clearly an unremarkable fishing village.
Dawstar almost seems like a placeholder. Like, they placed a few assets there and intended to come back to it to make a proper city but never got around to it. The way Dawnstar is talked about (as if it's some major place) suggests it should at least be on the scale of Anvil from Oblivion.
>I want ten times as many irrelevant NPCs with the same two lines of dialogue for the sake of immersion >I want more fake buildings like in the Witcher so I get a city that feels like a maze and a pain in the ass to navigate for the sake of immersion
Yeah, nah, frick off.
Skyrim has plenty of problems, size of the cities ain't one. For once it's scaled, Whiterun has supposedly 50k people and you only get to meet the relevant ones, quest givers, Jarl's entourage and the main shop/inn/blacksmith for in game mechanics. Do you really want to see thousands of useless potato faced kids and beggars every corner of your re-sized city?
Same for Riften with thieves, Solitude for generic Imperial soldiers etc.
Not to mention that would make the map absurdly large, thus forcing you to use fast travel all the time.
The only really shit ""city"" is Winterhold, idgaf about the lore implications, there's no way 3 buildings next to the College qualify as a "city". If only 3 buildings survive after a natural calamity then it's time to settle elsewhere.
Again, Skyrim's problems are the dumbass AI for NPCs, the (still 1000 times better than Morrowshit) lame combat and redundant quests (fetch this for X dude, clear this cave for X jarl, kill this guy for DB, etc.).
Really the only thing I'm glad they did is scale down the whole province, makes horse/foot travel interesting (and thus makes surival mode not only actually playable but even cool at times with the CC mods) doesn't add unnecessary NPCs or buildings and despite the entirety of Skyrim fitting inside a real life city you can still gaze at the far away mountains and feel you live in a vast and rich world.
They did more with less and that's always a plus.
Ah but OP is probably one of those Daggerfall posers, pretending that randomized copy pasted buildings and locations make the world feel "huge".
>Here's your major city bro
I think the problem isn't actually in the size or scale. Games like Gothic 1/2 operate on even smaller scale, and they get away with it, Gothic 2 being still considered one of the most immersive RPG's of all time.
It's with the fact that Bethesda never had seen, nor has any interest in seeing, an actual historical piece of reference data. It's about detail. It's about understanding how things work. A miniature of a breathing place is going to be immersive and memorable.
Full scale realistic-size town made out of brain-dead blocks of assets based on american cartoon idea of what middle ages looked like is not.
I mean you can use scale to enhance the experience, but it may just as easily backfire.
It's the fact that the dimensions are wrong. The houses are too tall. They are too far apart for houses without gardens, but they don't have gardens. it's the lack of real proper cluttter, lack of every-day use items. It's the lack of actually human-produced vegetation. The lack of wood sheds or stockpiles
People place their houses into certain configurations for a reason. They may stick houses really close together to preserve heat, to make the most of limited farmland. Or they set them quite a part, to make space for gardens and animal barns.
People do all kind of daily jobs. They wash their clothes, they fix up hole in the walls, they cook their meals, they store wood, they keep animals, they do the dishes, they throw trash away. All of that leaves a mark on the place.
Vegetation also has some natural patterns in which it grows, and people interact with it.
All of this leaves a mark on a place and even if we aren't conscious of it, it's what makes it immersive and belivable or not, comfy, or not.
And Bethesda is just simply the WORST at understanding this.
They treat EVERY settlement, from Fallout past Skyrim to Starifield, like it's an american sub-urb. Or not even that. Like it's disneyland park prop.
The only thing I agree with in your post is the lack of gardens bit.
Not only it's clear you haven't played the game, but you also don't understand the cultural differences in architecture.
The architecture of most cities in Skyrim is inspired by Norse houses. They are "too tall" as you say because the Norse used to build houses out of longships. In Markarth you have basically a bunker city as it's built inside a mountain by an extinct race of elves, with its distinct golden/stone style. Solitude is the best city in the game and it's very well designed, the only thing lacking is the Castle Dour "district" which feels very empty and underused.
It's true that there's often too much space in between buildings but you have to conceptualize this is for the gameplay. How can you pull a sneak build, if you're forced into narrow paths or stopped by walls and fences. You'd have to bring back acrobatics but the engine is what it is.
So basically in order to fix a "problem" that 99% of Skyrim players don't have you have to go back to the drawing board and redo the whole game, including game mechanics, to make an already somewhat realistic settlement more "immersive".
I'm not defending Bethesda, because their butchering of the lore and the factions, the "dumbification" of everything most importantly the dialogue options is unforgivable. But again.. the problem is NOT the immersion. Skyrim has still great immersion in 2024 and it's a fricking 13 yo game with an outdated engine and a team of morons behind it.
Given the background they made a wonder of a game, aesthetically speaking.
>Not only it's clear you haven't played the game, but you also don't understand the cultural differences in architecture. >The architecture of most cities in Skyrim is inspired by Norse houses. They are "too tall" as you say because the Norse used to build houses out of longships.
Want to know how I know you are a murrican?
>he architecture of most cities in Skyrim is inspired by Norse houses.
This has as much to do with norse architecture, as The Three Vikings had with realistic portrayal of scandinavian medieval raiding parties.
Which is to say: NO. This is a child's idea of norse architecture, an american suburb house with a PVC renassisance fair coat.
>They are "too tall" as you say because the Norse used to build houses out of longships.
Not only they did not actually do that, that is a myth about as accurate as the fricking horns on viking helmets are, but also: Did the word "long" not clue you in? Even if this hilarious misconception was right, it would just prove me right.
>How can you pull a sneak build, if you're forced into narrow paths or stopped by walls and fences.
KCD pulled it off, Gothic pulled it off, fricking Morrowind which runs on the same engine pulled it off, and you are absolutely full of shit. This has nothing to do with gameplay and you absolutely know that.
This is because again, nobody gives a flying frick in the US, they just plop shit down randomly because it does not matter, the audience are children and delusional people like you who will defend anything.
>But again.. the problem is NOT the immersion.
It is if you ever fricking lived anywhere that isn't american fly-over state. This is the absolute fricking core of the problem:
People who have no history, do not understand why history forms our understanding of present. If you have basic education, basic comprehension of history, or of cultural variety, this shit is the least immersive shit in the universe, because again:
You have seen world that has not been sanitized suburb in wayoming. People who don't quite grasp that apples are not magically appearing in supermarkets, and that milk comes from pregnant cows, cannot be immersed in this shit because it is UNBELIVABLY artificial and utterly vapid.
I played Skyrimjob first and while the world was big it was mostly just cardboard representations of it
Yeah sure theres a mountain I could climb through determination and jank
Yeah theres a bunch of generic dungeons and quests to do that pad out the time nicely.
But being quite frank we got it rereleased 10 times because nostalgia gays wanted to relive their first time with an open world RPG (that wasn't set in America)
We could have gotten ES6 with updated gameplay but no, we've kept the same stiff fighting and NPC interactions instead.
Spellcrafting looks cool but I'm not traveling back in time to the stone age just to try it out.
what do they eat?
Fish, moron.
>thinks fish exist
are (you) serious right now
snow cones
They have two fricking mines, can't you put two and two together?
They eat iron ore?
Only the Jarl gets to eat that. The rest of the townsfolk get their daily rock rations.
>mfw I find a garnet while mining and slip it in my mouth before the guards or other miners notice
You snooze you lose
>*CRUNCH*
Like most most of Skyrim, they eat a healthy diet of snowberries, mountain flowers, tundra cotton, and butterfly wings.
>Large body of what in the center of city
No idea.
You don't eat water moron
the salt in the water is edible
Ummmm sea = salt... all you need is salt and water dude... like omg...
wild life, wild berries, nuts, fruits, etc. Plenty of fresh water rivers nearby as well.
semen
Food
Thanks man I didn't want anything confusing or padded with non content
Who said there should be more empty buildings with meandering NPCs? OP isn't offering a solution, just recognizing a problem. Good for you if your immersion isn't broken by wandering into a major city that's the capital of a region and it's just a fricking hamlet. Mine is. Even the very biggest cities like Whiterun and Riften would barely qualify as villages.
Why not scale back the story and lore to the actual game world? Why not call them villages and have the game take place outside of the major cities? Why not have the game take place inside one major city or small county with various districts and parks?
they wanted a game set in the entirety of skyrim with every hold. video games are not for you if you can't handle standard abstraction
OK then why not go one step further and remove all graphics from the game? Delete all textures and have everything represented by low-poly wireframe meshes. No animations either, every time you swing your sword you get an audio cue to tell you if it hit or not.
Why not? Because it would be moronic, that's why. Immersion is an integral part of video games and has been since they existed. Yeah I enjoy Skyrim just fine but that's because I mentally block out whenever they say "great city" and instead view it in a scale that makes more sense in my own head cannon.
Yeah they should replace the city and NPCs with a single quest board alone in a field titled "content"
I would actually like to see a return to menu based abstractions for cities/guilds/hubs etc. walking around a town trying to find quest NPCs is pure time wasting anti-fun game design.
I don't remember this "city" having any content
I remember having a quest for the museum that I couldn't do because of a bug
Off the top of my head I can remember
>Vaermina quest
>Dark Brotherhood quest to kill one of the mine owners
>Fetch quest for a boat captain to find some void salts
>Fetch quest for the smith to find a book
>Ring of pure mixtures quest
mehrune's razor quest as well
I just remember being told there was a museum in this "city" and then getting to it and it's just a crappy shack with like 1 interesting item in it.
How tf are you going to tease me with a museum and pull that on me, Howard?
Doesn't the dude who opened the museum comment on how little it has? The only memorable display were the shards of Mehrune's dagger, which was how I discovered the quest for the Daedric artifact.
I heard about the museum from a random traveller on the road. "oh Dawnstar has a museum blah blah blah" and my expectation was something completely different from that little shitty shack kek.
Even at the size it's at now it's barely got any content.
Making it even bigger would be pointless.
I've never once played Skyrim and thought to myself
>You know what I need, a bunch of extra empty buildings and filler NPCs to make this feel more grand
If the size doesn't come with more meaningful content it's pointless.
You can tell this is a zoomer who started with Skyrim because the Imperial City in Oblivion had 5-6 times the amount of "useless" residential buildings as the largest Skyrim cities, but they still added to the sense of scale and importance of being in the fricking capital city of the world.
thanks for abstracting it a bit for the medium. it sure would be tedious to have 1k npcs that add nothing substantial to my experience
does no one care about the mysterious door in the rocks 20 feet to the west?
Thanks. Dawnstar is peak comfy.
dawnstar is lovely, i always make my home near there with my wife sylgja.
comfy
>Dawnstar enjoyer
based
>Sylgja enjoyer
double based
Too bad it never fricking looks like that because of the constant snow storms that make everything grey.
the main city in witcher 3 was so big that the thought of having to go in every house, explore it all and check box the content made me turn off the game, I never went back.
Sounds like a (You) problem
You can't enter most buildings in Novigrad anyways, I prefer the TES approach
>dawnstar is a shithole with 2 quests and a few houses
>dragonstar is memoryholed
skyrim was a mistake
Morthal got raped way worse. It really one has 1 quest.
at least it has the whole Falion's secret thing I guess
Which never got expanded on and never got a quest.
[ Distant Horizons starts playing ]
Somehow still better than any city in Starfield
It was great for what it was. If I were to be satisfied with making something myself there would be all different buildings with something to see in each. Something like 3D sexvilla 2, it has some of the best interiors and exteriors. Runs on anything made in the last 20 years probably. OpenGL, lots of tearing. Homes should pretty much just be one big empty room so you could play VR and look around. Stand in a corner to take an elevator or a train. Combat has replaced exploration as the main incentive in games, that needs to be fixed.
Bethesda hasn't made a single good game in their entire existence, such an overrated company. They were only relevant for their technical know-how back in Morrowind days.
They certainly didn't deserve to buy id.
They made one of the best games of all time.
Oblivion is also one of my personal favorites, and a game I come back to quite often.
And like them or hate them, they resurrected Fallout, and Fallout New Vegas is also one of the best games of all time. Maybe they didn't directly develop it, but their actions directly caused its development.
Burn in hell.
no u.
Where does this moronic "franchise revival" idea come from? The license deal was announced so soon after Van Buren's cancellation that there's zero chance they weren't causally linked. New Vegas was just them picking up where they left off.
FO would be a dead and forgotten franchise other than for a handful of autists had it not been for Bethesda. Sorry, kid. You can also stop pretending to have ever played the FO games before Bethesda bought them.
Why can't they make a good fricking city for once?
>b-but Imperial Ci--
SHUT UP
IC sucked in Oblivion
I liked the cities in Morrowind and in Oblivion. They keep regressing though. Skyrim's cities would have been fine if they had been 3x the size (at least). Markarth for example... fricking amazing. Just tiny as shit. Wildhelm and Solitude also had huge potential but were just too small. I think Whiterun and Riften were fine, and Dawnstar is clearly where they started running out of time and money but still called it a "city" when it's clearly an unremarkable fishing village.
Dawstar almost seems like a placeholder. Like, they placed a few assets there and intended to come back to it to make a proper city but never got around to it. The way Dawnstar is talked about (as if it's some major place) suggests it should at least be on the scale of Anvil from Oblivion.
but the imperial city fricking sucked
>I want ten times as many irrelevant NPCs with the same two lines of dialogue for the sake of immersion
>I want more fake buildings like in the Witcher so I get a city that feels like a maze and a pain in the ass to navigate for the sake of immersion
Yeah, nah, frick off.
Skyrim has plenty of problems, size of the cities ain't one. For once it's scaled, Whiterun has supposedly 50k people and you only get to meet the relevant ones, quest givers, Jarl's entourage and the main shop/inn/blacksmith for in game mechanics. Do you really want to see thousands of useless potato faced kids and beggars every corner of your re-sized city?
Same for Riften with thieves, Solitude for generic Imperial soldiers etc.
Not to mention that would make the map absurdly large, thus forcing you to use fast travel all the time.
The only really shit ""city"" is Winterhold, idgaf about the lore implications, there's no way 3 buildings next to the College qualify as a "city". If only 3 buildings survive after a natural calamity then it's time to settle elsewhere.
Again, Skyrim's problems are the dumbass AI for NPCs, the (still 1000 times better than Morrowshit) lame combat and redundant quests (fetch this for X dude, clear this cave for X jarl, kill this guy for DB, etc.).
Really the only thing I'm glad they did is scale down the whole province, makes horse/foot travel interesting (and thus makes surival mode not only actually playable but even cool at times with the CC mods) doesn't add unnecessary NPCs or buildings and despite the entirety of Skyrim fitting inside a real life city you can still gaze at the far away mountains and feel you live in a vast and rich world.
They did more with less and that's always a plus.
Ah but OP is probably one of those Daggerfall posers, pretending that randomized copy pasted buildings and locations make the world feel "huge".
I just like Morrowind.
>t. Not OP
>Here's your major city bro
I think the problem isn't actually in the size or scale. Games like Gothic 1/2 operate on even smaller scale, and they get away with it, Gothic 2 being still considered one of the most immersive RPG's of all time.
It's with the fact that Bethesda never had seen, nor has any interest in seeing, an actual historical piece of reference data. It's about detail. It's about understanding how things work. A miniature of a breathing place is going to be immersive and memorable.
Full scale realistic-size town made out of brain-dead blocks of assets based on american cartoon idea of what middle ages looked like is not.
I mean you can use scale to enhance the experience, but it may just as easily backfire.
It's the fact that the dimensions are wrong. The houses are too tall. They are too far apart for houses without gardens, but they don't have gardens. it's the lack of real proper cluttter, lack of every-day use items. It's the lack of actually human-produced vegetation. The lack of wood sheds or stockpiles
People place their houses into certain configurations for a reason. They may stick houses really close together to preserve heat, to make the most of limited farmland. Or they set them quite a part, to make space for gardens and animal barns.
People do all kind of daily jobs. They wash their clothes, they fix up hole in the walls, they cook their meals, they store wood, they keep animals, they do the dishes, they throw trash away. All of that leaves a mark on the place.
Vegetation also has some natural patterns in which it grows, and people interact with it.
All of this leaves a mark on a place and even if we aren't conscious of it, it's what makes it immersive and belivable or not, comfy, or not.
And Bethesda is just simply the WORST at understanding this.
They treat EVERY settlement, from Fallout past Skyrim to Starifield, like it's an american sub-urb. Or not even that. Like it's disneyland park prop.
The only thing I agree with in your post is the lack of gardens bit.
Not only it's clear you haven't played the game, but you also don't understand the cultural differences in architecture.
The architecture of most cities in Skyrim is inspired by Norse houses. They are "too tall" as you say because the Norse used to build houses out of longships. In Markarth you have basically a bunker city as it's built inside a mountain by an extinct race of elves, with its distinct golden/stone style. Solitude is the best city in the game and it's very well designed, the only thing lacking is the Castle Dour "district" which feels very empty and underused.
It's true that there's often too much space in between buildings but you have to conceptualize this is for the gameplay. How can you pull a sneak build, if you're forced into narrow paths or stopped by walls and fences. You'd have to bring back acrobatics but the engine is what it is.
So basically in order to fix a "problem" that 99% of Skyrim players don't have you have to go back to the drawing board and redo the whole game, including game mechanics, to make an already somewhat realistic settlement more "immersive".
I'm not defending Bethesda, because their butchering of the lore and the factions, the "dumbification" of everything most importantly the dialogue options is unforgivable. But again.. the problem is NOT the immersion. Skyrim has still great immersion in 2024 and it's a fricking 13 yo game with an outdated engine and a team of morons behind it.
Given the background they made a wonder of a game, aesthetically speaking.
>Not only it's clear you haven't played the game, but you also don't understand the cultural differences in architecture.
>The architecture of most cities in Skyrim is inspired by Norse houses. They are "too tall" as you say because the Norse used to build houses out of longships.
Want to know how I know you are a murrican?
>he architecture of most cities in Skyrim is inspired by Norse houses.
This has as much to do with norse architecture, as The Three Vikings had with realistic portrayal of scandinavian medieval raiding parties.
Which is to say: NO. This is a child's idea of norse architecture, an american suburb house with a PVC renassisance fair coat.
>They are "too tall" as you say because the Norse used to build houses out of longships.
Not only they did not actually do that, that is a myth about as accurate as the fricking horns on viking helmets are, but also: Did the word "long" not clue you in? Even if this hilarious misconception was right, it would just prove me right.
>How can you pull a sneak build, if you're forced into narrow paths or stopped by walls and fences.
KCD pulled it off, Gothic pulled it off, fricking Morrowind which runs on the same engine pulled it off, and you are absolutely full of shit. This has nothing to do with gameplay and you absolutely know that.
This is because again, nobody gives a flying frick in the US, they just plop shit down randomly because it does not matter, the audience are children and delusional people like you who will defend anything.
>But again.. the problem is NOT the immersion.
It is if you ever fricking lived anywhere that isn't american fly-over state. This is the absolute fricking core of the problem:
People who have no history, do not understand why history forms our understanding of present. If you have basic education, basic comprehension of history, or of cultural variety, this shit is the least immersive shit in the universe, because again:
You have seen world that has not been sanitized suburb in wayoming. People who don't quite grasp that apples are not magically appearing in supermarkets, and that milk comes from pregnant cows, cannot be immersed in this shit because it is UNBELIVABLY artificial and utterly vapid.
I played Skyrimjob first and while the world was big it was mostly just cardboard representations of it
Yeah sure theres a mountain I could climb through determination and jank
Yeah theres a bunch of generic dungeons and quests to do that pad out the time nicely.
But being quite frank we got it rereleased 10 times because nostalgia gays wanted to relive their first time with an open world RPG (that wasn't set in America)
We could have gotten ES6 with updated gameplay but no, we've kept the same stiff fighting and NPC interactions instead.
Spellcrafting looks cool but I'm not traveling back in time to the stone age just to try it out.
Just imagine all the shlongs of Skyrim, just waiting for you to find them.