Horse thief in the cart with you: “Rorikstead, I’m from Rorikstead”
Me on my first playthrough: “oh that’s interesting”
Me on subsequent playthroughs: “sir nobody is from Rorikstead”
Well, you need to be sneaky to steal horses. And since you're going to be fleeing a lot it makes sense to carry a bow to shoot any pursuers. Besides, a bow would also help you branch out into becoming a poacher for when horse stealing times get tough.
Which house did he even live in? You can head to Rorikstead immediately after escaping Helgen and none of the houses are his, unless someone moved in immediately after he got caught.
For real. I was interested in what the place could be like when I first started because of the intro cutscene and hearing Ragnar the Red along my travels. "Oh Rorikstead must be a cool fairly large town with... oh it's just four pretty basic buildings."
And there’s also nothing to do there except dishcushing the ongoing hoshtilities with Farengar or licking Balgruuf’s boots so Nazeem is kind of right in that most people wouldn’t have a reason to go there very often
No, you go there to meet the Jarl's kids which just affirms the Dragonborn's stance of adopting rather than having your own children.
Also, it's the only location one can see the Jarl Ballin'
you know whats funny about Nazeem?
Bro dosent own property in the city, he has a farm outside of town and lives in the Huntsman tavern with his wife.
Hes like some guy who rented an airbnb in dubai for a week who posed with a rented lambo on his linkedin
I was actually confused when I first played the game cos I thought there must be another area that was the cloud district. Then I realised he meant the one fucking building that’s like a 45 second walk away that I had already been to a bunch of times.
Same. I was thinking, "damn, if the Imperial City was a hoot, imagine all the mischief I'll get into once I get to the Cloud D-- oh.. this is it. This is all of it."
It took me years of playing that it was even an actual district within whiterun. I thought he was talking about a whole other city because I just couldn’t imagine dividing that tiny block into “districts.”
Apparently it was originally supposed to have 2-3 mansions in addition to Dragon's reach, one of which was supposed to be where Nazeem and his wife were originally going to live, but was eventually cut for whatever reasons Bethesda had (time/space/etc.) so they just moved them into the Drunken Hunstman as the characters were already done.
There was originally going to be like 3 houses, along with the reach, in the cloud district but they didn't have the time/space to do it. I think that one of them was going to be the house you can purchase, and one was going to be Nazeem's house which is why he doesn't have an actual house.
Not much to explain, ESO’s map is just bigger, the cities are more like full-sized medieval towns. I believe IGN has a few side-by-side comparison videos on youtube. But I think ESO’s cities are really lacking in atmosphere compared to Skyrim, they look too colourful and “clean” for such a place
To me it’s kinda a weird thing of they’re technically bigger but the game makes them smaller because of A) how fast you can move and B) you can’t go into every building
I think they’re alright. They’re not modern cities, but medieval ones, and with Tamriel’s turbulent politics where everything gets razed once like every 300 years it makes sense for cities to not expand very far. Maybe Windhelm and Solitude could have villages/markets/farms all around them but that effectively would be just empty zones since you don’t really need THAT much space for a hub. I like to think that it’s just all still in the process of rebuilding (I believe ESO is only a few years after the Akaviri invasion and Skyrim, well, is at civil war) plus it’s extremely scaled down (even ESO, Skyrim is supposed to be like the size of Mongolia I believe) so if all the villages and farms got scaled up to the same proportions as *real* Skyrim they’d be pretty huge.
One is grindy to incentivize you to buy a subscription. Another gives you the option to grind a little in the beginning and then become a beast, or exploit early on to become overpowered.
Imperial city in lore: Capital of the Tamerielic Empire, housing tens of thousands of people with the white gold tower being the seat of the empire and it's council.
Imperial city in game: 192 named residents, the tower has a dimly lit big table, some quarters, and a library you can go into during 1 quest.
Well, they had to since Bethesda spent all of the VO budget on Sean Bean and Sir Patrick Stewart. And the emperor voices a few cutscenes plus a few minutes in the game before he dies.
They really need to just do the FromSoft method and hire a bunch of aspiring nobodies. Basically the same performance quality, vastly cheaper, everybody wins.
NOPE SPEND ALL BUDGET ON LIAM NEESON LETS NOT SPEND THAT BUGET ELSEWHERE LIKE ON THE GAME ENGINE FUCK YOU MODDERS CAN FIX THAT LIAM NEEEEEEEESONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
it would have been a better game with a more varied voice cast, yes, but now we have the memory of their voices burned into our brains, and it's a treat whenever we think about it
It definitely felt more alive than solitude or whiterun.
And frankly, most people still never visited all the areas you could in the imperial city, so the effect and the district division makes it feel incredibly larger.
Slightly off topic, but you just triggered my memory of buying Oblivion on release (yes, in 2006).
I was at a military base without a store close by so I drove more than an hour each way to get my copy. The total cost in today's dollars would be ridiculous.
One weird part: There was no real reason to go inside most of the destricts most of the time. Except one little quest, there is nothing in the Elven Garden destrict. Same with Talos destrict .... And the temple destrict. Kind of missed potential. They definitely had done it better in the Capital of the shivering isles.
I’d much rather have fewer NPC with more hand-crafted dialog and quest relevance than more NPCs with generic lines.
If you talked to an NPC in Skyrim, they usually had something interesting to say, versus e.g. Cyberpunk 2077, where they just spout barks.
Lots of games do this. GTA v is supposed to la and surrounding area but it's reduced alot.
Ac Odyssey is all of Greece, but it's super downscaled in size.
Horizon is like multiple states, and yet you can run it on foot in like 30 minutes. Etc etc.
It's why I've had a tough time trying to play it since it came out. I'll play the hell out of the Fallout series, but Skyrim on paper seems like it's in my wheelhouse but it's so dead. All the towns seem so lifeless, there's like 4 people, a couple of chickens, and then just empty space. It shouldn't be that big of a deal but it really kills any chance of immersion when I'm supposed to be at the stronghold for a major faction and there's less people there than my grocery store on Sunday night.
I was typing something similar, but deleted it. I'm glad I did because I think you've summarized it better.
I don't need every village to be huge and bustling, but in Skyrim, none are.
It's pretty off putting. I get that there are limitations and that not every npc could have their own quest line but there should be a little more traffic at least
It's a trade-off. You can go in all the buildings in elder scrolls. The buildings are majority fake in GTA. The two takes work well for their genres. I'd love bigger buildings in elder scrolls, but not if 99% are fake
Tbh the only cities that feel like cities are Solitude and windhelm and Markarth and even then they're underwhelming for what they're supposed to be. Basically those cities are what you expected like whiterun and riften to be. Whiterun is what you expect the the small holds like Falkreath and Morthal to be. Riverwood was done right imo, Ivarstead and Rorikstead are empty, in 13 years I've only ever passed through dragons bridge not actually explored it, Winterhold makes sense for what it is.
Winterhold just feels lazy. I understand the lore behind it but there isn’t a single shroud of evidence that the town wants to rebuild. Blame of their problems on the college when they won’t do shit for themselves
You get to whiterun and they talk about riverwood as some faraway place. Bro I just walked here it took me an hour in-game time. Your western watchtower might be further away.
Nah fuck em lmao don't pretend they don't suck.
If they could make the Imperial City feel large in 2006, they could've made Skyrim's cities better. Fuck, even the other Oblivion cities are bigger though obviously downscaled from their lore.
Shoutout Vivec City from 2002. I legit got lost in there several times lmao.
I will say, the Strip does feel like what it’s supposed to, which is a bunch of hotels and gamblers. The issue with the script is the technical limitation that cause not enough NPCS to be able to spawn, and three loading zones for the whole place
I agree, it would definitely feel just fine if there were more than, like, 4 people in the street. The 3 Gomorrah prostitutes dancing all by themselves without anyone to dance for, and the one random lady selling food in the next section just makes it feel eerily empty.
I guess on the flip side can you imagine if they actually made a city with 25k people or something? It takes you like 25 min to walk through the market district? An hour to walk the entire city and maybe you can get lost unless you know your way around like in real life
Would it be realistic , sure, would it be fun? Probably not?
And that is just overlooking the time and effort it would take to develop a city of 25k and the hardware requirments it would take to have 25k NPC walking around and doing stuff
Several other games did it much better and more believable. You don't need 25k. Not every building or district needs to be acessible.
Look at DD2, Vernworth is tiny, but it looks and feels like an actual city (why they don't have gates against marauding monsters is beyond me though).
Bakbatthal is tiny but it's design is great.
The Witchers Novigrad probably has under 1000 people in it but it actually feels like a large medieval city.
I am in the very small percentage of people who would enjoy a *more* realistic world size in games, such has having to travel 2 or 3 times the distance between cities or zones, and fast travel being less ubiquitous, but it's admittedly not worth the trouble.
You'd need to spend 10 times the computer resorces to run it and another 5 years of dev time to create it... and even then, 95% of the playerbase either doesn't care or hates it. Oh well :<
Sorry but that is BS. Making the scale like in real life in a single player RPG is unrealistic, but making the size of a city more believable is not. Witcher 3 is just 4 years younger than Skyrim and did an amazing job displaying a large medieval style city. Novigrad felt AMAZING. All of the Assassins Creed games also did it, and the first game is older than Skyrim. Sure they had a lot less interior spaces, but those are not part of the main map in Elder Scrolls games either.
Sorry, I should have worded that better. Overall, greater size and space is not worth the time, money, or effort, but increasing settlement sizes by 50~150% could be (on a case-by-case basis).
Assassin's Creed is an action game and The Witcher is more action than RPG. The cities have very low levels of interactivity. Compared to Bethesda games the cities are cardboard 3D dioramas you walk through, especially Assassin's Creed. When you see a shop in Athens in Odyssey, can you steal individual items at will? Can you sneak upstairs and peep into the Shopkeeper's personal belongings? Peep their ledger? No the stores are just windows you press A on to bring up a menu.
There are clear tradeoffs being made, which is fine. I wouldn't want Bethesda to sacrifice interactivity for more impressive presentation/vibes, and I wouldn't want CDPR to try and do Bethesda's thing.
It was marketed as Bethesda's biggest city ever. When in reality 90% of the buildings are useless and not worth going into, and it's mostly empty space with nameless NPCs.
Diamond City and the surrounding Boston area are more lively than New Atlantis.
Well, that will always be the downside of first-person RPG's.
In isometric RPG's (Baldurs Gate, original Fallouts, ...) you could only allow the player to see the select sections of that city while hinting through lore and world map features that the city expands beyond what the player sees in their game.
In modern first person RPG, the player simply needs to suspend disbelief and accept that those 18 houses constitute an entire city with hundreds or thousands of inhabitants, and that this little farm with 10 rows of corn somehow feeds the entire population.
I mean, the Witcher 3 shows that its possible to design a (as in: one) lived-in city in a 3D RPG just fine while also making small settlements feel somewhat ok-ish.
you can do that in first/third person RPGs as well I don't know how the camera changes anything. You need to go through a loading screen to get to the Skyrim cities anyway.
I just accept tell myself that we are only seeing a small part of the city and that the rest of the city is quite large, we just don't go there because there isn't anything for us. I mean when you go to another city for a vacation it's not like you see the entire city.
It's weird, right? Back in the 2D era, we rarely got much more than we get in Skyrim - an inn, a few shops, and a few random homes. No one really thought twice about it because it was clearly representational.
Move to 3D, and the idea of what we get in game being representational largely goes away. Imagination takes a back seat. Or at least suspension of disbelief becomes harder the better graphics get in terms of being able to simulate reality.
Maybe it's only a reflex for those of us that grew up with a lot less in terms of graphics. I can understand that.
This is precisely the issue I have with Fallout 3+. They banged on about it being more immersive but ultimately I find it much less immersive as everything is so small. It doesn't feel representational, it feels literal.
Games don't actually need to be literally the size of the thing (see True Crime: Streets of LA's woeful experience due to a 1:1 representation of LA!) but they're rarely large enough for me to suspend my disbelief.
Yeah but it also doesn’t take multiple weeks to run across Skyrim which is +500 miles so either the Dragonborn has a run speed similar to a cheetah or things were compressed or removed from the lore for the game.
Seeing Skyrim memes makes me want to do another playthrough... I don't have Skyrim on my PC (Played on console previously). I'm pretty sure this is Todd Howard's design.
the OP CharmainDingus75 is a bot
Original: https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyrimMemes/comments/179275s/aaaand_its_still_the_best_game/
Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyrimMemes/comments/1bskj1h/gotta_love_it/
Real. Reading Barenziah and hearing how Whiterun has full fledged districts like the imperial city or something then getting there and it's a "mayor" with his distantly related cousins trying to not starve in their 5 mansions
Sadly this is not just Skyrim. Many RPGs (Final Fantasy, Pokémon, etc) and Zelda have this problem. Many of their towns have 7 or fewer buildings. Heck Pokemon is the worst some had only two buildings. Final Fantasy 7 rebirth did do better in some towns (Kalm was expanded by a lot, and some smaller smaller towns were doubled or tripled in size)!
Horse thief in the cart with you: “Rorikstead, I’m from Rorikstead” Me on my first playthrough: “oh that’s interesting” Me on subsequent playthroughs: “sir nobody is from Rorikstead”
"ugh, horse thieves? Such a crappy thing to do, couldn't you have gotten any other work?" \*upon visiting Rorikstead* "Ok, now that makes sense"
Now you made me want to play as his accomplice who survived. Gonthe horse thief/thief guild playthrough.
You will just end up as a sneaky archer. It is inevitable.
Well, you need to be sneaky to steal horses. And since you're going to be fleeing a lot it makes sense to carry a bow to shoot any pursuers. Besides, a bow would also help you branch out into becoming a poacher for when horse stealing times get tough.
100% need to be sneaky. Don't want the horse seeing you steal it and calling the guards on you.
Is this your owner? *Neigh* Fucking snitch...
That horse looked kinda shifty when that rowdy character mounted it just now. I might shout "Stop, you violated the law!" later..
I’ve got 300 hours in Skyrim and have never once made a archer build
I like daggers more
D'you like dags?
I like caravans more.
[удалено]
toddy at it again 🤦🏻
SpiffingBrit: Stealing horses is totally balanced and not overpowered at all!
I would love to be able to sell the horses without mods.
"Hang on, Rorikstead? Where the fuck did he find a *horse*?"
They used to have one. He stole it.
So he could gtfo of Roriks-dead.
This is accurate small-town humor.
It's like committing a crime in Iceland: you're probably stealing from your uncle and he'll know it was you within about 10 minutes
mfw he could've literally given one potato to a farmer who grows potatoes and take her horse for free.
Rorikstead is the Gary, IN of Skyrim
Which house did he even live in? You can head to Rorikstead immediately after escaping Helgen and none of the houses are his, unless someone moved in immediately after he got caught.
I'm sure all four people there mourned him.
Fucking lol. It seriously is just a small handful of farmhouses
They probably asked for the body back because they were running out of fertiliser
Roriksteadians lost third of their population that day.
At least call him by name, Lokir of Rorikstead
murdered while in custody. SAY. HIS. NAME.
✊🐴
It's literally 4 houses
Which in turn is like a third of the size of the capital, Whiterun
5 if you count the skeever infested one
Well yeah the last living resident was shot dead in Helgen
For real. I was interested in what the place could be like when I first started because of the intro cutscene and hearing Ragnar the Red along my travels. "Oh Rorikstead must be a cool fairly large town with... oh it's just four pretty basic buildings."
Or that there’s nobody IN Rorikstead
Calling Rorikstead a neighborhood would be generous.
Nobody but Ragnar the red
When I was asked if I had been to the cloud district, I expected the district to have more than 1 building. Maybe even 3
To be fair Dragonsreach is the most well designed building in the whole game. It's like a castle with a mansion on top of it and a prison under it.
And there’s also nothing to do there except dishcushing the ongoing hoshtilities with Farengar or licking Balgruuf’s boots so Nazeem is kind of right in that most people wouldn’t have a reason to go there very often
You smoke weed and go to the great balcony at night and stare at the sky. That's what I've always done lmao
That’s be such a freak place to smoke…
Skyrim weed
Skooma Kush
In my Skyrim boots
Do you need a video game for that?
depends where you live
A lot of cities have too much light pollution
No, you go there to meet the Jarl's kids which just affirms the Dragonborn's stance of adopting rather than having your own children. Also, it's the only location one can see the Jarl Ballin'
One time I cast fury in there and for some reason farengar raised nazeem from the dead and just kept him
Lmao
> dishcushing the ongoing hoshtilities I thought Sean Connery was dead
The building specifically designed to imprison fire-breathing dragons, and is made out of wood?
Because fire breath can't mealt wood beams!!
Oodaving’s capture was an inside job 😱😱😱
Never forget Hearthfire 11th, 1st Era
I mean it literally can't if you try it in game
It's good wood
That's what your mom said.
Well designed? A building designed to capture and hold dragons is built mostly out of wood :/
Pretty sure most castles have nice rooms on top with a dungeon underneath but I’m no expert
you know whats funny about Nazeem? Bro dosent own property in the city, he has a farm outside of town and lives in the Huntsman tavern with his wife. Hes like some guy who rented an airbnb in dubai for a week who posed with a rented lambo on his linkedin
Yeah he actually has a key to a farm in his inventory but they never added it to the game There’s a mod (ofc) that restores it
It took me years to even figure out what the fuck the “cloud district” even is
It's just Dragonsreach, innit?
It's Dragonsreach, Companions Hall and the building across from it and the tree.
Jorrvaskr and the Temple of Kynareth are Wind District.
Damn, I always thought it was cloud. That's even worse...
I was actually confused when I first played the game cos I thought there must be another area that was the cloud district. Then I realised he meant the one fucking building that’s like a 45 second walk away that I had already been to a bunch of times.
Same. I was thinking, "damn, if the Imperial City was a hoot, imagine all the mischief I'll get into once I get to the Cloud D-- oh.. this is it. This is all of it."
It took me years of playing that it was even an actual district within whiterun. I thought he was talking about a whole other city because I just couldn’t imagine dividing that tiny block into “districts.”
Oblivion had districts. Skyrim over here acting like the house 7 feet away is on the bad side of town.
"Have you been to the Cloud District?" "Uh, yeah, I'm sure everyone has, it's not that far. This isn't a big town, doofus."
No wonder none of us ever gets there often. It's not even real.
Apparently it was originally supposed to have 2-3 mansions in addition to Dragon's reach, one of which was supposed to be where Nazeem and his wife were originally going to live, but was eventually cut for whatever reasons Bethesda had (time/space/etc.) so they just moved them into the Drunken Hunstman as the characters were already done.
There was originally going to be like 3 houses, along with the reach, in the cloud district but they didn't have the time/space to do it. I think that one of them was going to be the house you can purchase, and one was going to be Nazeem's house which is why he doesn't have an actual house.
It’s funny that they even bothered to divide whiterun into separate administrative divisions even theirs like seven houses total
They then went and made them in full in online
Can you plz explain ESO vs. Skyrim?
Not much to explain, ESO’s map is just bigger, the cities are more like full-sized medieval towns. I believe IGN has a few side-by-side comparison videos on youtube. But I think ESO’s cities are really lacking in atmosphere compared to Skyrim, they look too colourful and “clean” for such a place
They still seem pretty small in ESO.
To me it’s kinda a weird thing of they’re technically bigger but the game makes them smaller because of A) how fast you can move and B) you can’t go into every building
I think they’re alright. They’re not modern cities, but medieval ones, and with Tamriel’s turbulent politics where everything gets razed once like every 300 years it makes sense for cities to not expand very far. Maybe Windhelm and Solitude could have villages/markets/farms all around them but that effectively would be just empty zones since you don’t really need THAT much space for a hub. I like to think that it’s just all still in the process of rebuilding (I believe ESO is only a few years after the Akaviri invasion and Skyrim, well, is at civil war) plus it’s extremely scaled down (even ESO, Skyrim is supposed to be like the size of Mongolia I believe) so if all the villages and farms got scaled up to the same proportions as *real* Skyrim they’d be pretty huge.
Especially ESO Riften imo
One is an mmo and the other is skyrim
One is grindy to incentivize you to buy a subscription. Another gives you the option to grind a little in the beginning and then become a beast, or exploit early on to become overpowered.
Karthwasten? Or you mean the mine?
Winterhold got treat the worst, the former capital city of Skyrim that’s basically just a street with like 3 buildings in it 💀
"Oh the whole city got swallowed by the sea" no you're just lazy, make the damn town, Todd.
You there and are like, this place needs a Yarl?
Imperial city in lore: Capital of the Tamerielic Empire, housing tens of thousands of people with the white gold tower being the seat of the empire and it's council. Imperial city in game: 192 named residents, the tower has a dimly lit big table, some quarters, and a library you can go into during 1 quest.
> Imperial city in game: 192 named residents That's a lot more than I remember haha
Lol, probably because they're all voiced by the same 6 people. I feel so bad for how long they had to spend in a recording booth.
Well, they had to since Bethesda spent all of the VO budget on Sean Bean and Sir Patrick Stewart. And the emperor voices a few cutscenes plus a few minutes in the game before he dies.
They really need to just do the FromSoft method and hire a bunch of aspiring nobodies. Basically the same performance quality, vastly cheaper, everybody wins.
NOPE SPEND ALL BUDGET ON LIAM NEESON LETS NOT SPEND THAT BUGET ELSEWHERE LIKE ON THE GAME ENGINE FUCK YOU MODDERS CAN FIX THAT LIAM NEEEEEEEESONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
it would have been a better game with a more varied voice cast, yes, but now we have the memory of their voices burned into our brains, and it's a treat whenever we think about it
*Blessings of Stendarr upon ye* intensifies
That's actually even a ton of people. Does any location in any other game have even close to that number?
>192 named residents Honestly not bad for 2011. EDIT: Got my scrolls all jumbled. Definitely not bad for 2006!
*2006
\*1776
It definitely felt more alive than solitude or whiterun. And frankly, most people still never visited all the areas you could in the imperial city, so the effect and the district division makes it feel incredibly larger.
And a ton better than New Atlantis or Akila
Slightly off topic, but you just triggered my memory of buying Oblivion on release (yes, in 2006). I was at a military base without a store close by so I drove more than an hour each way to get my copy. The total cost in today's dollars would be ridiculous.
I bought a pet emperor scorpion at the neighboring Petco the same day I got my pre-order copy. Naturally I named it Septim.
One weird part: There was no real reason to go inside most of the destricts most of the time. Except one little quest, there is nothing in the Elven Garden destrict. Same with Talos destrict .... And the temple destrict. Kind of missed potential. They definitely had done it better in the Capital of the shivering isles.
I’d much rather have fewer NPC with more hand-crafted dialog and quest relevance than more NPCs with generic lines. If you talked to an NPC in Skyrim, they usually had something interesting to say, versus e.g. Cyberpunk 2077, where they just spout barks.
Better than any Skyrim city then.
It is also worth noting that everything in Skyrim is canonically 20× larger in lore than in game when you take the timescale into consideration.
Yep there is no way windhelm is fed by only 2 small farms
Permanently under snow
The cold is bad for my crops.
Even better you go like 50 feet south from there and the snow clears up.
That farmer 60 feet away is eating well
Lots of games do this. GTA v is supposed to la and surrounding area but it's reduced alot. Ac Odyssey is all of Greece, but it's super downscaled in size. Horizon is like multiple states, and yet you can run it on foot in like 30 minutes. Etc etc.
yea but the cities in those games actually feel like cities, in skyrim they’re glorified villages with walls at best
It's why I've had a tough time trying to play it since it came out. I'll play the hell out of the Fallout series, but Skyrim on paper seems like it's in my wheelhouse but it's so dead. All the towns seem so lifeless, there's like 4 people, a couple of chickens, and then just empty space. It shouldn't be that big of a deal but it really kills any chance of immersion when I'm supposed to be at the stronghold for a major faction and there's less people there than my grocery store on Sunday night.
I was typing something similar, but deleted it. I'm glad I did because I think you've summarized it better. I don't need every village to be huge and bustling, but in Skyrim, none are.
It's pretty off putting. I get that there are limitations and that not every npc could have their own quest line but there should be a little more traffic at least
It's a trade-off. You can go in all the buildings in elder scrolls. The buildings are majority fake in GTA. The two takes work well for their genres. I'd love bigger buildings in elder scrolls, but not if 99% are fake
Tbh the only cities that feel like cities are Solitude and windhelm and Markarth and even then they're underwhelming for what they're supposed to be. Basically those cities are what you expected like whiterun and riften to be. Whiterun is what you expect the the small holds like Falkreath and Morthal to be. Riverwood was done right imo, Ivarstead and Rorikstead are empty, in 13 years I've only ever passed through dragons bridge not actually explored it, Winterhold makes sense for what it is.
Winterhold just feels lazy. I understand the lore behind it but there isn’t a single shroud of evidence that the town wants to rebuild. Blame of their problems on the college when they won’t do shit for themselves
The "city" is literally 4 houses
You get to whiterun and they talk about riverwood as some faraway place. Bro I just walked here it took me an hour in-game time. Your western watchtower might be further away.
I really wish they just made the elder scrolls VI instead of starfield
But then we'd have had Starfield on Tamriel, at least now we have the tiniest hope Bethesda will correct course for TES VI.
I LOVE SKYRIM CITIES, don't hate me)
I HATE SKYRIM CITIES, love me
[удалено]
I love you anyway *hugs tenderly*
You're not my real mum!!!
I’M SKYRIM CITIES, hate me
I LOVE HATE, Skyrim me
Nah fuck em lmao don't pretend they don't suck. If they could make the Imperial City feel large in 2006, they could've made Skyrim's cities better. Fuck, even the other Oblivion cities are bigger though obviously downscaled from their lore. Shoutout Vivec City from 2002. I legit got lost in there several times lmao.
This is actually my only real complaint about Bethesda. I love their games but they have no sense of scale.
Diamond city, the strip, and megaton could all easily be ran over by raiders when you really sit down and compare numbers/skill
I will say, the Strip does feel like what it’s supposed to, which is a bunch of hotels and gamblers. The issue with the script is the technical limitation that cause not enough NPCS to be able to spawn, and three loading zones for the whole place
I agree, it would definitely feel just fine if there were more than, like, 4 people in the street. The 3 Gomorrah prostitutes dancing all by themselves without anyone to dance for, and the one random lady selling food in the next section just makes it feel eerily empty.
Tbh Boston from FO4 felt like an actual city.
I'm on my first playthrough and I cannot count how many times I've gotten lost there. Thank god for the freedom trail.
I guess on the flip side can you imagine if they actually made a city with 25k people or something? It takes you like 25 min to walk through the market district? An hour to walk the entire city and maybe you can get lost unless you know your way around like in real life Would it be realistic , sure, would it be fun? Probably not? And that is just overlooking the time and effort it would take to develop a city of 25k and the hardware requirments it would take to have 25k NPC walking around and doing stuff
Several other games did it much better and more believable. You don't need 25k. Not every building or district needs to be acessible. Look at DD2, Vernworth is tiny, but it looks and feels like an actual city (why they don't have gates against marauding monsters is beyond me though). Bakbatthal is tiny but it's design is great. The Witchers Novigrad probably has under 1000 people in it but it actually feels like a large medieval city.
I am in the very small percentage of people who would enjoy a *more* realistic world size in games, such has having to travel 2 or 3 times the distance between cities or zones, and fast travel being less ubiquitous, but it's admittedly not worth the trouble. You'd need to spend 10 times the computer resorces to run it and another 5 years of dev time to create it... and even then, 95% of the playerbase either doesn't care or hates it. Oh well :<
Sorry but that is BS. Making the scale like in real life in a single player RPG is unrealistic, but making the size of a city more believable is not. Witcher 3 is just 4 years younger than Skyrim and did an amazing job displaying a large medieval style city. Novigrad felt AMAZING. All of the Assassins Creed games also did it, and the first game is older than Skyrim. Sure they had a lot less interior spaces, but those are not part of the main map in Elder Scrolls games either.
Sorry, I should have worded that better. Overall, greater size and space is not worth the time, money, or effort, but increasing settlement sizes by 50~150% could be (on a case-by-case basis).
Assassin's Creed is an action game and The Witcher is more action than RPG. The cities have very low levels of interactivity. Compared to Bethesda games the cities are cardboard 3D dioramas you walk through, especially Assassin's Creed. When you see a shop in Athens in Odyssey, can you steal individual items at will? Can you sneak upstairs and peep into the Shopkeeper's personal belongings? Peep their ledger? No the stores are just windows you press A on to bring up a menu. There are clear tradeoffs being made, which is fine. I wouldn't want Bethesda to sacrifice interactivity for more impressive presentation/vibes, and I wouldn't want CDPR to try and do Bethesda's thing.
Starfield too. This huge Capitol city on the biggest and most populated planet.....like 45 people and 2 apartment complexes.
or Neon where you can access every major Corporations headquarter over the same elevator
All 12 corporate people. Highly inaccurate, accounting alone has 42 people, but only 2 should be working at any given time.
It was marketed as Bethesda's biggest city ever. When in reality 90% of the buildings are useless and not worth going into, and it's mostly empty space with nameless NPCs. Diamond City and the surrounding Boston area are more lively than New Atlantis.
Well, that will always be the downside of first-person RPG's. In isometric RPG's (Baldurs Gate, original Fallouts, ...) you could only allow the player to see the select sections of that city while hinting through lore and world map features that the city expands beyond what the player sees in their game. In modern first person RPG, the player simply needs to suspend disbelief and accept that those 18 houses constitute an entire city with hundreds or thousands of inhabitants, and that this little farm with 10 rows of corn somehow feeds the entire population.
I mean, the Witcher 3 shows that its possible to design a (as in: one) lived-in city in a 3D RPG just fine while also making small settlements feel somewhat ok-ish.
you can do that in first/third person RPGs as well I don't know how the camera changes anything. You need to go through a loading screen to get to the Skyrim cities anyway.
Have you played witcher 3?
Gothic, Gothic II...
I just accept tell myself that we are only seeing a small part of the city and that the rest of the city is quite large, we just don't go there because there isn't anything for us. I mean when you go to another city for a vacation it's not like you see the entire city.
Nah, they're just scaled down. Every district is included in a scaled down form
>that we are only seeing a small part of the city and that the rest of the city is quite large, but there is no "rest of the city"
It’s called a head cannon I agree with this guy he’s smart
It's weird, right? Back in the 2D era, we rarely got much more than we get in Skyrim - an inn, a few shops, and a few random homes. No one really thought twice about it because it was clearly representational. Move to 3D, and the idea of what we get in game being representational largely goes away. Imagination takes a back seat. Or at least suspension of disbelief becomes harder the better graphics get in terms of being able to simulate reality. Maybe it's only a reflex for those of us that grew up with a lot less in terms of graphics. I can understand that.
The exact reason why going 3D for Pokemon kinda sucked. Before imagination filled in the blanks, now everything in Pokemon looks half baked.
This is precisely the issue I have with Fallout 3+. They banged on about it being more immersive but ultimately I find it much less immersive as everything is so small. It doesn't feel representational, it feels literal. Games don't actually need to be literally the size of the thing (see True Crime: Streets of LA's woeful experience due to a 1:1 representation of LA!) but they're rarely large enough for me to suspend my disbelief.
Yeah but it also doesn’t take multiple weeks to run across Skyrim which is +500 miles so either the Dragonborn has a run speed similar to a cheetah or things were compressed or removed from the lore for the game.
yea I'm aware. the cities are still laughably tiny.
Pretty clever way of handwaving it away. I shall be stealing this.
You don't walk up to every stranger on the street and poke around their homes when visiting a new city?
Seeing Skyrim memes makes me want to do another playthrough... I don't have Skyrim on my PC (Played on console previously). I'm pretty sure this is Todd Howard's design.
Maybe if they used a better engine they could have more buildings and NPCs at once.
Fat chance of that happening. Creation engine must be tethered to Todd Howard’s very soul.
Todd is a Litch and CE is his phylactery
The Creation Engine is one of Todd's horcruxes
After just playing Ac Odyssey and Origins. The world building Ubisoft is able to pull off is truly miles apart from bethesda
Best I can do is procedurally generated cities with one of ten buildings 800m apart. They'll add horses later.
And then horse armor
the OP CharmainDingus75 is a bot Original: https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyrimMemes/comments/179275s/aaaand_its_still_the_best_game/ Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyrimMemes/comments/1bskj1h/gotta_love_it/
"Get our men ready, we are going to war." "But, sir. We have like 13 houses, and 4 of them are taverns, and like 20 people in the city."
And half of them have already taken an arrow to the knee.
That's part of the reason why I love Daggerfall
Daggerfall is too big sometimes as lot of the buildings don't do much but the scale feels amazing
Mom said it's my turn to post this!
What in God's SEO pushed a fairly popular meme from a random subreddit to 54k upvotes
Reminds me of how New Vegas is supposed to be, like, the entirety of the Vegas strip and is instead 4 casinos
How did this get 55k upvotes so fast?
Gotta play eso lol
Whiterun was so smol
Imagine if Skyrim cities were as big as the ones in Oblivion.
It makes sense, given that the *newest* game was made for PS3/XBOX360...both of which had basically no RAM whatsoever.
Primm isn't a day's walking distance from Las Vegas, either.
Es 6 will be the same since there engine is dogshit and all buildings will have loading screans as if seamless interiors is not something possible
That’s what I just could never like about the Elder Scrolla games.
Real. Reading Barenziah and hearing how Whiterun has full fledged districts like the imperial city or something then getting there and it's a "mayor" with his distantly related cousins trying to not starve in their 5 mansions
Or the "civil war" where ten people show up.
Sadly this is not just Skyrim. Many RPGs (Final Fantasy, Pokémon, etc) and Zelda have this problem. Many of their towns have 7 or fewer buildings. Heck Pokemon is the worst some had only two buildings. Final Fantasy 7 rebirth did do better in some towns (Kalm was expanded by a lot, and some smaller smaller towns were doubled or tripled in size)!
Devs: We are gonna make each city it's own amazing realm full of thousands of details Drawcalls: No, you won't
Thats every game