Do cities feel small in Skyrim for you too?

[Sarin]

I've played Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, and this has been a bit bothering me. Skyrim cities feel small. Few people, few buildings. I can understand that they shouldn't be compared to Imperial City, but...even Balmora from Morrowind felt as big as Whiterun or Solitude. Vivec was at least as large and populous as three biggest cities of Skyrim combined. And so on...

I wonder if there's any lore explanation...it can't be technical issue, as Morrowind and Oblivion easily handled larger cities. And if necessary, it can be split into several separate zones, as done with Imperial City, Vivec and Mournhold.

Or am I jsut imagining things?

[legoless]

I think it's the number of houses. Solitude feels pretty big, but everywhere else does seem small for whatever reason.

[Will Zurmacht]

A smallish population would naturally lead to smaller cities and towns. Skyrim is a rugged province. Probably 1/3 snowcap, 1/4 mountainous, extensive badlands and steppes. Whiterun and points south have some decent farming and a milder climate. By way of analogy all of Scandinavia has ~25m people while countries a little south with more temperate climates have 80m (Germany) or 60m (Italy).

All that said from a gameplay perspective Skyrim's settlements feel about on par with Oblivion's to me, with Skyrim's nine hold capitals (Morthal and Winterhold are pretty sad, but they are in the northern blightlands) and a smattering of other built up rural areas. Markarth seems bigger than it is due to its extreme verticality. Then again that's Dwemer architecture. I wouldn't expect uncouth barbarians like the Nords to have much impressive in the way of buildings anyway. Longhouses?

Hidden:

Okay Windhelm is pretty cool.

[noobishlord]

I think what makes the cities feel smaller than those in Oblivion is that only about half of Skyrim's hold cities are actually their own instances, unlike, say, Oblivion, where each and every county city was its own instance. That allowed for larger cities in general, since they didn't have to have the main world loaded up for them. It really is a technical issue, despite being a newer and more powerful engine.

Wait, what about in Morrowind, you say? Vvardenfell is puny compared to Cyrodiil or Skyrim. Heck, it's small compared to the areas available in Daggerfall. This allowed it to be more open, along with the lack of NPC schedules and the like. Less coding to have to worry about.

[Will Zurmacht]

Apples to apples then; instanced cities in Oblivion and Skyrim. Wiki maps of a few representative cities from each game, Leyawiin and Whiterun, show that both towns have about the same number of buildings.

Leyawiin is broken up into a large central residential district, along with a combination commercial/temple section, and two special purpose adjuncts: one mostly devoted to imperial guild halls, and another for Castle Leyawiin.

Whiterun is divided into a large mixed residential/commercial district, a separate residential/temple district, and two special purpose adjuncts: Jorvaskr(sp) AKA the fighter's guild, and Dragonsreach, essentially Castle Whiterun.

Just running around and exploring, though, Leyawiin feels a lot bigger due to the verticality of its buildings. Tall two and three story structures in the imperial style. Towering cathedral. Its wall is high and imposing, not the squat masonry of Whiterun that you could probably pole vault over. Meanwhile Whiterun structures are low, they and the "roads" feel organic and haphazard instead of orderly in the imperial way. Whiterun is more primitive, but not significantly smaller than a typical Cyrodiilic county seat.

As far as uninstanced settlements, Skyrim has Oblivion beat by a long shot. There are only a few rural areas that would even count as settlements in Oblivion, say Aleswell or Shardrock. Mostly jumbles of shacks or a couple houses and a church. Meanwhile Skyrim has plenty of small to medium uninstanced towns, just to name a few: Falkreath, Dawnstar, Rorikstead, Dragon Bridge, Ivarstead, Riverwood.

The only strong outlier among the three main titles is the presence of super cities like Vivec and the IC. These are not really characteristic of any given province and would be closer to Tamrielic equivalents of "world wonders." Rustic, functional Skyrim towns have to pale in comparison to Morrowind ones, many of which seem to have been designed for sheer wow factor: you can imagine Todd saying circa 2001 "how about a city bored into a big crab shell" or "Tenochtitlan but with dark elves" (Vivec) or "a town made of living mushrooms."

[Tingz0r]

It's not so much of a technical issue as it is a design decision. Smaller cities are easier to make, especially when you're insistent on giving every single NPC some kind of fetch quest, Skyrim.

It's even worse when you compare it to other open-world games with big, populated cities that still manage to keep everything interesting. It's fine that you can't talk to everyone. It's fine to have a lot of people of no consequence who crowd the city. It's immersive.

Also, where do all of these guards keep coming from? That tiny little guardhouse? Not bloody likely. And two measly farmers provide all the food for an entire town? Yeah right.

[LugkAgumbuk]

Yes, yes it does, and it's such a shame. Could have been soo much more

[Fiar]

Only Windhelm has felt small to me, the rest have been average, though claustrophobic could be used to describe some cities with the house groupings.

I wonder if there is a practical reason for this. Maybe these cities are built tight together for insulation during the winter. Less open space for heat to escape, and more heat since people are grouped together.

Just my two cents.

[Imbalance]

No visual comparison can adequately be made between these titles without taking draw depth and Morrowind's interminable fog into account, firstly.

I can also say that Morrowind's towns "felt" much smaller - the whole world did - once Speed was ramped up.

Those factors aside, to me, the scope, appointments, population, and layout all seemed equally appropriate for each settlement in all 3 games. They fit neatly within the tropes of the role-playing genre. They have all that they have because that's all that matters to be entertaining and afford unique visual interest. That is their purpose, and TES games do this extremely well. Honestly, if you need more realism, you're going to have to go outside and quit playing video games completely, because you're missing the point.

[MetaCthulhu]

No visual comparison can adequately be made between these titles without taking draw depth and Morrowind's interminable fog into account, firstly.

Or you could turn those off [1]

To me, Solitude and Markarth feel like Skyrim's biggest cities; mainly because Solitude takes forever to go from end to end, and Markarth has everything involve climbing stairs.

Vivec though, if I dropped something I wanted outside Solitude or Markarth I'd just run back and get it, but if I dropped something outside Vivec and I was already at the temple? Not happening it can just stay there. Vivec just feels huge, so does the Imperial City; there's really nothing in Skyrim that compares.

So I guess yeah, Skyrim's cities seem small, but only in comparison to the colossi that are Vivic and the Imperial City.

P.S. I found a rather rudimentary size chart for the maps as a whole [2]

[legoless]

No visual comparison can adequately be made between these titles without taking draw depth and Morrowind's interminable fog into account, firstly.

Or you could turn those off [1]

Is that... an in-game shot? Man, OpenMW is so cool.

[Leckan]

Just a game mechanic. In-universe, every hold is vastly larger.

[Emzi 43]

Just a personal head-canon; I always considered Skyrim as not really having 'cities' in each hold. Solitude is certainly a city; Markarth too and to a lesser extent Riften. However places like Whiterun and Windhelm I considered more as castles or Holdfasts, with the Palace of Kings or Dragonsreach as the central keep and the rest of the castle town built up within the protection of the walls. It helped to explain it a bit for me and honestly added some flavour; it emphasised the sparse population of Skyrim since it only had 2 major cities and people clustered together in hillforts like Whiterun or great keeps like Windhelm.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

It's generally understood that as graphics improve, the scope and size of provinces and individual zones in series' like TES will be scaled down from how they canonically appear in lore. In the Greg Keyes novels that came out between Oblivion and Skyrim, the Imperial City was written such that it might take an entire day to traverse the entire city on foot. Several in-game books treat it similarly. I imagine all the cities are "really" bigger than we see them, too.

[Tingz0r]

I'm going to retract my previous statement about technical issues because the engine the game runs on is so, so bad.

I hope one of those projects they say they're working on is a new building block for future games. TESIV is going to suck fishy sticks if it's using the same potato engine.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

Maybe the reason they're taking so long on the next one is they're getting a new engine.

[Crawldragon]

From Morrowind onward whenever I step into an average town or city in an Elder Scrolls game I've always found myself thinking "I don't feel like there are enough houses to hold all of these NPCs." Now for Skyrim and Oblivion this is obviously all in my head as they took special care that every NPC has a home even if it's the local tavern, and even in Morrowind if you look you'll generally find that every NPC has a house that is "theirs" even if they never enter it.

I think a major reason why the cities feel smaller in Skyrim than in Oblivion is that the world outside of them feels so damn huge. Now the world was huge in Oblivion, but a lot of stuff felt really crammed together in that game. You could walk down the road and pass a Daedric temple that's just blatantly right there, so close you can't even follow the road without drawing aggro from a priest or a Daedra, which takes me right out of the game as I ask myself why in the nine circles of Hell the Legion haven't done anything about it yet. Morrowind also had this problem, to the point where your first dungeon crawl is suggested by a High Elf woman who's aware of a bandit hideout because she lives basically right next to it.

I always felt like Oblivion was sort of a stepping stone between Morrowind and Skyrim, and the overworld is a big reason why. It was obvious the dev team really wanted a hugely expansive world, but a lot of it had to be compressed for actual gameplay. The same is true in Skyrim, but you can spend hours on horseback in Skyrim following roads that go up and down mountains. The environment is absolutely enormous, and as a result the cities feel insignificant purely by comparison. I mean, the Ten Thousands Steps to High Hrothgar might not literally have ten thousand steps, but at least you have to make a trip to get there.

[Dohva.]

I think it's the number of houses. Solitude feels pretty big, but everywhere else does seem small for whatever reason.

Agreed. Riften seems decently sized, too. But Winterhold? Forget about it. I don't even know where the handful of people there live. In the inn, maybe?

[Pilaf The Defiler]

I think it's the number of houses. Solitude feels pretty big, but everywhere else does seem small for whatever reason.

Agreed. Riften seems decently sized, too. But Winterhold? Forget about it. I don't even know where the handful of people there live. In the inn, maybe?

They're living in the past. They should move on and build a new town.

[Dohva.]

^LOL For reals.

[The SheoDovah]

Winterhold feels like a town that was destroyed and the only people that are living there either have no choice or refuse to let go. I recall Bethesda promising Imperial City sized Cities prior to Skyrim's launch but i don't think we ever got a Skyrim version of the IC. The cities are spread out further then Cyrodiil's due to the lay of the land. Skyrim does feel smaller but I think it may just be due to the layout of some cities.

The engine is knackered at this point in time and they made a mistake of reusing Gamebyro elements to create Creation. Creation is a decent engine but Gamebyro is, i think a decade old and whilst I know little about engines, i think Gamebyro may be the cause of many techincal issues. Fallout 4 is said to be the defining point where the engine just can't cope anymore due to it's end. At least, that was a common point in reviews but I'm getting off topic now.

With luck, Bethesda will ditch Creation and any trace of Gamebyro in favour of an engine that can produce at least several Imperial City sized cities without the risk of the game having a heart attack.

[noobishlord]

Would we need several cities the size of the Capitol City, though? Isn't that supposed to be the BIGGEST in Tamriel? Unless for the first time we're going to leave Tamriel and finally see what the Akaviri are up to. Or we have multiple provinces in the next game, and need a couple of similar size for their capitols.

[legoless]

With luck, Bethesda will ditch Creation and any trace of Gamebyro in favour of an engine that can produce at least several Imperial City sized cities without the risk of the game having a heart attack.

I'm pretty sure the current engine is fully capable of that already, it's more an issue of NPC individuality.

[The SheoDovah]

That is a very good point but i think the main thing that holds it back is as you said, Individuality. GTA, Assassains Creed have massive cities with hundreds of NPCs and whilst they are generic, it feels like the city is actually a city. Oblivion had the right idea with the tons of NPCs per city but i think, they could have gotten away with generic citizen NPCs due to some being filler and from a roleplaying standpoint, we don't know everyone in the city. However, it also adds to Skyrim's culture. It may not be full all the time due to warriors out fighting, hunting being a favourite past time, deliveries etc...

But Creation is more or less finished and Bethesda can only do the coding version of using duct tape to keep it going.

[GamerAim]

Would we need several cities the size of the Capitol City, though? Isn't that supposed to be the BIGGEST in Tamriel? Unless for the first time we're going to leave Tamriel and finally see what the Akaviri are up to. Or we have multiple provinces in the next game, and need a couple of similar size for their capitols.

Even if it's supposed to be the largest, the scale can change. The IC is in all likelihood larger in-universe than in-game, so if a game has a larger scale, it makes sense that the cities would, just because the IC was scaled down further. You know how I mean?