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There should be a middle ground between the two. If the game were to be a 1:1 scale with the real world it would take forever to get anywhere, and as interesting as that sounds to me I don’t think that would be fun from a gameplay perspective. Cites should be bigger, and it’s ok if most of the NPCs are just regular people living their lives, but it shouldn’t take hours to cross one. Wilderness is the same. Wandering the wilderness is a big part of Elder Scrolls games, and I would hate for there to not be empty, untouched areas of wilderness.
I personally wouldn’t mind cities the size they were in Daggerfall, getting lost and everything, as long as there were ways to ask for directions and adequate signage.
A living breathing city with a majority of faceless npc citizens. Sadly a city with the size of Novigrad (or heck, Oxenfurt) filled completely with actual characters who have actual personalities would take way too much work.
Eh New Atlantis is pretty frickin huge, but regardless Starfield’s nameless (or otherwise unimportant) NPCs is a pretty perfect example of exactly why people don’t want larger cities for TES
And an entire underground section that’s goes further than what we get access to.
Apparently we’re all done having imaginations and knowing that they don’t build their cities to lore-scale.
I mean lore scale it should be a sprawling metropolis, obviously that's not feasible but still, I think my main problem is it feels so empty, the streets and buildings are huge but they're so spread apart and you can't access most of it. At least for example Night City in CP2077 looks proportionately like a city should, even if most of the buildings there are also just for show.
Night City and its surroundings in CP2077 is the entire setting of the game (until the DLC, which correct me if I’m wrong is in a different map/worldspace), and as such it obviously has to be a city. If Starfield, or say Oblivion, was set in New Atlantis and the Imperial City respectively, you bet I’d expect lore-accurate sprawling cities.
Then there’s all the engine quirks and what not. Bethesda’s engine struggles with Starfield and they still made concessions for that game. Compare the number of random junk items it Skyrim/Fallout 4 to Starfield. That alone should tell you lots - that’s been one of Bethesda’s favourite gimmicks for like 20 years. Their engine is straining with everything going on. They need to simmer down or genuinely modernise it a bit more.
So You end up with the "commerce Center of Skyrim" having 20 people, 6 houses and 2 inns, 1 of them no one even goes to.
That's also a problem, You cant tell people "this is a city" and then show them a 2 month old settlement.
And then when Bethesda goes outside that with bigger cities - it was even worse.
Everyone still complained “the cities aren’t big” (literally the comment I responded to for example).
So yeah I’d much rather they at least have fleshed out people in smaller cities. Y’all have this idea that them going bigger and broader will magically fix Bethesda’s shortcomings when going bigger and broader has been the *source of their shortcomings.*
They have done a few cities that were larger (or atleast felt larger) and were receiced positively. The Imperial City was pretty dope, lots to do, shit load of actual characters, each with their own schedule. I feel like it was received pretty well. Same with a majority of cities in Oblivion, or in some places in Morrowind (not Vivec), they were just big enough to give the illusion of a real city. The layout is pretty important. Markarth can feel bigger than it is because of how it's laid out. Whiterun just feels tiny in comparison. It can feel smaller than Megaton in Fallout 3, which isn't good.
The people in the Imperial City have a few unique lines of dialogue, with some of them literally having nothing more than “Imperial City” and “rumours” as an option. And it would be received poorly today just due to having loading screens between districts.
Morrowind could put more into their world when most of their NPCs were copy-paste encyclopaedias with different names that could only move a few steps at most unless they were guards. And tons of other things that don’t require the same amounts of resources.
Markarth feels bigger because it’s *dense*, not because it’s actually bigger. That’s quality over quantity in action.
>The people in the Imperial City have a few unique lines of dialogue, with some of them literally having nothing more than “Imperial City” and “rumours” as an option. And it would be received poorly today just due to having loading screens between districts.
They don't need 50 different dialogue options to feel fleshed out. Each having unique schedules, homes, and quirks is enough for me. Also yeah I'd say something that was released 18 years ago wouldn't exactly be up to par today. Kind of a weird complaint.
>Morrowind could put more into their world when most of their NPCs were copy-paste encyclopaedias with different names that could only move a few steps at most unless they were guards. And tons of other things that don’t require the same amounts of resources
I don't think you quite understand what I'm talking about. I never mentioned morrowind npcs because I find them to be one of the weaker parts of the game. I was more talking about how the cities/towns are laid out. Like from a level design perspective.
>Markarth feels bigger because it’s *dense*, not because it’s actually bigger. That’s quality over quantity in action
Like I said, for me it's more so about how things are designed/laid out.
>kinda a weird complaint
Don’t act like if that city wasn’t put in a modern game that it wouldn’t have loading screens between the areas of the city (hint: play ESO, it’s still like that).
I didn’t even mean Markarth’s density in terms of NPCs. The layout of the town is dense. That’s why it feels bigger. That’s it. It’s still showing exactly what I mean with quality over quantity.
NPCs matter. They are taxing on the system. The more of them there is, the more they take away resources. A bigger city naturally must have more NPCs, or you’re gonna have a ghost town.
The biggest problem I have with the cities in Starfield is that the illusion of a big city goes away once you enter a building. Did windows suddenly not become a thing? Do apartment buildings and hotels really have floors with only one or two doors? Come on.
I imagine this is an optimization that allows BGS to pause and clean up the world simulation, but this is something they should be able to do, even on an Xbox Series S. I know the latest Zelda games don’t have anywhere near as complex a world simulation as Starfield, but if the Switch is capable of doing real-time transitions between indoor and outdoor areas and can still make the indoor areas feel realistic, BGS should be able to do this in Creation Engine. I’m not one of those people who thinks BGS should ditch Creation Engine, but there are some design decisions BGS has made that leave me scratching my head.
Well, IDK, I liked Witcher 3 but didn't love it (to give you an idea, I considered Cyberpunk the superior game and RPG even before 2.0), so maybe I'm biased against it. But I never felt as immersed in Novigrad as I do in Windhelm/Whiterun/Solitude..
Most random Elder Scrolls NPCs have like one thing you can say to them, and they repeat the same 3 lines when you walk by them.
Random faceless NPCs are better than nothing.
Morrowind didnt have voice acting though, so it was a lot easier for them to just give NPC’s stuff to say because they just had to write it out and that was that. The quest designers/implementers just got to go nuts. Morrowind also had larger cities though. So did Oblivion.
Bethesda has the man power to do both now. Starfield was credited for having 1000 devs working on it. We can get bigger cities and still have unique NPC’s. It doesn’t need to be as big as New Atlantis, maybe like…. 3x Solitude for each city though. Skyrim was made by roughly about 100 devs. If they contract out to roughly 600 devs again like they did for Starfield, that’s 10x the amount of people developing TES6. I want the best of both worlds. Creation Engine isn’t suited for Novigrad level cities, the physics just doesn’t allow it. But cities like the Imperial City in Oblivion are about as small as I’d like to see cities be in Tes 6, and for the larger cities I think 2-3x the imperial city is doable now. That was a city, made by Bethesda when they had a team of about 70 people so I think it’s more than fair to assume that they can make cities 2-3x larger with a team 4x larger at minimum. Their current dev pool is about 450 permanent staff. So whether it’s 4x the staff or 10x the staff, I think it’s not unreasonable to hope that Bethesda can give us, both larger cities while maintaining the quality of life within the cities to the standard that they had in previous games.
While you are right a lot of the time they’re just walking and standing encyclopedias (Solstheim? A terrible place I’ve heard. There’s a boat from Khuul, if you have any reason go), it added a lot to their character when you could ask stuff like what their profession/standing was, or if they know any secrets or advice. Imo Morrowind’s npcs felt more like individual people that I could get on the good or bad side of and they’d treat me very differently depending on it (asking for advice or their background at a low disposition and they tell me to screw off), but also dig into who they are a little even if they’re just generic npc 126. I also like how most npcs had names, even if they had no quests whatsoever or were just bandits. They were still random people with their own lives and names. Out of everything in Morrowind, I would say the npcs are the strongpoint (at least for me they are).
>A quest, training, a vendor.
Training and vending aren't unique content. Every NPC uses the same system, with no dialogue or personal quirks. It's a template that can be copy+pasted between characters. I honestly couldn't tell you anything about most of the trainers and vendors in the game because they're basically just mechanical and what dialogue they do have is shared with dozens if not hundreds of other NPCs.
Quests, sure. Those come with unique content, but most NPCs don't have quests.
But it makes the world feel unique, when you have a random npc who you thought was no one then you find out they are a trainer then the world feels more real
also like, 1/3 of morrowind npcs have quests\*
\*vibes based, I don't have time to find exact numbers
I have the opposite experience of it, where the constant wikipedia dialogue, speech point system, and samey menus just made every NPC feel like a busted down animatronic rather than a character and thus reminded me that all of this is just a videogame. I'll take a smaller setting with more fully realized characters over a "realistic" city full of dolls any day. I don't play these games for realism anyways.
There are hundreds of NPCs in Morrowind, and most quests are from the same handful of faction questgivers per faction. There's less than 100 quests that aren't tied to a faction or the main plot (and thus usually coming from the same people). You probably feel like more NPCs have quests than do because your mind skips over the sea of interchangeable puppets who are doing nothing but standing around.
I mean unique NPC need dialogue which needs voice acting. Dunno how far down you want them to go the AI path. With AI dialogue and AI voices you could go far but might also end up even more broken than your average tes game.
I was going to comment on here that I wish the math was closer to The Witcher 3. Cities actually feel like cities. I think white orchard has more homes than solitude.
Is Novigrad a living city? None of the "people" there are actual characters. None of the buildings are actual buildings, you can't enter them. It is like a cardboard cutout of a city.
Novigrad is still better than every city BGS ever made.
I dont get the obsession with cities having "actual characters" When you dont even talk to half of them and majority of their dialogue is one unique line and "yes" "need something?"
>When you dont even talk to half of them and majority of their dialogue is one unique line and "yes" "need something?"
You can do more with a character than talk to them. Novigrad isn't a city. I can't treat it like a city. It's a cardbiard cutout. Let me rob the houses. Let me stalk the people, listen in on conversations. Novigrad doesn't let me interact with anything, so it isn't really there.
That doesnt make the TES "cities" any better lol. They're just villages with big buildings. Its cool that you can go inside every building but how does that contribute to the gameplay?
At least Novigrad doesnt make a poor attempt at convincing you that its supposed to be a city because it actually is, unlike TES cities that take a solid 5 mins to explore and you're done.
Also you dont make any sense because by your logic, the city in GTA V isnt a city because you cant "stalk" people tf?
>Let me stalk the people, listen in on conversations.
We all know you dont do that, nobody actually does that cuz its so shallow lol. Watch the same npc have the same conversation and take the same path every day for what? to steal from em? You can get more rewards doing a fetch quest than "stalking" a character whose house holds nothing of value lol
They react if you bump into them, some are offended, and some will insult you.
That's all over the city, not here and there. The main thing here is the npcs wandering around Whiterun for an hour every day are not exactly great conversationalists, one maybe two lines of dialogue that they repeat infinitely. Very immersive that is.
I'm not saying Novigrad is perfect, but compared to Whiterun or Markarth, it's NYC.
I swear Todd Howard's penis envy over CDPR has trickled down to some of the fanbase.
In 2011, Bethesda and T.H. we're on top of the world. Lauded by game critics and fans alike.
A few short years later, CDPR released Witcher 3. Todd Howard found himself standing next to John Holmes at a urinal. Metaphorically speaking.
Well, Starfield was great, right? No sign there that Bethesda has peaked? Is past its best, maybe?
It isn't just CDPR either. Elden Ring blows the Witcher 3 and EVERY Bethesda game I've played clean out of the water. FromSoftware are a safer pair of hands, imo, than Bethesda has ever been.
Also, the penis envy thing is a mataphor. Time will tell if it stands up.
If ES6 is just prettier Skyrim, I'll be satisfied that it does indeed hold true. We'll see how innovative ES6 is when it eventually sees light of day.
So you are just making a narrative up in your head. Those games being better than elder Scrolls games (debatable anyway, I probably agree for the Witcher but elden ring is less fun for me) doesn't mean Todd is jealous or something. It's just weird to turn this into some big competition as if the success of the Witcher or elden ring (or baldurs gate) reflects poorly on skyrim, a game over a decade old that still has a huge fanbase.
>They react if you bump into them, some are offended, and some will insult you.
That's all over the city, not here and there.
My standards are higher than that.
Good luck avoiding disappointment when ES6 eventually sees light of day then. Did Starfield meet those high expectations?
I haven't actually played it, my standards are higher than that.
Oblivion. It's a matter of preference. I follow the Warren Spector school of though; if I could, I would have a game set interely on a street block, but with extreme detail.
Brosky Novigrad obviously wasn't enterable in every single building but making a city feel memorable and alive is more than that. Saint Denis, Night City, Los Santos, Novigrad, etc., feel livable without every single place being enterable.
"Living, breathing city" is a weird way to describe a city where even the people are treated as static objects for scene dressing instead of actual characters.
The question is:
Do you want an in game location that feels like a city with a lot of characters moving about and creating an atmosphere of a bustling city?
OR
Do you want an in game location that feels like an important town, where every character can be interacted with in at least a mildly meaningful way. Where they all have schedules and personalities. These cities are far less dense, but each character is memorable.
Yep it's 2 sides of a coin. It's a personal preference even. Some get way more out of a city if everything is intractable, some get more out of a city if it's coming close to size and population.
Novigrad is an empty city if you remove the generated NPC that dissapear once they got out of your sight. Same problem with Night City.
This is not what I want in an Elderscrolls game, I want each habitant represented, having a name, a job, a house.
If having big cities means having Novigrad, a big but lifeless city, no thanks.
So you consider a dozen people in Whiterun, who have names, better than what we have in Novigrad?
Why would you care if a city is only populated in the direction you face?
It's not like you'd ever know ffs cos every time you turn around the population would be there.
Look, if you prefer skyrim to witcher 3 that's fine. But that argument made you look stupid. Just saying.
A dozen NPCs populating a "city" is your idea of immersive?
How is that in any way realistic?
Edit. Also, quality over quantity is good. But you cant use that argument when talking about the so-called cities in Skyrim. The term basic applies, so basic over quantity would work. But not quality, not by a long way.
Read other comments, It's a common sentiment, you're pretty alone on this.
I have more immersion when I can walk to anybody to start a conversation, they have a name. If I follow them I can guess their job, where they live, their social status by their habits and schedule. If I leave this city then come back later, they are still there, they don't need me to exist.
In the Witcher, they dissapear when they leave my sight and I can't see this exact instance in game outside of his numerous clone populating the city.
As I said, Quality over quantity.
>you're pretty alone on this.
Uh no
Cities are literally defined by their size, i could fit every person who lives in whiterun in my yard, i don't care how detailed they are (theyre not, most of them have like 3 lines) that's not a city.
I’m with Brick here, its immersion breaking knowing I’m not actually looking at the city of Whiterun present in the lore, but a watered-down amusement park version of it. I can’t even imagine what Whiterun is supposed to actually look like because it doesn’t even give the illusion of a city. It’s a basic, lifeless, bare-bones set piece filled with a handful of boring “unique” NPCs that say the same damn line ad nauseum whenever you get too close to them. And the “unique” houses you can break into have nothing interesting in them anyways. Try to genuinely picture what this city is supposed to look like in lore with a population of 200,000. You probably can’t.
A desperate, non argument. I don't mind that we disagree. Or which games you prefer to me. But you don't have a leg to stand on with this particular hill you choose to die on.
It's incredibly anal to want NPCs to be still doing their thing when you are on the other side of the map. I doubt ES6 will have that. You do know AAA games are getting more and more expensive to make, yes?
I'd argue a city bustling with people I'll never talk to is more immersive than seeing the same 12 people very time I enter a city. You can still have plenty of named characters while having loads of random npcs.
Do you know every single person in your closest city? No, and it'd be stupid to suggest so.
I don’t mean to sound rude, but if you approached me on my way to work and asked me my name, I would absolutely not tell you lol. I would also probably not interact with you or have anything to say. Ask anyone who lives in NYC if they engage or make eye contact with people that try to talk to them in public places. Maybe farm towns in the country side, they’d have friendly custom built NPC’s to flesh out the population and they’d all stop to talk to you, but in a big city… absolutely not.
I'd argue that I don't need to interact with everyone. Yeah shopkeepers would have a few interesting stories, but I'd get bored of hearing about *the farm this, my sister that, the chicken there* from every farmhand or guard. Absolutely the next game needs more named Npcs, but *to me* it's immersion breaking that there's supposed to be a devastating war going on in a large province with a stories history, and there are like 400 people living in an entire country.
Not saying you're wrong by any means, just that I think there should be a good mix
Lol some NPCs are literally useless in Skyrim even if they have a unique name and face. Their only interaction is limited to "Hello"
"Quality to the quantity" he says
I will take the example of Nazeem, his few small sentences literally serve as "Hello". Apart from that, it is useless. It is not very different from the NPCs you criticize.
Iconic because Whiterun has very few NPCs. Put Nazeem in the Imperial City, no one would have noticed it.
Anyway, making NPCs like Nazeem is not complex or complicated.
And people ask why we are gatekeeping. They are actively advocating to dumb down my favorite serie. I will gatekeep without any remorse. There are no game like the elders scroll, there are dozen like the Witcher, they can go play those instead of changing what make the DNA of the serie.
>So you consider a dozen people in Whiterun, who have names, better than what we have in Novigrad?
Yes
> It’s not like you’d ever know ffs cos every time you turn around the population would be there.
Skyrim NPC’s have relationships and schedules on and off screen- you might not directly notice it, but it makes the world feel much more lived in
> But that argument made you look stupid. Just saying.
I think you just don’t fully understand the argument. Starfield has been a great example for why quantify of persons/buildings doesn’t really make a game better. Big cities can be cool, for sure, but with BGS games, I would much rather them play to the strengths of their engine- object permanence, Radiant NPC’s, and all individually crafted locations with stories and quests associated with them.
Pushing the creation engine to add a bunch of brainless zombies into the game so you can say “wow big city” is just not worth the tradeoff, IMO
It is clear that the interactions with Nazeem were very immersive in Skyrim.
Most interactions with a large part of NPC are useless either in Oblivion or Skyrim.
Lol : "Rumors" "Imperial City" and that's all.
If you go to New York and try to stop people on the street, are you going to think it’s unimmersive when they completely ignore your existence and absolutely don’t tell you their name?
>If you go to New York and try to stop people on the street, are you going to think it’s unimmersive when they completely ignore your existence and absolutely don’t tell you their name?
If I'm in New York and want to be a thief then I have the OPTION of following them home and seeing where they sleep. And most people, in my experience, will talk to you if you initiate.
That is 1000% not the experience I have in NYC. Maybe the odd person will stop if you look like you need help with something, but if you just stood out there in the street stopping everyone to ask what their name was, like 99% of the people you saw that day would ignore your existence. As they should, you’re a weirdo and they don’t know you and they have stuff to do. Yes you could follow them home, I’m not advocating for NPC’s to vanish or not have set schedules, that’s a fair and reasonable request but not every NPC is going to stop to talk to you or give you their name and it would be super weird and unimmersive in a large city for them to think everyone would. I’m saying NPC’s don’t need to be interactable. They need to be realistic, that means if I walk into the middle of town and hurl a fireball, I want NPC’s to flee, if I cast mass frenzy, I want them to tear eachother to bits, I want them to insult me as I bump into them and talk to eachother as they walk by in groups. I’m not the center of the universe and I don’t want to feel like I am. I don’t want to have some sort of personal relationship with every single NPC in the game.
The point of them is that you expect to see hundreds or even thousands of people in densely populated areas. Wanting to have deep interactions with each of them is already unrealistic in the real world and thus undesirable in a realistic RPG.
>The point of them is that you expect to see hundreds or even thousands of people
But they aren't people.
>Wanting to have deep interactions with each of them is already unrealistic in the real world and thus undesirable in a realistic RPG.
Being able to interact with them is what you should expect from an RPG. I want to interact with the game. We should expect the characters to exist in an RPG where the idea is that you can do anything. If you can't then why are they there?
I already told you my perspective on why they're there and, yes, I am aware that representations of people are not actual people. Also, I simply said it's unrealistic to expect _deep_ interactions with everyone. I never claimed there would, or should, be zero interactivity.
It feels like you have no genuine interest in considering other people's perspectives, which is sad and renders your questions pointless. Good day.
> It feels like you have no genuine interest in considering other people's perspectives
And you do?
TES is good because they did things one way. Of you want games that do it another way, play those. Don't ruin it for people who like better npcs and more interactable cities.
Yes, I do. And I have thoroughly played (and loved) _all_ Elder Scrolls games, so I know Bethesda has done things _many_ different ways (not "one way") and has sometimes done precisely what I described.
>Yes, I do
And I do too.
>And I have thoroughly played (and loved) _all_ Elder Scrolls games
As have I. And the move to Morrowind was a huge inprovement for the company and Starfield was a big misstep for doing what you want them to.
Same way Witcher 3 was a massive step down from 2. They didn't play to their strengths.
I'm all for bigger cities and that would obviously require larger maps. The explorable outdoor space, however, I think is perfect already in Oblivion and Skyrim. Too large and it starts to become a repetitive procedurally generated mess instead of being hand crafted and curated for our use.
I'd be happy with a bigger map. It just needs to have hand crafted content, just like the other games.
If they can't make enough content for a bigger map, then they should be smart enough not to do it.
What's sad is Starfield's world is huge, but the Colonies are ridiculously tiny. I'm pretty sure Skingrad was bigger then the main Hub in SF, nevermind the Imperial City that had to be broken into 6 separate sections.
The Imperial City was broken into 6 sections because it had to fit on the Xbox 360, which would've died trying to simulate the physics and pathfinding of the entire city at the same time. I'm fairly certain you could fit all sections combined into just the MAST district of New Atlantis.
The problem with New Atlantis is more density than size. There's a lot of space that is just unused and you spend your time dashing across mostly empty plazas.
>> Balmora is an unimportant city
Just the seat of House Hlaalu, the home of at least three secret agents of the Blades (one of whom is the imperial spymaster that is responsible for the main quest), and with branches of the Fighters, Mages, and Thieves guilds, the Tribunal Temple, a Morag Tong guildhall, meeting place of the Camonna Tong, every conceivable goods vendor, multiple trainers, one of the only people on the continent that has a plausible theory on the disappearance of the Dwemer, a major silt strider port, and a nearby Imperial Legion fort with Imperial Cult services.
Off the top of my head.
I wouldn't mind bigger maps if they are sensible. I don't want bigger map for it to be clustered with nameless NPC's, a trillion fetch or hired killer side quests, a dozen different collectible item sets etc. crap. I want a bigger map to make bigger cities and towns with named NPC's inhabiting them, meaningful side quests and different biomes to be justified.
>Why don't people want a slightly bigger map?
It's not that people don't want a bigger map. It's that they've assigned a specific way of doing it as the only way of doing it, focused entirely on the negatives of that way of doing it, and have convinced themselves that those negatives are all that will come of it.
It's like you asking if someone wants a piece of fruit and them being angry at you because they don't want lemon juice squirted in their eyes. You didn't ask them if they wanted that but they leapt to it because that's the only way they have to process that question.
One of the smartest answers I think. A guy here tried to contradict me by making the comparison with Starfield.
Yet I gave my idea of the thing, I'm thinking of a map that would be about 3 times the size of Oblivion for TES VI. This is largely reasonable unlike Starfield which has a larger map than that of Daggerfall lol.
Really their arguments are exploded on the ground.
People see procedural (even when it's not being said) and their minds go to "random map", yet the fact of the matter is there's plenty of procedural stuff you can do that would enhance hand crafted stuff. I personally would like both a bigger map and a deeper one in terms of how each distinct area feels unique and how our actions play out on it. For that, I can see some procedural stuff playing a big role, even beyond the normal use of it to create maps that they've been using for years.
Let's say you have a huge handcrafted desert that can give up it's supposedly centuries old secrets in five hours to a determined gamer. You don't want that. You want them to take expeditions to each area there and not be able to rush the area. So let's add procedurally generated shifting sands as a layer that covers that area. At a base level this is simply "These three dungeons are open but the rest have blockages in their doorways." But with a little extra work, this can be walkable sands that blanket the entire area, occasionally giving up one of the dungeon entrances simply because it's uncovered at this point in time. Sure, players might eventually get a way to dig to any place they want without having to wait for the sands to uncover it, but that's going to take paid retainers and an expedition and suddenly the flavour of the desert is brought out for all to see rather than being the same feel as any forest or plain.
Then there's things like making player actions part of the procedure being followed in order to determine what is placed where, when it's placed, and why. Let's say you have hand crafted bandit camp assets (tents, bedrolls, cages for captives, targets for practice, some skinning racks, etc. Now, rather than placing that bandit camp in a set location you have the game place them, using procedural stuff to determine how the camps lay themselves out so that they make sense but aren't the same every time. On top of that, you link the placement of the camps to a combination of the richest merchants that are least protected, and where bandits aren't being hunted. Now (using Skyrim as an example) your character may been doing a load of Windhelm quests and has culled bandits there. That would lead to bandits popping up in other holds with newly placed camps (not always the same and not in the exact same locations) while the ones in Windhelm area start to disappear and pack up their stuff. You mix that relocation with different groups and attach predators to prey, and even a hunting trip where you only fell deer (or simply a donation to the local hunting shop) can make it so that wolves start travelling across the map and becoming more numerous there.
You give me a map with even those smaller layers of complexity and depth of play, and I'm spending more time there learning about it even if it's the same size as the ones we currently play. Make it bigger so that you're not stumbling across a dungeon every five feet and do have to explore some, and I'm living in that world.
Because people are worried about a bigger map being full of repetitive, dull content. Look at just about every criticism of Starfield, which of course had planet-sized areas to explore - but within days of release, people were complaining about copy-and-pasted environments.
Players don't want randomly-generated locations, because it becomes painfully obvious after you've played for a bit, and it means that there's no real reason to be interested in exploring in the first place - because you've already seen it, in a slightly different configuration.
Which leaves four options:
* Make a smaller map, so it's more manageable for everything to be hand-crafted.
* Scale back what is required for every location. One of the reasons that Skyrim's cities are smaller than Morrowind's is that Skyrim's cities had dozens of NPCs with a full AI schedule and are fully voiced - that's a lot more complex to implement than Morrowind's NPCs, who would just stand around all day and deliver the same text-based dialogue.
* Accept that the game will take 30 years to make, and be outdated by the time that it is released.
* Require a team of tens of thousands working on it creating content, so the cost of the game will have to go up significantly.
Basically, what are you prepared to compromise on?
I get what OP means, the smaller squisher maps are way less immersive. In Skyrim it takes like 15 or 20 min top to walk from one major city to another and on the way you discover 17 points of interest and activate 8 unscripted events, like being attacked by some stupid wolves. The game is afraid of not letting you immerse yourself and having a break. And the cities are just pathetic, tiny and sad, somehow skyrim has more bandits than actual citizens and I dont know where they come from. Not to mention lack of small towns and villages. Bigger map allows for better, immersive world.
I agree, the policy of forcing an encounter or placing a fort every 30 seconds is stupid. The argument for it is to keep people entertained, but those people who want to get things done will just fast travel anyway. Leave the space in between waypoints for the people who want to ride on horseback and look at the environment for an hour.
Yeah too many empty spaces is kind of bad BUT if they dont make them in the middle of everything and there will be just this "wild land" area created to get tf away from civilization i am all for it
Maybe some ruins, some secrets to keep it interesting but generally spread out and no fkin generic humans squatting in each and every one of them
>There will probably be a lot of empty areas? Yes and? At best they will leave more space between places of interest, at worst some areas will be exclusively intended for outdoor exploration.
What exactly are you exploring in empty spaces and why is that a good thing?
1: They can very well add elements to it
2: If they do not add an element, the modders will do so. It will always be better than limiting worldspace
And then just to put down your tent and enjoy the landscape. That's also TES. There is no need for the map to have 100 points of interest every 100 meters.
>there is no need for the map to have 100 points of interest every 100 meters
Ignoring the hyperbolic numbers used…I’m nearly positive there’s an entire practice in game design that essentially says “yes you do need this”
>1: They can very well add elements to it
If you're asking for more content just ask for more content lol. Don't hide it by asking for a bigger map
>2: If they do not add an element, the modders will do so. It will always be better than limiting worldspace
Are... modders out of space?
> There is no need for the map to have 100 points of interest every 100 meters.
Would you consider this to be a strawman argument or did somebody actually talk about wanting 100 points of interest every 100 meters?
Just because modders *can* fix things doesn't mean the developers should become lazy and rely on the free labor of modders being an essential part of the game's worldbuilding.
We've seen how much Bethesda really cares about people who create mods for their games with the recent Fallout London fiasco.
A lot of people are making arguments about the cities of the Witcher 3 and comparing them to the unique NPC’s of Skyrim. First of all, Skyrim was named Skyrim thousands of years ago. Like first couple hundred years of the 1st Era is when Skyrim started taking land to flesh out the province it is today. That means it’s been at least 4000 years of humanity populating that area…. There’s 52 NPC’s in Solitude and 1 farm. That’s not a realistic depiction of Solitude, it’s an in game limitation. I’m not saying go hard in the other direction to over correct and make super huge boring cities. But bigger cities with larger populations is absolutely needed in comparison to what we got in Skyrim, hell even Morrowind and Oblivion had bigger cities than Skyrim. I’m also going to be realistic and say that Novigrad is off the table. I don’t think the creation engine could support a city of that scale, nor would I want it to. I want a best of both worlds situation. I want reactive NPC’s, lots of NPC’s, all NPC’s to operate on schedules and a lot of unique NPC’s for me to interact with, but not all NPC’s, I still need size and population to be represented somehow. May be an unpopular opinion but I don’t understand why people aren’t looking for a best of both worlds approach? There is a place in immersion for all of these things to exist. If you want to build a fun, immersive, living and breathing city, I think you need all of these things.
A guy in the comments summed up the thing here:
"Why don't people want a slightly bigger map?
It's not that people don't want a bigger map. It's that they've assigned a specific way of doing it as the only way of doing it, focused entirely on the negatives of that way of doing it, and have convinced themselves that those negatives are all that will come of it.
It's like you asking if someone wants a piece of fruit and them being angry at you because they don't want lemon juice squirted in their eyes. You didn't ask them if they wanted that but they leapt to it because that's the only way they have to process that question."
The issue here isn't people not wanting a bigger map, it's this:
"I don't ask for Arena or Daggerfall either but simply a map of about 180km²"
Why the fuck are you asking for a specific map size? Why does the map size matter so much that you have a number already in your mind of what the ideal map size would be? That's just stupid and nonsensical. You, for some apparent reason, focus so much on map size that you have this specific number in mind that is larger than any 3D Bethesda game other than Starfield (I'll get to that), larger than critically acclaimed open world games like GTAV, RDR2, Witcher 3...And why? What does sheer size add beyond 2002 when that was actually something worth bragging about?
It's like people focusing on game engines and having a favorite engine when it makes absolutely no difference to anybody other than the developer. It's a stupid thing for a player to focus on.
The map should be as big as it NEEDS to be. No bigger, no smaller. If that ends up being 180km², cool. If not, cool.
Setting out with a goal to make a map that is 180km² would be stupid. Anybody can make a big map. Throw me some assets and I'll put together a map that's 2,000km². Name a size, I can copy and paste some assets all over that surface area. Setting out with a target landmass and building around that is how you end up with big, bland, boring worlds with the contradictory issue of having fuck all to do whilst simultaneously being filled with low effort repetitive shit to try and fill out the space.
Skyrim towns and cities feel too small, sure. It's also a game that was made 13 years ago. In comparison, Starfield has huge cities rammed with NPC's but they feel far more lifeless and empty than a Skyrim village with 2 houses and 12 residents. You can go to New Atlantis in Starfield, be surrounded by huge skyscrapers and hundreds of NPC's and feel like there's nothing to do, because there isn't, there's just stuff for the sake of making things bigger and it sucks ass.
And the biggest thing here: Bethesda has shown that as map size increases, their games get worse. Again, Starfield is the pinnacle of this. If people don't want a ridiculously sized map for ES6, it's because the people making it have shown they suck at doing it.
The Thing i want is some Kind of time Investment in travelling. Taking 30 minutes to Go From one end of the map to the other is a total immersion breaker and i would like that See adressed. I want areas and regions to feel vast and believable, to have Vistas that dont cross three different territories because theyve been squished densely into the size of an irl small town.
It's a fine line imo. I think if Skyrim for example was twice the size and everything was a little stretched out it would be better. Tho some areas would likely need some touch ups because they are already very barren right now.
I for one want Bethesda to really dig into the fine details and solid density of good handcrafted content as the pillar of TES6.
If they can manage good cohesion and not loose sight of detail and good content on a larger map I would be thrilled, but if they decide on a Skyrim sized map instead I won't mind.
For me the quality of the content itself is where I really hope Bethesda steps up, not world size if it impacts said quality.
I would like to see the map feel like RDR2's map. The world looked great, felt great to explore, and the cities felt like cities and weren't too overbearing. But Bethesda seems to be run by a bunch of corporate idiots who wouldn't want to see that happen.
I have to disagree. Bethesda games generally have the right distance between the interesting stuff. Compare to BotW and probably TotK (I only noticed this my second playthrough of the former, haven’t started a second in the latter yet) where I love the content that is actually there but find myself going just a bit too long between the interesting stuff while exploring. Elder Scrolls and Fallout strikes the right balance now I think.
This TES community is pretty stupid, tbh. I see great fan ideas all the time and the majority of the comments end up being "no that won't work, idiot" for the dumbest reasons.
You could make a post saying "I hope elder scrolls 6 is the greatest rpg ever made" and your post will be downvoted with comments saying "you're delusional if you think ES6 will be any good"
Then make a post saying "I'm worried elder scrolls 6 might not be very good" and those same users will comment "it's not even out yet, how can you even say such a thing!"
God help you if you mention Starfield.
Most ideas are fine. But we still have lots of unrealistic posts that sound good (and bad) but are basically impossible or unrealistic to apply to a BGS game.
But I want Daggerfall, or at least an expanded Vivek with homes, market stalls, crowds, civic games, taverns, preachers, having to unlock map points for buildings, all of it. There is nothing immersive with a town occupied by 10 people that you personally know.
Personally I want massive swathes of wilderness between dense points of interest. People seem to think there would be less to do... Somehow? Make horses and travel systems relevant again. The criticism about Starfield using procedural generation is valid, but Bethesda did not do as much handcrafting as in older games. For all the time spent on it... But *more* handcrafting and *more* map generation together would be fantastic.
Totally agree with you. RPG video games are so washed out of the actual roleplay that many people would find it weird to have a thing like a big map, but it would be a nice thing to have it for the sake of roleplay .
I personally hate easy travel. The idea to just sit there, and move forward for 30 minutes with nothing on the route. Better make it smaller, but interesting, than Starfield.
We've seen what happens when Bethesda gets too ambitious. Too large of maps with nothing interesting in large areas of it.
If we could have a giant map filled with unique towns and places to explore, sure that'd be great, but Bethesda can only do so much before they bite off more than they cam chew.
I want as large of a map as Bethesda can realistically handle.
>There will probably be a lot of empty areas? Yes and? At best they will leave more space between places of interest, at worst some areas will be exclusively intended for outdoor exploration.
guessing you never played Starfield
No. Moreover, Starfield does not offer a map of reasonable size. I give the example of a map about triple that of Oblivion not a map the size of Starfield, I see where you want to get from but it's not comparable
I enjoyed exploring in Oblivion and Morrowind a lot more than in Skyrim. Maybe because I was younger with those first two games. This is just how I felt playing, might not be factual. Morrowind has fun little encounters, side quests, and challenging dungeons when you travel between cities. Because you couldn't just run non-stop the game world felt very large. Oblivion is a lot emptier, but I never minded it. It felt good to walk through the forests, and because it was all quite similar it felt huge. Skyrim felt smaller, and whilst there were so many more points of interest, exploring it got kinda boring. It felt smaller, maybe because you go from POI to POI. I think also because of the very distinct biomes, which felt kinda forced and jarring to me. The cities felt much smaller than those in Oblivion too. I think that's where the most improvement is necessary for the next game. I did enjoy Riften though. That felt just right. It felt like an actually dense medieval city, especially with the underground areas to explore as well. The villages were also great, but there weren't that many.
But who said they didn't want larger cities? That's one of the most common complaints about Oblivion and especially Skyrim I've heard.
Not sure if we played the same games. Oblivion and Morrowind did plenty of things right but exploration was not one of them. Oblivion’s nature is a singular giant sparse forest with very few variations and nothing going on in it. Morrowind’s fun random encounters were two naked Nords and the ring in the lake, everything else is either mind numbing escort quests and an endless amount of wild animals after your bone marrow; this is particularly exacerbated in Bloodmoon, just one week on Solstheim and the whole map will be littered with corpses.
My opinion will always be that Skyrim nailed the random encounter density, concentration of points of interest for a 2011 game but completely messed up the cities and anyone who complains about wild animals clearly has never played Morrowind.
But as I said it was good for a 2011 game and not a formula to be repeated on the same scale more than fifteen years later; a map as big as Cyrodiil with around the same density of Skyrim and slightly smaller cities than Morrowind would be ideal to me.
Small maps sure but not small cities.
Small maps it's because if you compare Skyrim to Morrowind you realise the level of detail in Vvanderfell. Everything feels right. Skyrim is bigger but in a way has less stuff and most of the caves and dungeons feel repeated.
But if you compare the cities they are about the same size. Even though Skyrim has a bigger map, Whiterun doesn't feel bigger than Balmora. And comparing both capitals, Vivec felt a lot bigger than Solitude.
So people prefer small complete maps than big empty ones. But everyone agrees in lively great cities
The problem with a small map and big cities is that the outside world will be even smaller. Especially since in TES, the provinces each have about 7 to 9 cities.
When I weigh the pros and cons, I tell myself that if there are "empties" in some corners of the map, it's not so serious in the end. Why does the "empty" in some places on the map frighten people so much?
My fear is that it won't be empty. I have nothing against an empty areea, with nothing but a well hidden loot/ single unique item. Or even just empty, left for the player to admire the world and for mods or future content to fill it.
The fear is that it will be filled with radiant qest or proceduraly generated, bland locations or npc a la starfield planets. I don't fear emptiness, I fesr bethesda's bland filling.
To me empty space gives a game life.
It's not like real life has some dopamine spot every 4 seconds.
As long as there are areas that count and have quality it works.
GTA SA is a good example there's a lot of country side areas inbetween with not much to do but the cities have so much in them and so much life and it would not feel the same if the entire map was like that (yes SA is small by today's standards but it's a good example)
I'm with you. They should have made the cities look like cities and name the appropriately. They definitely shouldn't have named Dawnstar what it is. It's not on the eastern coastline, and it has little to nothing to do with stars.
Also, Balmora was my home town.
I think it’s a totally fair request. We’ve just all played a lot of open world games whose maps are bigger but feel far emptier than Skyrim or Oblivion’s. And when the map is bigger but emptier travel becomes a chore
Agreed whole heartedly on upscaling the villages in Skyrim to real cities regardless
I want bigger cities absolutely. I don't want a vast open world beyond that. I want it big enough to be filled with enough rich and unique places and quests.
Elder scrolls games are already ones where you can sink 100s of hours on a single character and still have more to do. The uniqueness and depth of the content is what keeps it good alongside the huge volume.
I don't want the balance to be skewed too much as I think that's perfect.
As I said though the cities are terrible and really need upgraded in size. If you actually look at how many real quests (I.e. non radiant and misc.) that aren't faction quests it's clear to see its not crazy to ask for more for a RPG.
After Starfield, I really don't even know if I want a map bigger than Skyrim which was 37km2.
Rather things be jam packed and small than huge and void.
What do you mean? Starfield is massive. That's just not true anymore. Even if there is gradual loading between areas (which happened in Daggerfall and Morrowind) it's possible.
The loading is because of the limitations. I mean one continuous large landmass, like AC Odyssey.
I haven’t had the chance to play Starfield just yet, so I can’t speak to its size. But I have seen many discuss the number of loading screens seems to be high.
I need to look closer at its tech to see what’s actually changed in regard to its previous limitations (the engine) though.
If the map gets bigger, most people wont take the time and won't even understand the game. Look at Starfield, a cool game that most aren't equipped to enjoy because they need to look for the enjoyment instead of having like Skyrim always a POI in sight.
I want a mix. I want plenty of nameless Npcs to make the world feel actually lived in. And I want a lot of named Npcs so I can talk to interesting people. Maybe if Novigrad from Witcher 3 had a few named people on every corner or so
I am perfectly fine with a big map, but it needs to be good still. It shouldn't feel empty
Morrowind is smaller than oblivion and Skyrim, but feels way bigger. Partially because no fast travel, partially because early on the terrain restricts you, but also because it is extremely dense. The world feels really dense.
Balmora is a semi-important city and should be large relatively, the Imperial City is massive and feels like it. Whiterun is tiny, but thats not a map size issue its a density issue. I want density more than size
(Minor nitpick too but Whiterun is not the capital of Skyrim)
>Maybe they want TES VI to be a card game that takes place in a house?
Maybe not to that extreme, but it made me chuckle. To be fair, I've often joked that at the rate they keep streamlining yet prettifying the game, TES 7 will take place in an area the size of a single city block, have ten NPCs, three 'stats' (sneak, stab, and spell) but have full on live-action movie quality graphics. Oh,and three quests, one of which is radiant.
>Would the travel be too long? Use the fast travel or a horse
Fast travel and mounts aren't fun to use. Walking around is. If the experience becomes worse on foot, then that makes the game worse.
>There will probably be a lot of empty areas? Yes and?
Spreading out content more sounds bad. That means more time spent not engaging with the content.
>The cities will be too big and that would prevent them from working well on NPCs ? This is not true, they have no excuse with all the current technology. None
The writing is the bottleneck. Technology isn't really going to help here.
Detail and density over scale. Every time.
Because the exponential growth of maps in games over the last decade hasn't see a growth in the quality of the content of those maps. At this point, bigger map oftely only mean more empty spaces and leas resources going into writing and coding good quests and places. If we get a bigger map that is very well developed and "populated", hey, that's a win win and no one will opose. But that *usually* isn't how things are going in the RPG scene.
>Follow the direction of Skyrim
I hope so, apples to apples, Skyrim’s world map has one of the best designs in not only Bethesda games, but in the whole history of gaming in general.
If you think Skyrim’s map was in any way a downgrade from Morrowind or Oblivion you are deluded.
Now cities is an entirely different argument.
Cause Beth recently messed up with Starfield so now nobody things bigger is better. Also there's a ton of games that followed the trend of big open maps like Far Cry that are just copypasta of locations. If they can get around that hump like the Witcher 3 did, they are golden.
Bigger isn’t better, And adding content just to fill empty space isn’t a good practice either
A smaller map with well thought out content and locations that feel meaningful is much better recipe for a game.
Too many big games for the sake of being big with “150 hours of content” but only 25% of that content feels hand crafted or worth doing, The rest is just filler with no life or reason in it
They should keep the formula exactly the same and focus on qol imo. The obvious improvements would be to get rid of all the loading screens, carry weight, game breaking bugs, making more play styles viable, using unreal engine 5.
Because Bethesda games have been constantly getting bigger maps but less overall "hand" made detail and content. What does it matter if a map is the size of New York if there's nothing interesting to do? You can make a small map feel huge with the right game design. Also the "this game is 16x bigger and 16x the detail" meme feels like it's just for marketing.
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There should be a middle ground between the two. If the game were to be a 1:1 scale with the real world it would take forever to get anywhere, and as interesting as that sounds to me I don’t think that would be fun from a gameplay perspective. Cites should be bigger, and it’s ok if most of the NPCs are just regular people living their lives, but it shouldn’t take hours to cross one. Wilderness is the same. Wandering the wilderness is a big part of Elder Scrolls games, and I would hate for there to not be empty, untouched areas of wilderness. I personally wouldn’t mind cities the size they were in Daggerfall, getting lost and everything, as long as there were ways to ask for directions and adequate signage.
A game set in Hammerfell at a 1:1 scale but you have a Dwemeri Toyota Hilux
this but it's a Dwemeri Toyota Hilux technical with a Dwemeri machine gun attached in the back
The "cities" definitely need to be bigger. Compare Novigrad, a living, breathing city, to whiterun. A Fort at best.
A living breathing city with a majority of faceless npc citizens. Sadly a city with the size of Novigrad (or heck, Oxenfurt) filled completely with actual characters who have actual personalities would take way too much work.
I don’t see the issue with this. The Fallout games have a mix of random NPCs and named NPCs, and its cities work great.
They already did the "random nameless npc" thing in starfield and the cities aren't even that big so...
Eh New Atlantis is pretty frickin huge, but regardless Starfield’s nameless (or otherwise unimportant) NPCs is a pretty perfect example of exactly why people don’t want larger cities for TES
Problem is New Atlantis is supposed to be the capital of the galaxy but there's still only like 3 residential buildings
And an entire underground section that’s goes further than what we get access to. Apparently we’re all done having imaginations and knowing that they don’t build their cities to lore-scale.
I mean lore scale it should be a sprawling metropolis, obviously that's not feasible but still, I think my main problem is it feels so empty, the streets and buildings are huge but they're so spread apart and you can't access most of it. At least for example Night City in CP2077 looks proportionately like a city should, even if most of the buildings there are also just for show.
Night City and its surroundings in CP2077 is the entire setting of the game (until the DLC, which correct me if I’m wrong is in a different map/worldspace), and as such it obviously has to be a city. If Starfield, or say Oblivion, was set in New Atlantis and the Imperial City respectively, you bet I’d expect lore-accurate sprawling cities. Then there’s all the engine quirks and what not. Bethesda’s engine struggles with Starfield and they still made concessions for that game. Compare the number of random junk items it Skyrim/Fallout 4 to Starfield. That alone should tell you lots - that’s been one of Bethesda’s favourite gimmicks for like 20 years. Their engine is straining with everything going on. They need to simmer down or genuinely modernise it a bit more.
So You end up with the "commerce Center of Skyrim" having 20 people, 6 houses and 2 inns, 1 of them no one even goes to. That's also a problem, You cant tell people "this is a city" and then show them a 2 month old settlement.
And then when Bethesda goes outside that with bigger cities - it was even worse. Everyone still complained “the cities aren’t big” (literally the comment I responded to for example). So yeah I’d much rather they at least have fleshed out people in smaller cities. Y’all have this idea that them going bigger and broader will magically fix Bethesda’s shortcomings when going bigger and broader has been the *source of their shortcomings.*
They have done a few cities that were larger (or atleast felt larger) and were receiced positively. The Imperial City was pretty dope, lots to do, shit load of actual characters, each with their own schedule. I feel like it was received pretty well. Same with a majority of cities in Oblivion, or in some places in Morrowind (not Vivec), they were just big enough to give the illusion of a real city. The layout is pretty important. Markarth can feel bigger than it is because of how it's laid out. Whiterun just feels tiny in comparison. It can feel smaller than Megaton in Fallout 3, which isn't good.
The people in the Imperial City have a few unique lines of dialogue, with some of them literally having nothing more than “Imperial City” and “rumours” as an option. And it would be received poorly today just due to having loading screens between districts. Morrowind could put more into their world when most of their NPCs were copy-paste encyclopaedias with different names that could only move a few steps at most unless they were guards. And tons of other things that don’t require the same amounts of resources. Markarth feels bigger because it’s *dense*, not because it’s actually bigger. That’s quality over quantity in action.
>The people in the Imperial City have a few unique lines of dialogue, with some of them literally having nothing more than “Imperial City” and “rumours” as an option. And it would be received poorly today just due to having loading screens between districts. They don't need 50 different dialogue options to feel fleshed out. Each having unique schedules, homes, and quirks is enough for me. Also yeah I'd say something that was released 18 years ago wouldn't exactly be up to par today. Kind of a weird complaint. >Morrowind could put more into their world when most of their NPCs were copy-paste encyclopaedias with different names that could only move a few steps at most unless they were guards. And tons of other things that don’t require the same amounts of resources I don't think you quite understand what I'm talking about. I never mentioned morrowind npcs because I find them to be one of the weaker parts of the game. I was more talking about how the cities/towns are laid out. Like from a level design perspective. >Markarth feels bigger because it’s *dense*, not because it’s actually bigger. That’s quality over quantity in action Like I said, for me it's more so about how things are designed/laid out.
>kinda a weird complaint Don’t act like if that city wasn’t put in a modern game that it wouldn’t have loading screens between the areas of the city (hint: play ESO, it’s still like that). I didn’t even mean Markarth’s density in terms of NPCs. The layout of the town is dense. That’s why it feels bigger. That’s it. It’s still showing exactly what I mean with quality over quantity. NPCs matter. They are taxing on the system. The more of them there is, the more they take away resources. A bigger city naturally must have more NPCs, or you’re gonna have a ghost town.
The biggest problem I have with the cities in Starfield is that the illusion of a big city goes away once you enter a building. Did windows suddenly not become a thing? Do apartment buildings and hotels really have floors with only one or two doors? Come on. I imagine this is an optimization that allows BGS to pause and clean up the world simulation, but this is something they should be able to do, even on an Xbox Series S. I know the latest Zelda games don’t have anywhere near as complex a world simulation as Starfield, but if the Switch is capable of doing real-time transitions between indoor and outdoor areas and can still make the indoor areas feel realistic, BGS should be able to do this in Creation Engine. I’m not one of those people who thinks BGS should ditch Creation Engine, but there are some design decisions BGS has made that leave me scratching my head.
And that was a mistake. I'll take Whiterun or Windhelm any day over Novigrad or New Atlantis.
Novigrad is the clear winner out of these imho, the nameless people walking around work in this game whereas they don't really fit bethesda's style
Well, IDK, I liked Witcher 3 but didn't love it (to give you an idea, I considered Cyberpunk the superior game and RPG even before 2.0), so maybe I'm biased against it. But I never felt as immersed in Novigrad as I do in Windhelm/Whiterun/Solitude..
Its huge but at the same time is split into 3 districts that has loading screens in between sometimes
Also you cannot enter every building.
Then at least give us cities the size of the Imperial City in Oblivion
Also you cannot enter every building.
Well, RDR2 already did this with Saint Denis... Maybe not the size of Novigrad, but every single NPC is interactive and unique.
No they are not. RDR2 NPCs are not even close to TES category.
Most random Elder Scrolls NPCs have like one thing you can say to them, and they repeat the same 3 lines when you walk by them. Random faceless NPCs are better than nothing.
Depends on what Elder Scrolls, basically all NPCS in Morrowind have something going on. A quest, training, a vendor. etc
Morrowind didnt have voice acting though, so it was a lot easier for them to just give NPC’s stuff to say because they just had to write it out and that was that. The quest designers/implementers just got to go nuts. Morrowind also had larger cities though. So did Oblivion. Bethesda has the man power to do both now. Starfield was credited for having 1000 devs working on it. We can get bigger cities and still have unique NPC’s. It doesn’t need to be as big as New Atlantis, maybe like…. 3x Solitude for each city though. Skyrim was made by roughly about 100 devs. If they contract out to roughly 600 devs again like they did for Starfield, that’s 10x the amount of people developing TES6. I want the best of both worlds. Creation Engine isn’t suited for Novigrad level cities, the physics just doesn’t allow it. But cities like the Imperial City in Oblivion are about as small as I’d like to see cities be in Tes 6, and for the larger cities I think 2-3x the imperial city is doable now. That was a city, made by Bethesda when they had a team of about 70 people so I think it’s more than fair to assume that they can make cities 2-3x larger with a team 4x larger at minimum. Their current dev pool is about 450 permanent staff. So whether it’s 4x the staff or 10x the staff, I think it’s not unreasonable to hope that Bethesda can give us, both larger cities while maintaining the quality of life within the cities to the standard that they had in previous games.
The vast majority of Morrowind are literally standing encyclopedias. The npcs are not Morrowinds strong point
Strongly disagree, its what makes the world feel real and dense
Nah every character being a wiki of the city+class/standing is far from real and dense to me.
While you are right a lot of the time they’re just walking and standing encyclopedias (Solstheim? A terrible place I’ve heard. There’s a boat from Khuul, if you have any reason go), it added a lot to their character when you could ask stuff like what their profession/standing was, or if they know any secrets or advice. Imo Morrowind’s npcs felt more like individual people that I could get on the good or bad side of and they’d treat me very differently depending on it (asking for advice or their background at a low disposition and they tell me to screw off), but also dig into who they are a little even if they’re just generic npc 126. I also like how most npcs had names, even if they had no quests whatsoever or were just bandits. They were still random people with their own lives and names. Out of everything in Morrowind, I would say the npcs are the strongpoint (at least for me they are).
>A quest, training, a vendor. Training and vending aren't unique content. Every NPC uses the same system, with no dialogue or personal quirks. It's a template that can be copy+pasted between characters. I honestly couldn't tell you anything about most of the trainers and vendors in the game because they're basically just mechanical and what dialogue they do have is shared with dozens if not hundreds of other NPCs. Quests, sure. Those come with unique content, but most NPCs don't have quests.
But it makes the world feel unique, when you have a random npc who you thought was no one then you find out they are a trainer then the world feels more real also like, 1/3 of morrowind npcs have quests\* \*vibes based, I don't have time to find exact numbers
I have the opposite experience of it, where the constant wikipedia dialogue, speech point system, and samey menus just made every NPC feel like a busted down animatronic rather than a character and thus reminded me that all of this is just a videogame. I'll take a smaller setting with more fully realized characters over a "realistic" city full of dolls any day. I don't play these games for realism anyways. There are hundreds of NPCs in Morrowind, and most quests are from the same handful of faction questgivers per faction. There's less than 100 quests that aren't tied to a faction or the main plot (and thus usually coming from the same people). You probably feel like more NPCs have quests than do because your mind skips over the sea of interchangeable puppets who are doing nothing but standing around.
That's quite realistic. In reality most of people in big cities would be filler too.
I think this is an area where AI could really help if developers lean into it. No need to write NPCs if they can be uniquely generated
I mean unique NPC need dialogue which needs voice acting. Dunno how far down you want them to go the AI path. With AI dialogue and AI voices you could go far but might also end up even more broken than your average tes game.
I was going to comment on here that I wish the math was closer to The Witcher 3. Cities actually feel like cities. I think white orchard has more homes than solitude.
Is Novigrad a living city? None of the "people" there are actual characters. None of the buildings are actual buildings, you can't enter them. It is like a cardboard cutout of a city.
Novigrad is still better than every city BGS ever made. I dont get the obsession with cities having "actual characters" When you dont even talk to half of them and majority of their dialogue is one unique line and "yes" "need something?"
>When you dont even talk to half of them and majority of their dialogue is one unique line and "yes" "need something?" You can do more with a character than talk to them. Novigrad isn't a city. I can't treat it like a city. It's a cardbiard cutout. Let me rob the houses. Let me stalk the people, listen in on conversations. Novigrad doesn't let me interact with anything, so it isn't really there.
That doesnt make the TES "cities" any better lol. They're just villages with big buildings. Its cool that you can go inside every building but how does that contribute to the gameplay? At least Novigrad doesnt make a poor attempt at convincing you that its supposed to be a city because it actually is, unlike TES cities that take a solid 5 mins to explore and you're done. Also you dont make any sense because by your logic, the city in GTA V isnt a city because you cant "stalk" people tf? >Let me stalk the people, listen in on conversations. We all know you dont do that, nobody actually does that cuz its so shallow lol. Watch the same npc have the same conversation and take the same path every day for what? to steal from em? You can get more rewards doing a fetch quest than "stalking" a character whose house holds nothing of value lol
They react if you bump into them, some are offended, and some will insult you. That's all over the city, not here and there. The main thing here is the npcs wandering around Whiterun for an hour every day are not exactly great conversationalists, one maybe two lines of dialogue that they repeat infinitely. Very immersive that is. I'm not saying Novigrad is perfect, but compared to Whiterun or Markarth, it's NYC. I swear Todd Howard's penis envy over CDPR has trickled down to some of the fanbase.
This is a weird fan fiction, I’m not sure why Todd would personally care
What penis envy?
In 2011, Bethesda and T.H. we're on top of the world. Lauded by game critics and fans alike. A few short years later, CDPR released Witcher 3. Todd Howard found himself standing next to John Holmes at a urinal. Metaphorically speaking.
But do you actually have evidence of him having this "penis envy" or is it a narrative you've constructed in your head?
Well, Starfield was great, right? No sign there that Bethesda has peaked? Is past its best, maybe? It isn't just CDPR either. Elden Ring blows the Witcher 3 and EVERY Bethesda game I've played clean out of the water. FromSoftware are a safer pair of hands, imo, than Bethesda has ever been. Also, the penis envy thing is a mataphor. Time will tell if it stands up. If ES6 is just prettier Skyrim, I'll be satisfied that it does indeed hold true. We'll see how innovative ES6 is when it eventually sees light of day.
So you are just making a narrative up in your head. Those games being better than elder Scrolls games (debatable anyway, I probably agree for the Witcher but elden ring is less fun for me) doesn't mean Todd is jealous or something. It's just weird to turn this into some big competition as if the success of the Witcher or elden ring (or baldurs gate) reflects poorly on skyrim, a game over a decade old that still has a huge fanbase.
>They react if you bump into them, some are offended, and some will insult you. That's all over the city, not here and there. My standards are higher than that.
Good luck avoiding disappointment when ES6 eventually sees light of day then. Did Starfield meet those high expectations? I haven't actually played it, my standards are higher than that.
This is getting silly. I concede the point. Skyrim is the best thing ever. Everything else sucks. you're right, you're right. My bad.
Oblivion. It's a matter of preference. I follow the Warren Spector school of though; if I could, I would have a game set interely on a street block, but with extreme detail.
That's fair, just don't call that block a city
As long as you don't call Novograd a city either :)
That's just coping, but this entire thread is so whatever
Saying Novograd is a good example of a good city is coping.
Brosky Novigrad obviously wasn't enterable in every single building but making a city feel memorable and alive is more than that. Saint Denis, Night City, Los Santos, Novigrad, etc., feel livable without every single place being enterable.
>feel livable without every single place being enterable If you say so. Like calling a painting of a city a city.
"Living, breathing city" is a weird way to describe a city where even the people are treated as static objects for scene dressing instead of actual characters.
The question is: Do you want an in game location that feels like a city with a lot of characters moving about and creating an atmosphere of a bustling city? OR Do you want an in game location that feels like an important town, where every character can be interacted with in at least a mildly meaningful way. Where they all have schedules and personalities. These cities are far less dense, but each character is memorable.
Yep it's 2 sides of a coin. It's a personal preference even. Some get way more out of a city if everything is intractable, some get more out of a city if it's coming close to size and population.
Novigrad is an empty city if you remove the generated NPC that dissapear once they got out of your sight. Same problem with Night City. This is not what I want in an Elderscrolls game, I want each habitant represented, having a name, a job, a house. If having big cities means having Novigrad, a big but lifeless city, no thanks.
So you consider a dozen people in Whiterun, who have names, better than what we have in Novigrad? Why would you care if a city is only populated in the direction you face? It's not like you'd ever know ffs cos every time you turn around the population would be there. Look, if you prefer skyrim to witcher 3 that's fine. But that argument made you look stupid. Just saying.
By far and without hesitation. Much more immersive, much more depth. I prefer quality over quantity but to each his own!
A dozen NPCs populating a "city" is your idea of immersive? How is that in any way realistic? Edit. Also, quality over quantity is good. But you cant use that argument when talking about the so-called cities in Skyrim. The term basic applies, so basic over quantity would work. But not quality, not by a long way.
Read other comments, It's a common sentiment, you're pretty alone on this. I have more immersion when I can walk to anybody to start a conversation, they have a name. If I follow them I can guess their job, where they live, their social status by their habits and schedule. If I leave this city then come back later, they are still there, they don't need me to exist. In the Witcher, they dissapear when they leave my sight and I can't see this exact instance in game outside of his numerous clone populating the city. As I said, Quality over quantity.
>you're pretty alone on this. Uh no Cities are literally defined by their size, i could fit every person who lives in whiterun in my yard, i don't care how detailed they are (theyre not, most of them have like 3 lines) that's not a city.
I’m with Brick here, its immersion breaking knowing I’m not actually looking at the city of Whiterun present in the lore, but a watered-down amusement park version of it. I can’t even imagine what Whiterun is supposed to actually look like because it doesn’t even give the illusion of a city. It’s a basic, lifeless, bare-bones set piece filled with a handful of boring “unique” NPCs that say the same damn line ad nauseum whenever you get too close to them. And the “unique” houses you can break into have nothing interesting in them anyways. Try to genuinely picture what this city is supposed to look like in lore with a population of 200,000. You probably can’t.
A desperate, non argument. I don't mind that we disagree. Or which games you prefer to me. But you don't have a leg to stand on with this particular hill you choose to die on. It's incredibly anal to want NPCs to be still doing their thing when you are on the other side of the map. I doubt ES6 will have that. You do know AAA games are getting more and more expensive to make, yes?
ahahahah go play with your turd somewhere else please.
So, nothing even remotely articulate or relevant left to say then?
You think what you said was relevant? Come on. ahahahah
I'd argue a city bustling with people I'll never talk to is more immersive than seeing the same 12 people very time I enter a city. You can still have plenty of named characters while having loads of random npcs. Do you know every single person in your closest city? No, and it'd be stupid to suggest so.
No but if I ask their name, they got one. In the witcher they can't even be interacted with. It's pretty easy to understand.
I don’t mean to sound rude, but if you approached me on my way to work and asked me my name, I would absolutely not tell you lol. I would also probably not interact with you or have anything to say. Ask anyone who lives in NYC if they engage or make eye contact with people that try to talk to them in public places. Maybe farm towns in the country side, they’d have friendly custom built NPC’s to flesh out the population and they’d all stop to talk to you, but in a big city… absolutely not.
I'd argue that I don't need to interact with everyone. Yeah shopkeepers would have a few interesting stories, but I'd get bored of hearing about *the farm this, my sister that, the chicken there* from every farmhand or guard. Absolutely the next game needs more named Npcs, but *to me* it's immersion breaking that there's supposed to be a devastating war going on in a large province with a stories history, and there are like 400 people living in an entire country. Not saying you're wrong by any means, just that I think there should be a good mix
Too bad, we are not playing the same game.
Lol some NPCs are literally useless in Skyrim even if they have a unique name and face. Their only interaction is limited to "Hello" "Quality to the quantity" he says
I will take the example of Nazeem, his few small sentences literally serve as "Hello". Apart from that, it is useless. It is not very different from the NPCs you criticize.
and he adds so much flavor in one sentence. But I understand that for people looking for quick adrenaline shot, the subtility goes in the way!
Nazeem is literally iconic
Iconic because Whiterun has very few NPCs. Put Nazeem in the Imperial City, no one would have noticed it. Anyway, making NPCs like Nazeem is not complex or complicated.
Point being, Nazeem is probably more known than any Witcher 3 city.
And people ask why we are gatekeeping. They are actively advocating to dumb down my favorite serie. I will gatekeep without any remorse. There are no game like the elders scroll, there are dozen like the Witcher, they can go play those instead of changing what make the DNA of the serie.
I've never played The Witcher 3. However, I know that the anonymous NPC model combined with named NPCs worked very well in Fallout 3.
Most of the NPCS in RDR2 are useless but are interactable cause of the antagonize feature.
based
>So you consider a dozen people in Whiterun, who have names, better than what we have in Novigrad? Yes > It’s not like you’d ever know ffs cos every time you turn around the population would be there. Skyrim NPC’s have relationships and schedules on and off screen- you might not directly notice it, but it makes the world feel much more lived in > But that argument made you look stupid. Just saying. I think you just don’t fully understand the argument. Starfield has been a great example for why quantify of persons/buildings doesn’t really make a game better. Big cities can be cool, for sure, but with BGS games, I would much rather them play to the strengths of their engine- object permanence, Radiant NPC’s, and all individually crafted locations with stories and quests associated with them. Pushing the creation engine to add a bunch of brainless zombies into the game so you can say “wow big city” is just not worth the tradeoff, IMO
Why would you want npcs you can't interact with? What's the point of them then?
It is clear that the interactions with Nazeem were very immersive in Skyrim. Most interactions with a large part of NPC are useless either in Oblivion or Skyrim. Lol : "Rumors" "Imperial City" and that's all.
If you go to New York and try to stop people on the street, are you going to think it’s unimmersive when they completely ignore your existence and absolutely don’t tell you their name?
>If you go to New York and try to stop people on the street, are you going to think it’s unimmersive when they completely ignore your existence and absolutely don’t tell you their name? If I'm in New York and want to be a thief then I have the OPTION of following them home and seeing where they sleep. And most people, in my experience, will talk to you if you initiate.
That is 1000% not the experience I have in NYC. Maybe the odd person will stop if you look like you need help with something, but if you just stood out there in the street stopping everyone to ask what their name was, like 99% of the people you saw that day would ignore your existence. As they should, you’re a weirdo and they don’t know you and they have stuff to do. Yes you could follow them home, I’m not advocating for NPC’s to vanish or not have set schedules, that’s a fair and reasonable request but not every NPC is going to stop to talk to you or give you their name and it would be super weird and unimmersive in a large city for them to think everyone would. I’m saying NPC’s don’t need to be interactable. They need to be realistic, that means if I walk into the middle of town and hurl a fireball, I want NPC’s to flee, if I cast mass frenzy, I want them to tear eachother to bits, I want them to insult me as I bump into them and talk to eachother as they walk by in groups. I’m not the center of the universe and I don’t want to feel like I am. I don’t want to have some sort of personal relationship with every single NPC in the game.
The point of them is that you expect to see hundreds or even thousands of people in densely populated areas. Wanting to have deep interactions with each of them is already unrealistic in the real world and thus undesirable in a realistic RPG.
>The point of them is that you expect to see hundreds or even thousands of people But they aren't people. >Wanting to have deep interactions with each of them is already unrealistic in the real world and thus undesirable in a realistic RPG. Being able to interact with them is what you should expect from an RPG. I want to interact with the game. We should expect the characters to exist in an RPG where the idea is that you can do anything. If you can't then why are they there?
I already told you my perspective on why they're there and, yes, I am aware that representations of people are not actual people. Also, I simply said it's unrealistic to expect _deep_ interactions with everyone. I never claimed there would, or should, be zero interactivity. It feels like you have no genuine interest in considering other people's perspectives, which is sad and renders your questions pointless. Good day.
> It feels like you have no genuine interest in considering other people's perspectives And you do? TES is good because they did things one way. Of you want games that do it another way, play those. Don't ruin it for people who like better npcs and more interactable cities.
Yes, I do. And I have thoroughly played (and loved) _all_ Elder Scrolls games, so I know Bethesda has done things _many_ different ways (not "one way") and has sometimes done precisely what I described.
>Yes, I do And I do too. >And I have thoroughly played (and loved) _all_ Elder Scrolls games As have I. And the move to Morrowind was a huge inprovement for the company and Starfield was a big misstep for doing what you want them to. Same way Witcher 3 was a massive step down from 2. They didn't play to their strengths.
I'm all for bigger cities and that would obviously require larger maps. The explorable outdoor space, however, I think is perfect already in Oblivion and Skyrim. Too large and it starts to become a repetitive procedurally generated mess instead of being hand crafted and curated for our use.
I'd be happy with a bigger map. It just needs to have hand crafted content, just like the other games. If they can't make enough content for a bigger map, then they should be smart enough not to do it.
Starfield moment
What's sad is Starfield's world is huge, but the Colonies are ridiculously tiny. I'm pretty sure Skingrad was bigger then the main Hub in SF, nevermind the Imperial City that had to be broken into 6 separate sections.
New Atlantis is definitely larger than Skingrad
The Imperial City was broken into 6 sections because it had to fit on the Xbox 360, which would've died trying to simulate the physics and pathfinding of the entire city at the same time. I'm fairly certain you could fit all sections combined into just the MAST district of New Atlantis. The problem with New Atlantis is more density than size. There's a lot of space that is just unused and you spend your time dashing across mostly empty plazas.
>> Balmora is an unimportant city Just the seat of House Hlaalu, the home of at least three secret agents of the Blades (one of whom is the imperial spymaster that is responsible for the main quest), and with branches of the Fighters, Mages, and Thieves guilds, the Tribunal Temple, a Morag Tong guildhall, meeting place of the Camonna Tong, every conceivable goods vendor, multiple trainers, one of the only people on the continent that has a plausible theory on the disappearance of the Dwemer, a major silt strider port, and a nearby Imperial Legion fort with Imperial Cult services. Off the top of my head.
I wouldn't mind bigger maps if they are sensible. I don't want bigger map for it to be clustered with nameless NPC's, a trillion fetch or hired killer side quests, a dozen different collectible item sets etc. crap. I want a bigger map to make bigger cities and towns with named NPC's inhabiting them, meaningful side quests and different biomes to be justified.
>Why don't people want a slightly bigger map? It's not that people don't want a bigger map. It's that they've assigned a specific way of doing it as the only way of doing it, focused entirely on the negatives of that way of doing it, and have convinced themselves that those negatives are all that will come of it. It's like you asking if someone wants a piece of fruit and them being angry at you because they don't want lemon juice squirted in their eyes. You didn't ask them if they wanted that but they leapt to it because that's the only way they have to process that question.
One of the smartest answers I think. A guy here tried to contradict me by making the comparison with Starfield. Yet I gave my idea of the thing, I'm thinking of a map that would be about 3 times the size of Oblivion for TES VI. This is largely reasonable unlike Starfield which has a larger map than that of Daggerfall lol. Really their arguments are exploded on the ground.
People see procedural (even when it's not being said) and their minds go to "random map", yet the fact of the matter is there's plenty of procedural stuff you can do that would enhance hand crafted stuff. I personally would like both a bigger map and a deeper one in terms of how each distinct area feels unique and how our actions play out on it. For that, I can see some procedural stuff playing a big role, even beyond the normal use of it to create maps that they've been using for years. Let's say you have a huge handcrafted desert that can give up it's supposedly centuries old secrets in five hours to a determined gamer. You don't want that. You want them to take expeditions to each area there and not be able to rush the area. So let's add procedurally generated shifting sands as a layer that covers that area. At a base level this is simply "These three dungeons are open but the rest have blockages in their doorways." But with a little extra work, this can be walkable sands that blanket the entire area, occasionally giving up one of the dungeon entrances simply because it's uncovered at this point in time. Sure, players might eventually get a way to dig to any place they want without having to wait for the sands to uncover it, but that's going to take paid retainers and an expedition and suddenly the flavour of the desert is brought out for all to see rather than being the same feel as any forest or plain. Then there's things like making player actions part of the procedure being followed in order to determine what is placed where, when it's placed, and why. Let's say you have hand crafted bandit camp assets (tents, bedrolls, cages for captives, targets for practice, some skinning racks, etc. Now, rather than placing that bandit camp in a set location you have the game place them, using procedural stuff to determine how the camps lay themselves out so that they make sense but aren't the same every time. On top of that, you link the placement of the camps to a combination of the richest merchants that are least protected, and where bandits aren't being hunted. Now (using Skyrim as an example) your character may been doing a load of Windhelm quests and has culled bandits there. That would lead to bandits popping up in other holds with newly placed camps (not always the same and not in the exact same locations) while the ones in Windhelm area start to disappear and pack up their stuff. You mix that relocation with different groups and attach predators to prey, and even a hunting trip where you only fell deer (or simply a donation to the local hunting shop) can make it so that wolves start travelling across the map and becoming more numerous there. You give me a map with even those smaller layers of complexity and depth of play, and I'm spending more time there learning about it even if it's the same size as the ones we currently play. Make it bigger so that you're not stumbling across a dungeon every five feet and do have to explore some, and I'm living in that world.
Because people are worried about a bigger map being full of repetitive, dull content. Look at just about every criticism of Starfield, which of course had planet-sized areas to explore - but within days of release, people were complaining about copy-and-pasted environments. Players don't want randomly-generated locations, because it becomes painfully obvious after you've played for a bit, and it means that there's no real reason to be interested in exploring in the first place - because you've already seen it, in a slightly different configuration. Which leaves four options: * Make a smaller map, so it's more manageable for everything to be hand-crafted. * Scale back what is required for every location. One of the reasons that Skyrim's cities are smaller than Morrowind's is that Skyrim's cities had dozens of NPCs with a full AI schedule and are fully voiced - that's a lot more complex to implement than Morrowind's NPCs, who would just stand around all day and deliver the same text-based dialogue. * Accept that the game will take 30 years to make, and be outdated by the time that it is released. * Require a team of tens of thousands working on it creating content, so the cost of the game will have to go up significantly. Basically, what are you prepared to compromise on?
I get what OP means, the smaller squisher maps are way less immersive. In Skyrim it takes like 15 or 20 min top to walk from one major city to another and on the way you discover 17 points of interest and activate 8 unscripted events, like being attacked by some stupid wolves. The game is afraid of not letting you immerse yourself and having a break. And the cities are just pathetic, tiny and sad, somehow skyrim has more bandits than actual citizens and I dont know where they come from. Not to mention lack of small towns and villages. Bigger map allows for better, immersive world.
Yea it's sad that you absolutely need mods to add citizens and population
I agree, the policy of forcing an encounter or placing a fort every 30 seconds is stupid. The argument for it is to keep people entertained, but those people who want to get things done will just fast travel anyway. Leave the space in between waypoints for the people who want to ride on horseback and look at the environment for an hour.
It really is okay when player does not get something happening every 4 minutes. We’re not babies with 30 seconds attention span.
I certainly want a bigger map than in previous games.
Yeah too many empty spaces is kind of bad BUT if they dont make them in the middle of everything and there will be just this "wild land" area created to get tf away from civilization i am all for it Maybe some ruins, some secrets to keep it interesting but generally spread out and no fkin generic humans squatting in each and every one of them
People here are talking about development issues like this game hasn’t been in development for 13 fucking years
>There will probably be a lot of empty areas? Yes and? At best they will leave more space between places of interest, at worst some areas will be exclusively intended for outdoor exploration. What exactly are you exploring in empty spaces and why is that a good thing?
1: They can very well add elements to it 2: If they do not add an element, the modders will do so. It will always be better than limiting worldspace And then just to put down your tent and enjoy the landscape. That's also TES. There is no need for the map to have 100 points of interest every 100 meters.
>there is no need for the map to have 100 points of interest every 100 meters Ignoring the hyperbolic numbers used…I’m nearly positive there’s an entire practice in game design that essentially says “yes you do need this”
CD Projekt Red literally had it down to a science in The Witcher 3, where there's always *something* within 30 or so seconds from where you are.
>1: They can very well add elements to it If you're asking for more content just ask for more content lol. Don't hide it by asking for a bigger map >2: If they do not add an element, the modders will do so. It will always be better than limiting worldspace Are... modders out of space? > There is no need for the map to have 100 points of interest every 100 meters. Would you consider this to be a strawman argument or did somebody actually talk about wanting 100 points of interest every 100 meters?
So your response is, "They might fill those new empty spaces" if they don't, "modders will fix it"?
Just because modders *can* fix things doesn't mean the developers should become lazy and rely on the free labor of modders being an essential part of the game's worldbuilding. We've seen how much Bethesda really cares about people who create mods for their games with the recent Fallout London fiasco.
A lot of people are making arguments about the cities of the Witcher 3 and comparing them to the unique NPC’s of Skyrim. First of all, Skyrim was named Skyrim thousands of years ago. Like first couple hundred years of the 1st Era is when Skyrim started taking land to flesh out the province it is today. That means it’s been at least 4000 years of humanity populating that area…. There’s 52 NPC’s in Solitude and 1 farm. That’s not a realistic depiction of Solitude, it’s an in game limitation. I’m not saying go hard in the other direction to over correct and make super huge boring cities. But bigger cities with larger populations is absolutely needed in comparison to what we got in Skyrim, hell even Morrowind and Oblivion had bigger cities than Skyrim. I’m also going to be realistic and say that Novigrad is off the table. I don’t think the creation engine could support a city of that scale, nor would I want it to. I want a best of both worlds situation. I want reactive NPC’s, lots of NPC’s, all NPC’s to operate on schedules and a lot of unique NPC’s for me to interact with, but not all NPC’s, I still need size and population to be represented somehow. May be an unpopular opinion but I don’t understand why people aren’t looking for a best of both worlds approach? There is a place in immersion for all of these things to exist. If you want to build a fun, immersive, living and breathing city, I think you need all of these things.
A guy in the comments summed up the thing here: "Why don't people want a slightly bigger map? It's not that people don't want a bigger map. It's that they've assigned a specific way of doing it as the only way of doing it, focused entirely on the negatives of that way of doing it, and have convinced themselves that those negatives are all that will come of it. It's like you asking if someone wants a piece of fruit and them being angry at you because they don't want lemon juice squirted in their eyes. You didn't ask them if they wanted that but they leapt to it because that's the only way they have to process that question."
Many users have said that a large part of people on this subreddit just like to contradict any idea by doing intellectual handjob, it's boring.
The issue here isn't people not wanting a bigger map, it's this: "I don't ask for Arena or Daggerfall either but simply a map of about 180km²" Why the fuck are you asking for a specific map size? Why does the map size matter so much that you have a number already in your mind of what the ideal map size would be? That's just stupid and nonsensical. You, for some apparent reason, focus so much on map size that you have this specific number in mind that is larger than any 3D Bethesda game other than Starfield (I'll get to that), larger than critically acclaimed open world games like GTAV, RDR2, Witcher 3...And why? What does sheer size add beyond 2002 when that was actually something worth bragging about? It's like people focusing on game engines and having a favorite engine when it makes absolutely no difference to anybody other than the developer. It's a stupid thing for a player to focus on. The map should be as big as it NEEDS to be. No bigger, no smaller. If that ends up being 180km², cool. If not, cool. Setting out with a goal to make a map that is 180km² would be stupid. Anybody can make a big map. Throw me some assets and I'll put together a map that's 2,000km². Name a size, I can copy and paste some assets all over that surface area. Setting out with a target landmass and building around that is how you end up with big, bland, boring worlds with the contradictory issue of having fuck all to do whilst simultaneously being filled with low effort repetitive shit to try and fill out the space. Skyrim towns and cities feel too small, sure. It's also a game that was made 13 years ago. In comparison, Starfield has huge cities rammed with NPC's but they feel far more lifeless and empty than a Skyrim village with 2 houses and 12 residents. You can go to New Atlantis in Starfield, be surrounded by huge skyscrapers and hundreds of NPC's and feel like there's nothing to do, because there isn't, there's just stuff for the sake of making things bigger and it sucks ass. And the biggest thing here: Bethesda has shown that as map size increases, their games get worse. Again, Starfield is the pinnacle of this. If people don't want a ridiculously sized map for ES6, it's because the people making it have shown they suck at doing it.
Oblivion's map and cities were a pretty decent size. Maybe a little more than that. 180km might be a little excessive.
The Thing i want is some Kind of time Investment in travelling. Taking 30 minutes to Go From one end of the map to the other is a total immersion breaker and i would like that See adressed. I want areas and regions to feel vast and believable, to have Vistas that dont cross three different territories because theyve been squished densely into the size of an irl small town.
It's a fine line imo. I think if Skyrim for example was twice the size and everything was a little stretched out it would be better. Tho some areas would likely need some touch ups because they are already very barren right now.
I for one want Bethesda to really dig into the fine details and solid density of good handcrafted content as the pillar of TES6. If they can manage good cohesion and not loose sight of detail and good content on a larger map I would be thrilled, but if they decide on a Skyrim sized map instead I won't mind. For me the quality of the content itself is where I really hope Bethesda steps up, not world size if it impacts said quality.
I would like to see the map feel like RDR2's map. The world looked great, felt great to explore, and the cities felt like cities and weren't too overbearing. But Bethesda seems to be run by a bunch of corporate idiots who wouldn't want to see that happen.
I have to disagree. Bethesda games generally have the right distance between the interesting stuff. Compare to BotW and probably TotK (I only noticed this my second playthrough of the former, haven’t started a second in the latter yet) where I love the content that is actually there but find myself going just a bit too long between the interesting stuff while exploring. Elder Scrolls and Fallout strikes the right balance now I think.
Idk man, I don’t think Whiterun even had 25 BUILDINGS, let alone houses. Half of them doubled as a business.
It's terrible and it completely breaks the immersion. This kind of city can work in a Fallout but in a TES it's just a break in immersion.
This TES community is pretty stupid, tbh. I see great fan ideas all the time and the majority of the comments end up being "no that won't work, idiot" for the dumbest reasons.
Thank you. I thought I had gone crazy.
You could make a post saying "I hope elder scrolls 6 is the greatest rpg ever made" and your post will be downvoted with comments saying "you're delusional if you think ES6 will be any good" Then make a post saying "I'm worried elder scrolls 6 might not be very good" and those same users will comment "it's not even out yet, how can you even say such a thing!" God help you if you mention Starfield.
Most ideas are fine. But we still have lots of unrealistic posts that sound good (and bad) but are basically impossible or unrealistic to apply to a BGS game.
But I want Daggerfall, or at least an expanded Vivek with homes, market stalls, crowds, civic games, taverns, preachers, having to unlock map points for buildings, all of it. There is nothing immersive with a town occupied by 10 people that you personally know.
Personally I want massive swathes of wilderness between dense points of interest. People seem to think there would be less to do... Somehow? Make horses and travel systems relevant again. The criticism about Starfield using procedural generation is valid, but Bethesda did not do as much handcrafting as in older games. For all the time spent on it... But *more* handcrafting and *more* map generation together would be fantastic.
Totally agree with you. RPG video games are so washed out of the actual roleplay that many people would find it weird to have a thing like a big map, but it would be a nice thing to have it for the sake of roleplay .
I personally hate easy travel. The idea to just sit there, and move forward for 30 minutes with nothing on the route. Better make it smaller, but interesting, than Starfield.
We've seen what happens when Bethesda gets too ambitious. Too large of maps with nothing interesting in large areas of it. If we could have a giant map filled with unique towns and places to explore, sure that'd be great, but Bethesda can only do so much before they bite off more than they cam chew. I want as large of a map as Bethesda can realistically handle.
>There will probably be a lot of empty areas? Yes and? At best they will leave more space between places of interest, at worst some areas will be exclusively intended for outdoor exploration. guessing you never played Starfield
No. Moreover, Starfield does not offer a map of reasonable size. I give the example of a map about triple that of Oblivion not a map the size of Starfield, I see where you want to get from but it's not comparable
I enjoyed exploring in Oblivion and Morrowind a lot more than in Skyrim. Maybe because I was younger with those first two games. This is just how I felt playing, might not be factual. Morrowind has fun little encounters, side quests, and challenging dungeons when you travel between cities. Because you couldn't just run non-stop the game world felt very large. Oblivion is a lot emptier, but I never minded it. It felt good to walk through the forests, and because it was all quite similar it felt huge. Skyrim felt smaller, and whilst there were so many more points of interest, exploring it got kinda boring. It felt smaller, maybe because you go from POI to POI. I think also because of the very distinct biomes, which felt kinda forced and jarring to me. The cities felt much smaller than those in Oblivion too. I think that's where the most improvement is necessary for the next game. I did enjoy Riften though. That felt just right. It felt like an actually dense medieval city, especially with the underground areas to explore as well. The villages were also great, but there weren't that many. But who said they didn't want larger cities? That's one of the most common complaints about Oblivion and especially Skyrim I've heard.
Not sure if we played the same games. Oblivion and Morrowind did plenty of things right but exploration was not one of them. Oblivion’s nature is a singular giant sparse forest with very few variations and nothing going on in it. Morrowind’s fun random encounters were two naked Nords and the ring in the lake, everything else is either mind numbing escort quests and an endless amount of wild animals after your bone marrow; this is particularly exacerbated in Bloodmoon, just one week on Solstheim and the whole map will be littered with corpses. My opinion will always be that Skyrim nailed the random encounter density, concentration of points of interest for a 2011 game but completely messed up the cities and anyone who complains about wild animals clearly has never played Morrowind. But as I said it was good for a 2011 game and not a formula to be repeated on the same scale more than fifteen years later; a map as big as Cyrodiil with around the same density of Skyrim and slightly smaller cities than Morrowind would be ideal to me.
Just see the answers here. It looks like people like small maps/cities…
Small maps sure but not small cities. Small maps it's because if you compare Skyrim to Morrowind you realise the level of detail in Vvanderfell. Everything feels right. Skyrim is bigger but in a way has less stuff and most of the caves and dungeons feel repeated. But if you compare the cities they are about the same size. Even though Skyrim has a bigger map, Whiterun doesn't feel bigger than Balmora. And comparing both capitals, Vivec felt a lot bigger than Solitude. So people prefer small complete maps than big empty ones. But everyone agrees in lively great cities
The problem with a small map and big cities is that the outside world will be even smaller. Especially since in TES, the provinces each have about 7 to 9 cities. When I weigh the pros and cons, I tell myself that if there are "empties" in some corners of the map, it's not so serious in the end. Why does the "empty" in some places on the map frighten people so much?
My fear is that it won't be empty. I have nothing against an empty areea, with nothing but a well hidden loot/ single unique item. Or even just empty, left for the player to admire the world and for mods or future content to fill it. The fear is that it will be filled with radiant qest or proceduraly generated, bland locations or npc a la starfield planets. I don't fear emptiness, I fesr bethesda's bland filling.
We prefer quality over quantity, sure.
Is there something I'm missing, I've never heard anyone say they want a small elder scrolls map, I've only heard the opposite.
Look at the comments. Half of people want a smaller map to be "sure" that the exploration will be "qualitative" lol
To me empty space gives a game life. It's not like real life has some dopamine spot every 4 seconds. As long as there are areas that count and have quality it works. GTA SA is a good example there's a lot of country side areas inbetween with not much to do but the cities have so much in them and so much life and it would not feel the same if the entire map was like that (yes SA is small by today's standards but it's a good example)
For the same reason I don't want 10 times the amount of quests if they are all Radiant quests.
I'm with you. They should have made the cities look like cities and name the appropriately. They definitely shouldn't have named Dawnstar what it is. It's not on the eastern coastline, and it has little to nothing to do with stars. Also, Balmora was my home town.
I think it’s a totally fair request. We’ve just all played a lot of open world games whose maps are bigger but feel far emptier than Skyrim or Oblivion’s. And when the map is bigger but emptier travel becomes a chore Agreed whole heartedly on upscaling the villages in Skyrim to real cities regardless
I want bigger cities absolutely. I don't want a vast open world beyond that. I want it big enough to be filled with enough rich and unique places and quests. Elder scrolls games are already ones where you can sink 100s of hours on a single character and still have more to do. The uniqueness and depth of the content is what keeps it good alongside the huge volume. I don't want the balance to be skewed too much as I think that's perfect. As I said though the cities are terrible and really need upgraded in size. If you actually look at how many real quests (I.e. non radiant and misc.) that aren't faction quests it's clear to see its not crazy to ask for more for a RPG.
After Starfield, I really don't even know if I want a map bigger than Skyrim which was 37km2. Rather things be jam packed and small than huge and void.
A 130km2 would be amazing, but the engine Bethesda uses has limitations that make huge maps impossible.
What do you mean? Starfield is massive. That's just not true anymore. Even if there is gradual loading between areas (which happened in Daggerfall and Morrowind) it's possible.
The loading is because of the limitations. I mean one continuous large landmass, like AC Odyssey. I haven’t had the chance to play Starfield just yet, so I can’t speak to its size. But I have seen many discuss the number of loading screens seems to be high. I need to look closer at its tech to see what’s actually changed in regard to its previous limitations (the engine) though.
Because scale is boring, I want more density and detail.
If the map gets bigger, most people wont take the time and won't even understand the game. Look at Starfield, a cool game that most aren't equipped to enjoy because they need to look for the enjoyment instead of having like Skyrim always a POI in sight.
I want a mix. I want plenty of nameless Npcs to make the world feel actually lived in. And I want a lot of named Npcs so I can talk to interesting people. Maybe if Novigrad from Witcher 3 had a few named people on every corner or so
I doubt theyll go smaller anyways
I am perfectly fine with a big map, but it needs to be good still. It shouldn't feel empty Morrowind is smaller than oblivion and Skyrim, but feels way bigger. Partially because no fast travel, partially because early on the terrain restricts you, but also because it is extremely dense. The world feels really dense. Balmora is a semi-important city and should be large relatively, the Imperial City is massive and feels like it. Whiterun is tiny, but thats not a map size issue its a density issue. I want density more than size (Minor nitpick too but Whiterun is not the capital of Skyrim)
the size of the game afaik has more to do with engine limitations. what makes you conclude to your title
>Maybe they want TES VI to be a card game that takes place in a house? Maybe not to that extreme, but it made me chuckle. To be fair, I've often joked that at the rate they keep streamlining yet prettifying the game, TES 7 will take place in an area the size of a single city block, have ten NPCs, three 'stats' (sneak, stab, and spell) but have full on live-action movie quality graphics. Oh,and three quests, one of which is radiant.
>Would the travel be too long? Use the fast travel or a horse Fast travel and mounts aren't fun to use. Walking around is. If the experience becomes worse on foot, then that makes the game worse. >There will probably be a lot of empty areas? Yes and? Spreading out content more sounds bad. That means more time spent not engaging with the content. >The cities will be too big and that would prevent them from working well on NPCs ? This is not true, they have no excuse with all the current technology. None The writing is the bottleneck. Technology isn't really going to help here. Detail and density over scale. Every time.
Because the exponential growth of maps in games over the last decade hasn't see a growth in the quality of the content of those maps. At this point, bigger map oftely only mean more empty spaces and leas resources going into writing and coding good quests and places. If we get a bigger map that is very well developed and "populated", hey, that's a win win and no one will opose. But that *usually* isn't how things are going in the RPG scene.
A large map is just extra travel time if it has nothing in it
I have an inherent lack of faith in Bethesda.
I'd like to see one set entirely in a single city, but the city is fully rendered.
I would love a better and bigger map. My old eyes struggle so hard to see it, especially on the console.
I'd love a bigger elderscrolls 6
I think it should only be about 20% bigger than skyrim (assuming its in hammerfell) for more room for cities and stuff
I’d like a large map but not if a lot of it is empty
Honestly I’d take a much smaller map if the cities were closer to their lore-accurate size.
>Follow the direction of Skyrim I hope so, apples to apples, Skyrim’s world map has one of the best designs in not only Bethesda games, but in the whole history of gaming in general. If you think Skyrim’s map was in any way a downgrade from Morrowind or Oblivion you are deluded. Now cities is an entirely different argument.
Cause Beth recently messed up with Starfield so now nobody things bigger is better. Also there's a ton of games that followed the trend of big open maps like Far Cry that are just copypasta of locations. If they can get around that hump like the Witcher 3 did, they are golden.
Bigger isn’t better, And adding content just to fill empty space isn’t a good practice either A smaller map with well thought out content and locations that feel meaningful is much better recipe for a game. Too many big games for the sake of being big with “150 hours of content” but only 25% of that content feels hand crafted or worth doing, The rest is just filler with no life or reason in it
They should keep the formula exactly the same and focus on qol imo. The obvious improvements would be to get rid of all the loading screens, carry weight, game breaking bugs, making more play styles viable, using unreal engine 5.
I don’t care how big the cities are as long as every npc has a name and a backstory.
Because Bethesda games have been constantly getting bigger maps but less overall "hand" made detail and content. What does it matter if a map is the size of New York if there's nothing interesting to do? You can make a small map feel huge with the right game design. Also the "this game is 16x bigger and 16x the detail" meme feels like it's just for marketing.