Dear Bethesda, This is What is what meant to look like

[tomhughes]

http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/images/15776-1-1335201891.jpg

 

Am I the only one who feels that one of the biggest problems with Skyrim is the fact all the settlements are utterly implausible? I mean less than 100 people are in every city!

[sajuukkhar9000]

You are aware they had to do that because of the limitations of consoles?

 

Also you are aware its equally unreasonable that skyrim is really only like 4-5 square miles?

Edited April 27, 2012 by sajuukkhar9000

[Rennn]

It's actually about 12 square miles, but yeah, still unreasonable. We can blame the consoles for the small towns.

[PsxMeUP]

It's not just a limitation of consoles. PCs also can't handle it. Oblivion and Fallout also have that problem. GTA doesn't but you can't enter buildings in GTA.

[Rennn]

It's not just a limitation of consoles. PCs also can't handle it. Oblivion and Fallout also have that problem. GTA doesn't but you can't enter buildings in GTA.

 

Well, some PCs can't handle it. Many can, and the ones that can't can turn down their settings. Most gaming PCs won't lose many frames per second over a few more people and more buildings, since geometry is pretty easy for a decent card.

[McclaudEagle]

It's not that PCs can't handle it, it's that the game engine can't handle it. Games such as The Witcher 2, Metro 2033, etc, have lots of on-screen NPCs without any issue. That is because the game engines that power them are capable of supporting it, whereas the Creation Engine (simply an upgraded Gamebryo) can not.

[RedRavyn]

I don't think it's an either-or situation. It's certainly true that the Gamebryo engine, in whatever incarnation you have it, is not very robust when you start adding lots of NPCs. On the other hand, with just a few object-intensive mods running on a computer that barely meets the minimum standards for an ES game, you're going to see stuttering and even crashes in certain areas. Add to that all the simultaneously-running AIs in a well-populated city, and whats a poor, overworked CPU to do? Answer ... croak.

 

So, yes, Tom, that's what it should look like. This is a medieval setting, after all. Very few cities were totally enclosed by walls. That was something restricted to the "high rent district". The "common rabble" lived outside the city walls, just as the picture you posted shows. But what Rennn said is quite true. This would make my laptop cry. My current gaming rig would probably be easily able to handle it. Whether or not the "Creation Engine" can handle this on a large scale is debatable.

 

Heck, there were computers that could run vanilla Oblivion without a stutter, but they would come to a grinding halt with just something like Open Cities installed -- one of the reasons I never got around to using that mod. I'd love to see a totally open world based upon Tamriel, about the size of Australia since that seems reasonable, with cities that make sense, populated with people who have unique and complex AIs. I'm just not sure anyone is capable of making such a thing, or that any commercially-available computer could run it.

 

Bethesda should have scrapped Gamebryo and licensed a a better, more up-to-date, and beefier game engine, but, after all, they're creating games for consoles and not for PCs. We PC gamers are probably going to have to look elsewhere for anything approaching realism in the populating of cities.

[Rennn]

It'd be possible to split up cities into loaded districts. One district, for example, could be all of Whiterun as it is in vanilla, while a second shabbier district could hold more buildings, and perhaps even some walled fields and lower-income peasant shops. That would have essentially no framerate impact, but then, of course, there's the obvious problem of actually having a load screen in a supposedly continuous city. I don't think it'd be a big drawback though, considering there are already load screens to every building, and all of the vanilla town would still exist as it does now.

[croc123]

I'd love to see a totally open world based upon Tamriel, about the size of Australia since that seems reasonable, with cities that make sense, populated with people who have unique and complex AIs.

 

Just making sure - you do know that AUS is about 80% the size of mainland US, right? But, yes, we PC gamers are hitherto constrained by console-sized dimensions in our games, and will be as long as consoles are about 80% of the profits. And consoles are constrained, in turn, by what the average console gamer is willing to pay for gaming.

[RedRavyn]

Yep, croc123, I'm fully aware of how big Australia is. I'm going by the necessary constraints which the existing geography we know about Tamriel places on the size of the continent, as well as the fact that Cyrodiil mysteriously changed from a tropical area to a temperate to sub-tropical area in the space of a few games.

 

The Niben valley is largely responsible for my estimate on the size of what Tamriel needs to be, and we can assume the high plateau of Skyrim is the reason for the alpine climate, there, and not it's latitude. Similarly, we can only assume that Leyawiin is sub-tropical because of its latitude. Unfortunately, that doesn't account for the nearly polar climate along the northern shore of Skyrim, but you can blame Bethesda for creating a "country" in Skyrim that is barely as large as any respectable American metropolis.