Why is Jorrvaskr divided up?

[tomomi1922]

I understand the necessity for instances and load screen: to segregate content and void performance hit in crowded and large places.

But Jorrvaskr is neither large or [that] crowded that Bethesda needs to cut the place up to have the main hall and the living quarter. The companions invited me to find a bed and sleep there. But frankly, to go through 2 load screens for that? No thanks. This decision by Bethesda is very questionable. It is as if they need to separate the player home into several sections with load screen, I would never live there, even my load screen takes 10 seconds to load (now it is longer).

[WastelandAssassin]

I'm pretty sure they always did this with similar designs (like the mage guild halls in Oblivion)

I don't understand it either , but it seems like how they design these buildings

and it's true that most of these are built in such a way , so you usually have to go through 2 loading screens just to pick up a quest (just like in the Ragged Flagon)

[HadToRegister]

Yea, I don't understand why some areas are chopped up so small like that, and the Ragged Flagon is a pain.
I still don't understand WHY though, because there are mods that add entrances to the Thieves Guild right from the well in the middle of Riften with only one loading screen and it doesn't cause any problems with quests or anything else.

[Deleted55545892User]

Maybe the lighting (big fire upstairs, chandeliers bottom), tons of clutter, and lots of NPCs at once - along with scripted events (Njada's fight, Kodlak meeting.. then dying later on), maybe there was a big limit for consoles. Not to mention leaving room for whatever the player may trigger or do in these settings.

 

2011 Consoles are pretty ancient now, if you think about it. Like the equivalent of a Pentium 3 or something. It's probably why the vanilla cities aren't very elaborate either...and even looking barebones, they're limited to their own worldspace.

 

They could have made a better version for PC at the time of release (or SE), but then that requires renaming cells and juggling too many seperate ways of handling things, depending on the version of the game. And would cause a nightmare of incompatibility issues. Just look at Open Cities. I love it.. but I practically can't do much more with it except play vanilla. I can't even find a damn suitable "extra forges" mod that works with Open Cities. The way it works is Open Cities changes the whole worldspace info for the areas.. so a mod that's targeting "Whiterun" won't see what Open Cities is doing, where the actual playable Whiterun is in the "Skyrim" worldspace now. If I wanted a forge, or some new Breezehome mod, it'll be inside an entirely different unplayable worldspace (the vanilla Whiterun). Or something like that? Same with other cells across the game. Like Jorrvaskr. Once they decided to name and do things a certain way (possibly to originally work on consoles), it's almost impossible to change it now. With Jorvasskr, they'd have to assign every instance that, say, Aela was doing in the current downstairs and upstairs cells.. every tiny instant of eating, talking, sleeping, taking the shield you gave her, watching Njada's fight, her responses to other events, etc.. then import it all in a new "all in one" Jorrvaskr cell. Except that'll break everything that ever referenced the old Aela. Which can possibly be a lot of things. Now apply this to all of the things happening in Jorrvasskr… not only Aela.. and then you see the problem.

 

When PC gamers grumble and call everyone else peasants, it may be harsh, but it's justified. Consoles are cramping our style. And when consoles are catered to, it's almost always a permanent alteration that can't be fixed in the future or in "remasters".

[tomomi1922]

I came from a software programming and design background. And one of my professors was literately on the Ultima Online team (or so he said). In my book, Meridian 59 is literately the first MMORPG, Ultima Online is the second. The team had no previous experience nor reference. They built the game as a single player game for PC. One glaring mistake, which became a classic story, is the sitting animation. It's a 2.5D game. For survival, the game couldn't rely straight on quests and exploration because eventually everyone would have seen everything. So they implemented a lot of things as after thoughts. Building your own houses, enjoying the aesthetic comfort of decoration and furniture. They couldn't make a sleeping animation (on bed). But they did their best for sitting: the entire character 3D mesh would be bent at the waist to go horizontal, and bent again at the knees to go vertical again. This looks exceptionally funny when you carry a polearm (the famous halbert): the entire pole bends with the character. And this is what I call "bandaging".

I think this is what happens here. Some of the designers at the time was still in 2008 mindset. However, I would blame the lead designer. If you manage to make a seamless open space where content are dynamically loaded as player travels (uGrid) that avoids straining the overall performance of the system, why can't they have more confidence to do it for all their interiors? The old school way of thinking: exterior world and interrior dungeon. But they managed to have hybrid locations (that have both interior element with a sky + weather system).

Oh yes, Winterhold College and the Thief Guild are 2 other places I hate visiting. The designers are well aware of the loading screen problem. Games like Dragon Age thrive on loading screens (at least DA:O). Players are trained to love and seek for the loading screen because it means they are done with an area and finally can move on. Open World games though, players are told they are LOST in this world (I refrain from using the word "stuck"). All 4 directions are vast land ahead. If players complain about the distance, Bethesda wins. But slapping a load screen on top means immersion breaking. Like hearing someone coughing, talking, phone ringing at the movie theater. Once, we try to pretend we didn't hear that. Twice or thrice in a roll, my god ...

I think it's too late to change now. I love and hate Open Cities because of the same reason: support. Why do I want to use Open Cities when most of the mods out there have no support for it? Using Open Cities mean I am excluding myself out of content. So a mod marrying all the interior with less loading screens would be great. But like you guys said: may break Vanilla quests and other quests. Which means the authors for such mods must work very hard to bridge the existing quests (and nav mesh). And unless such a mod is as popular and monopolizing as USSEP and SkyUI, it is not going to happen. It is a sad conflict of diversity vs monopoly. We want variety in life, but sometimes it's a draw back. Like AFT, iAFT, EFF, or ECE vs Racemenu, or ... sex mods, there are 3 different frameworks (at least they don't conflict each other).

As mentioned above, I don't think console is to be blamed. If consoles can handle uGrid=5 (maybe =3), they can handle tiny interiors like Jorvasskr. It's the oversight of the original lead designer. And about clutter concern... unless you go with Elinora's mods, clutter is not a problem. Comparing Winterhold Collge to the vast tundra outside Whiterun, the tundra has WAY MORE CLUTTERS. Those are trees and grass. Grass is actually quite low polygon, but higher poly than books. And there are tons of grass shrubs out there. In my game, grass size = 50.
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There is one thing though, if anyone can answer this: how often does Skyrim apply merged mesh? I know a great many modern games use this method to deliver better graphic, resolution, and content on screen, with higher performance. They can get away with it because if they are to render an entire house into 2-3 meshes (for inmovable and indestructible objects) the performance hit is as negligible as ... high polygon weapon downloaded off Nexus. In fact, someone uploaded an ultra high poly submachine gun for FO4, someone else made a comparison 1 of the little weapon may equal an entire city block in Boston, full of little debris and broken walls. So how often does Skyrim merge? I know FO4 merges quite a lot to squeeze out a lot of performance.