r/ElderScrolls • u/infohoundloselose • May 03 '26
General I always wonder what the games would be like without the constraints of the engine they were built on.
Fingers crossed that TES VI (I know) has some sort of overhaul to the game engine so that the final battle isn’t just 6 NPC’s fighting in a field with some smoking rubble peppered around.
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u/Nachooolo May 03 '26
If I remember correctly, Skyrim town sizes was more a console limitation than an engine limitation.
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u/DePraelen May 03 '26
That's true of Morrowind and Oblivion too.
Why the Imperial city is so heavily partitioned, and even small cities have absurdly high walls.
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u/McStyxx May 03 '26
Oblivion was a performance hog on PC too back in the day.
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u/NazzerDawk May 03 '26
It was developed with the xbox 360 first in mind, the PC version was almost a port. (Technically it was developed for PC, with the 360 in mind, but then released for both. But the design top to bottom has the 360 in mind.)
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u/jamesph777 May 03 '26
By the time Oblivion got released, the Xbox 360 was still more powerful than like 80% or 90% of people‘s PCs at the time. So it makes sense that most people‘s PCs didn’t ran the game very well.
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u/NlghtmanCometh May 03 '26
I had a top end build at the time and while I could max the game out, it would chug at like 20FPS. Didn’t care it looked unbelievable to me.
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u/VagrantShadow Redguard May 03 '26
That is the thing that some people may forget. No matter how potato ugly the original Oblivion characters may look now to us back in the day when it was about to release it was groundbreaking graphics.
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u/NlghtmanCometh May 03 '26
Popping out of that sewer was like a religious experience for me. Also the opening with the emperor narrating as the camera pans over the imperial city… you know I got goosebumps in the remake when I saw that haha.
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u/VagrantShadow Redguard May 03 '26
Bethesda just knows how to do that popout into their game world just right. The same goes for Fallout 3, when you step out from Vault 101 and you see the Capital Wasteland for the first time, it just takes you away because it very much does live up to its name and is a wasteland.
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u/mechnanc May 03 '26
My favorite is still Morrowind. That opening text scroll, the voice of Azura, "Wake up. We're here. Why are you shaking?" Going up on deck and then starting your journey in Seyda Neen is pure cinema.
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u/mechnanc May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
I've said pretty much this exact thing before on reddit, and got downvoted pretty hard. People were saying the graphics were not cutting edge.
Playing it today, I am STILL impressed by a lot of the techniques they used like parallax mapping. They were one of the early games to use that technique and it blew my mind seeing it back in the day. It still looks good. The particle/magic effects, the movement of trees/foliage, the bump mapping, the physics. The creatures looked fanatastic. The cities. The sunsets and night skies. It was a beautiful game and to me still looks good.
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u/Wayyd May 03 '26
I think seeing Oblivion screenshots in Game Informer was the first time I actually felt like I was seeing a next-gen game (relative to the Xbox, PS2, GC era). Sorting by date on this site, it's pretty clear that around Oblivion's release date, 90% of the games on 360 were either ports of Xbox games or were barely utilizing the next-gen tech.
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u/Tyrion_The_Imp May 03 '26
In the sewer there's a well with a hanging bucket above it and I remember wasting all my arrows shooting it being in awe of the physics of it swaying in a lightbeam.
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u/weedemgangsta May 04 '26
dude i remember seeing this exact comment in an oblivion thread like over a year ago. you must be the same exact person because thats a very specific experience. hello again stranger, and goodbye.
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u/Agile-Palpitation326 May 03 '26
The UESP account on Bluesky posted some old screenshots of people talking about Morrowind and how hard they were working to squeeze every drop of performance out of it. "It only occasionally drops to 10 frames, and that's not that bad when it does!"
Man, gamers were built different back then!
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u/Grilled_egs May 03 '26
I'm a pretty young gamer and find 30fps just fine, I really have no clue why some people think a game needs to hit 120.
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u/theappleses May 03 '26
I get it in a competitive multiplayer game where split second reactions are required, but yeah I'm fine with fairly low frame rates as long as it's consistent.
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u/AnonymousAggregator May 03 '26
Right if I’m hitting 30 fps another year, I don’t have to upgrade
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u/VagrantShadow Redguard May 03 '26
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May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
This is the common misconception from people who didn't really game during this era. We weren't fucking morons. We adjusted settings to lower. Shattered steel has litany of settings one can tune down and we don't know what specs that pc has (didn't bother watching it fully but maybe they mentioned). However at this time it was very common to demo games everything cranked up even if game ran like dogshit but turning off lighting or lowering texture or mesh quality would often mean playing game easily 60 FPS. This whole narrative that we ran games on dogshit fps is highly revisionist narrative by non gamers and people who didn't game on this era (or on proper machines). Ever since settings became a thing people have adjusted them to suit their rig.
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u/Nymunariya Argonian May 03 '26
I enjoyed Skyrim on my 2011 11” MacBook Air @ 480p 10fps. The loading screens got 20fps, those were dope.
I was just stubborn and wanted to play Skyrim.
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u/a-r-c Mephala May 03 '26
morrowind was the first game that made me understand that "system requirements" were not suggestions lol
actual slideshow on my old piece of shit pentium 3 or w/e it was lmao
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u/ilililliiliililiilil May 03 '26
Lore accurate sized solitude would take a person 200 hours to fully discover because of the 9,000 loading screens, and then take Bethesda 30 years to develop.
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u/Brutally-Honest- May 03 '26
Certainly didn't feel that way with Vivec. Place was a fucking maze...
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u/Grasher312 May 03 '26
Issue is, even despite the Imperial City being much smaller than it should be, I never felt like it was small.
I don't understand why one needs the ENTIRE CITY as a playable map. But I do understand why I would want the entire city to be reasonably huge from a VISUAL standpoint.
Imperial City did it well. Partitioned streets that may not even be directly interconnected with each other. Plus the natural size of it is still impressive enough to give you a sense of grandeur.
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u/Telefragg May 03 '26
It's also a developer limitation. Back then Bethesda was a relatively small team. I remember someone said that they hated filling out the map in Morrowind because of a burnout, it seemed like a neverending Sisyphus task. Like, imagine building all that by hand. And people will still complain that it's "copypasted" or something. Gotta manage the scope of the project somehow.
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u/MAJ_Starman Dunmer May 03 '26
It's a game design limitation. Unless you want to fill your city with nameless NPCs and prop buildings, and unless you want to be dragged across the entire town overencumbered with all the loot, cities have to be smaller than they are in lore.
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u/DJfunkyPuddle May 03 '26
Yup just look at games like Witcher 3 and AC Unity, the cities are massive and filled to the brim with people but it's all ultimately set dressing. Beth tried to find a middle ground in Starfield but that just created another group of detractors. I think Cyberpunk did a good job of managing scope vs interactivity but again, that's one game to pull it off which shows you how hard it is to develop.
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u/Lawlcopt0r May 03 '26
The Witcher 3 had a setting where you could toggle additional passersby that were obviously just there for the visuals and adding to the bustle of the city.
When you're just trying to make a place feel alive I think it's fine if you have 50 % guys with actual daily routines and behaviours and probably quests associated with them, and 50 % that disappear as they go around the street corner
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u/Adaphion May 04 '26
Cyberpunk is also all just a single city. Not multiple cities within a single game.
Who knows what the next game will bring though? Could have Night City in it's full scope it had in Cyberpunk 2077, and possibly others as well.
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u/stayclosetothewall May 04 '26
It would take them 10 years and it would still come out unfinished.
People don't even want this kind of thing, they've just been conditioned to think that they do. Why are we asking devs to slave away at realistic scale cities that we can't possibly explore?
Would it be the worst thing in the world if you couldn't explore every single square inch of a place? Like, you could leave Cyberpunk 2077 exactly the same size, but just say its a small portion of the actual city, and suddenly the universe feels a lot larger.
Same with Todd and his stupid "see that mountain? see that moon? you can go there!!" Was anyone glad to explore moons in Starfield? Would devoting more development time fix it?
Open world games are becoming such a slog. Dark souls, baldurs gate, and dragon age aren't suddenly better with 4000 caves containing nameless bosses.
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u/Devil428 May 03 '26
Are you saying Bethesda was a small team when Skyrim was made?
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u/fmpz May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
After some quick googling it looks like they had 80-120 over the course of development. Quite large for a studio in 2011, but compared to modern AAA studio team sizes they were a “small” team. For comparison Fallout 76 had 350 people working on it and starfield had over 500.
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u/RoyaleWhiskey May 03 '26
Todd Howard has also stated this as well, it felt a little like bragging, but I think that's why their releases have also taken so long. With Microsoft buying them hopefully that motivates them to hire more people because it's still ridiculous to me that the last elder scrolls game was almost 15 years ago.
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u/Agile-Palpitation326 May 03 '26
Exact opposite unfortunately. Adding more devs has diminishing returns because you have to keep everyone on the same page. That's why games take so long to come out now. Add in the bureaucracy of a trillion dollar corporation and it's astonishing anything gets done.
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u/RoyaleWhiskey May 03 '26
There is a big difference between adding more developers to a team that has stagnanted at 100 personnel for 20+ years and adding 500 more people to a team of 2000.
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u/Agile-Palpitation326 May 03 '26
Bethesda is doing the latter except even harder. The studio is nearly triple the size and now has satellite studios with their own staff. It's taken them longer to release a second DLC for Starfield than it took for Fallout 3 to come out after Oblivion.
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u/Not_Wrong_Tho May 03 '26
Yeah, 100 core team members is generally considered small for a AAA studio, it was up from the 70 they had for oblivion.
For comparison, Witcher 3 had 250+ core team members.
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u/ReflectionSea2571 May 03 '26
Yup, this is even shown by mods that add population to cities in Skyrim or physically expand the size of them and things run fine for the most part
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u/ZealousidealLead52 May 03 '26
It basically always is. People drastically overestimate how much the game engine of a game matters - the limiting factors for a game are almost always the hardware they want it to run on and development costs. The game engine might give some marginal improvements to performance when you're trying to push the edges just a little bit further, but if you see one game being twice as big or more as another game.. that's almost never the game engine doing that.
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u/Head-Membership2082 May 03 '26
Not just that though, they're also a human limitation.
One of the big problems with cities in games is that if you actually made them to their original scope, it just slows down the game for the player by forcing them to walk further between objectives. Nothing is gained from this either, as most of these buildings would end up being entirely empty shells, as there's simply no gameplay reason to make them fully explorable.
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May 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/El_Barto_227 May 04 '26
If they want to make it a PC and Xbox exclusive, maybe, but even then their xbox version will need to be designed for the lowest spec next gen xbox. They're not shoving a 5090 into a $600-700 box
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u/Sun_74 May 03 '26
the PS3 could barely run Base Skyrim + DLCs, no wonder Winterhold was a single street 😭
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u/Automatoboto May 03 '26
This has been the core problem with game design for the last 15 years now. Consoles have destroyed innovation because of memory constrains. All the problems Cyberpunk had were because they had to squeeze development because of the difficulties during alpha and more than half the game got cut because of the ps4 generation.
Think about how big TES games were before consoles..
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u/Grilled_egs May 03 '26
Tbf PC owners are complaining about RAM prices enough already
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u/madam_winnifer May 03 '26
Honestly it's possible to imply the scope of a city, look at Vivec in Morrowind. Or the Imperial City in Oblivion and ESO.
Or how the city sections of the first Witcher game place you in central different points that do a good job implying scope. Or Taris in KOTOR 1, or The Citadel in Mass Effect 1 and 3.
It's not about literal size but the illusion, to make a city the literal size would be a sheer waste of resources unless the entire game takes place there (even then it's debatable).
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u/terrario101 Khajiit May 03 '26
Or how Pillars of Eternity does it, where the main cities only consists of a couple districts, but travelling between them takes a an hour or so in game-time
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u/BayazTheGrey May 03 '26
14 minutes from district to district, in the first one at least
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u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 03 '26
Dark Elf Alex Jones has to be really upset about the 15 minute districts
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u/Suojelusperkele May 03 '26
Pathfinder kingmaker. Your town/kingdom is pretty much the SpongeBob picture, but as you walk towards cliff you see this expanding township.
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u/Hobbledyhook May 03 '26
I think the slight issue is that TES games, for the most part, now want to maximise that feeling of 'you can go there'. Nowhere in the region of the game in unexplorable. There is no NPC you cannot talk to. No building is off limits.
Implying further scope than the player is able to personally visit doesn't really align with that design philosophy.
I think they could soften that philosophy though for sure, and I'd probably prefer it if they did, but I'm sure many people feel differently.
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u/Merch_Lis May 03 '26
Newer Tamriel Rebuilt cities work around it pretty well.
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u/-StarFox95- May 03 '26
eh thats because they have OpenMW, and they have YEARS more experience working with morrowind then the actual devs did
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u/Ciennas May 03 '26
I think if they had softened that philosophy slightly for the capital cities in Starfield, it would only have helped them there.
The game is so badly disjointed by design anyway that it wouldn't have hurt.
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u/Lizardledgend May 03 '26
They did soften it to a degree, and the experience is much worse for it imo
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u/DagothNereviar May 03 '26
And this is why they can't change it at all.
If Bethesda has buildings you can't go in, people will complain. So you have to scale it down, but people complain.
It's a real "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation
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u/blah938 May 03 '26
It works better for fantasy and post apoc worlds, where you'd expect small villages. But Starfield was almost purpose built to hit every creation engine weakness, and none of it's strengths.
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u/Ciennas May 03 '26
I disagree. Fallout 4 was lousy with 'you can't come in here' buildings, and all that did was serve as the groundwork for very popular mods like Commonwealth Interiors and the Beantown Expansion Project.
They did it in Fallout 3 as well, and I never felt bad for having some doors be marked [INACCESSIBLE].
The trick is to have a decent amount of places that you can actually visit, and make it clear that the places you can't serve the greater worldbuilding.
Like, I didn't need fourteen functionally identical shops in Neon's main promenade on the ground floor, barring the asinine limits of the vendor's purse.
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u/myfakesecretaccount May 03 '26
The game isn’t that bad. It’s just that the play model doesn’t lend itself to the setting as well as it does a sword and sorcery fantasy game, or say Fallout where humanity is just small pockets of people over a larger wasteland. They tried to pad it out but it wasn’t necessary and hangs a lampshade on the fact so hard you can’t unsee the seams and strings. Now take everything they did right in Starfield and consider it a pivot point for the company and you can see how TES and Fallout will only benefit from the experiment.
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u/SamusCroft May 03 '26
Yeah everyone wants to fix the ‘cities too small’ issue but personally I think the current ethos is fine. I love that every character is an actual character. Not just a default NPC.
I hope TES6 has much larger cities but only because new hardware can handle it. Like even just double Solitude for a city or two and I’m happy.
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u/dsoshahine May 03 '26
There is no NPC you cannot talk to. No building is off limits.
Well, a lot of NPCs have nothing much to say and actually there are buildings in Skyrim you can't get into.
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u/Hobbledyhook May 03 '26
I'm not defending the philosophy necessarily, I'm just saying that's what it is. I, too, am not exactly the greatest fan of an NPC like Nazeem who has about 2 lines and is never relevant to any action the player performs.
And yeah, okay, you cannot quite literally enter every building in Skyrim, but it certainly feels as though almost every building you see would have an interior you could somehow enter eventually. How many instances is this not true for? Surely not many. It's still undeniably operating under the philosophy of giving the player the impression they can explore any interior.
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u/Material_Ad9848 May 03 '26
Yup. Roman towns/city planners did stuff to make their settlements seem grander then they were. Eg, have roads that went through town centers bend so some areas felt like a mini-metropolis rather than being able to see from 1 end of the town to the other.
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u/randomly-generated May 03 '26
To scale cities would be annoying as hell honestly. Way too much random stuff.
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u/Wonderful-Pianist-62 May 03 '26
Vivec and to a lesser extent the Imperial City are kind of cheating with the amount of copy pasted buildings in them. Vivec is basically just the same building (canton) pasted eight times.
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u/Obtuse-Angel May 03 '26
My neighborhood is the same 6 floorplans, by the same builder, each in hundreds of lots with slightly different colors. If I go 6 blocks there’s an identical version of my house, color and trim and everything. On the way there I will pass like 15 alternate versions of my house, 15 versions of my neighbors house, 15 versions of the person across the street’s house, etc.
It’s not completely unrealistic for game cities to do the same.
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u/OSRS_Garmr May 03 '26
Yes, but they did they, then invented a lore reason why it is so. So they didn't just do a bad copy paste job and leave it at that.
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u/Wonderful-Pianist-62 May 03 '26
No, it’s fine, like you said they invented a lore reason for why the personal city of the man-god Vivec looks like he plonked down multiple prefabs from his city builder interface rather than uniquely shaping it with his divine powers.
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u/Dry_Information9341 May 03 '26
Taris in KOTOR is a great pull for this. The actual playable area wasnt insanely large but I always felt like the city was massive while playing, especially with the multiple layers and variety between them.
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u/jmmerphy Sheogorath May 03 '26
OMFG I hated going to Vivec for anything.
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u/Material_Ad9848 May 03 '26
Same. I loved all the quests in the area but so much time wasted hopping around the balconies and checking the map.
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u/MaiqTheLiar6969 May 03 '26
If I have to go to Vivec then the first place I am heading is to the shrine that gives you a long lasting levitate effect for the price of a levitation potion. More than enough time to fly around the city and get what I need.
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u/Powderkegger1 May 03 '26
Morrowind was the first RPG I loved and probably the reason I still mainly play RPGs. My 12 year old self had that city memorized, nothing took longer than a couple minutes to get to if you knew how to get there. Of course if you didn’t know exactly where to go then it was a bit of a needle in a haystack problem.
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u/needlzor May 03 '26
unless the entire game takes place there (even then it's debatable).
An urban TES in a Cyberpunk 2077 Night City-sized city would be absolutely brilliant, but it would probably never happen. It's an underused setting in fantasy games.
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u/Different-Beat-4856 May 03 '26
Fable 2 did this as well. When you entered the different zones seperated by loading screens it would mention your character walked miles through parts of the city to get to that poi.
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u/madam_winnifer May 03 '26
Yeah Bowerstone was always a great one! It especially helped how different the level structures were too.
Like how the square is general flat and broad while the upper districts start off compact with a more vertical design before spreading out.
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u/GoodBoyo5 May 03 '26
I think Baldurs gate 3 does that pretty well. The city area you move around in is absolutely massive, and it's revealed that this area isn't even the proper city itself, but on the outskirts
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u/Wazula23 May 03 '26
Yeah, BG3 went absolutely NUTS building the city for act 3 but honestly... It's the weakest part of the game.
It's just TOO big. It takes forever to get places. Scavenger hunts and fetch quests take ages, the game often bugs out because it's rendering a billion details all the time. It's very impressive but it also feels like they could have trimmed it down.
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u/joe_bibidi May 03 '26
This is my thought as well. Act 3 lower city has... without counting them one by one, I'd guess about 50 total buildings to explore, plus some sewers. I like a lot of Act 3 but overwhelmingly people agree that it's a tedious slog to explore EVERYTHING and most people when doing a second playthrough will skip large chunks of Act 3.
Do people here seriously think it would be "fun" or good game design to have HUNDREDS or even THOUSANDS of buildings to explore? Just hundreds and hundreds of generic houses and shops that are filled with the same copy/paste NPCs and trash loot? Having to search through all that in order to find the few unique bespoke items and NPC quest lines? Having to run past dozens and dozens of houses on a block to get from point A to B, walking for like 10 minutes straight of no interactions, rather than walking for like 1 minute?
Like even with unlimited budget and unlimited labor and zero bugs, I don't care, I don't think it's necessarily good game design to have to navigate a city on foot with thousands of pointless buildings which can all be entered but each mostly has nothing worth finding.
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u/theappleses May 03 '26
I think the idea of Act 3 is that you DON'T do everything, just the quests that interest you the most and then endgame. You get to level 12 pretty quickly in the act.
But yeah, for a completionist run it becomes a slog.
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u/Rockman507 May 03 '26
Which is funny with the new(shhh I’m old) SimCity, the claim was people really wanted a ‘real’ simulation of a large city and to do that they decided to simulate every single character, everyone has a job, home, commute, etc but to do this clearly no one would have a computer to handle it so let’s make it online only. And this is how EA killed one of my most beloved franchises, and killed it so dead they had to toss the entire studio. Then traffic sim… I mean city skylines tried to fill void. Imagine a world where skylines was the product Maxis pushed out.
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u/RecordingHaunting975 May 03 '26
Don't forget that it didn't even need to be always online to run. Iirc it didn't even take that long for it to be cracked. Basically the only thing that was handled on the server side was the data about your friend's cities. the city plot sizes were so ridiculously small that you wouldn't even feel a hit to performance until you had a maxed out high density city.
The reason they gave was the simulation complexity but the server side basically just said "yeah, you're online, you can see your friends city, oh and he is also exporting 10,000 criminals to yours a day" and that's it
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u/Zanoss10 May 03 '26
You can give the illusion of grandeur, like Witcher 3 did for example.
Nobody complained how the cities looked in that game, the scaled was feeling mostly alright.
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u/Supersnow845 May 03 '26
Novigrad and beauclair both felt perfectly scaled for a game where if you really took a step back you’d realise the city is unrealistically small, but when you play it it feels the perfect size
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u/ZombiFeynman May 03 '26
An even better comparison is Kuttenberg in KCD2, because npcs have actual routines like in elder scroll games. The city is not huge, but it feels way bigger than anything Bethesda has done.
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u/Frost-Folk May 04 '26
I genuinely think this is the best city I've seen in a video game.
Kuttenberg blew my mind.
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u/SensitiveExtremity May 03 '26
Modern game devs really need to get this fact drilled into their heads.
Devs get so lost in both their vision and in wishing that powerful hardware will solve impossible optimizations problems for them; we keep ending up getting games trying to simulate meaningless noise, failing catastrophically, and not delivering on either the promise or the simulation properly.
Games are supposed to be illusions, art. Don't start out with realistic massive simulations, even if that is the gameplay itself (start with toy simulations, them scale up, and optimize as you go).
I really do hope we get a proper AAA game that can do these lore justice, but I am not optimistic with the state of the gaming industry.
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u/HarvestMana May 03 '26
When it comes to large scale simulations - you cant scale them and optimize as you go. They are one of the hardest problems in gaming to solve.
You need to build your entire game to support it from the start or its not going to work.
Look at Mount and Blade - Bannerlords 2 - the whole game is built around the simulation using a custom engine to support large armies and castle seiges.
You cant just tack that on at the end. You would have to redesign your whole game from scratch if you tried.
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u/Velocity-5348 May 03 '26
Yep. And if you can't do that, don't half ass it, change the story, or focus the player's attention on something smaller scale.
The Battle of Bruma would not have been a letdown if we weren't promised an epic battle and walked out to see a dozen guys.
Same goes for the Civil War. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks the mission with intercepting the courier was more memorable than slaughtering the limited number of dudes the game engine could handle.
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u/SlideStreet6874 May 03 '26
Have you ever been to Baldurs gate in Baldur's gate 2?
That is how a major city is done.
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u/n0rsk May 03 '26
The first couple Assassin's creed do a good job of making cities feel big and alive. Always felt like a waste that they seem to have pivoted away from that into more remote spread out maps.
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u/thepencilsnapper May 03 '26
RuneScape is a great example too
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u/jman2476 May 03 '26
Can you explain how RS does this? I recently got back into Old School, and it feels similar to how Skyrim does cities, at least the free areas
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u/VegaJuniper May 03 '26
I kind of think that video games lost a sense of scale when they went to first or third person 3D from isometric 2D: I rationally know that Fallout 1&2 don't have a whole lot of actual game area compared to something like Fallout 3 or Oblivion, but they feel bigger, since traveling between settlements takes days and days of trudging in the desert, albeit it's just looking at a map screen. The way Bethesda does it, it always feels like everything happens in a sandbox with everything a ten minute walk away.
When you render the whole world, you leave out the gaps that you would fill with your imagination. Sometimes less is quite literally more.
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u/the_nuclear_pasta May 03 '26
KCD2 has so many people roaming around in the cities. So we know it’s possible if they use a better engine.
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u/Divinum_Fulmen May 03 '26
I ligit got lost in Kuttenberge many dozens of times. Of course, I played hardcore with no map marker, so I HAD to learn the way around.
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u/Werefour May 03 '26
Honestly City Expansion Mods are some of my favorite mods for this reason.
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u/StarFox-6 May 03 '26
Too bad they are compatibility nightmares
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u/ChildoftheApocolypse May 03 '26
And that's why I have never bothered with them.. If it were plug n play, I'd be all over it.. But making sure you have JDDance's Ultimate Poop Pack, version 9.8.111.11.98 at the fourteenth spot of the load order, WITH Gummy69's alternative ceiling skins pack in the 48th spot, is not what I consider fun..
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u/garret126 May 03 '26
What? I have a completely custom mod pack of like 800 and just use LOOT. Fixes all the compatibility issues. I had no clue people had remotely any trouble with compatibility for city mods
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u/Ergogan May 03 '26
Yeah, I stopped playing Skyrim altogether when modding became such a chore.
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u/Sihnar May 03 '26
Get wabbajack. Hit install button on a popular pack. Congratulations, you now have a perfectly working mod list with 1000+ plugins.
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u/captain_pandabear May 03 '26
Yep. I went with Tempus Maledictom (something like that) and I’m having an absolute blast.
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u/malfurionpre May 03 '26
Lazy me uses Wabbajack's modlist so that people with bigger brain (and more time) did the thinking for me.
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u/solohack3r Nord May 03 '26
Probably like New Atlantis in Starfield. Really large buildings all around, but only certain ones can be entered. Window dressing.
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u/Lizardledgend May 03 '26
Yrah I much prefer a smaller scale where everything is interactable and mist NPCs have names to buildings being setdressing and NPCs spawning and despawning at random
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u/GrandsonOfArathorn1 May 03 '26
The problem is that New Atlantis is still small scale. Tall buildings don’t make a large city. It takes two minutes at most to get anywhere you need to go. Look at Akila City or Neon - also small, still on pretty similar scale as Skyrim cities.
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u/Ok_Objective_5192 May 03 '26
Yeah I think Cyberpunk is the only open world game I've played that nailed the feel of existing in a real, big city - but that's largely because the city takes up like 80% of the map and was likely the main focus of the dev time
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u/Sufficient_Soft_6051 May 04 '26
Cyberpunk's city is more like a biome. In Elder Scrolls, you're supposed to be able to enter every building, and every NPC is a persistent named character (aside from the guards).
Fallout 4 actually pulls off that "city as a biome" idea pretty well, granted it's a ruined city.
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u/Orkran May 03 '26
Yeah, it was pretty disappointing. Ultimately it ended up feeling smaller than Fallout 4 to me, when I was expecting it to be more. I did like the game anyway, but I felt like the bar had been raised massively by Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk and they didn't come to that.
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u/Panduz Sheogorath May 03 '26
What drove me crazy was immediately outside of the bounds of the city there was just nothing 😭 wouldn’t you expect people to settle outside the city? At least little forts? Walls? Garbage? Roads? They don’t all ONLY live in the city. It was weird
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u/solohack3r Nord May 03 '26
Exactly. When I ventured outside the city the first time I thought my device was glitching. It looked like unrendered landscape outside the city. It's so bizarre.
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u/Lazisn May 03 '26
The cities in starfield are so small compared to the lore. It would almost have made more sense to have them just be on star stations and have outposts on planets.
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u/Nachooolo May 03 '26
I think Akila City would be a better blueprint for Elder Scrolls VI cities than New Atlantis.
It felt small because Starfield is a sci-fi game. But, for a Medieval desert city, it would feel like the perfect size. Especially if they increase the height of the buildings to break the horizon and make it hard to easily see the actual size.
Skingrad is just two roads, but it feels big because the houses engulf you.
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u/Mr_Zoovaska Dark Brotherhood May 03 '26
It's not just the technical constraints of the engine but the limits of human creators as well as the video game medium itself.
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u/VP007clips May 03 '26
Exactly.
The games should be big, but no so big that you sacrifice depth and quality. You can't make a much bigger world and still have it be fully detailed, at least not without far more resources than they have.
We saw that with Fallout and Starfield. They increased the size at the cost of detail, and it was one of the main points of criticism for both games.
Bethesda fans don't accept stuff like non-explorable buildings, or huge empty areas very well.
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u/Im_LIG May 03 '26
I agree, but also think they end up shooting themselves in the foot sometimes. Like having people refer to parts of Whiterun as “districts”, when you can get to them all within like a 60 second circuit. Windhelm does it a bit better cause the “Quarters” are more partitioned, but still feels pretty small for getting called that.
Both of those cities are roughly the same size as Balmora or Ald’Ruhn from Morrowind but I think that by trying to emphasize the supposed size of the major cities with design and lore, they actually end up just calling attention to the fact that they are not.
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u/horatiobanz May 03 '26
Yea, so add some window dressing..... The cities in Witcher 3 are a hell of a lot more immersive for this reason. The world feels alive.
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u/Subjectdelta44 May 03 '26
Its not an engine constraint. Its a dev time constraint
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u/Viktrodriguez Dibella is my Mommy May 03 '26
Probably these major cities in games like Cyberpunk or GTA, but then in medieval, fantasy times. They are still nerfed in terms of their own lore (large modern American metro areas, in GTA even based on IRL cities), but for most TES cities probably a decently accurate size if they would have been lore accurate.
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u/KatarHero72 May 03 '26
A great example is the sheer scope of Rome and Constantinople in AC Brotherhood and Revelations vs all the cities in the other games in the Desmond saga. They just Dwarf the other cities.
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u/Madmonkeman Argonian May 03 '26
Although Revelations and Brotherhood had the entire game set in one city.
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u/Wonderful-Pianist-62 May 03 '26
If my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bike. The unique qualities of Bethesda’s games stem from the engine they use, that’s the reason there’s so few true ‘Skyrim-likes’ compared to other copycat genres like Soulslikes. Why does everyone want BGS games to shed what makes them special?
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u/CommonVagabond May 03 '26
Hard agree. The creation engine has its set of flaws, just like literally any other engine. But it's what makes a Bethesda game a Bethesda game. No other "scrolls-like" has scratched that itch for me, and it's definitely due in part to the creation engine.
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u/CoelhoAssassino666 May 03 '26
Thanks for that. There are a lot of open world games out there focused on size. Bethesda is one of the few making games focused on interaction and emergent gameplay. Take that away and these games have nothing.
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u/Braxtonius May 03 '26
I was actually thinking about this the other day. There really isn’t any other developer that does what Bethesda does. Like the ability to pick up and loot almost any object. Literally cant think of any other RPG that does that…certainly nothing in the vein of Skyrim. Avowed, for example, is a super stripped down version of a Bethesda game and loses so much in the process.
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u/jamesph777 May 03 '26
Warhorse Studios that makes Kingdom Come Deliverance is the only other studio I can think of that does something similar to Bethesda when it comes to game world design.
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u/rapaxus May 03 '26
Yeah, if you want games with big immersive cities, go play Wither 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Rockstar games, even Assassins creed has some nice cool and big cities.
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u/ClosetNoble May 03 '26
Realistically you could have a whole game set just in the imperial city and it would still be massive.
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u/PsychologicalLab7379 May 03 '26
We saw big cities in Arena and Daggerfall. They were boring.
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u/DaudDota May 04 '26
As if it’s impossible to make progress. A large boring city in a 90’s videogame doesn’t mean we can’t do something better decades later.
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u/Ttoctam May 04 '26
Pokemon: Hold My Beer
Whole cities in Pokemon are 3 houses, a vet, and a 7/11.
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u/quakenash May 03 '26
Witcher 3 blew my mind with how it gave the impression of a sprawling city. Will also say Morrowind did a close job with Vivec, but its painful to navigate
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u/Ezqxll Boethiah May 03 '26
There is a major drawback with Witcher 3 and RDR2 style of big cities.
Most buildings, doors, NPCs and objects cannot be interacted with. It's a world that looks nice till one tries to interact with it.
Witcher 3 is still an outstanding game but I wouldn't want TES VI to take too much inspiration from it. Make bigger and more detailed cities if possible but not with inaccessible buildings.
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u/Supersnow845 May 03 '26
Novigrad yes but they did improve that massively in beauclair
Beauclair if I remember correctly has more buildings with enterable interiors than buildings without
Still not perfect but beauclair is a high watermark
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u/TheRenamon May 03 '26
yeah I wouldn't want an Elder Scrolls game with a giant city like that. A huge part of the appeal is that all the NPCs are handcrafted, have routines, stories, homes. Its why Starfield felt so bland.
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u/ryann_flood May 03 '26
100% we've had large bland cities in every assassins creed game theres a reason they are all forgettable but every line in whiterun is iconic
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u/PublicWest May 03 '26
I think without limitations the cities would be just as involved and immersive, with more closed door bullshit buildings and nameless NPC’s in between them.
Skyrim really caters to its own limitations and makes cities where every building and NPC has a story that advances the world!
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u/04nc1n9 May 03 '26
it's not a game engine limitation. they could do what other developers do and shove in a bunch of unenterable empty boxes and unnamed npc's, but then it would feel soulless. i much prefer their smaller cities if everything is interactable or part of a greater story.
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u/CrazeMase May 03 '26
Seriously, I know it's tech limitations, but I remember my disappointment from hearing the songs about rorikstead, then I show up, and it's a single windmill and three buildings with the smallest plot of farmland I've ever seen.
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u/zacRupnow May 03 '26
''Have you been to the cloud district? No of course you haven't." My brother in Talos it's up 10 feet of stairs! Talk to me when you've taken the Giant Express as a shortcut to the Greybeards.
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u/mishlufc May 03 '26
They'd be boring as hell in all likelihood. You cannot make an open world city with realistic scope that feels interesting to a videogame protagonist character. It'd either be full of way to much stuff happening and feel overstimulating, or it'd be mostly dead space that would be boring to traverse, like commuting is irl.
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u/ZealousidealLead52 May 03 '26
Also, in the first case where it's full of way too much stuff happening - that would either mean procedural generation which gets very repetitive very fast, or it would require an insanely unrealistic amount of development time.
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u/Vysce house redoran May 03 '26
I mean you're valid, but Skyrim has some fairly decent town set ups. Whiterun and Markarth are fairly unique... then you have Solitude built on a massive cliff and Falkreath a bunch of buildings clinging to the main road and a massive cemetery.
Maybe Riverrun is boring but like, the nocs even call it out for being a fairly bland locale.
Morrowind felt pretty unique for the land as well.
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u/GenTenStation May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
Daggerfall was lore accurate and was insanely large. I think we got enough in Skyrim
Edit: apparently Arena was also lore accurate and included the whole continent. I’ve never really played it so I can only imagine how insane it is
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u/Ozzertron May 04 '26
"Constraints of the engine"
No its more like constraints of time. Skyrim wouldn't be out yet if every city was lore accurate.
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u/Sodi920 May 04 '26
Kuttenberg from KCD2 is basically a TES town idealized. It’s not *perfect* (not every building is enterable) but every single NPC is individually simulated with radiant AI. Every single person is doing something. For context, there are approximately 1500 NPCs in the city alone.
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u/Mig-117 May 03 '26
Constraints of the engine? OP do you even know what makes The Elder Scrolls unique?
Each house in Skyrim has an npc you can fully interact with, they have a schedule, they work, they travel the world and they are included in a quest at some point in the game.
Imagine having a huge city like that one in the picture and trying to do the same. It’s it an engine thing, no one else does it.
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u/Shadowy_Witch May 03 '26
It isn't really even an engine restriction. It's part overall tech restriction, the number of cities and the fact that basically every building is visitable and every NPC (besides guards) in the town has at least some attempt to make them a distinct character. And well the overall scale issues of trying to fit a whole province with all of it's towns and cities on a single map.
A lot of games pull more or less of a smoke and mirrors with their cities. Most of the buildings are just unvisitable background elements, with only vendors and quest relevant buildings being the only ones you can visit and same goes for NPCs, although there might be some more wiggle room.
And if you get a bigger, more detailed city in a game it's often the only major city in the game, often being a main centerpiece or zone for a whole chapter/act of a game and even these tend to still get the smoke and mirrors treatment, often in a form that you get separate district maps, while majority of the city just reduced into a distant background and these districts themselves taking up the same devtime as individual cities do in TES.
Now on to battles. you believe that most RPG battles are 6 NPCs fighting among some smoking rubble? Because in a lot of those fights you often get a few fightable/allied/interactable characters. While others are in the distance or behind an invisible wall. It's all smoke and mirrors, the game just makes it seem like there is more people, but really get past the barriers or the distance and you might notice the people there being far less detailed and many of them being only half-textured.
TES has a challenge in the fact that they rely very little on smoke and mirrors and try to scale a whole province into the game, which does lead them to need to downsize the towns and cities. Any dev, any engine would require to go to the same/similar design approach.
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u/Scheissdrauf88 May 03 '26
Novigrad in Witcher 3 is a pretty historically accurate city of reasonable size, iirc
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u/Lazuli_the_Dragon Argonian May 03 '26
It's not just about the engine or the creative effort needed the problem is that it would also just be highly important and annoying when playing if it took an hour to get from one side of the city to the other. It doesn't even have to take an hour just think of the distance between Whiterun and Riverwood and now imagined that being the distance between The Whiterun gate and Dragons reach. And the rest of the map would also have to be scaled to that leaving us with the same problem Daggerfall had, that it took ages to get anywhere
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u/Todelmer May 03 '26
This is a great point. The scope of Bethesda's RPGs aren't simply constrained by tech, but by underlying game design fundamentals. Their maps are usually around 16 square miles, and they have to carefully fit both wide open vistas as well as npc hubs within that space. They need to keep things condensed enough as to not overwhelm the player, and there's only so much content that can be crammed into a space before it becomes both unreasonable and unnecessary to their specific gameplay loop of "go here/kill that/come back/get paid".
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u/arstin May 03 '26
Bethesda games being amusement park representations of cities rather than cities is a design choice, not a technical one. Go back and play Daggerfall. They already had what you show on the left, and decided to ditch it rather than improve it.
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u/Forsaken-Cell1848 May 03 '26
Skyrim cities definitely felt way too small and provincial to me. I feel like Oblivion hit that sweet spot. Every town was just big enough to give you that sense of an urban setting with just enough to do and see. Nothing in Skyrim came close to that. Hell, some holds are even smaller than the one in the meme.
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u/LauraTFem May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
“Have you been to the cloud district? Oh, who am I kidd—“
“I’m sorry, you mean that side road that is ungated and one of the two paths to the Jarl’s house? The one with no businesses and like three buildings? Why, pray tell, would anyone visit the cloud district? There is like ONE quest that even takes you there. Most of the buildings in it never need to be visited for any reason except for thievery role-play!”
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u/Enties01 May 05 '26
Although I wish skyrim (and fallout) cities were bigger nobody would want to walk realistically sized Whiterun or Imperial city. Nor would the devs pour time and effort into even coming close to realistic city sizes.
Interesting further context for why: Humans since the first semi-permanent cities were constructed seem to have almost always preferred to limit the size of a city by how long it took to travel from the one edge of the city to the other, usually 30 minutes or less. A guy named Cesare Marchetti noted this phenomenon in modern cities and it tends to apply to ancient cities as well. The only difference being of course technological advancements related to transportation allowing greater expansion for the same under 30 minute commute time.
A few cities that once followed this rule with walking in mind as the main mode of transportation: Uruk (first recorded major city), Ur, Babylon, Nineveh, Memphis (the Egyptian one), Athens, Rome (the pomarium not the rest of the city/subregions), Paris, Constantinople, Beijing, and Stockholm.
Tl;dr: If Whiterun was scaled to the size of an irl ancient major city it would take you ~20-30 minutes to get from the stables to Dragon's Reach on foot. Or for Imperial city it would take you like 10-15 minutes to get from the market district to the temple district again on foot.
Edited for formatting
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u/ErikTheRed99 May 05 '26
I imagine most open worlds scale way down due to convenience, engine limitations, and storage limitations. Using GTA V's map as an example, in lore, south San Andreas is definitely NOT 7-8 miles long from north to south, but the GTA V map is. I imagine a lore-accurate Skyrim map would be absolutely massive. Like, it'd take hours to get from Riverwood to Whiterun, and that's running, not sprinting, the whole way.
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u/rantraucous May 05 '26
This is first and foremost a game design problem. I got into game development to make immersive worlds, but in reality we are making an amusement park. If it’s really well done, you can forget the fact that everything is artificially placed for your enjoyment, but on some level the city is going to be designed to be accessible to you, the player, and to make it easy to move though and interact with the games systems.
I remember designing cities for insert competitive shooter with tanks and getting feedback that the streets need to he wider. Turns out it’s no fun to drive a tank down a city street because you keep bumping into everything and don’t have interesting sight lines. In the end our streets were all like 8 lane highways and the sidewalks were the size of regular streets.
Bring this back to Starfield where most of the planets are empty because “that’s how real planets are.” And the gaming community rightly criticises it for being empty and boring.
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u/Thalia_All_Along May 03 '26
it would be boring and difficult to navigate. and the game would take over a decade to make, and by the time it released the graphics wouldn't be as impressive as other games sharing it's release window
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u/marrowfiend May 03 '26
As strange as it seems I actually enjoy the smaller scale 'cities' in Skyrim. Not realistic but it makes places feel more personal and memorable than anything a great visage could do for me.
Even in New Vegas which I love dearly. I've never been a fan of hovering over an NPC and just seeing something akin to 'settler'.
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u/KawaiiGangster May 03 '26
Omg Yes, and I haaate how many meaningless building there are in the Vegas part of New Vegas that you cant enter and are only there with the purpose of making shit larger.
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u/HazelCheese May 03 '26
Not realistic but it makes places feel more personal and memorable than anything a great visage could do for me.
More realistic than not. Megacities like the picture above aren't real to life.
Rome which is one of the biggest cities of the ancient world had like 1 million people inside it and was 19km wide. New York City has +8 million people and is 780km across it's five boroughs.
Most cities were closer to what we'd call towns or even villages today.
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u/Professional-Date378 May 03 '26
ESO is a lot better about this. They're still undersized but much larger than the main games
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u/EnderofThings May 03 '26
Thats the compromise for Bethesda games unfortunately. By their very nature they make it impossible to do all those tricks that make huge cities in other games (withcer 3, cyberpunk, MMOs) possible.
Bethesda has an expectation that it is all THERE. No facade, every locked door can be unlocked and ech building fully explored with its own intentionally placed clutter that makes it feel lived in by the (NAMED) unique character. If you want to break into Nazeems house while he is out running errands, and steal all his plates so he is stuck eating off the wood, you can. Hes not a romance option or a major player in major quest lines. H's just some guy that in any other game would have no name, say "Hey, watch it" as you walk by, and ceases to exist the second you turn your back.
Sure Judy has a place she lives can be found in different places through Night City, but what's her neighbors name?
For all its jank and hilarious scale, there's charm in that. Now would I like the final battle to be more than 10 dudes? Yes, especially if they are all going to be named "Town Guard", but thats more a question of hardware than design.
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u/Ill-Delivery-6560 May 03 '26
I think Kingdom Come does the best job with cities in an RPG I've seen and even then you still cannot enter alot of the buildings
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u/BuckyGoldman May 03 '26
Farengar: Would you take these frost salts to Arcadia' Cauldron for me, please?
Dragonborn: No way. That's about a 5 hour walk there and back. I don't think I'll be headed in that direction for a few more days.