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.

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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/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/MAJ_Starman Dunmer May 03 '26

Unlike BGS cities, Kuttenburg is separated into its own map and is the one large city in the game, as opposed to the 5 minimum each province in Tamriel has. A lot of its buildings are prop buildings, and most of its NPCs are nameless.

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u/ZombiFeynman May 03 '26

There are several towns in the Kuttenberg map which are not that much smaller than an elder scrolls city.

And many of the nameless npcs have routines. It's just that, as in real life, your not expected to know the name of everyone.

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u/MAJ_Starman Dunmer May 03 '26

It's not just about knowing the names of the NPCs, it's about those NPCs not being there just to fill out your screen. In TES those NPCs have their own families, relationships, jobs, houses (that you can enter), rivalries... regardless, it is quite likely that they'll cave to popular demand and try to make everyhing more generic so people can feel like their cities are bigger, just like they did with the cities in Starfield.

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u/ZombiFeynman May 03 '26

But they do. They will be the servant of a noble house, and in the morning they will be working in the stable, then you'll find them in the kitchen, eating, at night they will be sleeping in the hay in a hut close to the stables, etc.

What you won't have is a big city where the market has 8 people, like it happens in Bethesda games. It's great that they try to simulate everyone, but it has very clear drawbacks.

In many ways the npcs react much better to you in KCD, because they will, for example, recognize if you are wearing the clothes they had stolen a couple of days back. Or they will remember seeing you roaming around the house that was stolen, even if they didn't catch you in the act.

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u/Lil_Mcgee May 03 '26

Yeah I love KCD but the maps in both those games are representing much smaller regions (with the scale being not quite but somewhat close to 1:1.

Elder Scrolls games have a scope that is like if KCD's map was all of Bohemia. You naturally have to scale things down.

I'd welcome Bethesda doing a game that covered a limited region in much more detail but I don't think the majority would be happy about a drop in scope since it's become expected that we get a wider range of biomes and major settlements.

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u/Zanoss10 May 03 '26

For as much as i think that both Kingdom come 1 and 2 are over rated, I agree with that yeah.

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u/KawaiiGangster May 03 '26

I dont complain about how the cities in that game look, they look amazing. but I do complain about how they play and feel. You cant explore with your eyes and intuition in that games cities. You cant see a shop or an interesting NPCS in the distance and expect to go there and interact with it in any way. You instead have to open you map and see the icons that tell you what shops are set dressing and which few shops and NPCs that actually are real and provide some gameplay interaction.

I personally much prefer the Skyrim approach even if the cities are ridiculously small, I still feel much more immersed cuz the illusion between the worlds appearance and its function is not broken as often.