People still defend Bethesda.
Even Ubisoft can make cities that are alive and real in size compared to Bethesda. Doesn't that tell you something?
no one defends bethesda here
nor even jewbisoft cause everything you may see in their trailers will just be in the trailers alone
How many inconsequential no-name NPC houses would you have had the devs waste their time on?
Not saying Skyrim isn't overrated, it is, but this is a stupid thing to be upset about.
There have been plenty of cities in RPGs with even less than 11 houses, but better content and NPC direction. The problem with Bethesda is they focus on world building, but suck at it.
A town can be as simple as four houses and an Inn, if you actually have something meaningful in there. Whereas a place like Riften has a dozen houses, a pub, a thayne keep and etc. But what is there to do in there? Listen to annoying NPCs talk for hours and then steal their books. Wow, such fun...
>>340455797
yea yea houses and you can enter those house and interact with objects in those houses
there's a case to be made for smaller "cities" and not having no name npcs
pfffhhhah yea let's discuss open world video game design on /v/
>>340455789
>Blizzdrones in full force the post
Idiot. What about something like pic related?
Half the npcs in Solitude are inconsequential, unless you haven't at least tried to play the absolute shitfest that it is. Funny thing is people keep eating it up.
>>340455789
Also WHY shouldn't they make the cities larger with inconsequential NPCs.
Do you think that everyone you walk past in a city would want to talk too you or have the time of day to have indepth discussion about life and their problems? If you view Skyrim as an RPG and don't realise what i'm writing makes complete sense, you're a retard.
>>340454742
I want you to imagine Todd Howard schooling the pleb who made that image.
You think that was not a design choice that was made at some point probably early in development?
>>340456721
>Also WHY shouldn't they make the cities larger with inconsequential NPCs.
Because Skyrim is already 80% pointless NPCs and buildings. That's one of its biggest problems. Why do you want them to add more?
>>340457140
I understand you realise the flaws if you're the anon above, but excusing shit because its shit is stupid.
The game SHOULD have more npcs and buildings, but it SHOULD have done better with those that aren't. So don't argue the point that "Its already shit, why do i want more shit" but instead argue "It's shit, i want it to be good by doing this"
>>340456573
Am I suppose to know what that is a map of?
lolno, ubisoft cities are boring and feel like a themepark.
skyrim's cities had a cool aesethtic but i agree they were too small and needed to be bigger but not crazily bigger. endlessly walking through a city when you just want to sell some loot is tedious and not fun.
luckily we've got mods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UztnB91xaWg
Hold up let me give you guys this thing you need it to play Skyrim
>>340457140
Not him but you clearly don't get his point, he was saying there's no reason for every npc to have dialogue. Better to have a large city with pedestrians you can't talk to (you don't even have a reason to talk to them) than a walled "city" with 6 houses in them and 12 npc's that have (uninteresting) dialogue. See Novigrad vs Solitude.
>>340454742
I got Skyrim as a gift back on the 360. I was actually surprised by it until after I got to whiterun or whatever and realized that the game's big "cities" were just a handful of huts.
They're both equal amounts of cancer.
Bethesda just deserve worse for ruining Fallout.
>>340457302
No, you're supposed to have an actual brain and realise that it looks like a medieval city, and its size is something that Bethesda should be leaning towards for its major holds.
>>340457829
Final Fantasy XII is what you get when you have huge cities, but can only go into a handful of buildings and talk to 3-4 people. I think that's just as bad for a different reason.
>>340454742
There are literally just empty building models that you can't explore and non-interactable crowd in Ass Creed games.
>>340457829
Novigrad and Beauclair were utter sex. Bethesda got btfo by CDPR with Witcher 3.
>>340458247
For what reason? I don't see any reason for wanting to enter literally every house in a city and talk to every person on the street, do you do that as well in real life?
>>340454742
>people still make this thread
It's 2016, how long can you carry that butthurt before it destroys you?
>>340458015
It has architecture from at least four different cultures, that were all relevant at different time periods.
What fucking medieval city had a Greek style temple, a mosaic dome temple, a standard European castle, a marble pool of some sort, and a fucking Italian style tower? Its a hogpog of random shit dreamed up by some moron that doesn't understand time periods
>>340457302
Baldur's Gate, brosef.
>>340457140
Because 10 pointless npcs make a city feel empty while 100 makes the city actually feel alive because you can make them do mundane shit like work a field or fish or sit around in a tavern getting drunk. Not every person in the world has to be important or a quest giver and the pointless people doing pointless shit makes the world feel alive which is something Bethesda can't do.
>>340458271
>>340458247
You people are either being completely ignorant or are cancerous. I refuse to believe people don't understand this.
The point that's being made is this (I'll keep it as simple as possible for you);
The cities in all Bethesda games don't feel like cities. They're small and are more relatable to villages/hamlets. These places in the LORE of Elder Scrolls are described as big, bustling and full of activity (being major strongholds of ports). Yet we don't get that feeling when exploring them.
Furthermore why WOULD you speak to everyone you might. Why WOULD you enter the house of a family/strangers on your quest. If you want to argue 'Well you should', then dont expect to find anything worthwhile (Even Skyrim with its lack in size suffers from this).
The point is i'd much rather explore a city much like this >>340457829 or at least have cities with inconsequantial npcs so it at least FEELS like a living city that was described in the lore and what we SHOULD expect to see from a seasoned world building developer.
>>340458247
That is literally not a problem in an rpg though. It's not a requirement for every house to have a purpose. Logically most shouldn't. What is important though at the very least is the illusion that you are actually in a city and not a fucking hamlet like in the OP.
But have you bought Fallout 4 yet?
>>340454742
i will say this, Diamond city is so bad it actually makes Skyrim's cities retroactively better.
>rpg codex shitters still trying to do damage control after abysmally bad DLC expansion of witcher launched
>>340458513
But it felt like a city, rather than the essentially identical little showpieces in Skyrim.
>>340458015
How about no?
How about they do it the Elder Scrolls way small sized "cities" not necessarily grounded in reality.
Every single house needs to be open to the player in TES therefore you have a smaller population of named npcs right. These named NPCs have a schedule, a job , a quest for you and you'll probably remember most of them.
>>340458496
>I don't see any reason for wanting to enter literally every house in a city and talk to every person on the street
Plenty of RPGs do it. My favorite thing in RPGs is being able to search barrels/crates/shelves/cupboards/etc for items or clues. And it just feels like a waste when game developers spend hundreds of hours making a city look good, but then there's nothing to interact with and you just run past everything.
>do you do that as well in real life?
Its not real life. Do you compare every single thing in a game to your real life experiences? If that's the case, you should stop playing RPGs and go play a German simulation game.
>>340458792
>Bringing a Witcher is shit arguement into this thread
Why? Go back to the Witcher Threads and shitpost in there kid.
>>340458792
Blood and Wine was very fun tho
>>340458886
>How about they do it the Elder Scrolls way small sized "cities" not necessarily grounded in reality.
I've spotted the Bethesda fan boy!
>hese named NPCs have a schedule, a job , a quest for you and you'll probably remember most of them.
Brilliant, please tell me more.
>>340458645
It is probably to do with their engine limitations. Actual cities according to TES lore are much bigger. I doubt Gamebryo can handle cities like Novigrad from Witcher 3.
I am hoping TESVI to have large cities.
>>340454742
I like Bethesda as a publisher, and even then their track record has some massive holes in it.
Honestly if the options are tons of bethesda style cities or very few/one but large towns ala Novigrad i'd rather have the latter. Novigrad's still smaller than it probably 'should' be but it feels like an actual fucking town actual people made a city out of. Bethesda cities are so painfully functional abstraction it's getting hard to ignore. diamond city is too goddamn tiny for these 'upper balcony' elites to be a thing, ever.
>>340458645
The lore and the games aren't the same
You really think a country with 200 or less citizens that takes 12 minutes to walk across would be having a civil war?
>>340458662
But isn't Skyrim's whole gimmick that everyone talks and every building has an interior and whatnot?
Sure, disposable pedestrian NPCs add to the realism of the city somewhat, but the thing I remember most about Skyrim wasn't the story or the setting. It was a random dragon attack on a town that killed the blacksmith and a couple sidequest-key NPCs, so I kept reloading my save and trying to kill this dragon while keeping all of the townsfolk safe so I didn't lose quests and gear.
If the people in the town were multitudinous and disposable, moments like that wouldn't happen.
Is the setting's veracity worth giving up the "total interactivity see that mountain you can climb it" thing that makes Skyrim what it is?
>>340459175
They could work around this by splitting the city up though right? There's probably ways around it but bethesda is just a lazy developer.
>>340458645
I understood your point perfectly. But you need to stop claiming I'm ignoring your point when you're ignoring my points.
>Furthermore why WOULD you speak to everyone you might. Why WOULD you enter the house of a family/strangers on your quest.
This has been a staple of RPGs since Ultima. And many people play RPGs to do this exact thing. I understand you don't care about it. But you aren't everybody.
And if you care so much about the scale of the world over actual gameplay, then there's plenty of games out there for you. Skyrim was just bad because it tried to have both a huge detailed world, but also make everything have a gameplay trigger. and purpose. And so it ended up not pleasing either side.
>>340458792
TW3 is overrated as fuck and CDProject's lies in trailers were obvious since day 1. Still a great RPG though.
>>340457302
My childhood.
>>340458513
Rome you fucking retarded amerilard
If Bethesda uses a new engine which engine should they use?
>>340459175
yeah let's not kid ourselves, their trend has been to go even smaller still. Diamond city is one of the most pathetically tiny cities they've ever done, and it's still it's own magic cell outside the rest of the world.
our luck they are more likely to try and recreate Daggerfall's random town layout and make 'radiant towns'
"it just populates!"
>>340458886
I'm not a Bethesda fanboy at all anon
I'm just saying maybe you think you know better but you really don't. There's a reason why Bethesda does it this way there's always a design decision to be made.
>>340459175
>implying they will ever change the engine
They will use it literally till the end of time and beyond. Why create a new engine when you can make more money by using the old one?
>>340459175
It's not like anyone is forcing them to use Gamebryo. Don't know whether you meant it as an excuse or just a reason, but I've seen people say it as if it was totally out of Bethesda's control.
>>340459467
They won't
>>340459494
this was for
>>340459139
>>340459467
Gamebryo
Wouldn't an actual city be the size of the entire map?
>>340459330
exactly oblivions imperial city while still small felt reasonably sized and when it came out i even managed to get lost before i discovered fast travel
>>340459447
>Rome
>Greek style temple
>>340456573
>Blizzdrones
When was Blizzard brought up even once?
>>340458645
Why would you want to run for 15 minutes through a city and not interact with any NPC or building? You could play Assassins Creed for that. You obviously don't know the very basics of game design. If you make a huge city with only a few NPCs and buildings, you either need to have big flashing indicators to get people to go to those places or it becomes a shitty hide and seek puzzle for the player. And after spending 10 minutes not finding the next quest trigger, the average player will just quit the game and go sell it to Gamestop.
Skyrim already had too much empty space and pointless NPCs. What you're suggesting they do would make it worse.
>>340459286
Skyrim painfully draws back the amount of interesting interactivity to streamline everything due the engine. the problem is that while it seems more impressive to have a town of 12 people with 12 exact houses, when the game starts acting like it's the biggest, most impressive city it starts creating disconnect.
Novigrad is smaller than it probably should be for true scale, jsut like beth cities, but it 'feels' like a huge city because of it's scope, and even having fully visible districts and obvious changes in the area. you can't enter ever building in novigrad, but you feel like a lot of people live there even if you rarely see all of them.
>>340455075
>he hasn't been to witcher threads
>tfw no video game city has topped Novigrad.
Bethesda hired some new game engine programmers and graphics programmers just after Fallout 4 release. So there is still hope we might see something new in the next Elder Scrolls.
Where are you Todd, I can smell you. I'm not buying your Fallout 4 or your Fallout 4 DLC. Fuck you Todd, you lied again.
>>340459262
>You really think a country with 200 or less citizens that takes 12 minutes to walk across would be having a civil war?
Literal autism here folks.
You're defending a bad point in a games design even though you know it's bad. Why?
The lore and the game are the same fucking thing since the law comes from the games!
Hate to sound like a CDProjektShill but look what they did with the Witcher Lore (Based on books, not their own made up universe like Bethesda) yet still managing to make a huge city that felt life like.
>>340459175
How does he get away with it?
>>340459750
A modern one yes, not one for that time period.
>>340459934
what is so special about it?
>>340454742
Actually the Imperial City is in Cyrodiil
Im surprised people on /v/ get confused like that
>>340459854
>You obviously don't know the very basics of game design. If you make a huge city with only a few NPCs and buildings, you either need to have big flashing indicators to get people to go to those places or it becomes a shitty hide and seek puzzle for the player
>Gameplay should not get in the way of progression
This generation in a nutshell.
>>340459467
they will NEVER use a new engine, they are so unable to use a new engine they would sooner suicide pact than try. even the normies have caught on to it and every single time they try to pretend they made a 'new' engine, but all they ever do is change everything around' the core engine
every single time he says it's a new engine, he always least renders, lighting, everything ancilary tot he engine, they never touch the core scripting system
>>340459854
Because you're supposed to feel immersed in the world? That's the point.
How am i meant to feel immersed in a game that doesn't even represent the lore its based off on properly?
>>340454742
>Even Ubisoft can make cities that are alive and real in size
>Ubisoft
Are you by any chance retarded?
Both are terrible devs. Seriously just play something else.
>>340458662
>It's not a requirement for every house to have a purpose.
I don't think you understand what kind of franchise the Elder Scrolls became after Morrowind and forward.
>>340454742
Dragon's Dogma's starting town felt bigger than that shit.
>>340459494
Design decision?
And that was to make Cities into hamlets? Right? And make all the NPCS in those cities interactable, but completely forgetable and uninteresting.
So basically they failed on both counts?
>>340457829
How many of those buildings can you enter? How many NPCs can you speak to?
>>340459175
>I am hoping TESVI to have large cities.
That's never going to happen because every single house needs to be open to the player.
One large city that's a maybe
>>340459342
>And if you care so much about the scale of the world over actual gameplay, then there's plenty of games out there for you. Skyrim was just bad because it tried to have both a huge detailed world, but also make everything have a gameplay trigger. and purpose. And so it ended up not pleasing either side.
I agree with you on this.
The issue i'm saying is as you've said yourself some RPGs (Not all of them, don't like) focus on making everything relevant. But can you tell me which ones in recent times that aren't 2D based have suceeded in this?
What if they just made the whole map just one giant city, and the game takes place in that?
>>340459819
How can you tell wether thats a greek or roman style temple in the picture? Roman is basically pimped out Greek anyway
>>340459819
>america education
>>340460171
>How am i meant to feel immersed in a game that doesn't even represent the lore its based off on properly?
You realize its a game and it has limitations. Are you the kid who complained an SNES game didn't look as good as a movie?
>>340460318
and you forgot
How many objects in those building can you interact with
>>340460318
Skyrim cities are a joke compared to Novigrad, it is true anon. There are tons of building that you can enter. You can talk to every npc.
Witcher 3's engine is superior. It loads up the city/stuff in the background while you are playing.
>>340460171
honestly i think part of it is their cutting back so much it's really starting to work against their very design ideas.
design idea wise diamond city sounds awesome, but it's execution is so godamn purely functional it makes it even worse.
>>340460179
>Are you by any chance retarded?
I'm talking about Assassins Creed you idiot, and i'm not defending them you spaz. I'm just saying as shitty as they are at least in Assassins Creed i felt like i was in a moving city.
>>340460442
Dragon Quest VIII is a 3D RPG. And every single area has NPCs and searchable items that were relevant.
But aside from that game, there are few games which have ever done it well. Even modern Zelda can't do it. Skyrim had an even bigger scope. It couldn't make 350+ NPCs and every single bookshelf relevant to the world it tried to create.
>>340460548
>You realize its a game and it has limitations.
Your point is clearly irrelevant and you know i'm right.
As i said before, if i can feel like i'm in a city and get immersed within that city that the game is basing said city on it works. I also love how you're trying to go on a tangent with a childish insult.
Good attempt, heres the (you).
>>340460318
I'd say you can enter about 20 buildings at all times + `30 that are opened for story reasons at some point. People's private homes are closed because why wouldn't they be, and you're a witcher not a thief so you have no business going in there
You can speak to 20-30ish npcs
>>340460271
It was bigger sadly.
>>340460649
it's not super great sometimes though, and it clearly seems to assume loading south to north. if you fast travel to that center market, the swordsmith due south won't be in his shop unless you meditate once, but he's always there if you approach the city from a southern entrance
>>340460864
>Your point is clearly irrelevant and you know i'm right.
Your point is clearly irrelevant and you know i'm right. Make a stupid deflection and you'll get one right back.
>>340458936
>Plenty of RPGs do it
And that makes it acceptable?
I also love searching for clues / items as long as they make sense in the game world. If developers made every house in a city (and not bethesda cities but actual cities) entry-able I'm sure it would be a waste of time for the developers, time they could have spent on designing interesting dungeons and locations with good level design instead. Also if every house was entry-able I'm sure you would start seeing patterns of copy pasted and re-used models very quickly, I doubt developers have the time to make every house unique.
Same with npc's, what would you rather have: 100 npc's with shared voice actors you can talk to and deliver a few lines or 5 interesting characters in a city with each their own backstory and character progression. Which one of the two takes more time to make? You can clearly see why Bethesda went with the former option.
>>340454742
Actually, there are only 7 houses in Solitude
Weirdly though, this image labels three houses as one
>>340460931
>>340460318
oh yeah, also you can try talking to every npc but they most likely won't have a reason to want to talk to you, and every enterable interior you enter without any loading screens
>>340460318
About half of them can be entered , all NPCs can be talked to , but only select ones have dialogue options , the others just giving quips and one-liners.
Yet it still has tonnes of variation.
>>340454742
But most of those "Houses" are Hotels or shops. It's almost like you never played, and took this picture as fact...
>>340460976
(You)
>>340460078
It feels like an actual city and not some walled hamlet.
>>340460649
anon please
Witcher has some good qualities to it but let's stop overrating it
I doubt the game has truly impressed anyone around here
The variety of gameplay is just not there and the core gameplay isn't that great I'm afraid.
I guess it makes for some nice screenshots though
>>340460504
I'm not the dumb shit who said a greek style temple was to be found in rome you inbred fuck
>>340460179
The division has a wealth of potential, but walking great distances very slowly through lower manhattan is punishment. Also, the game forces you to grind terrible miniquests for level ups. What were they thinking?
>>340460670
AC does give you good feeling of being in a city.
>>340461091
Houses as in buildings you abortion
>>340461190
>I doubt the game has truly impressed anyone around here
You don't browse /v/ alot, do you?
There are plenty of appreciation threads on /v/ every time of the day, even when the kids come home from school.
>>340455789
why shouldn't they make bigger cities with more consequential houses you stupid horse fucker?
people that excuse bethesda's laziness should be shot
>>340461190
Are you fucking eating glue right now? All he said was that the city in Witcher 3 is more impressive than the ones in Skyrim and that the engine handles it better.
Jesus fucking Christ some people on this board.
>>340461190
>I doubt the game has truly impressed anyone around here
>implying
>>340461190
>Saying Witcher 3 is better than Skyrim is overrating it
>>340461032
>If developers made every house in a city (and not bethesda cities but actual cities) entry-able I'm sure it would be a waste of time for the developers, time they could have spent on designing interesting dungeons and locations with good level design instead. Also if every house was entry-able I'm sure you would start seeing patterns of copy pasted and re-used models very quickly, I doubt developers have the time to make every house unique.
Which is exactly why Skyrim was bad. Because it had this exact flaw. Tried to make 100+ dungeons and every building was able to be entered. But because there was so much, most of it lacked detail or purpose.
>
Same with npc's, what would you rather have: 100 npc's with shared voice actors you can talk to and deliver a few lines or 5 interesting characters in a city with each their own backstory and character progression.
The 5 interesting characters. But your example is an extreme. A game like Dragon Quest VIII or Red Dead Redemption had dozens of NPCs. They just put more effort on making them relevant, rather than making a ton of extra houses. So yes, it does have to do with how a developer allocates their resources. Skyrim just allocated more of its resources into making lots of buildings and dungeons, not so much the NPCs.
You're kind of cementing my point.
>>340461032
really the problem is beth keep cutting further and further back.
if we were talking about like a capital that's supposed to be the size of Manhattan but is the size of novigraad in tw3 that's clearly shrank for practicality, but beth cities are starting to not even be interesting. diamond cities market isn't interesting, it's just the vendors you need in a lazy circle, one being a dedicated one note joke, and two 'houses' next to a porch that represent the 'nobles'
while Novigraad had a full dock warehouse area, a clear market area, slums, a rich district, a religious district, multiple inn's, 2 brothels, one for upper class one for poor, etc. sure you couldn't enter every building, but diamond city has 4 houses, one is main story related, 2 are the 'nobles' and one is your buyable lot.
>>340461124
>quotes someone
>(You)
>>340461190
What in the fuck are you even on about
>Capital city
>no districts
>every building looks the same
>more merchants than citizens
i wonder why people play these games for 6 hours and never touch them again
>>340460318
Not too many, but there will be random events were you can hear NPCs talking about how to kill a monster or the location of things. Again, the point of a city isn't to give the player access to every home(unless there is a thieving aspect), but to create a sense of immersion. If I told about a remote hotspring that very few people know about and you visited this hot spring, but found it overrun with people you'd feel disappointed because it's the opposite of what you expected. It's the same with games when they tell you you are about to visit the capital of a city: you expect to see it be a busy city with lots of people, most of whom are just going about their day. You don't need to talk with everyone, but it gives you what you'd expect form a big busy city.
>>340458886
>These named NPCs have a schedule, a job , a quest for you and you'll probably remember most of them.
lmao
>>340460179
>Both are terrible devs.
THAT'S HIS ENTIRE FUCKING POINT
ARE YOU THIS RETARDED
JESUS
FUCKING
CHRIST
>>340457403
>endlessly walking through a city when you just want to sell some loot is tedious
Sounds like you should stick with ARPGs, sport.
>>340460931
>People's private homes are closed because why wouldn't they be, and you're a witcher not a thief so you have no business going in there
That's what I'm getting at. The Witcher games can get away with having dozens of filler buildings that serve no other purpose than to look nice because there is no gameplay reason to interact with them. TES can't do that. You must be able to enter every building for gameplay reasons. Classes specifically. If you're a thief and you want to enter just some random building in TES to steal shit, having that building be just filler would break the game.
>>340460318
Neither of those are important since Sky rim doesn't have a single interesting house or NPC to its name. More importantly, Novigrad has:
>NPCs that react to being bumped or shoved
>Town guards that don't require you to go on a killing spree before taking action
>Visible differences between rich and poor districts
>More quests and quest variety
>The ability to trot through the streets on your horse, but not at breakneck speeds
>Gwent
>>340461190
(You)
>>340459494
Are you seriously fucking implying that it's not possible to have a larger city than the ones in Skyrim?
Yeah there's a reason Bethesda does it this way. They cut corners every way they can and aborted fucksticks like you still lap it up. Doesn't mean it's good.
>>340461671
Daily reminder that Elder Scrolls would have been 10,000 times better if they had stuck with improving the Daggerfall experience instead of taking the OMG AAA GRAPHIX route.
>>340458792
Shame about the particle effects, but the draw distance can probably be fixed and people have corrected the color already.
>>340461802
the two games discussed in this thread are skyrim and the witcher, both arpgs.
>>340461909
they also react to the rain.
>>340456573
>Blizzdrones
The way you're bringing that up out of nowhere makes it seem you're just flinging it around without even knowing what it means. 2/10 - Try harder.
>>340461553
Witcher 3 is not a better game than Skyrim nor do I overrate Skyrim.
really makes you think
>>340461563
When I said interesting dungeons and locations I wasn't talking about the quantity, I was talking about the quality clearly.
This thread turned from a simple TES city discussion thread to a Witcher 3 shilling thread. Literally what the fuck is wrong with everyone.
>>340462003
While there are still slight differences between them and Torchlight II or Grim Dawn, I guess there's not much difference anymore, you're right.
>>340461981
the true irony is if you look at every post dagger fall game it's basically trying to get parts of Daggerfall's ambition to actually work without all the bugs
morrowwind
>make a game work in true 3d
Oblivion
>make npc scheduling.ai work at all
Skyrim
>improve general NPC ai, try and make Daggerfall random questing work
Easily why oblivion is better. It didn't have that problem.possibly morrowind too? I havent played it
>>340461889
Why. Why does every house have top be filled with "dude woah epic"? Most people don't have legendary weapons and stacks of gold in their homes, they have regular, "filler content" shit
I mean bethesda games always had the ability to enter every building and all of them had a story which is great. They choos to make smaller but more detailed cities. This is a design choice. The problem is that their execution is shit, its not their choice. In my memories of oblivion the imperial city didnt feel small at all
You can definitely have a city with 11 houses for a game like this. It's more than enough, senpai.
>>340462306
I completely disagree. Every post-Daggerfall game was about removing complexity or rpg mechanics for the sake of increasing graphics quality in order to create mass-market appeal. That's how all of these franchises end up becoming trash.
The thing is, you don't even have to make them real in size. It's enough to just make them FEEL large through moderately clever level design (i.e. don't just have one road that crosses through the entire town).
But Bethesda can't even do that right.
I wish they'd just pick a city/county, make it huge, add the countryside+villages and stick to that. They don't have to make whole provinces whilst making them look like shit.
>>340462329
Oblivion isn't any better in that regard.
>>340456273
>you can enter those house and interact with objects in those houses
Only SOME objects, most objects in Skyrim can't be interacted with if you have no mods.
>>340462378
>Most people don't have legendary weapons and stacks of gold in their homes, they have regular
Yeah, that's how it is in TES.
>>340457140
Some of the most popular mods are those that add useless NPCs to the game.
>>340462640
i hated oblivion cities and they all felt the same to me
>>340461665
(You)
Skyrim has dungeons. Tons of dungeons. They probably focused too much on dungeons to give a fuck about cities.
>>340456721
How will the player tell the difference between inconsequential filler NPCs with no dialogue and NPCs they can actually talk to?
>>340458015
>it looks like a medieval city
Why is there a pagoda there?
>>340462185
...and I was pointing out the same thing.
I truly don't understand the argument that Bethesda can't have a Novigrad sized city with all buildings enterable.
>It's too much work
Well they seemed to have no issue creating a million Draugr dungeons with nothing in them, so maybe next time channel those resources into making a bigger fucking capital city.
>Engine limitations
Not a real argument since it's Bethesda's choice to stick to a 15 year old engine, but they could divide it into separate cells like Oblivion. Slums, market, temple, political, and noble districts, along with a dedicated cell for every building. Include some nameless, randomly generated NPCs to fill the streets while making named ones visually distinct in some way.
>>340462640
That's already larger than OP. Also OP is the capital city. If you get Skyrim's other cities they're the size of Oblivion villages.
>>340462614
beth are stuck on a 'quantity is quality' design set. Falliut 4's map is technically bigger, has tons and tons of locations but they are so closely crammed together it makes the map 'feel' half the size.
>>340463061
>they could divide it into separate cells like Oblivion.
>Slums, market, temple, political, and noble districts, along with a dedicated cell for every building.
>Include some nameless, randomly generated NPCs to fill the streets while making named ones visually distinct in some way.
In other words, remake Daggerfall with modern technology.
was this big enough /v/?
>>340463061
We will see that in the next TES. Skyrim is more comparable to Witcher 2, both released in 2011.
>>340462502
>Every post-Daggerfall game was about removing complexity or rpg mechanics for the sake of increasing graphics quality
While every game is guilty of this, Skyrim took it a step further by simplifying mechanics not just because of graphics, but also for the sake of simplifying the game.
>>340462884
they focused so much on dungeons,t hey forgot to put shit worth finding in them.
>>340462640
I won't lie Oblivion suffers from the same mistakes as Skyrim BUT
Unlike Skyrim at least Oblivion had unique architecture per city while Skyrim had only the 4 main holds feel anything but Unique.
Morthal was supposed to be a city port but looked and felt like a hovel. Falkreath was just shit in general for a hunting town.
Markath was the only decent looking City in Skyrim (I can't even remember some of the other terrible ones) but at least in Oblivion i can remember most of them due to their unique appearance and interesting quest chains.
Fuck, why was Skyrim (minus graphics and kill moves) such a downgrade from Oblivion
>No Imperial Guards
>Shitty Voice Acting
>Shitty Radiant Quests
>Shitty Main Quest
>Shitty City Designs
>Same Shitty Scaling.
Also why were NONE of the Skyrim Dark Brotherhood characters anywhere near as cool as those in Oblivion (except Cicero)?
>>340459330
>They could work around this by splitting the city up though right?
Yes, they could easily do that, and I wouldn't mind at all. That's what they did for the Imperial City in Oblivion. If a few loading screens are the tradeoff for getting cities that feel like real cities, I'm okay with it.
>>340461207
>Skyrim hate thread devolves into shitting on others for not having studied greco-roman architecture
I love you /v/
>b-but but but Bethesda is lazyyyyy
>WHY CAN'T WE HAVE GTA/MEDIEVAL GTA STYLE CITIES?
yea totally smart ass
let's close every single building except the one you have to enter for the main quest and maybe a shop
let's add more pointless no name npcs that'll make the game better surely
Why not focus on the real problem?
Like loading screens too many loading screens for entering and leaving buildings,towns whatever
That hurts the experience more it's really annoying and immerion breaking
>>340462614
>vanilla game = Imperial city + surrounding areas/villages
>expansion 1 = Colovia
>expansion 2 = Nibenay basin
Why can't they do something like that? The whole map would be a lot bigger. If they did it for Oblivion I bet the Colovia/Nibenese cultural differences would have been explored much further.
>>340463302
Yeah, that's absolutely true. Skyrim really took "streamlining" to the next level. To me it's the final proof that Bethesda has given up on making a good rpg. All they're doing now is making shineys to grab kiddiedollars.
>>340463249
I didn't play Daggerfall, but if that's what it was like then I understand the people saying Bethesda has been cutting back. It's not perfect, but it's hard to worse than Solitude, which was just a straight fucking line with shit sprinkled off to the sides like a cul de sac.
>>340462915
See what this anon wrote >>340463061
>>340454742
>Empty thalmor offices in solitude
What was it gonna be /v/, I felt sneaking around that embassy far away was fun as fuck but after that, finding the elf guy in windhelm and seeing the women at a meeting, nothing much is really ever done with the thalmor despite the way NPCs hype them up to be some illuminati shit that kidnaps you in your sleep
>>340463181
Difference is, Skyrim is the capital of a frozen shithole province. The Imperial province on the other hand is the center and most populated province of the empire.
Also it's a good thing you bring up the Imperial City because I think it is an even bigger insult to the Elder Scrolls lore than Solitude. The Imperial City is supposed to the capital of an empire that spreads an entire continent. What kind of capital has a harbor in it with only one sailable ship?
>>340463427
Skyrim's dark brotherhood is trying to hard to top the Oblivion guys, who we're way simpler, but exactly the right crew of people to enjoy.
I mean the main plot of the Skyrim DB is you being the whisperer and plotting to kill the emperor, if that isn't a trying to one up someone plot i have no idea what is. they even threw a vampire loli at you.
>>340463285
When was the last time Bethesda improved their city design in a sequel? Skyrim was worse than Oblivion, and Fallout 3 was far worse than 1 and 2. For fuck's sake, 4 just gave up and made us build them ourselves. How you can be in any way optimistic mystifies me.
>>340463580
You can download and play it for free now. There's even a utility that makes it easy to install:
wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN
Be warned, the game came out in 1996, but if you give it a shot I think you'll see what I mean about taking the Daggerfall route vs. taking the AAA graphics route. Bethesda really should have stuck to improving on Daggerfall in the ways that you mentioned.
>>340461981
The series works better in 3D
>>340463061
>Well they seemed to have no issue creating a million Draugr dungeons with nothing in them, so maybe next time channel those resources into making a bigger fucking capital city.
This is so fucking true. All quests involve raiding some dumb draugr ruin. Why can't we have more quest that involve content in a large city?
>>340463427
Markarth*
Whiterun
Solitude
Windhelm
Riften
All have a unique architectural style
>>340463835
Solitude is smaller than Bruma.
>>340454742
Skyrim was just a disappointment and a half all the way through.
>>340463868
they keep cutting back presentation for function. Diamond city is the most painfully functional city design ever \they even add a 24/7 vendor so you don't need to wait for shops to open.
>>340464015
I want to play a game, not look at a pretty painting. Elder Scrolls should have scaled graphics way back, only improving them as much as a deep set of mechanics would have allowed.
I would much rather have huge, procedurally-generated environments, living world mechanics, complex character stats and skills, etc. instead of fucking Skyrim. And I really don't care if it's not as pretty.
>>340464068
Scripting would break and they'd have to make a bunch of essential npc's to prevent further quest breaking.
>smaller than FO4 map
>packed with unique locations
>not just 200 buildings with raiders and super mutants
>>340463835
alright so the in game imperial city had the same ratio to the lore one as the in game solitude to the lore one so its fine? If the lore solitude is at least as big as the imperial city was in oblivion they should have made a city at least as big as that
>>340462209
It's pretty much impossible to mention any fantasy RPG without some jerk coming along to tell you that Witcher 3 is a million times better in every way.
>>340464070
Markarth basically uses the same style as Dwarven dungeons. Whiterun is pretty much the vanilla style used everywhere else in the game. Solitude architecture barely has anything memorable. Riften is insultingly small and uses vanilla style for houses. Most architectural changes are simply different roof coloring.
>>340454742
People can bitch and moan about Witcher 3's combat, but goddamn all the villages and cities felt really alive
>>340456721
>World is unimaginative to me, let's have unimaginativevideogamesand be ok with that too
>>340464070
No, they don't.
Stop posting shit.
Also
>Thinking he's cool for naming Skyrim cities.
Bet the pussy loves you anon.
>>340462378
All he was saying is that being able to enter houses is important in TES because it's possible to play a thief. He said nothing about having every house contain thousands of gold worth of stuff, and indeed, most houses in TES only have mundane things in them.
>>340464635
I dunno if i'd say truly alive, but defiantly more 'living' than what bethesda cities have become
>>340464667
Your point?
>>340464070
yes they do stop being ignorant
you're not cooler
only the lesser hold cities like Morthal,Dawnstar,Falkreath,Winterhold are samey in architecture
>>340464874
for you
>>340464715
>>340454742
Why did Bethesda drop the concept of splitting the capital up into sections like with the Imperial City? It allowed the city to perform well and also feel large at the same time, they didn't even bother with anything like that in Skyrim. Solitude and Windhelm should have been at least double the size, they're each only about the size of a single Imperial City quadrant, it's pathetic.
>>340464070
>All have a unique architectural style
What? The houses in Whiterun and Riften look the same. They're just a typical wood buildings. Many of the Inns also look cloned.
>>340464874
>only half the cities in the game are samey in architecture
>>340464504
The Witcher 3 has some flaws, but world and city design is not in that list. People bring it up here because Novigrad is essentially what everyone wanted Solitude to be. It has poor districts, rich districts, a market district, and a bustling port area. There are quests that let you explore and interact with the city rather than sending you away to Draugr Dungeon #418 to collect a magical dog shit for less gold than the potions you used up getting it were worth.
wouldn't adding more NPCs with unique dialogue cost more money because of the VAs?
>>340464980
Thanks kid
>>340463061
>making named ones visually distinct in some way
But in what way, exactly? How do you make them stand out enough that the player gets the hint, but not so much that they might as well have exclamation points over their heads?
>>340465020
>The houses in Whiterun and Riften look the same
no they dont
>>340465076
That's right you cut corners in video game development. The less important stuff gets the generic nord town architecture treatment.
>>340465123
I'm pretty sure that if Bethesda ACTUALLY were passionate about their game and wanted it to be the best it could be they would hire VAs for misceallenous characters for free who wanted to participate in the games advancement.
Just looking at Skywind as an example of free VAs who are passionate about the Elder Scrolls Universe.
>>340461190
I was pretty fucking impressed
>having a smaller city is okay because it makes the NPCs more memorable
No, it literally fucking doesn't. I've spent days playing Skyrim and outside that dumb rich nigger and Heimskr in Whiterun I literally don't remember any NPC from a city. They all have unique jobs, names and homes and all fourteen of them in each city are entirely fucking forgettable despite that.
When I walk into a city, I want it to feel like a city, not a goddamned village with a castle at the end like a fucking Ren Faire theme park. If that means you had a shitload of buildings you can't actually enter and people you can't talk to then so be it. It's more immersive to have an actual city of nobodies than 6 houses and a castle full of people that are supposed to represent the biggest city in the realm. You want to know what immersion in a city is? It's getting lost in the streets, it's seeing massive throngs of people you could never speak with the entirety of in a year if you tried, it's buildings of every shape and size sprawling out as far as you can see. It's not six houses and a fucking castle.
>>340465123
The only NPCs that need voice actors are significant ones. Does anybody honestly give a shit about generic quest NPC #4815's voice? 90% of the NPCs in both Oblivion and Skyrim (and any other open world Bethesda title) could be left unvoiced to no loss in gameplay value.
>>340465205
most players are pretty good at grasping when a set up hook is playing, you just add the ! after it's obvious as a reminder rather. Hell witcher quest people sometimes even just say 'hey can you help me?' when you walk by.
>>340464991
>why did they want to reduce the number of loading screens
>>340465123
They only hired like fifteen to voice the entire NPC cast anyway - what's making them say a few more lines?
>>340463061
>Slums, market, temple, political, and noble districts, along with a dedicated cell for every building.
I would be perfectly fine with this, but a lot of people seem to get really upset at the very existence of loading screens or separate cells.
>>340465123
Yes, another reason why voice acting is utter cancer in the industry.
>>340465308
>Anonymous 06/09/16(Thu)01:13:38 No.340465308â–¶
> >>340465076
>That's right you cut corners in video game development. The less important stuff gets the generic nord town architecture treatment.
I'm defending a shit game made by a shit company by saying its okay to be shit and cut corners!
You're the cancer thats killing the gaming industry and making it what it is. Consider suicide.
>>340465308
>That's right you cut corners in video game development
Right, they invest more into marketing rather than making the game actually good.
>>340465417
People who totally get it: this guy
Is the GOTYAY thread?
>>340465524
The loading screens in Skyrim are like 4 seconds each, do you have ADHD?
>>340454742
But why would I want to walk around in a pretend large city? Yes Solitude is small but at least you do interact with all of it, I don't want to fast travel inside a city.
>>340465535
I'd be fine with separate cells honestly. It never bothered me in the Imperial City or in Freeside/the Strip.
>>340465314
it's probably more likely a lazy scripting issue than pure amount of va's if every guard has the same amount of lines and all are identical, it's less likely to cause some sort of random bork when something happens.
>>340465459
>>340465314
I'd rather do away with voice acting completely if it meant having better dialogue/story and more dialogue options, but I don't think that's realistic in this day and age
>>340465417
Amen.
>>340465642
Did you play that shit on consoles: their main market?
Last i heard, they cant even 30 fps fallout 4.
>skyrim remaster
literally why, the game is fine
>>340465524
They might as well not make the game at all so that the player won't have to deal with any loading screens.
>>340463427
>Same Shitty Scaling
That's just flat out wrong. Skyrim's scaling is nowhere near as bad as Oblivion's. For example, no bandit will ever wear anything better than steel plate armor, and even that's rare. They basically fixed it, unless you're one of those people who hates scaling on principle.
>>340465689
What was wrong with the size of the Imperial City? I found it entirely memorable, as were most of the characters in it, and it was larger than Whiterun and Solitude combined.
At the very least the capital of Skyrim should look like a capital, it should not just be the size of every other village in the area.
>>340465823
>They basically fixed it, unless you're one of those people who hates scaling on principle.
Kind of am. I prefer how Morrowind worked it but i agree, Skyrim did do it better in that regard.
>>340465751
>it meant having better dialogue/story and more dialogue options,
neither of the last 3 TES titles had any of this
>>340465689
this guys right
>>340465579
yes. witcher series is seriously kicking ass.
>>340455075
i do
bethesda games arecomfy
>>340464068
>Why can't we have more quest that involve content in a large city?
Because then Bethesda would have to actually write stories for their quests instead of plugging variables into their Radiant Quest Creator.
>>340465823
Scaling is bad with beth because they handle it retardely, difficultly to them was always 'they do more damage, you do less' and that's it. fallout 4 survival is literally the first time they've ever even remotely tried to make things difficult in a way outside of nerfing your damage and buffing theirs.
>>340466040
>bethesda game stories
nice meme
>>340466091
Oblivion had some great quest stories, they are perfectly capable of it, but just choose not to do it.
>>340454742
Great architecture though.
>>340466159
they've gotten to obsessed with 'amount' of content and have gutted everything else substantive.
Fallout 4 has infinite levels, but good luck feeling like playing more than one character because of how bland the entire thing is.
>>340465689
Why have any distance between points of interests then? Its just pretending to walk there. Why have an open world then? Just choose what you want to load next its youre just pretending to go to the next quest anyway
>>340465689
>>340465951
See >>340465417
Also interacting with all NPCs in Skyrim? Wow!
Its a shame they're stale as shit and unmemorable.
I actually remember the placements of guards in Witcher 3 and side characters from side quests. But i don't remember any of the npcs in Solitude except for the Civil War 2 main Imperial characters and that guy that goes pssssst over here! .
>>340466159
>they are perfectly capable of it, but just choose not to do it.
they might have ran out of trick that's why. they have had the same lead writer for 3 recent games.
>>340465118
That's fair enough. I've just gotten fed up with people who think things like having to play a predefined character and not being able to play any class besides "swordsman alchemist" aren't legitimate issues for someone to have with an RPG.
>>340466443
This.
How can i not remember the names or recognisible personalities of Lizardmen and CatPeople but CAN remember generic farmer #13 from that side quest to slay a ghost.
Maybe its becuase even side characters had character and personalities and were memorable due the quest they gave you compared to the raidiant generic shit you get in Bethesda games.
Who the fuck wants to be able to enter to every single house full of fucking nothing to begin with?
>>340466431
It is an optimization problem, what you describe is not enjoyable either and I agree with that. You may like doing chores but if the landscape does not offer anything new it gets boring.
>>340466553
I guess.
It must take some serious lack of skill to make a quest where you literally kill the Emperor boring and fairly unmemorable. The quest in Oblivion where you get taken out to sea on the boat-bar thing after you fall asleep in it is more memorable than the entirety of the Dark Brotherhood quest line in Skyrim.
>>340466890
gtafags and ocd autist.
>>340466890
People who play theif characters usually,
>>340466890
It's important in TES games.
>>340461980
Oblivion's imperial city was bigger than all the holds in skyrim combined.
>>340465471
I've only played up to the third chapter of Witcher 1, but even then, I've already had a few cases where an NPC with actual dialogue looked no different from any of the others and didn't even have a unique name. Relying on dialogue barks when you pass by isn't a good idea, if for no other reason than because there could very well be ambient conversations or sounds going on that will drown them out.
>>340466704
>>340466443
Bethesda NPCs blend together like crazy because all of them are voiced by the same six people barring plot characters like Tullius and Ulfric. They're also bland as fuck and don't do much regardless but it's hard to differentiate them in your mind when literally every old Nord is voiced by the guy who voiced Tigger on Winnie the Pooh.
>>340454742
>11 houses
Fucking jap porn games have better developed cities than skyrim ell emm ayyy ohh
>>340466987
"thief" gameplay is about cheeki breeki with a bow and dagger, kind anon.
>>340466890
someone who wants to play as a thief, not that stealth isnt stupidly broken in all tes games but still
its ok in witcher where you are always a gruff dude with 2 swords, but a tes game should let you enter everything and anything desu
>>340465417
It actually makes everything more memorable that design choice and also it's easier for the player to create a mental map of the world they are in.
You want a game that simulates a somewhat realistic medieval city which is fair but this being an Elder Scrolls game it's not feasible.
>>340466890
People who wanna steal everything that isn't nailed down.
>>340466987
But there is nothing to steal. Every house is filled with the same worthless shit and "valuable" items only appear on "steal the generic golden cup from this house" quest of the thieves guild.
>>340466631
Thats fair criticism of the subgenre of RPGs that Witcher represents but you can hardly say it makes the game worse. They executed their vision very well and that's the scale I measure games on. It would be pointless to say you can't choose your character in pong too
All these fucking modern games need to quit wasting our god damn time with these "big, fully explorable" areas that are either way too big and empty as a result, just making it a much more uneventful long walk, or pathetically small because they wanted you to be able to enter each of the very few builds even though almost none of them are worth it.
Let me get to where I need to go without having to waddle around for several minutes. I want my overworlds and hubs and quick-traveling pace back so I can actually do fun shit and the devs can focus on making more fun shit.
>>340466890
I think in TES at least most of the houses should be able to be entered.
I'd rather the devs had worked on increasing the number of enterable houses than work on all those generic Draugr dungeons and shitty caves.
I understand TES has roots in dungeon-crawling but perhaps it's time to either make the dungeons more interesting across the board or reduce the number of them drastically and put the manpower into something more immediately interesting.
>>340466945
A lot of us have the same problem with cities though and that's exactly the point. I want to feel like I'm in a city just as much as I want to feel like I'm roaming the tundra or exploring a burial site or whatever. And they drop the ball with cities real hard for some reason
>>340467287
yea well when you wear rose-tinted glasses it looks like varity
>>340467370
Fuck you I want to feel immersed rather than walking around a world full of a whopping 6 NPCs.
>>340467370
Just because open world is not good for some games it doesn't mean it's not good for ANY game.
>>340467228
>It actually makes everything more memorable that design choice and also it's easier for the player to create a mental map of the world they are in.
It's only easier to remember where you are because there's nothing to get lost in. All the cities are one road leading straight to the castle with markets and houses on the side. None of that is memorable, and if the characters are it's in spite of this system and not because of it.
>but this being an Elder Scrolls game it's not feasible.
Bullshit. It's not feasible because Bethesda is notorious for cutting corners wherever they can. They did it in Oblivion by putting chunks of the city in cells behind loading screens. They could easily do it again if they wanted to. I'm willing to accept a city with some limitations like not being able to enter every house, talk to every civilian and have a load screen between areas. I'm NOT willing to accept six houses and a castle, and neither should anyone with any standards.
>>340467269
some people just want to steal every single object they can, regardless of the practicality of it
>>340465314
>if bethesda were really passionate about their games they'd profit off free labour
>>340461190
>I doubt the game has truly impressed anyone around here
You're right, It didn't really impress me and It wasn't until Fallout 4 released that I realized how fucking convenient the no loading screens of Witcher 3 was.
Some mods add new houses to cities with unique interiors and it's hardly much work. The problem is they don't want to increase the game specs.
>>340467287
I don't know if you're taking a shit on Oblivion but literally every single major town has different architecture besides the temples and the walls.
Is anyone else prolific at starting mods they will never finish?
>>340467697
That's why i said "IF" you fucking retard.
Learn to read before you write, fag.
>>340454742
Why does this bait still work? Skyrim doesn't have a capital city, let alone a city on the scale of the Imperial City. It's not supposed to, because it's sparsely populated and isn't the center of the Empire. It's only the "capital" in that the High King resides there, but it's just a title. The High King is a Jarl like all the other Jarls in Skyrim, they get together and choose a King among themselves.
And because Skyrim is split into Holds there is no large capital city, because there is no central government. Each Hold governs itself. Like I mentioned before, because Skyrim is less populated than Cyrodiil, which is flanked by countries on all sides, none of the cities are particularly large. The low population is on account of Skyrim being a cold, inhospitable pile of shit. The only reason anyone stayed is because it's the ancestral home of the Nords.
Do you want there to be a bunch of cities that have more buildings than there are people? You'd just complain about that too so why not?
>>340466952
>It must take some serious lack of skill to make a quest where you literally kill the Emperor boring and fairly unmemorable.
Probably because there's nothing in the game to get you emotionally invested in the Emperor or anything else.
>>340454742
This city was such a let down.
>>340461989
You got a name for any mods that makes it a bit more like top pic, if there are any? Starting a playthrough soon.
>>340467508
Yeah man it's so "immersive" walking around 2D doors that don't work and the same NPC's parroting some dumb repetitive shit everytime they pass you on their scripted laps.
>>340468075
>having cities with 10 inhabitants is good
Eat shit.
>>340467269
The way to fix that is to take the time to add some valuable or interesting loot to houses here and there, not to remove those houses entirely.
>>340468075
>it's okay because it's less populated.
There's like 5 houses in most holds, a couple more in bigger ones. So Skyrim is lacking population so much that only a few residents can live in a town like Solitude?
>>340468057
Are you legitimately retarded?
>>340468075
Solitude is the seat of the High King, who rules over the entirety of Skyrim in the name of the Emperor. It's also the seat of the Imperial forces in the province. For all intents and purposes it IS the capital of Skyrim and it being 11 houses and a castle is fucking embarrassing.
>>340467769
witcher 3 is crap at being an open world RPG, one of the main reasons is level restricted loot, lets describe a hypothetical situation you can run into when exploring in TES vs Witcher3
Morrowind:
Run into a daedra in some ruins
>oh shit, boots of bliding speed save me, fuck
>run around the ruins while dodging the mad daedra
>find some daedric sword
>barely kill the daedra
>fug this is great, and was totally worth it, I can now kill the damned cliff racers in like two hits
>proceed to enjoy the reward from exploration
Witcher3:
>oh fug, that birdy guarding the tower has that skull sign, lets roll around and get inside
>hey noice a chest
>a sword of major ass-kickery, cool!
>cant use until I get like 10 more levels
>by the time I get those 10 levels I have far better shit anyway
its such a poor decision, that it made exploration boring as shit, you might as well turn around and go somewhere else whenever you see the skull because there is no reward in exploring the place
and lets not even get started on the fact that you can play as a swordsman, a swordsman or a swordsman. They should have stuck with the Witcher2 hub system it worked much better
>>340468264
Whoever made the whole "NPCs babble random lines of dialogue at you as you walk past" thing standard should be fucking shot.
>>340468075
People want to have settlements that have a lot of buildings and a lot of people. Preferably 40 buildings, 500+ people, so that it actually feels authentically like a real medieval settlement. Who the fuck is going to put stone walls to protect 20 people? 5 houses? It breaks the illusion of the game world because that kind of shit isn't logical in real life.
>>340467782
As others have pointed out, making cities bigger doesn't have to increase the game's requirements if you just separate the city into districts with loading screens.
>>340468407
You like to use the word retarded alot don't you.
Honestly anon, no need to be upset for being such a useless cunt in real life.
>>340468575
>one of the main reasons is level restricted loot
>They should have stuck with the Witcher2 hub system it worked much better
I wholeheartedly agree
>>340468575
What you describe is a crap looting/equipment system. It is worth exploring in Witcher 3 just not for the loot
>>340468708
>It breaks the illusion of the game world because that kind of shit isn't logical in real life
Wow, it's almost like the fantasy game with magic, zombies, dragons, and wizards doesn't take place in real life or something.
Anyone who tries to apply real-world logic to a universe that doesn't obey the rules that put real-world logic in place is doomed from the start.
>>340468750
The guy I replied to used retard too what's your problem. And he really is stupid if he can't realise what the original anon meant
>>340467508
That shit ain't immersive.
Long walks through bloated yet empty cities and sparse landscapes make me look away from the screen because it's fucking boring and I don't even need to pay attention while I'm on my way to wherever I need to go.
Tiny but dense Elder Scrolls maps with buildings that nobody except Wikia users enter, "unique" but still generic NPCs that blather the same handful of unimportant rumors and copypaste dungeons doesn't immerse anybody.
>>340467595
There are only two types of game where an Open World isn't immediately a shitty idea.
Grand Theft Auto, where the city is more of a playground for causing chaos, driving around and having shootouts.
GTA games have a good scale, fun to just fuck around for a long time; Just Cause games are too big and empty, gets boring quickly.
MMOs or games where you can put that empty space to use and build things there. Such as Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online or even Minecraft. For example, SWG in particular had almost nothing but empty space AND their cities were pointlessly huge and empty, BUT players could work together to build their own, much more interesting cities from the ground up to fill that space.
>>340462209
>>340464504
Because the game was a mileston in modern Open World RPG. Now people who realised that, are complaining about how other devs fucks players in the ass with their copy paste games.
>shitjustgotreal.jpg
>>340468967
Witcher 3 isn't really a direct competitor for Skyrim. It doesn't have anywhere near the same level of mod support, and it forces you to play a voiced, predefined character.
>>340468090
There are dozens of e3/trailer reshades on the nexus, but I never used any of them because I never gave a shit about the aesthetic change.
>>340469336
And frankly it came out five years after Skyrim did. Everyone who wanted to play Skyrim has done so by now. There's no competition.
>>340469336
did witcher devs even release the modding tools?
>>340459854
Balmora was bigger than any city in Skyrim, and it made sense without map markers. why cant they do that shit again?
>>340463546
this desu senpai
>>340459854
You have a map at the touch of a button that you can check and mark whenever you want. Fuck off with this "basics of game design" shit that's killing games. Games should NOT be made to cater to the fucking kids who ate paint chips. Fuck holding everyone else back because little Johnny is too stupid to check his map.
>>340468946
Ah, wrong anon then' my mistake.
>>340469336
Because you play as a witcher? Geralt of Rivia, who has fucking 8 books of his story? it's like you would argue that you can't play Zelda as blank character without backstory
https://youtu.be/76DgDi-O314?t=165
skyrim is for blank characters
Witcher is for goym who wants to play as a fucking Geralt of Rivia, butcher of blaviken
I'm actually baffled by this. Fallout 4 and Skyrim didn't bring any kind of improvement over oblivion and f3/nv other than better graphics. They even degraded parts. What the actual fuck is Bethesda doing?
>>340465579
Wow that's fruity as fuck
>>340469536
I don't think they did.
>>340469536
>>340469336
When will you realise that fanbase of Bethesda have to fix their fav devs games with mods?
Witcher 3 will have relese RedKid 3 propably as they did in wticher 2, but gee, i never use any mods. Most of people doesnt. it's like 1% of gamers who do it.
>>340469880
He's never said it's bad, he's just pointing out how the games a different.
>>340469880
That was exactly my point. Witcher and TES are very different games, so you can't really talk as if CD Projekt have somehow dethroned Bethesda because they made a better TES-style game.
>>340470128
>When will you realise that fanbase of Bethesda have to fix their fav devs games with mods?
Bethesda's modding tools also let fans add or change a ton of stuff that CD Projekt's tools don't. TES mods aren't all just "fixing the game".
>people thinking that TW3 is anywhere near comparable to a Bethesda RPG
It's in a whole different fucking league. FO4 and Skyrim have INSTANCED towns and buildings. Just think about that for a second.
Maybe Bethesda could make something comparable to TW3 if they actually cared. Because their games have no effort put into them.
>>340470576
>so you can't really talk as if CD Projekt have somehow dethroned Bethesda because
its another level, it's about detailing the world and proving it is real. But i guess they just had books too hook on the world, which skyrim did not have. It's just feels real,emotional,I had depression after this game m8
>>340470857
>Maybe Bethesda could make something comparable to TW3 if they actually cared.
Fucking/thread
This sums the whole W3 / other RPG wars
>>340470857
If bethesda actually used a non-shit engine they might get something like CDPR did. W3 feels more alive than Skyrim ever managed. That and fire all their shit staff.
Do you think it would be possible for Bethesda to make a halfway decent game if they moved on from the literal abortion that is the GameBryo engine?
>>340470857
see
>>340462150
stop the Witcher dick suckage party because it's gross and really undeserved if you ask me heh
>>340471204
Probably, but it'd lose the grand majority of its modability, which is a huge selling point.
Although to be fair, the majority of mods exist only to fix the problems Gamebryo caused in the first place.
>>340471204
I dont think so. Imagine what a bethesda world designer would do without instances and with the pressure of having to place more than 10 buildings. Their minds would shatter
>>340471121
>If bethesda actually used a non-shit engine they might get something like CDPR did.
In terms of graphical fidelity, for sure. The thing is, TW3 surpasses Bethesda games in other categories.
>>340471630
This. Bethesda is just a shit developer no matter what engine they may use.
>>340470891
I'm sure it did well enough at what it set out to do, but I'm not particularly interested in it, because I like to create my own character and choose my class and such. And I like an RPG to have modding tools that let people add more quests. For those reasons, I don't consider The Witcher to have "defeated" TES, despite all the problems TES has. That said, I do wish someone with the dedication would make a TES clone that's better than what Bethesda gives us. I have as many criticisms of Bethesda as anyone, and I don't like their monopoly.
>>340462640
I forgot how shitty the designs were in Oblivion. No concept here, they just plopped down a bunch of generic medieval-themed buildings on a hill and put a wall around it.
>>340459923
those people aren't from here. the main guy who shits those threads is literally (as in it was proven) from reddit
>>340471954
(you) here, did you beat witcher ? Just asking. Because i always get a bit suspicious when someone defends Skyrim over W3.
wont reply, going sleep, its 3:40 am in Poland
>>340471675
Wouldn't say bad. Thing is, Beth games are about the player driving the experience. What it lacks in quality writing it makes up for in players "making their own story" (not that that's an excuse for having abysmal writing in general), as simple as those stories are. For instance, you raid a dungeon and get a cool sword. That's really what it boils down to. Pretty boring story on paper, but because YOU were the one that drove it and participated in it, it's more powerful. That's basically why Bethesda games appeal to so many: they're about player-driven experiences.
Another way to think about it is that TW3 is about many characters, but Skyrim is just about one character (You).
>>340471954
To assess both games you have to acknowledge what they have in common and what makes them different. They're both considered RPGs, so there's that. But which is the better RPG? Well, like with any vidya, you have to answer two questions. Firstly, what is the game trying to do? That is, what kind of game is it trying to be? Secondly, how successful is it (in this context, how successful is it compared to its predecessors who tried to the same thing)?
Skyrim is trying to be sandbox game where you run around a huge world and explore stuff, building and customizing your character through quests and combat. That was clearly the goal for the game. It does a pretty good job, too, and for mainstream vidya players totally set the bar for that. People liked it so much that it basically set the standard for RPGs at the time.
TW3 is trying to be a literal "role-playing" game where you play a preset character and define his actions in a semi-linear story set in an open world. There's less exploration, but a lot more story. So less player-driven story, more pre-written story. It does a great job of telling interesting stories and having memorable characters. It's also much larger than Skyrim, in every sense of the word. It set the new bar.
>>340461190
Witcher 3 has better everything than Skyrim.
Quality of content > Quantity of content
>>340473976
why not both?
>witcher 3
>>340473752
This, if you argue otherwise y ou're retarded.
>>340455789
You're right. Instead, they used their time fixing bugs.
>>340473370
I lost interest around Chapter 3 of the first game.
>>340473737
Good points. When I think about it, my ideal game would be something like Skyrim, where I can create my own character, but it would have much more focus on story on dialogue with lots of dialogue options, relationships with NPCs, etc. I'd actually prefer a greater focus on story, but I just don't like playing a preset character. So I sort of end up caught in the middle where neither game really offers what I want, and then I go back to playing NWN modules.
>>340473752
What about magic?
>>340454742
I won't defend Bethesda, because they cater towards the "Call of duty audience," now, but let's be honest, we have consoles to blame for shit like this.
>>340473976
>Quality
HAHAHAHA
>>340474573
Skyrim
>big fireball
>bigger fireball
>lightning
>stronger lightning
>freezing mist
>stronger freezing mist
The Witcher 3
>5 different spells that can be used to exploit monster weakness
>putting some ability points on the spells will give it the ability to change function giving you more choices
Unlike you, I played both games to know Skyrim is shit compared to The Witcher.
>>340473737
Here's what it comes down to for me: in either type of RPG, the amount of content is super important. What dungeons are to Skyrim, quests are to TW3, and both have loads.
But something always amazed me about TW3. How, 60 hours in, I was still seeing new stuff. As soon as Velen starts getting old, you hit Novigrad. As soon as you're bored to pieces there, the game hits you with Skellige which is huge and has way different atmosphere, culture and story to it. Then, just when you think you've seen EVERYTHING, Kaer Morhen blows you away with how beautiful and comfy it is.
It's just stupid how much there is in that game and how fresh it stays even up to the very end. Put simply, TW3 manages to blow Skyrim out of the water in terms of both quality and quantity.
There's other things too, like the graphics making Beth games look like they're from the stone age.
>>340458792
i've never played the witcher but i thought everybody on /v/ liked the new dlc
>>340475046
Then you have the DLC, HoS took me 16 hours to completely finish. Then there's BaW which is like an entirely new game.
Are house counts the new meme metric we're using to gauge game quality now?
What a brave new world.
>>340458513
It's Dungeons and Dragons, it's the ultimate "throw everything in" type of fantasy setting
His point about scale still stands though, I do remember it having more than a dozen buildings you could enter
>>340459447
Baldurs Gate looks nothing like classical or medieval Rome, you retarded Albanian
>>340458886
Mate, go bag your head, I love Bethesda games, but the cities in Skyrim were garbage, objectively, not a stylistic choice, bad, objectively, fuck off.
>>340460942
>No loading screens
Novigrad would have had 7 separate load in areas in a Bethesda game due to the amount of NPCS.
>>340474573
So you haven't even played TW3, the thing people are arguing about?
>>340474573
>my ideal game would be something like Skyrim, where I can create my own character, but it would have much more focus on story on dialogue with lots of dialogue options, relationships with NPCs, etc.
Fable tried that. The problem is that if you have a flat character that you created, it automatically has no depth so it's kind of hard to make him seem interesting, and to make the people around him seem interesting by extentsion because they're essentially talking into a camera and waiting for your response so they can give a canned reaction.
When a fictional character is created it operates off of some basic rules to make it seem real: he acts relatively consistently, he has his own beliefs or lack thereof, his own relationships, and so on. So when two fictional characters are talking they seem like real people actually interacting. But when the player completely controls a character who has none of those rules, you don't have to abide by them. You can act however you want. That's part of the appeal, but that's part of the weakness as well. It's hard (some say impossible) to craft a good story when the player has near total control of where the plot goes and how characters act.
Ultimately you have to find a middle ground, like Mass Effect, where your character is a blank slate that you self insert but also a pre-set character.
>>340476129
People are arguing about how comparing TW3 and Skyrim isn't really fair because they aren't really the same kind of game, with my specific problem being the preset character. I don't have to play TW3 to know you still play as Geralt.
>>340476909
Go play it anon, it's game of the decade. Have an open mind, maybe you don't like preset character RPGs because you haven't played one this good.
>>340463061
>Well they seemed to have no issue creating a million Draugr dungeons with nothing in them, so maybe next time channel those resources into making a bigger fucking capital city.
Too many retarded TES players love dungeon crawling and feel it's the most important aspect of TES, and would never compromise for it. In fact they already can't stand Skyrim's generic dungeons so it's a moot point to ask for resource allocation.
Dungeons have always been silly, basically a concept against realism the moment you make them wide spread instead of making them rare secrets and branches of existing buildings. The forts that have dungeons are perfectly acceptable, as it's a fucking fort, so having a dungeon for prisoners and storage makes sense. Same with something of importance light Blachreach or whatever.
The radiant dungeons filled with Draugr? Uh no. There's no fucking way any fantasy with a remote sense of realism would have people wasting time digging out and creating all those caves just to be glorified grave yards where it's free to be looted right after.
Bethesda would have it so much better if they cared more about top world shit which would naturally allocate resources into a better scaled city and such, and naturally the civil war arc stuff that got cut would have been implemented.
But people these days still love the idea of going into a tiny hole and sneaking around damp passages to find phat lewt while fighting dragons and monsters. Totally more awesome than having actual battles and sieging forts and cities, waging total war against dragons with your battalions of archers and shit with your LOUD NOISES commanding them with orders and heroically downing Alduin against all odds while men die left and right in heaps sacrificing themselves to bait and pin down the boss and climb, nah fuck that let's just stealth archer his ass solo while 3 ghost 'heroes' stand in the fire and complain how it hurts. Totally more epic, after all that's how WoW works.
>>340476876
>Fable tried that. The problem is that if you have a flat character that you created, it automatically has no depth so it's kind of hard to make him seem interesting, and to make the people around him seem interesting by extentsion because they're essentially talking into a camera and waiting for your response so they can give a canned reaction.
I may be wrong, but doesn't Fable completely lack dialogue options for the PC? If so, I think *that's* the reason it failed.
>Ultimately you have to find a middle ground, like Mass Effect, where your character is a blank slate that you self insert but also a pre-set character.
I don't think that's true. I've played a lot of NWN modules, and they don't predefine your character as much as ME does. But many of them do let you control your character's personality through dialogue and story choices. They also have interesting characters.
You can create your own character and give them depth through the things you have them say and do in the game.
>>340474573
>I lost interest around Chapter 3 of the first game.
(you)here, Make yourself favor and play this game, pirate it, its DRM Free. I played Skyrim , beated this 3 times. Just Play it for 20 hours and give back relation of game calling on (you) guy. This game, you must experience it for yourself.
>>340477631
>beated this 3 times
>>340459175
>TESVI
>not gamebryo
how many 'not gamebryo' games have been promised by wishmaster todd.
I mean, Creation engine was used to create the wonderful world of Skryim, not Gamebryo. And Fallout 4 is not similar to Fallout 3
>>340455789
Why shouldn't they make them more dense with inconsequential npcs you ass goblin?
>>340477567
>having actual battles and sieging forts and cities, waging total war against dragons with your battalions of archers and shit with your LOUD NOISES commanding them with orders and heroically downing Alduin against all odds while men die left and right in heaps sacrificing themselves to bait and pin down the boss and climb
That sounds more like an RTS than an RPG.
>>340455789
Why shouldn't they add more no-name fuckers in a city you trout sniffer.
>>340477748
Yeah he beats off to his games, something wrong?
>>340455789
What's wrong with more inconsequential npcs and houses you dirty sanchez.
>>340455789
What's wrong with more inconsequential NPCs you back alley cum can?I can't stop. I'm sorry.
>>340477834
>What is Mount and Blade
You kidding me? It's not like war is the only part of the game, I'm just saying it's a way better way to deal with Alduin instead of having the chosen one take down the big bad dragon single handed with a triplet of cheer leaders. It's still you who does most of the work, as your army is nothing more than glorified fodder and bait and will only ever do real damage if you give them the opportunity to.
What the flying fuck is so fun about going in the same damn randomly generated cave or tomb 50 times grabbing stupid loot that's gonna get replaced by your crafting anyways? You can count the amount of fun dungeons in vanilla Skyrim on one hand, yet there are countless dungeons.
People in this thread argue about quality vs quantity for the immersion of cities, why can't that apply for dungeons? Why the fuck should there be a bajillion dungeons? Why can't each one have real importance instead?
I don't see anyone crying that there's too many wolves in Dragon's Dogma and that there should be more caves to explore do you? Why can't more questing be top world, too hard for radiant quest engine? You're in fucking Skyrim, at least take the time to put most of your content where the god damn snow is so people feel like they are Skyrim and not Zombieville.
If they made Valenwood with the exact formula as Skyrim and didn't replace Draugrs with some other generic unit, how the fuck would you even know you're playing TES6? You wouldn't.
>>340473737
>Beth games are about the player driving the experience. What it lacks in quality writing it makes up for in players "making their own story"
No. Skyrim is honestly a pretty damn awful RPG in general. To begin with, no matter what kind of character build you pursue your build is likely to be completely optimized around level 25~ give or take. After which point your character won't benefit at all levelling or anything whatsoever. It essentially puts your character growth to a complete halt for the rest of the entire game, of which should still be the vast majority. Meaning that for the vast majority of the game, Skyrim has 0 character growth in terms of the player character. And that's just laughable for a game pretending to an RPG.
At this point they should quite frankly just cut all the RPG elements and attempt to make a straight action game out of the franchise. As they currently are I am pretty sure they would be more successful at that somehow because they've clearly lost their ability to make RPGs.
Secondly. The way Skyrim tackles the idea of an open world is fucking laughable. Skyrim has a very recurring issue revolving around content progression. A sadly very common theme you run into a lot in Skyrim, is the inability to jump right into the middle of a quest or even end of a quest. There are towns where everybody are clearly acting strange, so you investigate the town further making it undeniable that the towns people are acting weird. But it never gets you anywhere and you don't learn or unravel anything relevant to it, so ultimately you have to take off and leave the place behind. Because as things turns out, the designated "start" of the quest is an entirely different location from the town altogether, and you can't do squat without first having "started" the quest. Skyrim has tons of quests like that. Unlike Morrowind or other RPGs by completely different developers, you can't enter quests in the middle.
>>340479530
Wandering the world of Skyrim aimlessly is a very odd experience because of this often you find odd things that you realize should be something but ultimately amounts to nothing until you find point A first, and seldom do you aimlessly find point A before B, C, or D, even if you comb D, C, and B thoroughly after meaningful content you can't start anything without finding and interacting with point A.
And not only can't you enable the quests wthout point A, it's almost impossible for you to even screw up the quests by messing up D, C or B beforehand. They've even made it impossible to kill supposedly essential NPCs. You are basically disallowed to disrupt or somehow not experience quests the intended path from A to D as intended.
Older Elder Scrolls games did not share these issues. But it has become blatantly obvious that Bethesda have completely dropped the ball on designing RPGs as good RPGs but also completely dropped the ball on playing to the strengths of open worlds. If you wander around aimlessly and uncover intriguing threads, you should be able to uncover these threads forwards as well as backwards as you learn more about it. But it's like Bethesda are deadly afraid of players missing or somehow not experiencing the in game content the way they intended that they've almost made it impossible not to. And at that point, why are you even making open world games over linear games?
>>340479530
>>340479643
Worst yet. Bethesda have been infecting Fallout with this complete and utter bullshit now as well.
Fuck. Fallout 4 straight out barely even worked out of the box day 1. But they were literally praised for the bugs by people and even gaming press claiming it added to the experience.
>>340479815
If the modding scene didn't exist to fix all of Bethesda's bugs for free they'd go out of business.
>>340459421
You are my bro, bro.
>>340454742
>Each individual building has unique cells with items hand-placed by mappers, and carefully such that they don't fuck up, which are then tagged with Owned or Unowned tags, NPCs are assigned to sleep in (one or many of) their own beds ...
The problem is that it would simply take too long to do that 50 or more times for every individual city. I'd always argued Skyrim was simply lowly populated, one of the "final frontiers" of Tamriel, as it were. Further evidenced by the fact the walking dead are basically fucking everywhere and apparently there are fucking dragons and a massive civil war, it's reasonable to me that people wouldn't want to move there.
You're also forgetting the 5-6 houses on the outskirts of most major towns but that is inconsequential to the argument at best.
>>340480405
You know half the side of the civil war are Nords right? Just the Stormcloak side alone has enough NPCs to overflow every single city/village/camp/bedroll/etc and then some.
Where the fuck do these people sleep or live then? Where did they live before this civil war started then huh? You telling me 80% of the population slept on grass and snow for their entire lives?
And by the way I'm one of the ones that don't mind poorly scaled cities if the alternative is fake cities. But it still needs to be said. There are more Stormcloaks than there are citizens, and this isn't even accounting for the random fuck bandits and shit. Where the fuck can they possibly get enough food to live?
>>340480405
>The problem is that it would simply take too long to do that 50 or more times for every individual city.
thrice its current size would be ideal, just look at Better Cities from Oblivion or similar town expansions for morrowind, being just the right size for the scope of the game without being unrealistically huge (for the engine)
Theres also the problem that Skyrim lacks a ton of miscelanoeus assets and items that both previous games had. Previously you could live off stealing silverware and decorative shit and still make dosh, while in skyrim the very few household items aren't even worth the space they take in the inventory.
Skyrim is just uninspired
>>340480996
>Skyrim is just uninspired
My god, this. Literally everything feels rushed and half-assed. Like, you can see what they wanted the game to be, and there's glimpses of it every now and then, but it's fleeting and you go right back out of the immersion as soon as you get into it.
I'm praying Valenwood will be better but I know it won't.
>>340457302
kill yourself babby
>>340459934
How about any city in Daggerfall?
>>340454742
So you are going to pretend that palace doesn't exist ?
>>340480781
They were most likely members of house clans that were repurposed or destroyed during the war, lived with their families, etc.
The amount of bandits may be due to a massive poverty issue. Hard to transport building materials into that kind of climate so if you're poor you need to flat out live in a bunch of broken down shit.
I mean look at all of the abandoned towers and, to a lesser extent, buildings. They must've been populated before the war with the people you see fighting in the war. There's also lots of people who rough it, "huntin' and fishin' in these parts for years" and all that, so there's a cultural aspect too. Nords are canonically more resistant to cold, after all.
>>340480996
From a marketing perspective it makes sense for the player to focus on the "fun" parts and not the "roleplaying" parts, unfortunately. Beth figured out the money is in naive gaymurs and press. There's a reason most people start with Bleak Falls Barrow which is incidentally one of the most impressive setpieces, along with the cave near the exit from Helgen.
>>340480405
>The problem is that it would simply take too long to do that 50 or more times for every individual city
Imperial City from Oblivion is bigger than any 3 cities of Skyrim combined.
> I'd always argued Skyrim was simply lowly populated, one of the "final frontiers" of Tamriel
Skyrim is not a fucking frontier. It's where Men have first appeared in Tamriel, did you even play the game you are shilling for?
Also that's why there are so much damn graves BTW, dear >>340477567 -kun. Also dungeon crawl in itself is not bad at all. It's dungeoon crawl in the simplistic and repetitive TES combat system gets really dull really fast.
>>340479530
>>340479643
Exploration is ok in skyrim. It's far from perfect, but it's ok.
>>340478409
M&B-style combat is fundamentally impossible on Gamebryo. Also Dragon's Dogma is shit and worse than any TES except maybe Redguard.
>>340459175
Slim chance. Bethesda can get away with basically anything at this point. Their most stripped-down games have been their best selling. They release games in disgraceful states that any other developer would be crucified for, but people just laugh it off with an "Oh, Bethesda!"
>>340481778
I play the game with massive overhaul mods but nice buzzwords mate. Simply offering my reasoning on the smallness. Don't get your panties in a bunch, retard.
>>340457140
Except every single citizen NPC in Skyrim has an identity,story,unique character design,almost 100% unique dialogue
Unlike your "kid" from witcher 3 who is copy pasted a gorillion times in novigrad and keeps screaming the same damn dialogue "AYYYHAYYY WEZ CATCHIN SNAYLS" again and again
This adds more depth to the world than having a HUEG city with 1000x NPCs who feel like walking pieces of code instead of actual characters
>>340481778
>Also dungeon crawl in itself is not bad at all.
Not that guy, and you're right. Dungeon crawling can be amazing. In fact, Daggerfall has exceptional dungeon crawling even compared to other franchises.
But they've really gone downhill at this. The dungeon of Skyrim or Fallout for that matter, is pretty terrible indeed.
>>340482084
haha, le daggerfall wasn't shit meeme, can I cash in on some hipster cred too lad?
>Play Witcher 3
>Novigrad is huge and has like 20 hours of content just in the city alone.
>Play Skyrim
>Tip top kekkity kek
>>340482084
>Procedurally generated world with over 15000 in-game miles or some shit
>Game designed without graphics in mind is larger and more diverse, aimed at a smaller audience
>Game designed with graphics sort of in-mind, trying to master a new engine
>Game designed to generate preorders from impressive graphics and first-sight combat, aimed at the largest audience is small and linear
idk
>>340481576
>They were most likely members of house clans that were repurposed or destroyed during the war, lived with their families, etc.
Means nothing when there aren't even ruined houses to prove they had a fucking place to sit their asses down and not sleep in the rain and snow.
Those abandoned towers and forts already house people, and they would have housed soldiers but that doesn't mean soldiers were born in those places. There's still missing villages and shit, even if we factor Skyrim's retarded scale into the equation.
>Also that's why there are so much damn graves
I already know that, it doesn't matter since those graves should either still be guarded or looted and caved in so the crazy dead don't come running down the hills and shank the villagers one night because the skeletons decided they were bored. It's retarded and basically saying Nords and their ancestors didn't put a single thought into planning for the future. You may as well tell me they shit in the very water they drink from even as of Skyrim, would explain why everyone is so god damn ugly.
>M&B-style combat is fundamentally impossible on Gamebryo.
Whoever said anything about the combat? It's just the idea of being a 3rd person RPG but having the ability to command a legion of NPCs to battle. How did you interpret it any other way? It's no harder than having every possible spell available to you and having a clunky control on how to use them in combat.
>Also Dragon's Dogma is shit and worse than any TES except maybe Redguard.
Based on what? The animation is certainly superior, the hitboxing and actual interaction in combat as well. Are you speaking of realism here and how Skyrim is more low-magic? It would make sense if said Alduin and friends died the way I envisioned in my post, but you basically just shot 3 arrows at a world ending dragon and he dropped out of the sky, how is that any better than playing Not Guts? Your bias is pretty obvious here.
>>340482282
VENGEANCE
>>340482023
no m8, Skyrim is underpopulated, its NPCs "personalities" are just the same lines repeated forever whenever you pass close to them
>NPC in Skyrim has an identity,story,unique character designis
plain bullshit, they remian in the same spots all day, say the same shit to you, don't even talk amongst themselves except for a few scripted dialogues, dont ever venture outside their respective towns and are basically the same as Morrowinds lampost NPCs, but much fewer and with less personality because at least in Morrowind beth bothered to make different assets for social classes and factions that got reflected in the NPCs residences
>>340481983
>I play the game with massive overhaul mods
Here ITT, we ARE talking about Skyrim with massive overhaul mods, including reworks like SkyRe/Requiem, improved textures/shaders/lighting and additional content.
Because without them Skyrim is not a game. It's a travesty.
>>340482628
>they remian in the same spots all day
No they don't. Many of them walk around all the time.
>>340482282
No. Daggerfall was pretty shit all things considered. It's more a cool game than a good game.
But its dungeon crawling was legitimately great. That's like the thing the game got right.
>>340482969
Yep Requiem. Wish more mods were tooled for it, because it's actually really good, even if you're just powergaming.
>>340458513
It's a fantasy game, you massive autist.
>>340482628
Play the game
No 2 NPCs will say the same thing to you unless you do something to their disposition towards you.
Of course they all have limited dialogue,can't make infinite voiced dialogues, they're still leagues better than the "NPC title" saying that 1 dialogue they have been programmed to say,everywhere you go in Witcher 3
>Don't even talk amongst themselves
>Except when they do
Obviously the dialogues with no player involvement between 2 NPCs are going to be scripted you retard,so what,this is cognitive dissonance.
Stop spouting buzzwords you don't know the meaning of and stop flat out lying,Skyrim NPCs move around a lot depending on ToD,they just don't go out of the City
>>340482495
>Nords and their ancestors didn't put a single thought into planning for the future
Oh they did. They just didn't imagine anyone but a Dragonborn having the mental capacity to solve the mind-boggling puzzles that are the Dragon Claws and their respective doors.They were right
>Whoever said anything about the combat? It's just the idea of being a 3rd person RPG but having the ability to command a legion of NPCs to battle.
That's exactly what I meant. You clearly didn't try any companion mods. Traveling with as mych as 3 companions at once in Skyrim turns simplest tasks into hell, and any combat into an unimaginable horrible mess. Gamebryo and mass combat just don't mix. I'm not protecting the state of things as it is, only saying that to improve Beth would have to get rid of their abortion of an engine. Which is not a thing that is going to happen.
>The animation is certainly superior, the hitboxing and actual interaction in combat as well
True. And there the advantages end.
>Are you speaking of realism here and how Skyrim is more low-magic
No.Actually TES is much higher in magic but whatever.I'm talking about how DD, despite having superior combat, manages to be even more shallow and uninteresting characters-, setting-, plot- and exploration-wise. SHALLOWER THAN THE SHALLOWEST TES. IT'S A FUCKING ACHIEVEMENT ON IT'S OWN. Never mind the pointless rpg-elements that serve no purpose at all, the horrible shit of interface and k+m controls and nonexistent modding scene.
>>340483304
>I took an arrow in the knee!
No seriously. And it's not just guards. Beggars or even the occasional outskirt farmer will have shared dialogue as well.
Some NPCs even change voice actors mid dialogue in between lines.
>>340467287
i can't remember which city is which.
Bravil was the place where the dude gave you a house right?
>>340483897
That's absolutely the worst.
Good work Beth, you acquired somewhat of a VA pool. Now use them wisely to provide vari~
What? No! Beth, stop! Beth what the fuck are you doing?! Why the fuck are you forcing ALL your VAs to read all the lines for the flavor banter EXACTLY THE SAME DOWN TO INTONATIONS?! WHY?! FOR WHAT PURPOSE?! IS THIS SOME SORT OF A CRUEL JOKE?!
>>340483879
>DD, despite having superior combat, manages to be even more shallow and uninteresting characters-, setting-, plot- and exploration-wise. SHALLOWER THAN THE SHALLOWEST TES. IT'S A FUCKING ACHIEVEMENT ON IT'S OWN.
Damn, that *is* an achievement.
>>340483897
Yes,of course,use the generic NPC title characters as examples when the entire discussion was about the unique ones
>>340483879
>They just didn't imagine anyone but a Dragonborn having the mental capacity to solve the mind-boggling puzzles that are the Dragon Claws and their respective doors.
Most of the tombs did not have those doors though, that's the problem. And most of them weren't even close to a town/village, they were in the middle of bumfuck nowhere easy for anyone to go to.
>You clearly didn't try any companion mods. Traveling with as mych as 3 companions at once in Skyrim turns simplest tasks into hell, and any combat into an unimaginable horrible mess. Gamebryo and mass combat just don't mix.
But I'm not looking for companions. It's just general orders I wouldn't be asking for a scenario where you command an army and march them across half of Skyrim. I mean something like Whiterun where you meet up with the army and give simple orders.
I mean I played the civil war overhauls, war zones, etc, and they were fine for a bit. And my toaster can't even support the 4gb launcher. Granted what I'm basically saying is fuck consoles, but even if you limited the army to a small fraction it's easily doable.
I mean you are given 'command' of a god damn dragon that swoops in and crushes your enemies like bugs, getting a platoon of archers to shoot Alduin or hide under cover can't be all that bad.
Worse case scenario, you skip the command part, but at least have the army DO SOMETHING. I'm not saying it's absolute, it should be an outcome depending on how you progress the quests. You do Alduin before civil war, then you get no army. You do it after you finish civil war, you get the army of your faction. You do it while civil war quest is happening, the enemy army tries to interfere/cherry pick your faction leader during the chaos or some shit.
It's just basic 101 brain storming. You can easily limit the amount of NPCs in the zone at once to a god damn slider in graphics options or some shit. Got a toaster? Well your army is gonna be tiny. Got a high end PC? You get an army.
>>340484231
>Bravil was the place where the dude gave you a house right
No that's Anvil.
I remember Anvil and Cheydinhal all right. Those had SOME character to them. The rest? Bruma was cold. Bravil and Leyawiin were shitty and full of untermenschen. Chorrol and Skingrad were generic AF. Kvatch was ded.
Bethesda is damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Make a huge city, you have to make tons of buildigns unenterable so the player doesn't get lost or sidetracked
Make a tiny city, /v/ calls them out for unrealistic tiny city
>>340484570
Fuck, Skingrad, that was the place where some guy close to the king was a vampire right?
>>340484726
AFAIK he was the count of Skingrad and thus the ruler
>>340484685
Maybe they should just take their time and allocate their resources effectively instead of making E3 setpieces in an arbitrary 4 year timeframe? That or move away from an engine that would make fixing their mistakes nigh fucking impossible, let alone tedious and space consuming.
>>340484726
Yeah. It also had the biggest house for sale, the necrophiliac Hlaalu bitch, the paranoid bosmer aaand... aaand... AND SURILI BROTHERS VINEYARD. And that's it. I got nothing more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvGXCisAaR4
>>340483879
>I'm talking about how DD, despite having superior combat, manages to be even more shallow and uninteresting characters-, setting-, plot- and exploration-wise. SHALLOWER THAN THE SHALLOWEST TES. IT'S A FUCKING ACHIEVEMENT ON IT'S OWN. Never mind the pointless rpg-elements that serve no purpose at all, the horrible shit of interface and k+m controls and nonexistent modding scene.
Oh, well I agree with you there, but no one plays DD for that. It's just a dungeon crawler / adventure hack n slash that's fun, like an arcade game you know? Oh but I'd also argue at least Grigori has better voice acting than Alduin and Parth, even if that's not much given how Alduin says jack shit.
But the combat is pretty much 99.999% of the fun. The other 0.001% being how the equipment works is far better. I mean you can have a lamp on your belt and it works, though I guess that's also gameplay/combat but yeah outside of modding DD mix and match is far superior to Skyrim sadly.
I too think Skyrim has far more replay value than DD, but the way you compare them is basically apples and oranges you know? They are both 'rpgs' but technically both fail on that account when it comes to being good at it, and one of them basically isn't so why bother comparing on those silly grounds? It's like comparing a locomotive and a subway train about which one can multi-track drift better.
>>340482084
dungeons are ok but not when literally 99% of quests and activities revolve around dungeons.
>>340484918
There's no solution to this problem. No engine or dev time can change the choice.
Either confusing huge cities that are realistic or small unconfusing cities that are unrealistic. Take your pick.
>>340484726The king himself is a vampire.
>>340485050
>It's just a dungeon crawler / adventure hack n slash
Yeah. And not a particularly good one at that.
>They are both 'rpgs'
No. There is less RPG in DD than there is in fucking Dynasty Warriors. Skyrim at least has A BIT of roleplay, and also setting, atmosphere and exploration.
>>340485536
I bet the city you live in is at least 1000x bigger than solitude. Are you confused by your city?
>>340485772
DW has quite a lot of RP though, just check out /eagg/ in archives.
I'd argue that it's not a great dungeon crawler, but as a hack n slash it's plenty. There's a lot of interaction with you the enemy and the environment let alone the pawns so that already makes it a good hack n slash.
You're probably just frustrated by the keyboard layout, which is indeed kinda shit. It's a lot better and smoother if you use a controller.
>>340485865
Ah dun laive in nah citah.
Also, the difference being that when you play a video game you have not lived in the city your entire life.
Novigrad was pretty big, realistically a city, and not confusing.
bethesda are just bad. Skellige Islands are more skyrim than skyrim
>>340484685
>Make a huge city, you have to make tons of buildigns unenterable so the player doesn't get lost or sidetracked
Vivec was too much for you?
Basically any one of these cubes/districts is bigger than all of Solitude.
>>340484570
>Chorrol and Skingrad were generic AF.
Skingrad may have been a bit generic, but it was also a very interesting city because of some of the unique architecture, like the castle on a high plateau only accessible via bridge.
>>340486778
Vivec was a major pain in the ass to navigate.
>>340486608
>DW has quite a lot of RP though
Yeah, within your head. TES is a lot better for that. Most games are a lot better for that.
>let alone the pawns
DO YOU SEE THEM ARISEN?
HIT HIM NOW ARISEN!
THESE ROADS ARE UNSAFE AT NIGHT!
LOOK, ARISEN! A (that pawn-spawning thingamajig)!
I'M READY NOW, ARISEN!
ENEMIES AHEAD, ARISEN!DD pawns are the blandest, most faceless pointless characterless NPCs to ever grace the realm of vidya
>>340486738
I played GTA 5 for about a month without a minimap and now i can go to any specific location without a map for any help. Once you go somewhere a couple of times it becomes embedded into your brain.
>>340486778
I'm not entirely saying this for my sake. Generally I was able to navigate Morrowind's cities fine. But for our normie friends, which Bethesda must now cater to, this is not their cup of tea.
Marcin > Todd
>>340487108
You must be 18-25. When you get older you'll understand because your brain will stop doing that. I remember when it did that for the GTAs. But it don't do that no more for open world games
>>340487245
You did not get old. You got fucking lazy-ass.
>big cities are confusing in a game
No. Stop right there. Fucking no.
Press the fucking map button if you get lost. Cities are SUPPOSED to be confusing you shits. They're huge - that's the point. The game provides you tools to accommodate for this - fucking use them. Companies shouldn't have to design their game for literal retards and hold back on everyone else because little Timmy is too stupid to look at their fucking map and divine which way to go.
>>340486778
Just seeing Vivec makes me excited for OpenMW and Tamriel Rebuilt.
The very thought of me actually being able to replay that game with those expansions in my lifetime is incredibly exciting.
>>340470060
>nature
>fruity as fuck
What did you mean by this?
>>340470060
>colors are bad
morrowind was red ant wasn't it?
bethesda games get more casual as time goes along
casual games have no depth
coupled with the limitations of their horrible creation engine and optimizing for limited console hardware and control schemes
well.....
>>340477798
Because they have a hard enough time making the gameplay not shit (and they failed at that). Asking them to waste more time on houses nobody gives a shit about is stupid, whiny, and self-entitlement beyond comprehension.
>>340487695
It's actually not nature, it's an illusory magic realm of fairy tales. Completely fake
>>340487363
I was always a lazyass. My brain just worked better.
>>340454742
ITT: Ignorant consumers pick sides and bitch about games while having no knowledge whatsoever of the actual industry they are talking about.
>How can you have limitations? THATS STUPID AND LAZY
>Why didn't they record dialogue for 600+ NPC?
>Why isn't this city filled with 700% more useless clutter and empty buildings!?!
SHUT THE FUCK UP
Judging by the posts in this thread, none of you have even the slightest idea of the process of creating a modern AAA title.
>>340487039
>Most games are a lot better for that.
Most games are a lot better than both DD and TES and DW by orders of magnitudes when it comes to RPG elements. Why bother glorifying one snail winning a race against the other? No matter how much it won by it's still a snail's race.
You can remove the shitty voices if you want with mods, and while definitely faceless they aren't pointless. They learn from you, and basically so long as you don't min max your pawns across multiple runs won't ever be the same.
You can't ever say that about companions in Skyrim. They have no ability to become different than they are designed to be without your manual input like swapping their weapons or modding them. How is such a progression of game mechanics pointless? It's pioneering.
If Skyrim companions learned habits and changed how they behaved according to the player's actions Bethesdafags would be bragging about it all day and night and waifufaggotry would dial up to 11.
>>340487446
exactly. the human brain is designed to remember places and routes. it doesn't matter how big the world map is, people will remember how to get from point a to point b.
the problem is the resources required to create these worlds, a dev/pub will only dedicate a set amount of $ for a game based on that game's predicted sales cycle.
>>340488017
>Judging by the posts in this thread, none of you have even the slightest idea of the process of creating a modern AAA title.
We don't need to, since we have products from the same genre (even the same series) that are doing all of this much, much better.
>>340488238
>the human brain is designed to remember places and routes.
It doesn't do its job so well. That's why GPS and maps and shit exist, broseph
>>340488147
>JUST TAKE THIS SHIT AND EAT IT GLADLY YOU FAGGOT
>>340488147
>Why bother glorifying one snail winning a race against the other
I didn't do that. This branch started after I just called DD shit.
>They learn from you
Their learning progression is about going from a useless meatshield to a mostly useless meatshield.
>You can't ever say that about companions in Skyrim
Not gonna fly. TES companions have character and quests tied to them. Some of them, at least.
>>340487225
Post the one where it zooms in on todd's face
>>340488454
meant for
>>340488017
>>340454742
Okay I really hate defending Bethesda because they're generally lackluster or just boring but these shitposts are just too much. A lot of Nordic "cities" weren't really all that big. It was usually just one main building like a hall or something just surrounded by scattered houses.
>>340463859
>I mean the main plot of the Skyrim DB is you being the whisperer and plotting to kill the emperor, if that isn't a trying to one up someone plot i have no idea what is. they even threw a vampire loli at you.
The DB quest in Skyrim is the best. It has the most interesting character in the game in it, Astrid. A tragic character. She runs the family until two interlopers come in. She is suspicious of the other but accepts you. Then you are revealed as the listener. The family starts to warm up to you and Cicero. Her leadership is threatened. She plots to destroy you and Cicero but this is her undoing. It leads to the destruction of most of her people, the loss of the sanctuary and her horrible death.
It's great.
>>340464506
>Riften is insultingly small and uses vanilla style for houses.
The architecture in Riften and Windhelm is different from Whiterun.
>>340488017
In my defense, I wouldn't have a problem playing a game with no voice acting at all in return for having a lot of dialogue choices, a reactive plot, and so forth.
>>340488736
>Astrid
4edgy9me
pathetically sized cities
reduction of armor slots
durability removed
no attributes system
no items required for alchemy
perk system
reduced dialog in npc conversations and topics
reduced everyday tasks in npc AI
essential npcs
no faction consequences, example dawnguard you can change sides, easiest cure to lycanthropy which also has not implact on factions
npcs cannot be insulted to the point where they attack you, if you attack them than pay the fine they act like nothing happened
quests don't get failed, ever, the only failure state is death
the quest marker
simplified journal
shorter and simplified questlines which are linear
linear dungeons
uncomplicated puzzles
reduced item value, easy to get daedric prince items
casual as fuck
>>340488487
That's no different than the companions you gain in DD like Mercedes. After the quests they are bland as shit. And Skyrim companions outside of Serana basically are generic as fuck and share the same voice as 10 other generic npcs, say the most trivial lines and all that.
I mean, there's a good fucking reason that despite being incredibly boring, and having no quest tied to them (unless she got one in Dragonborn DLC) Lydia is the most famous and popular companion to date just by being the first one given to you without having to work for it. Those two faggots at the first town? Who the fuck remembers them outside of you cucking the both of them? They have no character outside of being cucked.
>Their learning progression is about going from a useless meatshield to a mostly useless meatshield.
Not really. You can look it up there's ways of making them useful, it's just that you can solo the game even on the hardest difficulty so it's not needed, just like Skyrim.
It still doesn't mean a thing towards a mechanic that changes an NPC companion without your direct input. As I said, it's a pioneering aspect, it's great because it pushes the boundaries of what other games never tried to do, same with how DD gameplay does shit like having size and height matter, having logical torches/lamp behavior to the point where a midget crossing a stream will most likely have their fire put out by the water. The pawn system is just that, if you introduced it in say an SRPG that allowed you controllable NPCs as well as non-controllable NPCs as long term allies, the system would be very important.
The only thing to take away from Skyrim is the NPC schedule and make modding as free and supported as possible.
>>340467838
>Is anyone else prolific at starting mods they will never finish?
Focus on smaller ones.
>>340488706
>Nordic "cities" weren't really all that big.
Except no. They weren't that different from other societies of the time.
And even something like Visby - Gotland completely and utterly dwarfs Solitude.
And yes I know the true story behind this painting. But it's still a good painting of Visby.
>>340489219
>no items required for alchemy
You mean aside from all the stuff the alchemy labs have? I actually liked how you couldn't just whip out a full alchemy set anywhere in the world.
>>340489973
oh that shit you find in the deepest caves halfway through every dungeon that have unlimited uses and cost nothing
>>340490132
>have unlimited uses and cost nothing
And that's different from the alchemy tools in previous games how?
>>340459958
Anon Fallout 4's settlements are far from stellar. Solitude is just as big as Diamond City.
>>340490308
they cost money to get and had durability
So I got Skyrim like 2 years ago and never finished my playthrough. Should I just pick up the vanilla run I was on or should I just restart and mod it?
>>340490456
it's just a rumor, we don't know if it's true or not. just wait until bethesda's conference on monday and see what they announce.
>>340490456
> the vanilla run
So the legends were true...
The madmen who play vanilla Skyrim.
They exist.
>>340455789
>more immersion in an RPG is stupid
Oh wait, Skyrim isn't an RPG.
>>340490980
skyrim's pretty good vanilla, it just needs skui and it's good.
>>340491360
Unless you're playing a mage.
>>340454742
But, but.....radiant ai.... And what game allows you to pickup useless shit and move them around while bloating your save file in the process?
>>340458936
Your a retard, not everybody has the time to sit all day and go around wasting time looting crates and chests for items that are useless 90% of the time. I rather be playing the game not wasting time on filler shit that Bethesda bloats their game with.
Honestly it'd be fine if they had made the rest of the city an inaccessible backdrop.
Kind of like how Bioware does it. Something like Taris has a relatively small playable area, but you still feel like it's a much bigger place.
I'd say it's the fault of 256mb of RAM on consoles more than anything else though.
>>340494547
>I'd say it's the fault of 256mb of RAM on consoles more than anything else though.
As others have already pointed out several times, all they'd have to do to get around technical limitations like that is break things up into separate cells.
>>340495403
Right, which is what they did with the Imperial City in Oblivion.
My guess is they decided they didn't want cities broken into sectors like that, even if they ended up feeling small. (But they don't even put enough content for the space that is already there, so who cares.) But maybe they did that anyway, I dunno, never played Skyrim.
>>340496872
I guess they just didn't care. They had a perfectly workable solution if they'd been willing to put in the effort to make bigger cities, but they weren't willing to do that. I guess they figured that with most quests now being nothing more than dungeon crawls, there was no reason to populate the world with NPCs that had anything of substance to say or extra space to accommodate them.
Imagine i'm a consumer.
Now promote Skyrim as it is WITHOUT mods, without whitewashing or lieing.
Sell the game to me while being as honest as possible.
>>340499253
There are no other games quite like it.
I think that's the best I can do. Even then, a big part of that statement has to do with the game's moddability.
>>340499253
undefendable
but you can mod it into the best HGame in the market
>>340459467
fox
>>340488017
>Why didn't they record dialogue for 600+ NPC?
I don't understand why they don't just have the developers voice random NPC. Max Payne used their own staff for the actors and from that stupid voice actor boycott thing not too long ago, some developers said voice actors aren't as important as they think they are.
>>340458936
>clues
The location of any clues would be clearly and obviously labeled by a floating quest marker directly above the container they're in.
Witcher > Skyrim
Prove me wrong.
>>340498006
The thing about Skyrim and Elder Scroll games in general is that the basic design principles prevent Bethesda from making those kind of bigger cities that we'd like to see. Specifically with regards to how each and every single NPC needs a personally designed day/night cycle & movement patterns. Which is partially due to the whole focus on "radiant quests", regardless of how effective it is.
Compare with Witcher 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFmr0P_Ci5c
It's a better looking city that has properly developed rich & poor districts teeming with life. However, the majority of NPCs are not important. Or rather, few of them have actual cycles or movement patterns that matter. Even fewer of them have meaningful possible interactions with Geralt. Most of them are basically copy-pasted carefully enough to not look uncanny. And yet it's very successful in bringing out that sensation of a living city.
The Elder Scroll series will eventually catch up to this point when better tools and more powerful systems allow Bethesda to efficiently populate their worlds, but it really shouldn't surprise anyone that current Bethesda games have such small towns. It's just not physically possible for them to hand-craft hundreds of NPCs.
I liked how Baldur's Gate 2 did Amn. Huge city but you can only go to the important districts. There's zero reason they couldn't have done the same thing in Skyrim other than for laziness.
>>340461989
When Ubisoft does this we have dozens of threads shitting on them. When greedy Poles do it /v/ defends em
>>340502124
no point in arguing, though I still disagree, witcher is extremely overrated
>>340502443
I wouldn't mind if they used some combination of named NPCs with a schedule and all that, plus filler NPCs to make the cities look more alive, but I'm just unsure of how they could differentiate them enough that you can tell them apart without putting exclamation points over named NPCs' heads.
>>340455789
What's wrong with more space to play in you nut ninja
>>340454742
Most of them aren't even houses. They're businesses and services.
>Play morrowind
>Each race and gender voiced by 1 person
>But each is distinct and memorable
>Wonderful gravelly Dunmer voices
>play Oblivion
>The Dunmer men now sound flamboyantly gay
>>340485510
>dungeon crawlers are ok
>except in dungeon crawling games
>>340488383
Those exist to get you to places you've never been or rarely visit.
>>340454742
>Even Ubisoft can make cities that are alive and real in size
>even
Are you retarded? Ubisoft are the masters of making big alive cities. Them and Rockstar. Hardly anybody else knows how to do this.
>>340482282
>hates game, probably only because he's heard bad things about it from people who will never play it
>calls others hipsters for trying it out and liking it
I love it when newfags try so hard to fit in. You cucks are so easy to spot and pick on.
Daily reminder
>The Imperial City
>Refayj's famous declaration, "There is but one city in the Imperial Province,--" may strike the citizens of the Colovian west as mildly insulting, until perhaps they hear the rest of the remark, which continues, "--but one city in Tamriel, but one city in the World; that, my brothers, is the city of the Cyrodiils." From the shore it is hard to tell what is city and what is Palace, for it all rises from the islands of the lake towards the sky in a stretch of gold. Whole neighborhoods rest on the jeweled bridges that connect the islands together. Gondolas and river-ships sail along the watery avenues of its flooded lower dwellings. Moth-priests walk by in a cloud of ancestors; House Guards hold exceptionally long daikatanas crossed at intersections, adorned with ribbons and dragon-flags; and the newly arrived Western legionnaires sweat in the humid air. The river mouth is tainted red from the tinmi soil of the shore, and river dragons rust their hides in its waters. Across the lake the Imperial City continues, merging into the villages of the southern red river and ruins left from the Interregnum.
>>340454742
First person RPGs are an intimate experience that is obviously incredibly hard to pull off with a high level of detail.
Yes, the TES and FO games could be 100 better than what they are but NO ONE else has brought out a fully open world first person RPG and done it anywhere near as good in the last 10 years.
>>340460052
>have all rights to idtech5 and 6 and all the code sorcerers at id
>decide use their 15 years old engine that wasn't even in-house to begin with and charge 60 bucks for it once again
>>340504261
Like a city in a video game I've never been to before
I can't tell anymore if people defending Beth are actual paid shills, dumbass useful idiots or baiting shitposters.
>>340459934
>not AC2's florence
>>340504771
wtf i hate oblivion now!!
>>340459467
FOX
>>340459934
it was incredibly boring, the quests in it are horrendous too, everything related to Dandelions rescue is so dull I almost dropped the game
>>340458271
I'd rather have empty buildings there for aesthetic than a bunch of huts with shit inside that doesn't matter because its all the same hut.
The choice is obvious.
>>340459934
>novigrad
Easily topped by GTAIV's Liberty City or Ass Creed Unity's Paris.
>>340470060
It's a massive illusory world created by a master sorcerer as entertainment to two royal children
It's a fairytale land, recreating common fairytales they knew (and as many stuff in the game are based of real life legends, the player shouod know them too) and letting them participate in them. Overtime the magic has decayed and the creatures have turned hostile - rapunzel hung herself with her hair and is now a vengeful spirit, prince charming fell to his death trying to save her, the big bad wolf killed red riding hood and the hunter, geralt, the "wolf" blows down the 3 pigs brick home and kills them, and so on
Of course it's going to look colorful
You slay a giant in the clouds after climbing a giant bean stalk and have 0 gravity sex with syanna floating through the air should you wish
>>340506730
Liberty City has to be one of the most boring video game cities ever created, which isn't really surprising since NYC is ugly as shit and the people suck.
>>340454742
Honest question here anons.
Is it that it is too impossible to make a truly large city with many houses all detailed that you can go inside of? I mean even if it's just 50 houses instead of 11 that would be a massive improvement. So why is it that they don't at least make them have a couple dozen homes?
>>340507158
For Bethesda's games? Yes
Due to the engine they use making a city the size of something like toussaint in TW3 would be nearly impossible
>walk into Ubar in Uncharted 3
>feels like a giant city with a ton of houses
>the houses you can actually go into are only 1 or 2
>doesn't matter because it still feels like a huge hidden city
That's what matters. Solitude could have still just been 11 houses if they had actually tricked you into thinking the city is still gigantic by having a well-made backdrop. Instead, they approach it like a child would and model only houses that you would go into.
>>340461889
Fuck I know I'm late to the party but this anon is whats wrong with recent rpgs.
This is the reason bethesda gets away with the bullshit they pull.
>well it they aren't going to completely flesh it out they might as well just not include it.
So we end up with barely any npcs or buildings that are still copy pasted and uninteresting as fuck, at least do some world building and add some atmosphere.
I'd rather a full cup of water but three quarters still beats half.
>>340501776
That's because it isn't, otherwise how can so many modded companions and NPCs be popular despite the rest of the game being voiced? The voiced logic is mainly one done to get voice actors jobs and developers an excuse to do less on their end because a giant portion of the budget is allocated allowing them to be lazy.
It's really that simple. Ask yourself, if you removed the budget for voices and used the devs themselves or just said fuck it altogether and only did grunts and shit, put those funds into actually developing the content and game play, which would be the better game?
Voices are great for immersion definitely, but they also get old after a few times as well and it's no different than people skipping dialogue on their 5th run when people just walk away or stop listening. The replay value in it is very low, people aren't gonna fucking tune in every time they make a new character and have to sit on that stupid wagon all the way until Alduin appears to save your ass. No one is that autistic, not even /v/.
>>340507261
Why though? What is it about their shitty engines that their games always have to follow this strange structure? 50 houses isn't even a lot. It would make a ton of a difference though. At least the illusion would somewhat be there if they could do a town with 50 homes.
>>340475347
I am extremely confused by the mention of albanians
>>340507729
Gamebyro is a really old engine, that was created by actually just modifying an even older engine. This is the same case as FO4, which basically took Gamebyro, slapped on some modifications, and called itself a new engine.
That's it. Try it with a car. No matter how hard you mod an old car from the 50s, no matter how you tinker around with their engine, it still isn't gonna give you current 2016 super car performance or even come close.
The damn thing is literally Frankenstein tier at this point.
>>340461207
>>340459819
Before you fuck up even more, the Romans had a pretty massive hard-on for Greek culture.
It didn't go as far as not murdering them when they invaded, but that's just what they were like at the time.
>>340455789
What do you have against more unimportant npcs and places, you assbat.
I like dragon's dogma's cities and towns.
>>340465417
THIS.
>people are still defending the tiny immersion-breaking "cities" of TES with their 12 inhabitants
What the fuck is wrong with you? It's like you're inviting the developers to produce low quality content.
Even Morrowind has this problem, although it's demonstrably true that it gets worse with every next entry in the series. Morrowind's towns are amazing compared to those in Skyrim or Oblivion.
>>340508605
Vvardenfell has a much smaller population, so in most cases that's understandable
Vivec and maybe Ebonheart should have more npcs, the rest are ok
I know it's an mmo but Black Desert has amazing cities with countless npcs going about their daily lives.
>>340487039
WOLVES HUNT IN PACKS
>>340508605
I want a game that has real size cities. I will not settle for anything less than 800 fully explorable houses plus a sprawling marketplace and an enourmous castle and a single city that takes at least an hour to traverse.
Also that city has to be only a small part of the open world as a whole, the whole map needs to be at least 100 times that size and take real world days to cross on foot.
Because bigger is better and video games should be as tedious and boring as the real world. MY IMMERSION DEMANDS IT!
>>340509381
I also think only in extremes and if someone argues against pisstiny capital cities with 10 houses in it, then clearly he's delusional and expects devs to spend 20 years on a game
>>340509534
But the argument you were agreeing with was an argument that a city without enough houses to feel like a city is not immersive.
Thus I am extruding that you wish for the immersion of having to travel for hours to get anywhere interesting and wish for all the tedium of the real world.
Otherwise you aren't talking about what is immersive, you are merely talking about what you prefer on a personal level.
In other words your own fucking opinion.
