If Elder Scrolls 6 doesn't have cities like this, it's DOA
>>735150298>small city but all npcs are uniqueor>big city but only few npcs are uniquechoose
>>735150597The number of unique npcs is the same in both cases, one just has more fodder npcs.
>>735150597I'll always choose the city that feels like an actual city, so I'll go with the big city with only a handful of unique NPCs. Your character isn't supposed to know every NPC anyway.
>>735150597A city should be big enough to not be mistaken for a town not be mistaken for a village not be mistaken for hamlet not mistaken for a farm.A village probably needs 10 buildingsA town probably 20-30, so a city should be closer to 50-100
>>735150298Is that from Crimson Desert
>>735150597Give me Big City and most NPCs are generics who spawn in the periphery around you.The GTA and Daggerfall model is the best. I would rather fewer fleshed out characters who get more attention and multiple quests, and then a shitload of procgen nobodies whom I can interact with or ignore at my leisure, all in a very large city that is fun to explore and run around in.
>>735150957That looks like one of the procedural map generators.
>>735150739>Your character isn't supposed to know every NPC anywayThe city has to feel alive, if you make a 20 people town like in oblivion or skyrim, you can implement pretty complex routines to every npc, while if you have a "massive" city, you find yourself with nameless npcs roaming around in circles like in cyberpunk and starfield, or are we just forgetting how npcs in starfield literally did jack shit but roam in circles and look at you the wrong way?
>>735150739Witcher 2 was perfect in this regard
>>735150597Starfield was the worst of both worlds, small cities with generic NPCs everywhere.
>big city>thousands of npcs>most generic npcs (97%) use ai generated dialogue for generic mindless citizen (farmer, merchant, bartender, whatever) >top 3% of interesting important npcs (questgivers etc) are handwrittenthis is the way. you get the best of both worlds. in real life 97% of people are braindead npcs that may as well be controlled by ai anyway with how they are brainwashed by media and institutions to regurgitate whatever crap the system wants. so it would be realistic.
>>735151414Last ES game i played was Oblivion, and while it was cool being able to talk to everyone it definitely didn't feel unique in any meaningful way.
>>735151414Starfield was fucked because there were no cities to explore, just tiny hub areas with a few shops, mostly. All of the NPCs passing by were coming and going through the hub area, and you could not really interact with them at all. They had zero permanence.Daggerfall established a solid procedural generation of "large" cities, however crude, since each NPC was given a name, a house, random generic quests, and you could build relationship points with each of them. Comparatively, the generics had about the same amount of potential content to them as Ysolda in Skyrim asking you to get a Mammoth Tusk and then becoming a marriage candidate.If Starfield wasn't being developed by a bunch of Indians, they'd have made the procgen system function so you'd find large settlements of NPCs in those pod houses in the middle of nowhere, each NPC given a unique name.
>>735150298wheres the color?
>>735151917this but also make sure that the ai ones sometimes go schizo and do weird shit, no city experience is complete without random encounters with crazy people
>>735150298AC games already had cities like those. They're nothing special.
>>735150298
>>735152153they might not be new but I'd say that they are special, running around Venice or climbing to the top of Castel Sant'Angelo and looking at Rome from above were very memorable experiences
>>735152153Bethesda games have a very different approach where they want all buildings to be enterable and the npcs aren't just randomly generated (until starfield anyway)
>>735150597Big city. Modders will add interiors to all the buildings eventually.
>>735152354Which one is the cloud district?
>>735152354You wouldn't be going to the Cloud District very often in a Whiterum this big
>bro they have to make them small because they want every npc to have their own house fitting their routine!>half of the tavern npcs supposedly sleep there when there aren't enough beds and theres more guards than barracks beds in most cities
Retarsda fags still fear a simple questionWhat do they eat?
>>735156457well you see bethesda is incompetent at both design and execution
>>735153789it's the entire left part of the city
>>735150298>Having a forest right next to your city wallAre they stupid?
>>735159703What kind of risk is it?
>>735151917>giant, sprawling city with hundreds if not thousands of NPCs>game runs like absolute fucking garbage because it's UE5Kill me now.
>>735158961Cabbages, potatoes, leeks, mead and giant piles of cheese
Can't wait for the TES fandom's BBC worship to lead to the next TES game being set in boring, shitty desertland.
>>735153789Why do you care? It's not like YOU get there very often.
>>735150298They can have a city like that but 99% of the buildings won't be enterableOr, they can have a small city where you can enter every building you see but it's tinyYou can't have both, no game has done both. You'd think AI would help with that but devs haven't used it that way
>>735150298Some of these city walls super do not make sense.
>>735156457And every building has a detailed unique interior, which is more important than some npcs having flatter schedules than others
>>735150597Not all NPCs are unique in The Elder Scrolls, that's a common misnomer. They are internally unique in that they have their own identity and are persistent in the game's logic but many are derived from templates (guards especially) and feature reused assets, voice lines, etc.The best system I've seen is Baldur's Gate 3. It's actually a really thoughtfully designed system and works perfectly. All NPCs are interactable - you can kill them, loot them, etc, whether they are persistent or procedural NPCs. You can click on them and usually get at least a line of spoken dialogue even if you can't engage them in active dialogue. They are solid objects which you cannot walk through. So no CDPR or Hitman-style hollow crowd mechanics - each feels real and tactile enough to fit in. They also do not overwhelm real NPCs in number - there are around 1-2 incidental NPCs per authored NPC. This meaningfully nearly triples the perceived population of the city but never makes it feel like you're walking through crowds of automatons to get to real characters with agency. They are usually clustered around points of interest as well, rather than spawning and wandering aimlessly. Usually they're shopping, watching performers, working - and quite often will be flanking a persistent NPC who lends a sense of identity to the whole group. I've honestly never seen a game do it better, it's the perfect system with the tools currently available. Oblivion and Skyrim cities bothered me even back then, not enough to ruin the game, but it was definitely jarring visiting the capital city of an entire province consisting of about 15 buildings and 2-3 visible people in any given location. I would really struggle to enjoy them now though having experienced how well it can actually be done.
>>735150298BASED
>>735150597Always smaller with unique NPCs that's a huge part of the TES appeal for me, do not give a fuck about bigger cities that just have generic faceless crowds like Witcher or Cyberpunk
>>735156457It's not just about unique NPCs, not every NPC in ES games are unique. It is a general design philosophy where they want you to be able to enter every building you see
At the rate videogame tech is devolving, you'll be lucky to get 3 buildings with instanced interiors and 6 NPC's in the capital city.
>>735160714I wonder if Todd will even attempt to stick to his claim of wanting seamless parallel loading of nearby buildings to eliminate loading screens and have transmission of light and sound
>>735160853[fleetwood mac intensifies]
>>735150597I choose option 3.Huge city with unique NPCs made possible by artificial intelligence. Of course, the content would be curated and enhanced by a human consultant in the middle.
If you can't fill your map with at least semi interesting shit to do there is no point in making it big. This is where most open world games fail
>>735160671Yeah but theres nothing in them and you cant enter or exit them without an annoying loading screen. If theres nothing in the house but two loading screens and a few copy pasted empty rooms who gives a shit
>>735160530Detailed copy-pasted interior with nothing interested, sure. So much better than having a bigger city.
Narsis. Home.
>>735150597First is better and that's why Skyrim is the best. It prioritized what's important.
>>735150298Once AI games kick off we'll get massive cities where you can go in every house and fuck the inhabitants
>>735160957It's the opposite, fuckhead. Large open world games should centralize their content into a handful of areas and have very little if not nothing at all in other parts of the map.
>>735152354>let's build our city 5 miles away from any fresh water source>farms inside walls>no defenses besides some moderately difficult terrain leading directly to the inner castle wall>the more easily accessible gate is less fortified than the one furthest away from the keep/barracks>random wall inside the city, just incase invaders forget they can besiege the outer walls
>>735150298no, it's elder scrollsthis is doa
>>735150298>tes6 has cities this big>95% of the buildings arent enterable>95% of the npcs are saarfield generated npcs you cant interract with at all
The solution is unironically AI, have the devs do most of the work on the most important buildings or unique ones tied to major quests, then use AI for more generic buildings (ie the 200 houses than 99% of players won't ever enter) and of those buildings, have devs curate the ones the players are most likely to enter (like if it will be involved in a minor quest)That is one of the few ways procgen from something like Starfield could actually be useful
>>735160908And that consultant should be indian.
>>735150298>>735150597Games already do the latter, Witcher 3, CP2077, KCD 2, GTAV, RDR2.And they're WAY worse than Skyrim. The issue isn't the city size. It's if there's anything to do. Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, New Vegas all mog Fallout 3, 4, 76, and Starfield becuase there's actually shit to do in the cities.Then you have other games, where either the city is the map, like GTA and CP2077, and therefore need it to be processed genned and mostly unenterable buildings. Or it's just strictly worse like W3 and KCD2. Where you have a terrible and dead Open World along with cities that are uninteractable, and there is no point to anything that isn't a quest with dialouge.
>>735161084Because for decades all anyone ever said when they found a building in a videogame they couldn't enter they would say "hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could enter that building"?
>>735161291They would sooner take a step back toward daggerfall and introduce Radiant Houses so that thief characters continue to make senseTodd would fuck up anything, but I truly believe he would go full costco hot dog over keeping that aspect
>>735161291They've already shown a willingness to randomly generate trash. The buildings will all link to a pool of randomly selected interiors that totally don't match the exterior you entered. Basically only good for robbing places.
>>735161291That's fine, you want it to feel like a city
>>735151917if you put ai-generated content in your game i am not paying a cent for it
>>735161191Whiterun literally has a spring inside the city, it has far better access to fresh water than most citiesFarms inside of walls is something that medieval cities did all the time, if anything there's not enough farms inside of the wallsand the second wall obviously looks like it's the original city wall before it had to be extended
>>735161292The problem is Todd will abuse it, instead of “still make handcrafted content use AI for generic interiors to help with scale” it will be “use AI for 99 percent of interiors because we need to show off our Radiant scripts”
>>735150298Looks like bloated slop that would be insufferable to play and for absolutely no benefit.
>>735150298It's HammerfellSentinel will be Wakanda but everywhere else is desert aka yellow snowThere won't be dragons but there will be Radscorpions
>>735161714>enormous empty city with nothing to do>but it feels like a city™Nah, I'll pass.
>>735150957No, this is what a "city" in Crimson Desert actually looks like. Pretty sad.
>>735150298The industry is going to crash.
>>735150597Starfield they have small cities with almost all generic npcs lmao
>>735160573>the capital city of an entire province consisting of about 15 buildingsThe Temple District already has more than that amount.
>>735161191you expect too much from nords
>>735165615Nah, it's more like a noguns trying to draw a gun rather than Nord incompetence.
They should bring back Oblivion's NPC system and conversations
>>735151414Complex, highly personalized routines for every individual npc doesn't make a city that feels alive, though. You don't go to any major city IRL and spend the day following people around to get the feeling that "city is alive". I can honestly say Night City or Novigrad feels way more alive than Solitude or Khorinis because to create an illusion of that life you do need a bunch of extras whose only job is to murmur in the background to emphasize the performance of the cast actors.
>>735165394No it doesn't, there are about 5 buildings there, each with multiple doors, some of them leading to unique interiors and others to the same interior. That map by displaying every door makes the city look a lot busier than it is.
>>735151372Since no one has said it yet.This is a promo for Might of Merchants, a game spun off from the dev's map making tool called Canvas of Kings.Both are listed on steam.
>>735167282>release date TBADamnit I'm in the mood for just that kind of thing right now.
>>735160908>>735161185>>735161292good morning sir. you are hire
>>735150298I wanna to fuck up the lizard swamp and stick my dick in the hist.
>>735151414Giving NPC's rigid, scripted routines makes them feel less alive. People don't live their entire life on a schedule. They don't do the same thing every day. Bethesda NPC's can't even interact with more than one person at a time.You want living cities? Stop populating them with robots
>>735169038Playing Metro made me realize how quiet Bethesda cities are. They could use a lot more ambient sound effects
>>735160530>detailed unique interior>same bed, same chest of drawers, same dining table, same cooking pot over fireplace, 10 small props maximum from a pool of 30 itemsMeanwhile RDR2 interiors are packed with unique assets
>>735150597with bethesda, you get neither
>>735169038ai will fix this
>>735170027Everyone always says you can't have big cities with all buildings enterable but why can't you?
>bethesda drones already in damage control for their game that hasn't even come out yetit's going to be the most pathetic end of a franchise ever, isn't it? they're literally going to lose the IP, aren't they?
>>735152354>not expanding towards the river with a dock yard, so they get river and sea accessLearn2world build mate
>>735173002The river is flowing towards rapids. Nobody's sailing it
Big or small doesn't matter as long as it got that SOUL.
>>735160649Even back in Fallout 4 the majority of people in DC and Goodneighbor were unnamed residents and town guards with no dialogue and it worked fine
There's too much worship of realism in this thread.
>>735150597>small city but all npcs are unique>big city but only few npcs are uniqueThe real issue is how many unique NPCs are overall.That said I still preffer the big city. I genuinelly don't give a shit about NPCs, unique or not. I play those games for the exploration, not for talking and doing retarded sidequests.
>>735150298What about something like the cities of Assassins Creed where the buildings mostly exist to serve as a giant obstacle course for you to parkour around and the nameless NPCs act like living cover, distractions, etc.?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDkH7odN9dchttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKa5p_EQvlchttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKIq8HSUQdU
>>735150597The issue is the total lack of things for NPCs to do. Take any Whiterun citizen. Their day consists of>get up>sit down to eat or drink>walk to work>work>sit down to eat or drink>work>walk to the tavern>sit down to eat or drink>walk home>go to bed>spout random lines from a list of generic subjects at any character who ends up within 10 feet of themThat's three idle activities, and only one of them happens dynamically. People used to say the city in Saints Row 2 felt alive because of the absurd number and variety of idle flags around the map that even the player could trigger
>>735150298es6 wont even launch until 2030 and it will barely function due to all the ai slop jeets that are building it.
>>735153789here
>>735150597Small cities with infinite LLM driven ultra veddy veddy smart sir NPCs. Romanceable
>>735150597BottomI want to enter every buildingHowever, I want fewer cities so the few that exist can be bigger while keeping unique npcs
>>735150597I want a mixture of both. TES towns and cities are pitiful but naturally making them too big would be a strain on their duct-taped excuse of an engine. So I say, make them a bit bigger, make more unique NPC's from good voice-actors, but not too big. Most of them don't even have to be apart of quests.
>>735161191>>let's build our city 5 miles away from any fresh water sourceThere's a river right there and another smaller stream in front of the torn. There's wells in town.>>farms inside wallsThey're small gardens, it's clear to see most of the actual wheat is being grown outside.>>no defenses besides some moderately difficult terrain leading directly to the inner castle wall2 reasons for this1: Nords used to never even build fortifications because shouts rendered them utterly useless.2: Skyrim has not been invaded by anyone for a very, very long time. Walls are practically there just to keep people safe from wild animals.>>the more easily accessible gate is less fortified than the one furthest away from the keep/barracksI'm not sure what you're referring to, all the entry points across all districts, including the front gate look well-made.>>random wall inside the city, just incase invaders forget they can besiege the outer wallsThis is the only dumb fantasy part. The idea is that if the invaders took the lower district, the entire thing wouldn't fall. It's obviously ridiculous for about a million reasons.
>>735179395>>>random wall inside the city, just incase invaders forget they can besiege the outer walls>This is the only dumb fantasy part. The idea is that if the invaders took the lower district, the entire thing wouldn't fall. It's obviously ridiculous for about a million reasons.More likely is that the wall represents where the city limits used to be, and the city simply continued to grow, and eventually they put up a second wall.
>>735150298I'd be fine with 5 cities that are at least a third larger than the cities in Skyrim. You can do a lot to make them feel denser as well, so they have the illusion of being larger than they are. Skingrad and Windhelm are examples in the recent games that feel larger and denser than they really are.They could also consider not doing a whole province and instead particularly fleshing out region of it. You can imagine a very detailed and diverse game set in specifically the Illiac Bay with a very big Daggerfall, Wayrest and Sentinel.
>>735179884Historically they just dismantle the old wall and use it to extend to the new size.
I wouldn't mind a GTA5 style map, where 1/3 is one major city, and the rest is open wilderness with small villages/towns scattered around
>>735152354>>735178536The biggest problem here is that very convenient path up the side of the mountain that leads to the waist high wall protecting Dragonsreach.
>>735150597The later is better because the only thing unique about them is the three lines of skippable dialogue is different.
I loved KCD2 but I thought the city was way too big, and it didn't really have any missions that justified the size. I played on hardcore mode which removes you from the map, so I was lost for like the first 80 hours of my playtime.
