Cities that aren't actually cities

miahq

I realize this is a trend in all games like this, single player RPGs as well as mmos, but why do even the biggest cities have to feel so small? Everyone lives in suburb style homes and the total population (npc) couldn't fill a school bus usually. We can fit 200 people on a screen each tossing around skills and trebs, but the cities are brill left so empty?

Why not put in apt buildings? Even the Romans had apt buildings, they're older than you'd think. Some people live in housing in bigger cities, it's true. But, those people are typically pretty well off. Or given the time frame of the game, maybe multi-generational family houses.

And a wider array of buildings and businesses. Just make it feel more like a city. I've yet to see any in game city really impress me, and that's unfortunate. But in the end they all just feel so empty. Even with PC, they usually have little reason to go to but a few places. No incentive to hang out or explore. Put up a gambling hall or something, a few entertainment places. Make the markets in different cities more varied.

Skyrim especially was terrible about this, eso is somewhere in between oblivion and skyrim, but still it would be nice to walk into a capital city and just be blown away with it. So far, that's not really happened.

Gehennan

This was pretty bad in Skyrim, even worse than in Morrowind (I haven't played Oblivion). Even with the piles of mods I installed to make Solitude and Whiterun just a little bigger they still felt ridiculously tiny. The only game I've seen do cities properly was the Witcher 3. Novigrad is huge for an RPG city. You actually feel the need to fast travel within the city, unlike in Skyrim and ESO where that feels unnecessary.

I often wish that instead of giving us dozens of micro-cities would lump a few together into a couple of legitimate cities. ESO isn't as bad as Skyrim, but I do wish they would ratchet up the size, particularly for major capitals or places that are supposed to be metropolises.

You're right about the apartment buildings. Six story tenements were common in Rome, as well as Carthage and a few other ancient cities.

Tors

Historically speaking they have it pretty much correct.

While its hard to pin down a time, we can talk early middle ages as a correlation with our own Historical world.

Apart from some of the Arabic, Sumarian and South American Citys which DID hold millions, the European counterparts would have had a few hundred, certainly not more than 10s of thousands.

They just did not have the infrastructure to support more (the various plauges helped in this respect as well, removing the need to support large populations)