Interesting thoughts, OP. I've often thought about how huge Tamriel is, and I wonder about things like average population density. Does the current population of NPCs and real players around towns have similar population densities to real villages? What's a good estimate for the entire population? Many questions can be asked.

@dpencil1, this is true! But also remember those that can be resurrected by Soul Gems "currently" have had their souls stolen by the big Molag Bal, so they are allowed to be resurrected like that

Keep in mind that soul gems contain literal souls: every time you charge your weapon or res an ally, you are spending the animus of a creature/person/daedra - their soul, their person-ness, the part of them that can return.

Isn't Tamriel wonderful? And that's not even getting into things like black soul gems or relative tiers. Who needs equivalent exchange when we can use a failed incarnate to power our weapon damage enchants?

2 things: respawn and IT'S A VIDEO GAME.

SilverIce58 wrote: »

Fishoscandi wrote: »

2 things: respawn and IT'S A VIDEO GAME.

I've already said that I know it's a video game, which wasn't the point I was making.

The point I was making was just an observation I had while playing. It's not meant to be taken so literally.
(whoops double post)

For a single continent at this kind of technological level, thats in an almost continuous state of War with itself other continents, and the Daedra, i'd say tens of millions, at most. For comparison Earth didnt have its first billion till the 1800s.

It's a game, therefore it's an extrapolation, just as skyrim only showed a handful of villages and towns where as in reality there would possibly be thousands, from hamlets on upwards

Elder Scrolls is a world that effectively exists within a series of legends and stories and so it's physical size and contents will change over time just as stories change when they are retold, however given the number of climates and more importantly their locations relative to each other it is reasonable to assume we may be dealing with an area at least as big as euroasia extrapolated down to less than 1 percent of its actual size. An area that size in, let's say, the roman period could have had a population between one hundred and two hundred million. Very sparse by our standards but still a huge number. However, unless you have an AI handy to crunch the data there is no reasonable way to show this and so like a movie the whole is condensed into just the bits we require in order to tell the story.

ESO (and almost all Elder Scrolls games) are scaled down, and the size of even major settlements changes between games. It's a good guess that the full-size Tamriel has a couple hundred million people on a continent many times bigger than we've yet seen represented in 3D. I don't think a capital city like Mournhold realistically has less than 100 residents that share 30 beds, so don't worry about your adventures in bandit slaying causing a significant drop in world population