this is why i love witcher 3, it actually has a reasonably large and detailed city! like it's still pretty unmatched as far as i'm aware.
Baldur's Gate 3 has also done this very well. The build up to finally reaching the city of Baldur's Gate really is worth the in game hype. The city is massive and the entirety of act 3 is spent within it. They use the standard trick of ensuring you can only visit part of the city, with much of the city being inaccessible but visible. That's a great way to make the city feel like it's actually city sized while still ensuring that the part you can explore can be explored in depth (as in, almost every building can be entered and is unique).
As contrasted with the GTA approach where the visitable area is far larger, but you can't enter most buildings and it's more generic.
I think it's pretty hard for an open world game like Skyrim to achieve the way games like BG3 or TW3 do cities, though. After all, Skyrim basically lets you go everywhere, which makes it difficult to fake the size of cities. Skyrim also tries to have not one city but like a dozen cities and towns. I feel like if they wanted to make a realistic city, they'd need to really focus on a small number of cities (probably just one city and a few towns). I'm not sure of the Skyrim scale can really allow for cities as detailed as BG3 or TW3.
Skyrim also has far more in depth NPC, which have routines going all the way from waking up in the morning till they go back to bed. That surely adds scalability issues.
They could do a hybrid approach. Have many unenterable buildings and generic NPCs. But I'm not sure that's a good idea. That'd make things look bigger, but it wouldn't really be that much more content and it'd kinda waste our time in traveling to the good stuff. Or they could scale things down. They don't actually need to span an entire province. They could have focused entirely on one city and surrounding area. But it does come at the cost of more limited lore options and a less varied map.
Personally, I like the Skyrim cities. They're flawed, but very fun. Not a lot of games have the level of NPC detail that Skyrim has and none of them have the kind of massive, open world that Skyrim and Fallout have (I'd love more games like those).
It's not fantasy themed, but the city feels pretty dense in cyberpunk too.
I loved the hell out of CP, but it killed me that most of the businesses were spray painted onto the sides of inaccessible buildings and that lots of business was done via vending machine.
Maybe that was the goal, I don't know.
Huge, living breathing city but you can only set foot inside of a couple dozen locations, and if you go to a place that isn't currently part of a quest nobody has much to say.
That being said, I haven't played the latest Dlc and should probably have a fresh play of it.
Meanwhile BG3 just has one district of Baldurs Gate available and it's so detailed and jam packed with NPCs that it's unstable for many people's computers.
I mean Bethesda’s games are so full of bugs AND barren that I don’t see how this can be an actual talking point. BG3 is running just fine on my 6 year old pc
I'm not sure it's fair to compare Skyrim and BG3. There was like 12 years of development between them, and quite a bit changed in that 12 years.
I had to move my co-op save to my wife's PC to continue playing in Act 3. Three year old PC with a 3070. She would crash loading into the Lower City.
I ran it with much worse hardware. It isn't the power of the hardware that was the issue (unless you didn't try turning settings down). Something else must have caused the crash besides power. Maybe not enough RAM or too slow of a CPU or potentially maybe loading from an HDD and it was too slow? It could also just be a bug with the specific hardware configuration in that computer.
It's a bug within BG3 while multi-player. This is the fix: host on the crashing side.
You playing at 4k res or something? 3070 is more than powerful enough for 1440p.
I’m a RTX 2080 user and everything is ok here. I’ve had more crashes on starfield than bg3 and have had to revert to earlier saves due to broken mechanics which I’m used to in the Bethesda style of things
I love BG3. It's a very different game from Skyrim though. After all, that city is basically a third of the game. Plus BG3 has all kinds of travel and camera limitations that Skyrim doesn't. That's what lets them make the city truly seem like a sprawling city.
By comparison, Skyrim basically lets you go everywhere and it has a far larger map. Skyrim chose the "big as an ocean, shallow as a puddle" approach when it comes to map design. Though NPCs are actually deeper than BG3. Skyrim NPCs have lifes, while BG3 is frozen in a moment.
I don't know Skyrim wasn't that shallow. It's not like most of its locations are window dressing like in an assassin's creed game. Almost the entire map had somewhat meaningful encounters and mini story arcs
There were many spots in Skyrim that were so pretty that I found myself just stopping and staring like I'd do in real life at scenic spots.
If Bethesda made the Battle at Helms Deep it would be a dozen orcs and one human NPC to help you.
Without modifications, Starfields combat AI is set to 20 active users, so youd get a clunky 10v10 at best, but really its probably going to be 15 orcs vs 5 allies and the player character
You're certainly doing a great job at making me feel that Starfield isn't exactly a huge loss to the PlayStation.
Its not the worst game in existance or anything, IMO its almost a straight up upgrade from FO4 in almost all aspects. The biggest problem imo is they fumbled the biggest aspect, exploration, ironically in a space game.
It leaves you feeling sorta like Yooka Laylee, who had most of the Rareware team who made the N64 platformers, well except the stage designer, who was still working at Rare at the time iirc. The Stage design was Yooka Laylees worst aspect.
FO4 is a pretty low bar
With the quality memes I barely notice I'm on Lenny anymore.
This applies to Pokemon really well too.
First time I saw the big city in Pokemon Black/White I thought "This is the future of gaming".
I always assumed that NPCs represented mroe than one actual citizen, because otherwise the world would become far to cluttered, and teh system requirements far to high to manage literally thousands of NPCs that exist for no reason.
It's also been Bethesda's MO that every named NPC has to have a quest associated with them.
That's just not true and I don't know what dimension you pulled that out of
Or you could have sprawling mazes of mostly empty towns with mostly filler npcs like everquest.
Nothing like spending an hour lost just to step into the wrong alley way and insta die.
Navigating Qeynos and Freeport before maps were made, accidentally attacking your guild master and adding your corpse to the pile by falling off of Kelethin bridges due to lag were a right of passage.
Maybe it will be interesting to someone: what you see on the left is an artwork of Aldis, biggest city in a tabletop RPG called Blue Rose. As opposed to classic swords & sorcery, Blue Rose is in romantic fantasy genre.
I hated quests that required killing an NPC because the game felt empty enough already. I would actually use cheats to resurrect NPCs afterwards just to have more bodies moving around.
I will give them credit for giving the NPCs homes and schedules. I love it when games have the NPCs actually live their lives like work, sleep, go to taverns, etc. You lose immersion in a game when the NPCs are perpetually glued to one spot.
am i the only person who rememberes cities in the witcher 3???
what the fuck happened since then man no game even red dead 2 came close
What are you talking about? RDR2 has at least one big bustling port city, and the rest is literally a frontier
Or randomly generated so that they feel less like they belong.
That would be cool too. Random NPCs that you only see occasionally. Skyrim did have traveling merchants which was a nice touch. I'd like to see more of that. You could also have people who lived in the country show up on market days in town.
This is more accurate to starfield which I got bored of pretty quickly compared to skyrim
Yep. The cities in starfield look huge but they are completely empty. All their size does is make you walk longer. Nothing happens on the way
well what people have been wanting is bigger cities, stuff that actually looks like the lore says
The mods make it gooder
One on the right is from New Vegas actually and its where I get "love and hate" for my unarmed build 🤓🤓🤓🤓
I should probably play that game one of these days.
You definitely should, it's a fantastic game. I've just been replaying it myself.
Don't forget the impenetrable wall of loading around each "city"
Civil "war": the mighty Empire and the heroic Sotrmcloaks deployed their vast armies and the clash of the 12 guys began!
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