It was a lively, bustling major city... of about 12 people and 1 chicken.

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.

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the witcher 3 had the benefit of not needing to run on a ps3

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- Sounds logical, but seeing how barren cities in Starfield are makes me think it was a design decision rather than a technical limitation.
  
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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).

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- The sad thing is enterable buildings is pretty achievable. They could have an algorithm to generate a generic interior based on a seed at the time that the player enters the building. It's not exciting, and it would add complexity but it at least would make enterable buildings without massively impacting install size nor save size.
  
  You can play with procedural generated cities and structures here for example to see the potential. Just imagine that instead of a top down map it generates an interior with generic furniture, clutter and possibly loot. Add in different sets of assets it fills in with based on building type and location and verify it generates the same interior every time it gets the same seed and you have a very efficient system for at least being able to enter every random boring building
  
  Alternatively there is a gameplay argument to be made for only being able to enter buildings that actually do something gameplay-wise so you know what buildings you need to enter
  
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It's not fantasy themed, but the city feels pretty dense in cyberpunk too.

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- 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.
  
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- Play it on a PS4 lol
  
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A reasonably large and detailed city, full of opportunities for playing Gwent.

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- The Witcher 3 was a really strange DLC to the critically acclaimed game of Gwent
  
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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.

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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

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- 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.
  
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- 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.
  
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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.

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- 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
  
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- 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.
  
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Still lacks a lot of buildings. BG2 had a more detailed city.

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If Bethesda made the Battle at Helms Deep it would be a dozen orcs and one human NPC to help you.

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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

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- You're certainly doing a great job at making me feel that Starfield isn't exactly a huge loss to the PlayStation.
  
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Relevant Viva La Dirt?

https://youtu.be/RatUjXnxci4?si=g7lr-yKzvMd6x55J

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With the quality memes I barely notice I'm on Lenny anymore.

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( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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You just loaded in on a Nokia and are awaiting an update

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This applies to Pokemon really well too.

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First time I saw the big city in Pokemon Black/White I thought "This is the future of gaming".

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- Yknow… even going into 3D the “big” cities haven’t felt as actually big as Castellia did. I think the amount of places you could go into and secrets you could find in it really helped.
  
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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.

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It's also been Bethesda's MO that every named NPC has to have a quest associated with them.

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- That's just not true and I don't know what dimension you pulled that out of
  
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I recall ages ago having read a theory about this concept of compression. That most game worlds that we see aren't literal, but rather are compressions of the world that characters experience. A city that we see might have just 5 streets, but that's just the city being compressed to a manageable size. For what characters experience, there'd be hundreds of streets. And same thing for NPCs, as you put it. We mostly only see the important NPCs and a small sample of others, but there's many NPCs that really are there for story telling purposes, they just aren't shown.

It's a really good technique if pulled off well. After all, it's really hard to have cities in game. You have to do something to limit it. Either padding it out, making most of it unvisitable, "compressing" it, or... just not having cities. Every option has downsides, but at least the compression approach optimizes for gameplay and your time.

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- Exactly.
  
  We don't actually want big, vast cities.
  
  Starfield proves that with New Atlantis. Its annoyingly huge, spread out pointlessly (for gameplay purposes, obviously a capital city is going to be huge lore/realistically), and is all around irritating to find stuff in.. As an example
  
  We want cities that feel big and vast, while being manageable and navigable for players playing a game.
  
  We want cities that feel that are full of life and bristling with NPCs, without actually having so many NPCs that that you'd need a cray supercomputer to process it all.
  
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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.

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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.

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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.

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Interesting! I've never heard of it. Have you played it?

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- Yes. I'm not the biggest fun of the rules but I truly love the setting - it is very evocative and inspiring in many ways. Highly recommend to read. The artstyle is gorgeous.
  
  If you like D&D 5e there is an official conversion for that ruleset. Haven't played it though
  
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Agent Desmond can't tell us about the blue rose.

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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.

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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

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- What are you talking about? RDR2 has at least one big bustling port city, and the rest is literally a frontier
  
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- Is your username a spoiler tag or does my app have problems displaying your username?
  
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Or randomly generated so that they feel less like they belong.

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- 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.
  
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This is more accurate to starfield which I got bored of pretty quickly compared to skyrim

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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

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- well what people have been wanting is bigger cities, stuff that actually looks like the lore says
  
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One on the right is from New Vegas actually and its where I get "love and hate" for my unarmed build 🤓🤓🤓🤓

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I should probably play that game one of these days.

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- You definitely should, it's a fantastic game. I've just been replaying it myself.
  
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- If you haven't played FO3 then play with Tale of Two Wastelands starting with FO3
  
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- For better or for worse, its one of the best games ever made and Bethesda might never live up to it again
  
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The mods make it gooder

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Don't forget the impenetrable wall of loading around each "city"

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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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By the end of this bloody battle, there were bodies strewn as far as the (severely nearsighted) eye could see.

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