Gaming

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

A reasonably large and detailed city, full of opportunities for playing Gwent.

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

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 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 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.

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

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

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.

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

Or randomly generated so that they feel less like they belong.

I should probably play that game one of these days.