I'd much rather have cities and towns with hundreds of NPCs than the ones in Skyrim with 20. With larger cities, you can still have those 20 NPCs all with unique quests, among the other NPCs. If anything it would make searching for them a game play mechanic in its own right.
DO NOT TRY ARGUING WITH ME I DO NOT CARE - FUCK OFF.
Oh, look. Someone is mad at the number of souls the dream-sleeve can process. "I think Mundus should be bigger and have more mortal souls". Shut up dude, are you going to create a whole new realm of existence just to add a few million more NPCs to existence. Maybe sacrifice your existence as a second Lorkhan... no? Then I don't need to hear it.
Cyberpunk 2077 has the best open world city design bar none IMO. For all of CDPR's many problems, they have an excellent level design and art team.
Don't think the engine can handle more than 20 NPCs. Unless they where like, fixed statues.
They purposely reduced the scale to improve performance, rumour was that the cities were supposed to be much larger and the final imperial stormcloak battle was going to be hundreds of NPCs instead of the 20 person street brawl we got.
I refuse to believe this, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas had all shipped on more or less the same engine and infamously could barely have 10 NPCs on screen at a time. Nobody could seriously believe Skyrim would somehow have more NPCs on the same hardware with higher graphical fidelity.
If you have more than 64 actors loaded at a single time the game starts loading actors flying around in the sky without a mod to fix it. This is the bug that causes the infamous flying horses.
The base game is absolutely not capable of anything big. It has only been forced to be capable of it through modders solving problems bethesda ignored.
I think the future of NPC design is something that returns to Daggerfall-style cities and towns with a robust procedural element - but then also applying Dwarf Fortress-like needs and schedules to the simulated people. Half the fun people have in Skyrim is emergent gameplay from messing around with the townsfolk, imagine how many more things you could do if each one had a dozen more methods of interaction.
They had the radiant AI thing with oblivion, or whatever it was called. I don't remember if they kept it with Skyrim.
Yeah what I'm thinking of is a more advanced version of that. AFAIK Skyrim NPCs just have a schedule that tells them where to walk and hang out at different times of day, enough to give the illusion of a living world to someone sprinting through collecting quests but not much else.
Wouldn't that be the "Post-Daggerfall Method of Town Design" in general? I mean, you had Vivec, Mournhold and the Imperial City but other than that, yeah.
In the elder scrolls you usually don’t kill the npcs because they are named and usually have quests but like in fallout, unnamed townspeople are no different than unnamed raiders and usually have the same loot.
:agony-deep: Navigating a procedurally generated maze with like one tileset per region everytime you want to turn in a quest.
Wasn’t there only like 20 npcs in disco Elysium? 40 if you count Harry’s mind
Yeah, but that's a much different game where the quests are the people. The conversations are the dungeons.
The need to give every single NPC unique lines results in them all being shallow as hell and usually having only one trait. I was gonna bring up how Nazeem's only characteristic is that he's snooty, but he's actually an exception because he has any personality at all. Most of the NPCs just exist to give you exposition. Making the cities bigger and filling them with random NPCs is much more immersive than making a "city" have three buildings and seven NPCs who have nothing to differentiate them
You mean RPG towns have only ever had 20 NPCs in them?
Always have been.
Haven't played Skyrim ever but in the spirit of :zizek-joy: I'll agree 100%
No please don't send me back to vivec please. I'll make the meteor crash! I will I will.
