Too lazy to watch, but in es lore the cities are described as grand and rich, the imperial capital is supposed to be huge but in game its tiny, obviously for stability. I would have preferred if skyrim had the population that starfield has because I would question less where the nameless soldiers of the empire and rebellion come from

One Issue I have with Cities in general is that often times they set up these cities as like THE BASTION OF CIVILIZATION and then you go there and its 5 houses and 2 stores.
Like how for example the Imperial Capital is a joke compared to the Lore of it.

And while I know the limitations, I can take it in Riverwood, some backwater village in skyrim not THE IMPERIAL CITY OF THE EMPIRE.
If there is a place for insane scale and thousands of nameless NPC, its those places.

But most Video games have either named NPCs and Routines, or only spawn in stuff.
I think Witcher and Novigrad did a good job, besides also having big events happen in the lore like half of the city burning down, etc.
Like how London basically dissappeared like 3 or 5 times in history before exploding in size.

I rather see this if the City is a joke.
Let the War with the Dominion be clearly seen, and make half of the city completly empty, just so it looks big.
But I find it hard to praise Skyrim Villages when even back in the day, were considered underwhelming.

Starfield just showed what happens if you take any interesting lore or characters out of the already no substance cities and just scale it up.

I suspect the reason why Starfield’s cities aren’t built with the same considerations as the cities in Skyrim is “We have technology”:
○ no water – haul it from somewhere else;
○ no land for agriculture – hydroponics or some other sci-fi solution;
It seems the Skyrim team did a proper job in researching how cities in the medieval times developed, but how would an advanced civilisation with interstellar travel capabilities would develop its frontier cities? Who know, they’ll probably solve their problems with advanced technology. But many games feature people from advanced civilisations stranded on other worlds, or even just outside of our normal one, struggling to survive in the same way we did centuries ago.

the only thing I can say about Akila City being a hundred thousands miles from the coast. is that maybe the oceans of Akila have storms so powerful that building near them destroys anything and everything.

Skyrim had “””cities””” that had less people than a fucking hamlet during the Plague. They aren’t realistic, we just had different standards back then. Even though I’m not really a fan of The Witcher 3, they made the cities and towns actually feel like it.

Starfield is the first step, on TES VI they will certainly use the scale of Starfield’s cities and make it more detailed, more lived-in

This feels like the nautural conclusion when CEO’s fire full development departments between games to make it look like you earned more, even if they hire new people to fill the roles on new games they lost the core knowledge and structures that would make it easy to innovate and further build on the core knowlage

So now we get pretty games that technically are advance but no substance because some body decided respecting with out points in wisdom 😅

I wouldn’t say Skyrims cities feel realistic. But i can head cannon my way through it. Its a remote place. Populations were smaller back yhen, There’s probably bigger settlements somewhere else etc. cant do that with starfield. Interstellar civilizations need big cities

Now i wish they put more effort in their world building in their Fallout games too

Lol, realistic ??? Skyrim cities are literally worst cities i saw in any game and more often than not they break any immersion.
Generally skyrim is as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

Imo, Starfield is a pretty good game, I enjoyed… but yeah, it’s not in the same league as Skyrim, Oblivion, or FO3 unfortunately

I played Starfield for about half an hour on Game Pass and quit because I was completely bored. I’ve been playing Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim since they were released. It feels as though Bethesda has become lazy. Other than the limited voice acting, the earlier games were much more varied and interesting.

This bastard mentions saint denis before any cities from KCD

“…a few hundred thousand miles away…”

Lolz, how gigantic is that planet?!

Not a single city in Skyrim feels real. They are small, scarcely populated, and the distribution of said cities is a mess. Starfield is even worse.

hey lets be honest, we all want a big world but fill with little detail like skyrim but in upscale, i know it will definitely so hard and take a large amount of time to make a game in that scale.

but im just sayin we all prefer something like that, an open world that feel immersive for player to interact with almost anything, all npc have their own role to fulfill, the world around us progress and react when player make some impact decision in the game, for example, we became a thief guild member the guard will comment to us about that, the bountry hunter/vamp/vigilant or any faction will sent their men to hunt us down if we made them our enemy, and in survival mode it make player feel pressure, how u gonna get a good rest when you try to sleep outside the world you might have a chance that those guys will attack you in any moment…

if (if) Bethesda decide to make TES 6 in more of larger scale than skyrim but still retain how immersion, concept, feeling, writing from skyrim and improve it to another level of gameplay experience, fan will definitely happy about it…

Finally at the point where Skyrim’s barebones cities are “immersive”, huh? Bar must be six feet under.

You are another wyte suprmacist racist

Akila not having any water or resources is really sad

Glad someone covered this

neither feel realistic

The NPCs in Skyrim are unique, their face, clothes, weapons, personalities. Every Starfield NPC looks the same with a waxy coated fake human synthetic look to them idk why they downgraded graphics from Skyrim but they want this pop cartoon look to their games now and I’m sick of it. Go back to realism and detailed textures not this undetailed cartoon animation look.

Funny enough on akilas concept art, it has snow

Never played Starfield, so can’t comment on that, but while I do agree that Skyrim’s cities are interesting and well thought out, I can’t say that they ever felt realistic when they are populated with bethesda NPCs.

That’s the thing about Starfield: All of its settlements just feel like bland, generic set pieces without much thought or care put into them. Just like the entire setting and its writing.
Nothing seems to have any actual purpose, nothing seems organically grown. There is no connection between cities and their environment. And the settlements themselves feel small and superficial, like pure film sets. There’s just no relevant details giving everything credible depth and bringing it all together. Just like the entire game is just a collection of disjointed boxes you jump between.

I don’t care how bad Starfield’s cities are. I will never praise Skyrim’s cities. Disappointing to see the bar set so low.

I miss more on rails games instead of just open worlds.

interesting

Yes, the lack of purpose for each city’s populace, coupled with the sleepless shopkeepers and cloned ship’s maintenance technicians remove the veneer of realism that Skyrim created.

What got me is that this should be a giant city this is humanity’s only colony really outside of the solar system. It should be huge, but the scale just felt small.

So you are telling me the exact same people who made Starfield, are going to make ES6? yeah there’s no way ES6 gonna live up to Skyrim.

To your first point, if you can fly to water vs having to walk to water I’d say it’s more important to build a city in a place that tectonically and meteorologically stable than near water.

Wacky take

Speaking for the lack of NPC schedules, I remember starting the Ryujin questline in Starfield late at night so I had to deliver coffee to execs meeting at 3 in the morning lol

Is not a RPG but i thought of Bioshock Infinite Columbia city, just to mention another good immersive city.

You don’t have to mispronounce Saint Denis in an Anglo accent. As a French speaker, I cringed so hard at that. Just say Saint Denis man

Along with pretty much everything you said, one of my main problems is size. While I do feel like Skyrim’s cities are smaller than what they should be, they are still big enough that you don’t really think about it. Starfield is set in a future where humanity not only started living in other planets, but they also went further beyond out own star system. Cities should be HUGE.

I know that making multiple Night City-sized cities that are also all distinct from each other is a tough ask, but still…
The Imperial City from Oblivion felt bigger, denser and thus much more immersive than New Atlantis, at least for me. Neon too. I do like it, but come on. The entirety of Neon would barely qualify as a district if you put in in Cyberpunk’s Night City.

“Skyrim’s cities” and “realistic” are words i never thought I’d hear together…

Never did I think the bar would be so low that people would start praising skyrim cities. The bar is so far low its gone

The Rift isn’t the hold that harbours Lake Ilinalta. That’s Falkreath Hold. The Rift has Lake Honrich instead (where Goldenglow Estate is).

Skyrim cities settle near water for holy site adjacency bonuses, where the godless space heathens dont care about faith. Seems pretty obvious to me.

idk about skyrim but i only play starfield and starfield doesn’t make you the need to explore o be curious about something, most of side quests come from guards who will be giving you quest and quest by just talking

sometimes i feel like they just wanted a game with some freedom and creativity but they lacked with lore and immersion
also, the creations/mods the game by itself its not enjoyable, but with some mods it does.. so idk
when i need to compare starfield to another game i always chose zelda botw

Ill be honest, i always thought bethesda cities were pretty lame. There was nothing that great about skyrims cities

The sad thing is, Bethesda hired Elianora, the Skyrim house modder. And apparently ban her from making gorgeous stuff right away.

But Skyrim’s cities don’t feel immersive or realistic

Imagine the gaming industry becoming so bad that the cities and NPC’s in Skyrim are being considered “good” GTA IV came out a couple years before Skyrim so did RDR1 and The Witcher 2 acme out around that time. Bethesda games have always been good at some stuff but cities and NPC’s is certainly not one of them unless we go back to Morrowind which was amazing for its time.

Open water on Akila is toxic. So you want to stay away from bodys of open water. But the size of the city is way to small. In reality it would have walls outside the walls like every protected city on Earth.
New Atlantis is better, but still to small, and to sterile. It does not feel lived in. Its just a facade. There is no culture, no nightlife, no sports. In contrast, Londinium feels way bigger and more real, maybe because you get only glimpses of a way bigger city while walking you path to the spaceport.
Neon also is just to small. And it is missing boats around it, a harbor and maybe swimming outposts for farming and fishing.
And there is no industry and not enough farming outside the citys. This may be plausible on Akila, but there would be way more farms still. And people would build fortified settlements.

skyrim cities didnt feel realistic
-Oblivion gang

Skyrim’s cities don’t feel realistic. They feel _interesting_. Starfield’s don’t.

They never felt realistic to me. Skyrim cities are tiny, with only a handful of people living there. Cp2077 shows far better how cities should be done.

Cyberpunk 2077 has also one of the worst citizens. They still spawn from nowhere, do nothing and disappear.

To be fair, for someone who has not played starfield, these cities look absolutely stunning. Not talking about the architecture, just the tiles and concrete on the ground are an artistic achievement.

Nah shops opening times in skyrim serve the purpose so you can steal everything at night 😀

If a studio has been making mideval fantasy since its inception developing the world and its lore for over a decade it’s hard to switch to a comepetely new IP cause you don’t have a standard of lore to keep up with. There is a lot that they thought about to make starfield it’s just they didn’t go far enough. The designers on the game are fantastic it’s that they mainly focused on the story it seems and the rest of the play space was an after thought. I also feel like the idea of resetting the game at the end of the story was not in the plans from the beginning! So many parts of the game should have been different to accommodate for the idea of resetting or maybe changing the reset to be 100 years into the future idk it just doesn’t fit the rpg style Bethesda wants to build with their settlement mechanics and finite story quests

10o% this dork has a large display of toy’s and an excessive amount of LED lights in his room.

The main character in skyrim is skyrim. The map, and everything that is placed in it, the more you can make the world feel like it can exist without you, the more compelling it is.

Starfield’s cities aren’t the only thing feeling fake
The entire damn game feels fake
Imagine spending hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development to make something that would be the same as made-up background filler in tv show

18:50 this argument doesn’t make any sense to me, neutral organizations exist in the real world that are based in a country but don’t work for the country, and not allied to them and their goals. its not like its a government institution. its basically just a private club funded by that rich guy of people who are willing to explore, and they try to be neutral to both governments in space

at 2:56 if you loog at the split section of the city it looks like a dryed up lake that was running through there at one point in time, so that criticism is somewhat unfair.. i haven’t played starfield but that’s just my opinion

Starfield had a huge lack of “why?” Nothing clear to explain how all of humanity is down to a few hundred thousand people. No one took two seconds to ask ” why should this make sense?”

Skyrim has realistic cities? Wtf are you smoking man? They are all just glorified, fortified villages with 10 buildings. If you want a realistic and immersive medieval city look no further than Witcher’s 3 Novigrad.

Sounds like the wolrdbuilders at current day Bethesda have no idea what they are doing, and are not any good in woldbuilding in general, stuff like this is extremely important for immersion and even when people can’t point to something not feeling real, its usually either one or multiple of these points you talked about.

I’m already aware TES6 isn’t going to be good but this is a lot more alarming than I originally thought.

Akila city is the exception. Neon and New Atlantis feel pretty dead.

Skyrim is amazing ❤️

I think you need to look into the WEF’s agenda more and think how that was applied to Starfield. A lot of people dislike Starfield because it represents a lot of that stuff, and for how shallow the game content is. It’s a game for those who don’t delve deep and are happy with what they see on the surface.

The background music: 🇨🇦🍁🇨🇦🍁🇨🇦🛶⚜️‼️‼️‼️🔥

I entirely disagree with your title.

Skyrim and Starfield’s cities both feel shallow, empty, and fake despite all of the people there. Starfield’s are just worse, because they fail to present themselves how the lore and story tries to make them out to be.

This is a problem in both games but everything, literally everything, is paused in these “cities” until John Skyrim/Starfield shows up.

Morrowind didn’t have NPC schedules, but Oblivion did. The NPC’s were not on pause waiting for the player to arrive. When you enter the Imperial City, you’re not hit with “A Dragon! I saw a dragon!” every time. You’re not getting called a pussy by Aela because the giant they were fighting outside of town died before you could help them. When you go into town, You’re not gonna see the same conversation playing out in front of Warmaiden’s every time. You’re not gonna get hit with that stupid execution scene, even though you’ve been exploring for around 20-30 days after Helgen was attacked.

Starfield does that same exact thing that Skyrim does and I do not trust Bethesda to not do that again with ES6.

I love both games but yeah this is one of the areas I feel they dropped the ball in starfield.

1:40 Skalitz!

video falls a part just from the title alone, Skyrim “””cities””” are not realistic, zoomers need to stop praising Skyrim, it’s a very shallow game too

because it’s just a given to praise skyrim and hate on starfield

sure, whiterun being the biggest trading hub in the north with a whole of 6 houses feels very realistic

🤡 take

Starfield is nothing but underbaked references and inspirations.
New Atlantis is the Googlplex meets starship troopers with none of the social commentary. Citizenship is earned through service, yet majority of the population is also a citizen and nobody seems to be “suffering” even the people who are stuck living in the ghetto beneath the Dam. There’s no real class divide in the city either. There’s no rebels in the sewers who are plotting the downfall of the elite. It’s all just “future city that exists for you to join the Vanguard.”

Meanwhile Akila is Firefly with hardly ANY of the rough and tough scrapper feel. Yea it’s pretending to be a frontier town, but the city was founded 2 years after New Atlantis, 160 years ago according to game lore. It SHOULD be an actual city, not a cowboy town with dirt and mud roads. It makes sense to have a wall because of the Ashata, but where are the farms outside? The rough n tough punks who live off the land? The bandits who aren’t just the one gang you come across in the main story and then never again?

Neon is trying to be a cyberpunk-esque corporate ran oil rig thing which sounds cool on paper, but isn’t as oppressive as it tries to make it sound. The “overlords” of Neon don’t do anything unless a quest says so. Merchants have complete autonomy of their businesses and only complain because of a quests script. The merchants even have their own protection union and aren’t getting their businesses raided by the guy who owns the oil rig. Neon misses the whole point of the autocracy it presents.

Starfield’s lore is well enough, but isn’t deep enough to be immersive. Everything is surface level and exists to be a game world, not a world that’s lived in. Skyrim did both.

23:23 The Treasure House in Markarth has a skill book and one of those gems for the stones of Barenziah.

“Realistic” isn’t exactly the word that comes to mind from Skyrim’s cities. But maybe the cities in Skyrim are what Americans think medieval cities are like.

I think bethesda got it right with cutting nameless npcs and giving every character a house, name, quests and schedule.

The graphics in starfield are terrible when it comes to the cities. The trees look like they belong in mass effect one on 360

Where in New York City are you getting pizza slices for $2?

I understand your point. But I think you ignored some aspects. 1. Sea doesn’t mean drinkable water for human and most land animals. 2. Where there are plants, there could be water underground. 3. When technology is advanced enough, it’s technically possible to gather water from air and tiny underground water sources. Technology in Starfield is way more advanced than in Skyrim, that’s why some human settlements don’t seem to be near any visible water sources. For example, there are high possibility that there is water in our moon, but it’s solid because of the extreme environment. There are “solid gas” in many other planets which has extremely different environment comparing to earth. Water may not be liquid water like on earth in many other planets.

If you think skyrims cities feel realistic you should play kingdom come deliverance

I’d say New Atlantis serves the purpose it was designed as. A façade, a grand empty status symbol for a pretend representative of a government that is at best foolish and at worst a failure. Eagle City (Akila) might not seem grand, but it feels more alive, despite the whole lack of perceptible water.

My thoughts on Akila was that they just looked for the best landing spot for a bunch of ships, did a “wagon” circle to protect their families and then decided to go scout the place, and while a group went to do that the ones left at the camp just started building a temporary shelter that then became a permanent settlement. The critters even when they are a nuisance they make for good hunting. As for the ocean, maybe there was something in it that made it more dangerous, plus making desalinization facilities might not be as easy as just digging a well.

Yes the cities of Starfield are more inhuman and less fun than the ones in Tamriel. They are also a lot newer so that is something that explains why its cities are so plain. As a consequence Starfield is just boring as it is.

Aquila city looks like they had been settled next to a dried up lake, it could be fair to assume that they settled there when the water still exist, but then something happened the surface water dried up and turn into wasteland.

1:44 ‘settled near… even the ocean’. Well that’s not a very good decision when it comes to agriculture and drinking water and thus coastal settlements are always near fresh water bodies too. Not meant to be just a salty comment, but when commenting to please our lord an saviour the YT algorythm, I can be smartmouthing too. 🙂

Note, there are reasons to settle at some distance from bodies of water, the risk of malaria is one, sometimes it’s better to walk 30 minutes to and from your water source every day than be exposed to mosquitos 24 hours. Not that Todd ever considered this mind you.

You are giving Skyrim too much credit tho

So you’re saying NPC’s don’t sleep in Starfield? Or just shopkeepers? MY IMMERSION D:

None of them feel real. They’re all too small

Plot Twist – they both feel fake and inauthentic.
Neither get it right, its just Starfield is far more egregious than Skyrim

NPC AI peaked in Oblivion.

Well clearly New Atlantis settlers chose that waterfall as it is the only one in the entire universe.

The reason is simple, every building is lived in, every NPC has a name, schedule and place of residence. It’s not perfect, but it sells the illusion much better than having hundreds of nameless randomly generated NPCs that wander and despawn the moment they’re out of sight.

It feels fake because it’s full of randomly generated npcs with do schedules or personalities.

Part of the problem is the lack of filler OUTSIDE of the city. There are usually a small amount of infrastructure surronding it, but ultimately, these cities simply exist in a void, no one ever apparently leaves the city borders. No roads, no houses outside, not even any abandoned buildings.

They can SORTA maintain the illusion while you’re in the city, but the second you leave, the man behind the curtain is revealed.

One of my problems with Starfield is the almost universal lack of past lore/history. In Skyrim you’ll find HUGE books of lore from the 1st era down to current day. Hundreds of detailed journals (some in multiple parts) are placed in the world to give the quests context and history. Starfield has some data slates and computer log entries with a tiny bit of information, the actual books in game are all just a page or two of classic literature meant to trade off to the Akila bookseller. Something like “why Akila City wasnt placed near water” wouldn’t happen in Skyrim, there would be an answer aomewhere in Skyrim lore, or at least some theories backed by lore.

Since when do skyrims cities feel realistic?

Such a great video on this topic

I can also suspend my disbelief a bit more with a fantasy setting that is also a bit medieval in a sense. Built for the purpose of survival and having small businesses and economies. That and I can walk over every inch of the towns in Skyrim seamlessly for the most part.

Starfield however has an issue with cities where they feel so small because you can’t walk over every part of them and need to use loading screens to even go to other parts of the city in general.

And yeah the other things you brought up also make sense.

Skyrim cities are almost fully functional, just scaled down

Starfield is the opposite

All of that time and resources for Starfield could have gone into ES 6

If a player doesn’t end up questioning why a thing exists, that’s all the “realism” a game needs. You are believing the lie and are checked in, that’s what suspension of disbelief is.

Every time I went to Akila City it felt like it was some shitty outpost. The part that makes me hate it the most is all the dirt and mud roads. Really? A civilization that has Galaxy level influence and it has dirt roads in its capital still?

Haelgas bunkhouse is one of my favorite filler buildings. It has nods to every character that lives there, its communal and offers random npcs a sense of self importance and community.

So realistic and theres like 6 houses

Lol so Bethesda couldn’t even adhere to the same settlement requirements they laid out for the player in Fallout 4 for Starfield

Classic case of “bigger doesn’t mean better.” Walking past 100 nameless npcs is so much worse than walking through white run and hearing the ACTUAL characters go about their daily lives. Also no matter how small almost every character in Skyrim tries to have a small quest attached to them that provides history and lore about them or the town.

Starfield is not a household name, it belongs in the trash.

Calling Starfield or anything in it a ‘household name’ is…. quite the stretch

I blinked and the videogames industry got so disappointing that people are suddenly praising Skyrim’s cities.

It’s fine in the Witcher 3 but not Starfield? Oblivion even had better cities and towns than Skyrim. Does GTA feel lifeless with all the nameless npcs?

This reminds me of how much time you can spend at the start of a game of Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress just choosing where you want to embark, taking into account the climate, resources, dangers, and geographic location to other things, because those are all important things to consider when building a settlement. Bethesda clearly never took a single one of those things into consideration when making Starfield.

New Atlantis is the size of Whiterun, riften, Windhelm and winter hold combined together but feels so lifeless.

Bros never been to Phoenix.

More farming the anti-paid mod freeloader chuds for engagement with weird bethesda hatepraise. Skyrim cities don’t feel realistic to anyone with a 3 digit IQ. Starfield isn’t unbelievably immersive either but the cities have a lot more granduer than skyrims. These games aren’t made to be lifestyle simulators or realistic.

Love hearing the Civ 3 ancient Canada theme

it’s the same with witcher3. yes, town/cities are big & pact with npcs. but it feels dead. all are like walking ghost. same with starfield, except the consistent spitting or hawking in w3.

Really hoping they don’t do the same style of cities with TES 6. I’d rather have a Riverwood-style village with 4 houses than New Atlantis 2.0

As an aside: while I don’t like Starfield’s cities in general, Cydonia is absolutely the best one. They really sell you on the whole Martian mining colony atmosphere. Shame there’s no player house there.

Starfield is the least immersive Bethesda game for me because of the cities and the general lack of creativity in the lore

The part where the city becomes the wilderness always made so much sense in Skyrim. It’s not just the gate but signs of settlement leading up to it. Like the horse stables or patrols.

You don’t realize just how dead Starfields cities feel until you notice that NPCs don’t enter shops or go back to their homes, shopkeepers work 24/7 and never sleep. They completely removed radiant AI.

As basic as it was, it still managed to make Skyrim cities feel more alive and not just like you’re surrounded by background characters in a bad sitcom.

Skyrim’s cities feel immersive until you realize that they are not cities at all but tiny settlements.

Developers need to shift their thinking from bigger maps to denser maps. I’d rather have a map that’s 10 times smaller, but every area is packed with detail, more lively npc’s, every building is explorable and actually serves a purpose

I always treated the cities we see in-game to be scaled down versions of what we would find if we actually lived in Tamriel. In shows like Game of Thrones and The Witcher, the cities never felt real because there really is never any direction shown of where in the city the scene is supposed to take place. Ok, Joffrey’s escort is walking through the Bits (or whatever it was called) and there’s a crowd throwing shit at them. *Where* in the city is this? Geralt is having a sword fight with Renfri in this stable or alley or whatever, cool, but this is a faceless village to me. In Skyrim if someone says “The Grey Quarter” or “The Cloud District” I know exactly where those are in Windhelm and Whiterun. I can find my way around Skyrim cities, or Fallout settlements, like I can a real city. If you dropped me in Kings’ Landing or Blaviken (in the TV show) I couldn’t find my way.

I guess what I’m trying to say is people give Skyrim a lot of shit over its “cities” when very few games actually create a realistic city, and TV shows and movies don’t do any better.

I’ve been playing since launch and I only now realized where Whiterun got its fucking name

To be honest for me is all the same thing, a place to sell all my loot.

The one thing that really fucks me off about the dialogue around starfield is that no one talks about the biggest problems with the game, the tone, aesthetics and world building. Fallout has identity, Elder Scrolls has IDENTITY, Starfield is void of any kind of interesting identity and world building. The UC and FC are cookie cutter factions, their history is uninspiring, and 3/4 of the faction quest lines have virtually nothing to say about the ideology that drives them.

it is so bizzare how everytime a new bethesda game comes out the fandom decides the game they hated last time is actually good now until the next game after that comes out and then the cycle repeats. I’m sorry but skyrims cities are not some immersive masterclass. half the npcs don’t even have homes. these supposed cities arent even city sized their more like small hobbles. oblivion had better cities than skyrim and their just barely bigger. I’m so tired of Bethesda RPG fans.

BS
Skyrim cities were always fake af

Great content! You put into words the sensation I got from the first 4 or 5 hours of playing Slopfield that “this feels wrong”. You just can’t compare any of Snorefields locations to those found in Skyrim, or Red Dead Redemption 2 or Baldurs Gate 3 amongst others.

The entire civilisation design is “off”, the characters are “off”, the NPCs are “off”, the entire place feels incredibly superficial, like you could just poke a hold through it. The very thing that the product needed most, to hold it together as a place the player might want to enjoy spending some time, is grossly absent. It’s worse than just absent, though, it’s in your face screwed up.

I’ve spent more time just hanging around Lakeside Manor in Skyrim with Lydia, than I’ll ever spend in the whole of New Atlantis or Neon in Sludgefield. Why? Because Slopfield is completely devoid of charm and personality and Skyrim is oozing with it.

The thought that Starfailed is a gauge of the quality of experience we would have got in TES6 if Bethesda had not prioritised Sludgefield first, is terrifying! Alas, it’s now impossible to look forward to TES6 with much enthusiasm.

Nice one Bethesda, you turned Wine into water, hope into despair and anticipation into dread… all because of this utter jank you hyped as a space adventure, but is actually something I would not use to clean my dogs ears with.

Despite being set in an icy hellscape, Skyrim feels warm, while Starfield, set in a warm future, feels icy and bleak.

Playing on Skyrim’s survival mode is extremely satisfying to come into even the smallest settlement.

As I get older, survival mode is a lot more fun.

I just started another modded play through of Skyrim. Even after all these years it still holds up so well, especially with the help of some quality of life mods. Every place you go to makes sense, nothing feels like it there “just because”. Starfield on the other hand just doesn’t make sense in almost any way. I tried so hard to like it but the repetition killed me. I played for the dlc and never played it and never even came close to finishing the main campaign.

It could of easily been explained by some solar-punk nasa tech version of star wars vaporators and a small artifical lake in akila not just an underground source but that they had a fancy scifi dehumidifyer that takes water from air and pureifies it to drinkable standards, for akila anyways, like so many wooy crowd funding scams have tried to make a reality.

For me it’s city number vs land size. Skyrim has a decent ratio of cities/towns to open land compared to starfield

Starfield shatters the concept of suspension of disbelief.

Morrowind was better, it had open cities. Oblivion was better, it had bigger and distinctive cities. Skyrim was better, blah blah blah. By the time of TES VI we well be talking about how Starfield had great cities.

Skyrim is truly a unique game. It’s both nearly perfect yet full of flaws, I suppose it’s a game that’s just so charming you can overlook it’s (numerous) mishaps

Skyrims cities dont feel realistic to me

Even at their rather small scale, each city of Skyrim is still worth exploring. Every nook and cranny has something to see, do, or play around with.

Every “city” of Starfield is just a nesting doll of containers within containers with arbitrary loot and no drive to explore for niche things.

😂 Sam’s main character Mission literally takes you to a mine directly Northeast

love the bsckground banjo tune towards the beginning, it’s called Hard times come again no more

Skyrim’s cities don’t feel realistic. Bethesda doesn’t know how to design a proper city.

Love the critique. Starfield’s cities give off theme park vibes, where everything is just there for the player on a surface level, while not actually functioning as cities. The shops don’t close, there are no entertainment options, and there’s a dearth of memorable people to interact with.

is that o canada in the background

Oblivion had far better cities than Skyrim which btw had terrible cities (if you could even call them that) it was probably the biggest let down in the game for me.

While I agree that Starfield’s cities feel lifeless, I think you are overly glazing skyrim too hard. It’s a great game especially for its time, but you’re grossly minimizing Skyrims faults. Each city does NOT feel multifaceted, some being worse offenders than others. I get its due to tech limitations but I digress..

Nah I agree that Skyrim’s cities are likeable & unique (at least the bigger ones) but realistic is a stretch imho

3:00 If there were wells, or some sort of technology showcased in the city that told us an immersive way these places accumulate water that would have been helpful to understand why people even live there. Take Star Wars for instance, in A New Hope, Luke’s family were literally moisture farmers, a valuable resource of a barren desert world like Tatooine and it’s an obvious profession, they used moisture collecting technology and machines to harvest water vapor. It’s literally one of the first world building elements in the entire franchise. And Bethesda couldn’t be bothered to explain Akila City and how it even sustains itself in such a basic way.

you are delusional

What’s amazing is how New Atlantis is somehow way too big and way too small at the same time

Lmao Skyrim does not have believable cities at all. Whiterun has like a few dozen residents. What a weird premise. Balmora beats any city in Skyrim hands down

Imagine if you had to deal with some sort of water barons extorting the people, then the lack of a water source turns from a overlooked mishap to a functioning plot device to either further the player being good or evil in their playthrough

I haven’t watched the video but I wouldn’t call Skyrim cities realistic.

Skyrims cities don’t feel real at all. And just because the NPC’S don’t have schedules in Starfield does not make it feel any less real. Cyberpunk and gta have hundreds of NPCs and none with schedules.

3:10 There are plenty of modern cities which have been built in places with no water or other such resources, it would be strange for a fantasy world but not a sci-fi one.

No starfield on PlayStation cry more youtuber.

This is one of a few videos I’ve seen recently that shows modded footage when referring to vanilla Skyrim. You didn’t use any city overhauls or anything like that so it didn’t affect the actual content, but I am curious as to how many mods or what pack you might be using.

Besides that, great video, the comment about Morthal being a fly over state will stick with me.

First time I have seen Skyrim cities being compared as the good example

Its absolutely insane to me how despite making an entire new IP and Universe, Bethesda didn’t him a heck ton of quality writers to flesh out the world and instead jst let Emil make it…
Well he did one thing right and that’s convince me to uninstall this waste.
Goodbye Starfield.

Fallout 3 and Megaton: What do they eat?
Starfield and Akila: What do they drinkl?

I have literally never heard a single person call Skyrim’s cities realistic. You’re the type of guy to say that Starfield’s cities felt realistic while The Elder Scroll 6’s cities feel fake (if/whenever that releases).

1:43 huh, KCD?

skyrim’s cities sucked ass

I think on of the reasons is that skyrim is kind of an medieval setting and back then cities and towns were very small. Starfield i suppossed to be futuristic and there arent even room for 10 000 people in the universes largest city.

If your answer is that settlements were founded next to cranberry bushes, then you played Age of Empires

A coastline doesn’t help much, it’s salt water. If rivers are home to diseases, it can be prudent to build some distance from them. Then there’s megafauna, flora venom, unstable river beds… If you can drill wells, this works well enough as a civilisation that has interstellar travel. Weizman and Ben Gurion originally planned to settle in the Negev, as this was feasible for an early 20th century civilisation, and would have avoided conflicts with those already settling there for millenia.

Spot-on analysis! I started playing Skyrim again because Starfield felt so lifeless and half-baked. The lack of other sentient races is also a real missed opportunity.

Skyrims cities are small because engine limitations but it’s also pretty historically accurate, the Nords are clearly based on the Scandinavian cultures and throughout history Scandinavia had rarely ever had large population centers. Even large cities like Stockholm were much smaller population wise compared to the rest of European cities.

Skyrim cities DO NOT feel realistic, that’s preposterous. Bethesda cities since Morrowind have been a main gripe I have with their games.

I won´t comment on Starfield cities as I haven´t played it.

skyrim’s cities felt realistic???????? LOL

Skyrim Cities are nowhere near realistic, and when I realized how small the Solitute is, it hurt my enjoyment of the game. That being said, one key difference that makes it much more palatable is the fact that the whole Skyrim is like that. You can run across whole province in like 15 minutes. You climb the highest peak in 5. The world is compressed, but everything is like that. What kill immersion in Starfield is the CONTRAST. You have realistic planets (divided to chunks, but still) that you can spend your lifetime exploring. But that just make the village sized cities pop out like a sore thumb.

What I fail to comprehend is that there was a such a simple solution to this: Make the main planets not fully acessible. Make the only place to land in Jemison to be the New Atlantis. Then, put a low-poly Skyline in the distance, make night texture of the planet have massive webs of city lights, and imply there is massive metropolis there, and you are just visiting the neibourghood of the Lodge, because thats the centerpiece of your activities there. It would be trivial to justify it in-game: In real life, planes also cant fly over cities how they like, so you are directed to the Constellation spaceport and nowhere else. Damn, parts of the planet far enough from the city could still be explorable.

even in real life there are a lot of countries which import water the freestar collectives capital could very well import water due to grave drives ( remeber the people of akila are people who originally belonged to earth and went there . like blud did u not play the game ?
because the civilazation started from earth then left for akila , ( neon ) , the planet of house varrun and new atlantis .

Its hard to settle near water when the whole planet is constantly randomly generated by a ai

My dude, half of Skyrim’s cities are like 5 houses that look exactly the same.

Could be just me, but I prefer 50 NPC with full day schedule, family, history and homes to 100 nameless filler citizens

When did Skyrim villages seem like immersive cities to you? Ever?

There is literally a moat between Akila’s spaceport and city. The only way to access the city from the spaceport is via a bridge over this moat. Perfect place for a river. It’s like they started to create an area that makes sense and then just stopped. This relatively minor issue is like a microcosm of everything that is wrong with Starfield: the beginnings of ideas that never get properly developed.

Lol what skyrims cities feel realistic???? What?

Yeah, but where do Skyrim rivers start from?

Morrowind city vs Oblivion city vs skyrim city feel like the citys gets smaler and smaler

Excellent video, all great points.

Fall out 4s city’s are really immersive, what little cities there are.

Hot take: Skyrim cities don’t feel real, they all have like 20 people and a small market.

A city the size of a small town is realistic? People coming up to you and starting conversations with you randomly for no reason is realistic? Vendors with no bodyguards?

Starfield’s citites might be worse but cities in Skyrim are definitely NOT realistic 😂😂

If I remember correctly, the guy in charge of Markarth(?)(could’ve been Morthal I don’t remember this part clearly)was almost fired due to how he was doing things. He then decided, “Fuck it, I’ll just make what I’d like to see in a game.” and was later given the honor of making the game intro.

12:42 Saarthal was the first city built in Skyrim after the arrival of Nords from Atmora sometime in the middle of the Merethic Era. Saarthal was also the first capital of Nord civilization in Tamriel, as well as the largest of the ancient Nordic cities

It’s sadly obvious why Akila is where it is. The devs just needed a place for the city and they saw that there is free space. This place was as good as any other, so they just put it there.

Skyrim cities are way too small tho

If the next elder scrolls have massive cities filled with no name NPC’s and houses you cant enter but are way bigger, I would see that as a loss. Other games have that and does that well, but the Elder Scrolls is unique in the kind of interactivity you get in their cities, albeit small. Though I think with Bethesdas budget they could and should probably still scale them up somewhat. But at this point i have little faith in them.

YouTube recommended me this video! It’s a good one, thank you for making it. Overall, Skyrim’s just a much better game.

The worst part is Starfield’s failures don’t end here, this is just the start of the trash snowballing.
Unimaginative setting leads to boring combat, outdated design philosophy makes the gameplay boring and repetitive/unnecessary; let alone the scrubby game engine they refuse to give up. I mean I refund the game when I get the quest ask me to take quests at A kill monster at B then turn the quest in back at A, ffs not even Ubisoft have the balls to design their quest like this at 2023, who is well-known for their flow charted design framework. Tod feels like some senile old grandpa that believes he still holds the sharpest mind and refuses to believe that things have changed drastically. Makes me wonder how he come up with something so explosive 15 years ago, when I was a 13 year old boy Skyrim blew up my mind, years later Tod did it again.

I think they would’ve struggled to program a human routine on multiple planets with multiple different hours in a day

Skyrim may have small cities, but at least it feels like everything exists for a purpose.

What civilization need?
Me:Food
“Water”
Seems like I played too much Rimworld due it need no water.

commenting for the algorithm,, love your video essays man!

amazing video neon is the best city in starfield btw

Now we are going) I like this essay, admire your work and passion to analyse games not only from mechanical, but from anthropology side of things. If it’s what you want to do, I will definitely watch more of it

glhf