Starfield's New Maps Are Great, But Boy Those Cities Are Tiny
Starfield's New Maps Are Great, But Boy Those Cities Are Tiny
The capital city of the RPG's major, galaxy-spanning government looks so tiny in the update's new maps
They felt extremely small, too.
Because they are extremely tiny.
Crazy to me how Witcher created a believable medieval city in 2013 and Bethesda still can’t do something similar 10 years later.
Bethesda has always had an approach to designing cities where they feel you must be able to enter every building and talk to every NPC. You can see this since at least Morrowind. This design constraint makes it prohibitively expensive to design large cities with hundreds or thousands of inhabitants. That's why you see "cities" in Bethesda games with several dozen houses at most. In Oblivion, there are less than 200 people living in the capital of an enormous empire, the imperial city (300 if you count the guards). Skyrim has a total population of 700 or something.
In the Witcher series they don't feel the need to do this and can just plop down buildings without any interior, and NPCs that only give you a generic voice line. That makes it feasible to create larger cities, although there's a sort of suspension of disbelief required. Most of the people you meet don't actually have a house and just walk around. If you try to investigate the city as more than decor the illusion quickly falls apart.
Not saying one approach is better or worse than the other, just different tradeoffs.
That is because they don't have to.
Fuck me, those maps are still so bad.
Just make a normal map like every other game ever made.