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love oblivion but bethsoft has always been awful at world design. morrowind was a good attempt though

Great video, and I totally understand your point about the horses in the city, but I will say, in lore, the imperial city is absolutely MASSIVE, it is a couply miles in diameter and with that scale horses would most definitely have a path somewhere in the city, i agree though the market district is most definitely in a shitty spot and should probably swap places with the even gardens district

12:23 WAT?? The Niben river literally cuts southern Tamriel in half. It feeds out into Topal bay. That’s like its whole thing. Edit: oh that’s weird asf, I haven’t played too much oblivion. In lore Lleowyn is on the West Bank of the niben river.

Morrowind had many of the elements you talk about here. You could strategically set a “recall” point to fast travel. Otherwise you walked (levitated) took “public” fast travel (silt strider) or some magical means.

Or as Sean Connery calls it: “The Imperial Shitty”

The lack of sprawl was one thing I noticed really early on when I played this as a kid. I think there was a burned down shop just north of the city that made me really sad it wasn't usable. That's when I started to realize that there was nothing else interesting or worth exploring on the roads circling the city. I so wanted there to be a dozen or so small towns or something

Sprawl is one of the things I notice always. Like, too much. It's why I've developed the attitude that "games are not the world they are set it, they are just depictions of it." The actual Nirn in lore would have lots of sprawl, the imperial city would be connected to the ocean, & all these things. But we don't see that, because it would be impossible to show in a video game format. Not even Daggerfall does, despite its acclaimed size.

Am i the only one who simply doesn’t get immersed in fake history

“Step aside, sound planning. Rule of cool is talking.”

Heresy

It feels so simple now that you've said it, but yeah, having a blatant visual marker is so much more immersive than repeatedly dying because I can't figure out the exact spot I'm supposed to climb or jump. I wouldn't want that in immersive sims, but in something like Mirror's Edge or Assassin's Creed it works great.

As a level designer you should know that that is not the imperial city, or leowen. Every square foot ir representative of however many square foot. Every game is a scale model. The imperial city in arena is the imperial city in oblivion is the imperial city in eso. Now obviously it has been built rebuilt and torn down over the ages but there is a higher chance that whatever complaint you have is not actually there. Those docks are bigger the waterside district is bigger. There is sprawl its just not at all relevant to the oblivion crisis.

The religion aspect is the part that gets me. Bethesda didn't want to be controversial by incorporating real-world religions, so their genius solution was to destroy all of them without any significant impact on humanity and therefore imply that religion is just a cosmetic thing that can be changed with no consequence. It's religion as an equivalent to "favourite band". The continued presence of national pride makes this even more confusing, since religious affiliation is a massive part of many national identities.

Great video would you do this for Skyrim?

What I'd add about the budget/detail thing is that you should look at the game as at an impressionist painting where different colorful blotches create a whole picture of a forest, flower field or something else and kinda like through the eyes or memory of your character. I mean, how many buildings do you personally remember from your town or the area you live? Your memory is probably also just as segmented as the game world: there's a nice street and here's a shop, oh, and there's the house of an old woman whom I helped once, just like that. In the same way one quest-less NPC can portray a whole group of people.

Does feel very American to think having a flight of 6 steps in your city is crazy

It is basically a Moscow layout but condensed into an acidic poisonous concentrate.

Great video, would love to see you talk about the city of Vivec.

This is why The Witcher 3 is so freaking awesome. Every city and town I walked into felt alive and well populated. I love my Bethesda games but this has always been a problem with them. Why I have a hard time with Starfield, a game spanning vast swaths of space that feels incredibly empty

i think youre looking at the gamer too literally your points kind of go out the window when you remember the game limiations of the time. if it was done now a lot of these issues wouldnt exist or if it was described through another form of media.

I did notice how steep that hill always was, but I never gave it much thought lol

It's worth mentioning that Imperials not being in Arena wasn't an oversight, they did not yet exist in lore and are kind of a later retcon.

I love Oblivion, Sylkyrim amd Fallout. Unfortunately Bethesda make the worst cities and towns in any game series. They should learn from Witcher 3 Novigrad and Oxenfurt.

The lack of sprawl I can forgive in oblivion. The lack of sprawl outside New Atlantis in Starfield is literally unbelievable.

I can excuse and ignore the fact that all the towns and cities in pretty much any open world game is ridiculously small both in size and population; because even a realistically sized town would be much larger than the whole game map. But the "mega cities" like the Imperial City in Oblivion and Vivec in Morrowind really feels wrong. All the walls are so oversized compared to the almost complete lack of inhabitants so it feels really stupid. I personally would have preferred if the Imperial city was reduced to the just the tower and a much more modest city wall and more organic sprawl around it. The circle sector idea just makes it very same-y and hard to navigate and the huge size just emphasises the lack of population. Vivec would also have seemed much more like a somewhat sensible city if it was only one of those "canton" buildings and have it surrounded with more organic sprawl. I always dread going to Vivec because the massive and identical looking structures just makes it hard to know where you are; and unlike most of Vvardenfell you keep having to consult the map to know where you're going, or you keep running (or let's be real, fly wearing the Boots of Blinding Speed because otherwise it's soooo slow to get around) up to the door of every building to check the tooltip to figure out where you are.

Elder scrolls games are made at around a 1/100 scale, so i imagine the Niben river as 100x wider irl. Obviously it would connect to the ocean too lmao

Don't all the little bandit camps outside dungeons constitute sprawl?

Of course it doesn’t make sense, it’s Bethesda

no joke, when i played that game like 14 years ago when i was ~13, i was kinda disappointed that the city is way to small and awfull empty, like you cant call that a city at all...

they actuallyfixed leywaiin in eso. it now have a river in the middle splitinbg city intoi two parts

I think the key word I would describe Dragon's Dogma 2 with is "consequences" and that's something that comes through in every aspect of its design, including its travel. Everything you do and every decision you make has consequences and unlike a lot of games that tout this, it's not limited to story progression. Like for example, everytime you go out you need to 1. pick a destination and 2. prepare for how to reach that destination. and if you don't prepare sufficiently the game will make you deal with the consequences. But those consequences are also opportunities. Like taking an oxcart to rest town but getting ambushed. the cart breaks but maybe this also leads you to find a ravine that leads down to a new area you hadn't been to yet. And maybe this new path keeps going and going despite seemingly reaching several logical end points but you didn't plan for it so you're continually fighting the urge to just nope out with a ferrystone because you didn't bring a port crystal and you're this deep already and it just keeps showing new and interesting things, all while your pack continues to fill up and slow you down the deeper you go. And then you find the sphinx completely randomly because of a dumb decision you didn't prepare for. and the even is infinetely more meaningful because you're tired, you want to leave but you're also curious and don't have to means to easily return so you push further than you normally would. Moments like this make DD2 truly special. I think also the closest game i would compare it to is Breath of the Wild, in that they're both games that have the same goal: make the travel part of open world games be the main appeal again, but where BotW does it by making travel fun, easy to do and painless and giving a constant stream of unique and interesting landmarks, DD2 does it by, as stated above, limiting your ability to do so easily and giving you consequences for failing to prepare properly. Travel means something and matters and by doing so exploration becomes its own reward. Incredible game.

The Aldmer and Ayleids were heavy users of magic so the stairs might not have been an issue back then. Levitation spells are common enough to be banned in the modern day

I used that hill, at the entrance to the city, to farm lvl acrobatics

The best game ever to exist ❤

Have you ever been to Italy? It is a real country and has like a gazillion stairs everywhere. Walking around in Venice is you constantly walking up a bridge over a channel. The towns of Cinque Terre have even more stairs and are on top of hills steeper than Imperial City. It sounds like a very Northern American idea that cities cannot have stairs. More to that point, Venice is also connected to the mainland with just one bridge. Yes, in 2024. Also, I actually enjoy the lack of urban sprawl in the Imperial City. You leave the city and you're already surrounded by beautiful nature. Aren't games supposed to be escape from reality to something nicer rather than photocopies of our annoyances?

The journey was a massive reason why I enjoyed Dragon's Dogma 2, I should really replay it soon!

Well said.

Oh no. Anyway...

I just asked you to make more videos, and then the next time I log on you release a new video...COINCIDENCE?!?!?!

That giant guard on the walls in the opening pan is such a perfect, succinct microcosm of the lack of attention to detail of this game.

Hey... make more videos. I enjoyed this.

I tried the game and got royally screwed. It starts me off in prison for some stupid reason. Then I had to fight threw hoards of enemies that were challenging to say the least. Then do to the game not giving me real instructions on what to do I got stuck inside of a weird place surrounded by level 100 to level 300 gods and demons or what ever and the entire place was surrounded by fire and barriers and I died. Then I tried again and the game caused all save data including starting new games to return to that area and I would die. The game hard locked me to where even trying a new game would send me back to that death trap. The game needed a shit ton of work that was never done to it.

What always bugged me the most is the fact that the harbour district is NOT connected to the city There’s a gate leading to nothing that teleports you to the city, but if you go behind it, there’s just nothing, as if there was a tunnel to access the city, hidden behind a loading screen

Dude, you sound like James Woods

how do I unsee the oversized guard?

Huh?

There's just a little argonian named Yoda who helps levitate ships over Leyawin Or is he orc/dwarf hybrid??

like movie Minas Tirith