I have been playing Oblivion my whole life. For like 15 years it seems. I have done literally EVERYTHING. Never, not once, did I ever realize that the imperial city doesn't connect to the ocean lmao
No same! I have over 1000 hours played on steam, never mind also having used to own a physical pc disc AND a ps3 copy, and I have not once noticed that
In lore the imperial city is absolutely massive, like the in game city doesn't even make up for 1% of it. All in all I think they did a good job trying to capture it with the tools they had available in 2006.
@@nickv1212 That I disagree on, Starfield is just a display of incompetence. You can write a good story with tools from 500BC, all you need is a pen,paper and some imagination. Bethesda is severely lacking in the last ingredient.
I mean it pales in comparison to Peach's Castle in Super Mario 64 a much smaller equally important place that actually made sense sense wise despite being their just for gameplay... Also SM64 came out a dacde earlier on a much weaker console, on a cartridge and was made with less budget...
@@GreenBlueWalkthrough I don't see how SM64 is relevant to the discussion, ES2 Daggerfall was released the same year, it was programmed by cockroaches on MS-DOS on a budget of 2 pennies and still had a better story than Starfield.
Drives even more mad you cant go to the top of the imperial tower. There isn't even an inaccessible door anywhere for the top or even the battlements for immersive aesthetic but they do for other places.
what's even crazier is that ESO fixed most of those issues. Even the waterway access to the ocean was fixed with the Blackwood chapter. I repeat: ESO FIXED OBLIVION'S MAP
TESO????? FIX?????? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.. teso the same game that fucks up the minerals by putting ebony as mediocre when ebony is the strongest and most expensive metal known in Nirn. teso the same one that puts the Argonian maiden before Crasius Curio exists. teso the same one that puts Dwemer ore when it is made clear to us that Dwemer metal is an alloy with a lost recipe and the only way to get it is from the remains of the dwarves. teso the same one that puts Windhelm on the north coast SHITTING on the skyrim map and practically ignoring the existence of Wintherhold. teso the same one that puts the worst Daedric princess in history with a generic design, a generic story that its mere existence screws up the entire lore. Teso is the same one who trivializes, ruins and burns the image of the Daedra princes and the gods by filling and saturating the second era with PURE divine events every second (in Oblivion, Morrowind and Skyrim there are also divine events) YES but with decades or centuries of difference. TESO does not solve anything, he only ruins the lore. It seems more stupid to me to ignore the existence of Wintherhold than the logic of access to the Sea of Oblivion. Teso, for every thing he fixes, screws up 10 others.
At least Morrowind had the legion forts occupying each major town. It was so strange hopping into Oblivion on release and seeing the Imperial Province had 0 forts that werent crumbled ruins. I definitely did notice the weirdly steep terrain on my first playthrough as well as the lack of small towns to visit. Morrowind had its dead end fishing towns and those were fairly absent in Oblivion. I think Skyrim did a better job with some more farms and settlements here and there, though Solitude kind of repeats the weird overly steep and narrow bridge issue.
Much as I enjoyed Oblivion despite how it wasn't like in the Pocket Guide, the forts were funny since they all were just occupied by anything but the Imperial Legion. Not even a small outpost. And there also could of been a few more farms.
@@Chinothebad That's the part I always found very odd. Yes the odd keep might have been abandoned and subsequently taken over by bandits (or deserter legionnaires just kept the keep they were assigned to) but this is the very heart of the Empire... where the hell are all the troops? The cities don't even have garrisons outside of their guards (who are closer to a Police force than Soldiers). Like Baron said, at least in Morrowind they had actual forts that were manned and able to overlook the cities they defended. They worked like actual medieval castles would have. Its weird that the Counts of Cyrodiil don't have actual soldiers or knights (outside of a few quest-related Orders) in their castles. Like that is the exact place they would be, just waiting for their Count to send them out.
@@cyqry yeh now tgat you mentioned it, having some knights or the Cyrodilic equivalent would of added more to the courts. And with forts, I can get random middle of nowhere ones going abandoned but one near a main road? It is ridiculous especially if they didn't give a good enough explanation like "they got low on numbers due to Daedra, easy pickings for bandits and the like."
@@Chinothebad The thing is, with the Oblivion Crisis in full swing and the subtle hint in Morrowind that things are reaching a political boiling point and Legions are being actively recalled to Cyrodiil; you'd think the Empire would be actively garrisoning these forts right? I feel like the events that you say would thin their numbers out should actually suggest a stronger military presence, maybe with peasant militias alongside to bolster the weakened Legions. It also sort of ties into what Chancellor Ocato says during the "aid for Bruma" quest, he can't spare military aid because it would use up military resources he's using to deal with political unrest. I think he says its in Cyrodiil but I may be mistaken on that. As far as I can tell the only real "military" in the region (aside from the mentioned quest-related Knight Orders) would be the Fighters Guild and Blackwood Company (more like mercenary companies though) and the Imperial Guard in the Imperial City, which now that I think about it seems really weird that its either their military in a Policing role (I guess Cyrodiil is in a state of emergency though?) or their Police force is given extremely heavy military kit (basically a full suit of plate armour which was typically only used by wealthy knights, rarely the average rank-and-file soldier). The more I think about it, the weirder the Empire's military situation seems.
@@cyqry much as I never cared on writing, thr lack of reinforcements during said Crisis was non-existant. Even Jauffre saying "see if the guilds can help" was hollow since it's all just getting town guards to help. I could get it if it has to do with the tech back then and consoles but it is disappointing nonetheless they didn't have some legionnaries and fighter guild members on the battlefield. That said, plate being for the wealthy deserves suspension of disbelief since iron armor is dirt cheap in these games while more fantastical metal plate armors are actually expensive.
I like to view the game maps we see in the elder scrolls game as an almost “Lego set” version of the actual city in lore. While not really being to scale or to making sense when you really analyze it, it gets the vibes across pretty well and letting you feel what the city would actually be like.
I love how a crumb suspension of disbelief is enough to get past glaringly obvious world building errors that should break immersion. Loved the info and your level designer perspective. I want more videos like this thanks!
@mushyroom9569 Raiders are a clone army created and suppliedby the true shadow government, that's the only way you can explain why there are so many raiders after like 200 years into the post-apocalypse
That's why I love about these games you can literally go into their houses and see what people eat. Nuka cola, beer, rad scorpion parts, mirelirk meat, molerat meat, brahmin, bloatfly loafs, swetrolls, and things like mutfruit which is known to grow like a weed.
I really loved the pocket guide to the empires depiction of the imperial city. Here's the excerpt, it's from the First Pocket Guide to the Empire. "From the shore, it is hard to tell what is city and what is Palace, for it all rises from the islands of the lake towards the sky in a stretch of gold. Whole neighborhoods rest on the jeweled bridges that connect the islands together. Gondolas and river ships sail along the watery avenues of its flooded lower dwellings. Moth-priests walk by in a cloud of ancestors; House Guards hold exceptionally long daikatanas crossed at intersections, adorned with ribbons and dragon-flags; and the newly arrived Western legionnaires sweat in the humid air. The river mouth is tainted red from the tinmi soil of the shore, and river dragons rust their hides in its waters. Across the lake the Imperial City continues, merging into the villages of the southern red river and ruins left from the Interregnum. The Emperor’s Palace is a crown of sun rays, surrounded by his magical gardens. One garden path is known as Green Emperor Road-here, topiaries of the heads of past Emperors have been shaped by sorcery and can speak. When one must advise Tiber Septim, birds are drawn to the hedgery head, using their songs as its voice and moving its branches for the needed expressions." I really appreciate oblivious depiction, and the work the artists of Oblivion put into it. But I love the jungle cyrod depiction of the city, with it being something never really seen in fantasy games or movies. The worldbuilding of TES is awesome and I really hope they bring the more unique elements of its lore to TES VI. You guys should check out the First Pocket Guide, the stuff in it is amazing. And other works of art that really show off the uniqueness of Elder Scrolls lore such as Only_Bee_00's art on Elder Scroll fashion. This community really is amazing.
one of my favorites right there. I really wish we could've seen more of this. I'm at the point that I want graphic design and such to go backwards to give us bigger, denser, sprawling cool stuff.
@@stargate525 I think they also use telekenisis magic to move the ships, and levitate magic is specifically for humanoids and allows them to move themselves while under its effects. Levitate magic lets whoever is under its effects move themselves for its duration, compared to moving another thing with magic; which is telekenesis.
Maybe they did it because it's probably the most exciting place for the player to visit first so they put it at the back to encourage you to see the other districts first.
But one only entrance is also one only place to defend. The imperial city would be top tier if it was also self sufficient (with crops growing inside the island)
That would only really be the case if the fortifications covered the shores of the island (which wouldn't really be feasible if it was farmland either given obstruction of sunlight behind the walls) if it were otherwise just farmland like you say, besieging forces could still ford the river and the defending garrison would have to continuously sally forth to rout them no doubt sacrificing a few defenders every time. Also, the Waterfront district, a key strategic lifeline for the city in a siege, isn't even connected to the main city's walls making it that much more susceptible in a siege. In our world, the antiquity Greeks would at times build "Long Walls" if a harbor was close enough, Athens' perhaps being the most famous stretched 3.7 miles to the coast, so it isn't unrealistic to say that one of the greatest powers in Tamriel couldn't construct something similar even considering the Imperial City in Oblivion is significantly scaled down from it's in-Universe size
@@evanhamlett6350 I think its worth adding about the Waterfront District, its a notorious den of thieves and the entire city looks down on it. Its not a trade port, its literally the slums of the city. I doubt the residents would trust the Waterfront to deliver the goods, assuming the Waterfront hasn't already switched sides and is smuggling enemy forces into the city in the first place. You're definitely right about the empires of antiquity having the resources to defend their waterfront settlements though. Considering that the Imperials are supposed to be very heavily influenced by Roman culture, you'd think they'd be taking that concept of "lets actually defend our cities" to the max. I mean Rome literally had a wall spanning its entire northern border in England when they decided they were done expanding... and that shit was manned too. I don't think that its a valid argument to say that one point of attack is also one point of defence. The enemy could ford across the river literally around the entire city, all it takes is figuring out which point is easiest to get across/less likely to get noticed, get troops to walk around the walls (because remember once they're over the river its all dry land) and they have four different access points into the city which are most likely not very well guarded due to everyone watching that ONE bridge. And like I said before, the Waterfront folk are most likely going to side with attackers. And that's four main gates in, there are three external locations to attack (the Prison is a high priority target due to the attached armoury) AND there are sewers that provide very easy access into the city itself. The Imperial City would be an absolute hell-hole to defend in a siege.
I think shadiversity did a video about it's defensibility, and he summarised it would have been terrible.. He highlighted sections of the island close enough to the mainland that was also shallow enough to simply walk across, the design of the walls left a glaring blind spot directly below with no way to defend against them, and there was no actual way up to the walls, especially the towers on the bridge, just to name a few of his points. His general summary was similar to this video in that it "looked cool enough to be believable, but wildly impractical"
Still shit for trade though, even if they somehow grow 100% of their food themselves, you'd ideally want your city to be connected to other places, and to be able to receive goods, troops, and messages from the outside, no? things like silk and other materials, luxury goods, or even the people themselves coming back from business trips or weary guards returning from duty, having a massive fuck-off 80 degree incline after a long giant bridge as your only entrance doesn't seem super fun, seems like any horse and cart would be stopped by it
1:55 It wasn't an oversight, there was no such thing as an Imperial race, the Imperial City was a neutral ground where the races of Tamriel mingled. There was no native population in Cyrodill, in fact, there was no Cyrodill, it was simply called The Imperial Province and consisted of nothing but the Imperial City, with no towns or villages. It wasn't until TES Adventures: Redguard that the Imperial race was introduced into canon and Cyrodill became a real province with a native population.
There technically were Imperials, they weren't playable, and they were called Cyro-Nordics. Later, Nibeneans and more importantly Colovians. Then simply Imperials.
So, in canon it means, an entire race of men just suddenly vanished at some point to be AWOL for up to 400 years, only to then return within the decade after Daggerfall? I mean, I could see that, given all the other weirdness happening in the franchise, as that's what "Imperials as race didn't exist in Arean and Daggerfall" would imply.
that's the least of the weird things about the palace, like why does the palace have a sub-basement larger than the tower itself that is abandoned and only accessible through the guard quarters, is the bedroom on the top floor the battlemage's or ocato's?, why is there no room for the emperor?, why is there so much wasted space?, where is the room from daggerfall?
10:11 You neglected to mention that when you have one path into the city, it's also incredibly easy to bottleneck any enemy force that attempts attack the city. A sufficiently large army can cut off all supply routes no matter how many of them there are, and a smaller enemy army can be beaten on the field with the imperial army.
that's a refreshing take at the end of the video. in a similar fashion, I never found myself wondering "what do they eat?" while playing fallout 3. I was too busy enjoying the game
I always have problem when looking at a city and then there's no fields etc beyond the city walls. Especially Skyrim's Solitude or LOTR Minas Tirith. Like, where do they get their food? Sure, Skyrim has hunters, fishers and poachers around and they would sell their catch to the sellers in the city, but I want fields! The people need potatoes, leeks and wheat!
I just imagine Whiteruns farms are bigger than they are and they trade their wheat and other crop yields with the other holds. Just like Falkreath probably provides a lot of the lumber to other holds.
@@reidparker1848 A realistic representation would be miles of farms bigger than the playable area. Even games like GTA V don’t have a realistic representation of scale. My hometown is bigger than the entire map of Skyrim as are most peoples.
@MultiSpeedMetal Exactly, and so I don't take much of the setting seriously. No wonder armies are just about 100 men. Tamriel is like 15 miles from Alinor to Vvardenfell. Tiny place, Lichtenstein dwarfs it.
@@MultiSpeedMetalhell at least whiterun had farms at all. I think windhelm is the only other city that has them. (I was going to say morrowind lacked local farms but then I remembered the egg mines, fishing villages, and slave plantations.)
Didn't Tamriel originally have more of a Mesoamerican design before it was revamped? That might make sense of it sitting in an inland lake with only a few bridges, if it was based more on Tenochtitlan than Rome.
In Arena and daggerfall it didn't and Morrowind is implicitly stated to be very much an outlier that has a lot of autonomy in both culture and governance.
I assume you mean Cyrodiil/the Imperial City and not Tamriel, but while it was Tenochtitlan it was not necessarily Mesoamerican, with generally more Roman and South-East Asian inspirations. The Tenochtitlan comparison is specifically in the way the city was described in the Pocket Guide to the Empire, 1st edition, which reads as follows: "From the shore it is hard to tell what is city and what is Palace, for it all rises from the islands of the lake towards the sky in a stretch of gold. Whole neighborhoods rest on the jeweled bridges that connect the islands together. Gondolas and river-ships sail along the watery avenues of its flooded lower dwellings. Moth-priests walk by in a cloud of ancestors; House Guards hold exceptionally long daikatanas crossed at intersections, adorned with ribbons and dragon-flags; and the newly arrived Western legionnaires sweat in the humid air. The river mouth is tainted red from the tinmi soil of the shore, and river dragons rust their hides in its waters. Across the lake the Imperial City continues, merging into the villages of the southern red river and ruins left from the Interregnum." Ignoring all the purple prose and glorification, it presents it as much like well, Tenochtitlan, a massive city built not on an island in a lake, but over the lake itself. Although it's worth that if we're comparing to Tenochtitlan for defensive purposes, Tenochtitlan was actually /dotted/ in bridges, but they were designed to be easily retracted or dismantled for defensive purposes. As the other person implied however, this was actually only a brief moment in the irl history of the lore. This description first appeared in the PGE1, which was a booklet included with Redguard, the game which totally overhauled the series' lore into what we know it as today. This also came with descriptions of the whole province being almost entirely jungled. Morrowind then copied a lot of the PGE1's text as description text from npcs (which is part of why a lot of people don't realise these descriptions come from Morrowind), but actually started dismantling the representation of this Cyrodiil within its actual depictions, removing much of the Asian inspiration, and never really depicting the supposedly all-important split between the Colovians and Nibenneans, implying that equestrian knights exist in the supposedly almost entirely jungle Cyrodiil. And then Oblivion almost entirely undid much of it (although it had a bit more of a split of the two cultures, at the very least, than Morrowind's depiction). But people got very, very attached to this depiction of Cyrodiil, and have been bellyaching, both fairly and unfairly, about it ever since. Also as always, the note is worth making that none of the provinces and their inhabitants have been inspired by a single people, especially after the Redguard revamp.
I think the conclusion on this video really nails it. A well designed game world doesn't necessarily always have to make sense, it has to be good enough to make you enjoy it enough to miss those parts that doesn't make sense. A lot of Oblivion's size and limitations can be looked past with the suspension of disbelief. The cities are small but in lore are much larger and we can pretend that. The Imperial City is land locked, but in lore it is connected to the ocean and we can pretend that. The Oblivion crisis and the battle against the gates took entire armies to fight, but in game it's at most 50-ish guys, but we can imagine the epic stand the armies take. Because for all the faults Oblivion and its world is just fantastic enough that you can immerse and let it take you on a tale of magic and monsters. In fact, I've always found that so far all of the Elder Scrolls games have been able to nail that suspension of disbelief and that atmosphere pretty consistently. It's why it's such a shame for me how lazy Bethesda has gotten lately, forgetting that magical mix of effort and immersion that let you submerge yourself in their worlds. You can see in their work, like in Starfield and Fallout 76, that they still know *how* to make them but they don't put in the _effort_ to do it.
The ending of this video is something that current day studios need to take to heart. They underlying game is the single most important part of the experience. The story and gameplay themselves need the most refinement. Focus too much on polishing things that don't really matter and you get the current day AAA games crisis. Buggy, unfinished messes that put way too much attention to detail into things that don't really matter causing the core experience to suffer as a result. Am I saying that this kind of thing never matters or that details like this shouldn't be polished? Of course not. However, I'd prefer for game studios to focus on making games that are similar in scale to great games that came before first and foremost, and then spend whatever time and budget they have left over polishing the smaller details like the things pointed out in this video. Make the core experience good and polished and refined first and only then put more specific attention into ironing out the smaller problems.
I might've agreed a month ago but after playing Enderal: Forgotten Stories, a full Skyrim conversion mod I have to disagree. The map was entirely handcrafted, albeit using Skyrim's assets, yet completely decorated and polished and offering much more diverse terrains. There's only one main city, but it is massive, with dozens of houses, a museum, bathhouse, massive barracks, huge temple, marketplace, 2 player houses, 3 taverns, etc and a huge underground city as well. Yet despite the time and effort put into the map itself, the story was phenomenal and was delivered in a manner I've seen many other people compare to the likes of The Witcher 3, or even coming close to Baldur's Gate 3. The characters were well written and felt like real individuals, and the voice acting was performed with passion. Taverns even had bards playing songs the devs composed themselves. SureAi, the studio that made this full AAA quality game were just a team of 14, and the craziest part is that it's completely free on steam. Obviously they had the entirety of Skyrim's code to work with as a base compared to making something from scratch but I also think companies nowadays just have to deal with too much restrictions on their creative freedoms, which leads to devs with subpar motivation and equally subpar games.
I mean that isn't Besthda's problem though it's scope creep and their enablity to manage it... Like Peach's casle in Super mario 64 a game on a much weaker console, pressed on a cartrige, likly had a much smaller budget and inovated on tons of stuff... Was well made and made sense while being a jungle jim that showed your progress on the story... Like why wasn't the imperal city like that? Why wasn't it a hub from which you explored the wrold from? Like it has the concept of a hub but an implementation of an after thought...
although this doesn’t apply too much to the imperial city, where there is no foreseeable immediate threat, when it comes to early modern and pre modern cities and castles/forts, often sprawl would be disensentived, destroyed, or made impermanent for defensive concerns. if you are under seige, its not a good idea to have ready cover just outside your walls. So if there was any, they would be destroyed.
Except not everyone is going to be living within the castle/fort walls. A city like this would be tens of thousands of people at least. Outside of the city would be littered with structures and farms. Likewise, a fullscale seige of a city would take an enormous army. It's not a small undertaking.
What? Disincentivized for strategic purposes? Its a city for Christ sake not a fort, people will live outside the walls, until it’s too big and they’ll have to build new walls around the new residential area, and then, again after that. Case in point, Jerusalem, look at its history. Hell look at history in general, what’s with this warped understanding of how things worked back then.
@@madmantheepic7278 what are you on about? Yes cities do expand and make new walls as needed, but they also regularly DESTROY the sprawl outside of the current walls if a city is under the threat of siege (like if there is a potentially hostile state or raiders nearby). you know, cities were often sieged in warfare right? not just forts. They are kind of important seats of power. how many sieges did Jerusalem go under? Paris?
Lore: From the shore it is hard to tell what is city and what is Palace, for it all rises from the islands of the lake towards the sky in a stretch of gold. Whole neighborhoods rest on the jeweled bridges that connect the islands together. Gondolas and river-ships sail along the watery avenues of its flooded lower dwellings. The river mouth is tainted red from the tinmi soil of the shore, and river dragons rust their hides in its waters. Across the lake the Imperial City continues, merging into the villages of the southern red river and ruins left from the Interregnum. The Emperor's Palace is a crown of sun rays, surrounded by his magical gardens. Actual game: BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPFFFFFF
I noticed the sprawl part, but then I DM'd games for my friends for around 30 years, carefully crafting new worlds and such countless times. So, certain things just 'pop' for me. A supposedly bustling city that has definite boundaries only really makes sense, for me, in once case: when the immediate outside of that city is so hostile that all citizens stay inside the walls. And, it's really hard to convince me that the capital city of a major empire has that problem. I never noticed the water part, though. But, I think that goes back to your earlier comment: Budget.
I remember thinking that the oblivion gate in the waterway immediately north of Leyawiin would be the focus of an important quest since surely the game would observe that it blocked the only connection between the Imperial City and the sea but then there was just... nothing
There is a ford across the lake near Vilverin where you start the game. I am certain it intentional too because if you look closely there are paths (poorly defined but there) on either side of it. You can wade all the way across it without ever going into the swim animation.
Oblivion is the game that pulled back the veil on hype for me. Once I saw the technical limitations compared to what I imagined from trailers, marketing tactics to make a game look extraordinary were just transparent from then on
Great video, I haven’t learned anuthing new, or something I don’t know about Oblivion, but it was interesting to hear your opinion and your perspective on the approach to the game dev back in time
Cool vid =) That Leyawiin concept art look really interesting. My idea to fix the river there though would be to make it a tide kind of thing, where on low tide you can see a muddy pathway leading to the city. But yeah the imperial city is weird. Always felt to me like an oversized hallway.
Thanks for watching!! Vivec (The City) is definitely a nightmare city too, though I suspect a lot could be hand-waved by ~deep obscure Tribunal lore-religion reasons~ causing them to just ignore conventional city planning haha
@@Slaughterneko My understanding is that the city of Vivec was *intentionally* designed to be confusing for anyone that wasn't a local. Vvardenfell has a history of being xenophobic, and they abhor outsiders with a passion. You can even see this with one of the cantons - the "Foreign Quarter." It's as far away as possible from the temple and other structures - almost added as an afterthought. Also (and this is speculation on my part), it was designed to be as confusing as possible to any invaders. That place is a maze to anyone that hasn't lived there for many years - imagine an invading force trying to navigate their way through in order to take over.
The imperial city never connecting to the ocean was something that has bothered me for years, especially with how the river past leyawiin is so shallow and thin and windy and I always thought that would never work for such a large and important city
As someone who really dwelled in the Lore, loved the details and good worldbuilding Morrowind brought to the table and who had a Pen & Paper and a Fansite going back in the days I recognized all these things. And one of the things we had written in the rules for the RPG: Everything you see ingame is a mere representation of what it should look like, if it would be realistic and as such go with your imagination, not with the actual ingame content, when involving yourself in the games world for the PnP. I was also into the whole cut content, especially because of these flaws (and some major disconnects with the games lore from the ingame-lore-books like missing two whole important towns in Cyrodiil (one of them is Sutch, they made into a fortress ruin between Kvatch and Anvil), the Arenas that every major town should have like in Arena, the Imperial Palace without any rooms for the emperor or the imperial offices. The different Layouts / designs for some of the cities, the Imperial City missing the famous blue Palace, every village only three of the same ugl buildings (really a major setback after the beautifull farmsteads we had in morrowind sprinkled in). Oblivion was in every aspect cut short and the worldbuilding suffered really, what makes the sentiment back in the days, that it is forgettable generic medieval fantasy to some extent true. But with the years now a lot of people come forward, who have very nostalgic feelings and memories of love and enjoyment for it, because it was the elder scrolls game of their generation, they grow up with, in some cases their first big RPG. And its so lovely now to hear people talk about it, instead of the totally overrated Skyrim.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video. It's really interesting seeing a game I've played for nearly 20 years through the eyes of a professional game designer. You truly gave a remarkable insight, thank you. I'll now never not think about the Imperial city not connecting to the ocean lol.
If you're planning to analyse other video game cities, I like to submit Gran Soren from Dragon's Dogma 1. The city is decently sized (it feels like a real city) and its right on the coast, but has no port whatsoever and it is completely surrounded on the land side by ruins, [with no food source in sight.]* It sits in contrast with Vernworth from the second game, which has its own port and its surrounded by wheatfields, farms, and sprawl on the land side. *I forgot about the farming district.
Absolutely agree with you, I to am a level and world builder and I think about things like this all the time, what could have been. This is why I mod for now lol, in a few more decades I would love to see where were at capability wise with PC's and what kind of worlds we can build! Great vid 👍
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
I never noticed that there was no waterway to the ocean. And to be fair I literally have the maps of Cyrodiil and Tamriel hanging above my screens, and on there it looks like there is a way around Leyawiin. :D
When you said "I'm doomed to think about my work" as you play games I immediately imagined how that must suck. I see strange details because of my work too and it ruins my hobbies just as much. Bless you man 😭
There's a channel called sckchui that YEARS AGO did a series about the architecture and urban planning of Morrowind, which I really learn a lot from at the time. He also mentioned how the Imperial City looks weird because it's so rigidly planned and has no sprawl, iirc. This is also an issue with Vivec in Morrowind, for similar reasons (ie. saving on processing), but once you notice it, it's gonna be weird forever. One thing that always bothered me about Oblivion is the complete and utter lack of cows. It just... seems like something that should exist in a medieval fantasy game. Sheep, chickens, cows, at a minimum. (On a bit of an apropos, Morrowind does a really good job showing off the different ideologies and subcultures of its factions through the architectural tileset and town layout, it's worth giving the channel I mentioned a look.)
1:44 it wasnt an oversight. The imperials weren't originally meant to be a race and wouldn't be introduced until Morrowind. The existence if imperials as their own race was a retcon.
Great vid man, and I gotta say that yeah, kid me noticed all the weird quirks when I first played it. It drove me crazy as a kid why I had to walk all the way around the damn thing just to sell my gear in the Market District. Or that ships couldn't actually sail the Niben or even the lake since most of it is to shallow to even swim.
This was very impressive in 2006. Skyrim was actually a downgrade in city design, but it’s my opinion that Skyrim was a downgrade across the board except for that there were more things to do.
Big downgrade was the quest design. Oblivion had some really cool quests. Skyrim is 90% in caves fighting bandits and draugr, with the occasional dwemer remnants.
Oblivion was limited by it's engine and it's creators basically. It's kinda like how fallouts don't have working cars despite their lore saying they do. You basically have to pretend the sprawl is there and think that for ever person you see there's like 1000 more that are there in the background.
And to think, 20 years ago this was a cutting edge game and was used for PC benchmarks for most of the rest of the 2000’s. They had to work with limits of the technology at the time.
@@BriggieIt's that way even now. Developers are more likely to use the extra performance to make compressed world nicer/more detailed than reducing compression. And TBH I can't blame them. If you don't strive for absolute realism, pointlessly lenghtening commute is counterproductive for the game itself.
The biggest thing was Radiant AI. As the video touched on, every NPC had to have their own home, places they could go, day to day lives, and every building should have a purpose as well, usually facilitating those lives. This /vastly/ increases the sheer amount of effort necessary for basically everything. Add a new house to increase sprawl? Well now you need to fill its interior cell, add who lives there, decide on their day-to-day schedule, including accounting for how that would run up against others', and thus the needs that are there as well, since you couldn't add 10 more npcs visiting Oblivion's taverns without making the taverns bigger. Even if you magically gave the Oblivion Team an engine that could achieve everything they ever dreamed of, they wouldn't make their cities /objectively/ big, because even before we account for what it might be like for a player to have to walk those massive distances, they'd just need to put a lot of work in to actually implement everything. And ultimately, that's a tradeoff for a specific kind of immersion they were going for. They were going for, instead of a giant city that has to fudge the implication that the people there lead actual lives, it's an unquestionably alive city that has to fudge the idea that it's more than a few dozen people. Doesn't work for everyone. Me personally, I absolutely prefer it this way, I'll take a dozen more Imperial Cities and Whiteruns to one city where 99% of the citizens are glorified cardboard cutouts and the only gameplay difference between a house and a boulder is the shape.
@@tanwenwalters7689 Yeah, you'd need and AI to make a story/life/interaction with other pcs for thousands of npcs. But that's another steaming pile of shit I'd rather not get into.
There are definitely a bunch of little towns outside of major cities but they're really not close enough to cities to be called "sprawl". But the world isn't completely devoid of all settlements outside of cities. Also I think a really interesting thing they could have done for the trade aspect to make more sense in spite of the awkwardness with stairs everywhere and only one bridge etc is if the mages at the arcane university worked with mages at the other Mage's Guild halls to create a teleportation network that made it so goods could be teleported into warehouses. That would grow the wealth of the city considerably faster since you would literally have no travel times. Though you're still right about all the stairs creating so many other annoyances.
I like to think that the Ayleids are the ones who built all those stairs, and levitation magic was common enough back then that they didn't need to traverse areas by foot.
@@Irisverse well that's fine but still, think about wagons and horses that cannot go up the stairs. Did the Ayleids not need horses and wagons in their cities? Or did they have flying wagons? Either way, I think that after over a thousand years the Imperials would have done something to address that.
I still think that Weye is bullshit. There's an inn and a single other house. That's not a town. That's a bandit target. Furthermore, Weye doesn't make sense. Weye is right outside the city. Just walk for like 20 minutes and you can rest at the high end imperial inn, or whatever it was called, instead of the bandit bait.
Good video, i never even thought about all the stairs 😅 as for sprawl, i feel like a world full of goblins and minotaurs and necromancers might... discourage... people from living outside city walls. They would still need farms, though...
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.
About the steep road from the bridge up to the city gates... I would like to point out some medieval castles that were built on mountain tops, that also have steep roads. It can be seen as a defensive measure. It´s more difficult for attackers (and things like catapults) to get / shoot up to the wall / gate, while it´s easier for archers and war machines to shoot down on the approaching army. Also, if there is only one way an army could realistically attack through in strength, then that is a plus-point for defense as well. A city (especially a wealthy one) should always have enough food stored to hold out a while.
The river was perfectly navigable until the Empire banned levitation. After that, a series of exceptions were under negotiations, when, well... # headcanon
Loved the video, not overly fatalistic. I think the important thing, as you sorta said, is simulation. Yeah its not a perfect simulation, but if you're there it can work for sure.
You made me realize I've never gave the imperial city much thought in terms of logistics. It really didn't matter to me but now I can never unsee that the city is landlocked with a single entrance and exit lmao
I have seen some more current images and maps of the Imperial City and it turned the entire island into sprawl. Very cool, and as a European, yeah, outside the city centers is still a lot going on, even in olde times. For the Leyawiin island situation, I have seen similar things along the Rhine, with castles and towers in the middle of the river on some island. No bridges, they used ferries because said river was and still is a major shipping lane.
@@BlackTacticalVest not at all at all friend. If you research both games and their cut contents oblivion has i would say about 75 precent more cut content
@@DAGGERBLIVION I meant more in the way that both games were much much smaller in reality than the original planned scale/scope of the games was supposed to be, but ik people gotta hate on Skyrim any chance they get
@@BlackTacticalVest what who hates on skyrim i love it whats the metter with you. I only said what is the truth and that is than oblivion was supossed to be a lot bigger than skyrim was
I have been playing Oblivion my whole life. For like 15 years it seems. I have done literally EVERYTHING. Never, not once, did I ever realize that the imperial city doesn't connect to the ocean lmao
I haven’t even started the video yet and this comment made my jaw drop in disbelief, how could I have never noticed?
same
No same! I have over 1000 hours played on steam, never mind also having used to own a physical pc disc AND a ps3 copy, and I have not once noticed that
It does connect in the map, but I think the game developers wanted to take Leyawiin into one whole and forgot about the capital.
Considering it's built on a lake. lol
After "Morrowind doesn't have any rivers" I didn't expect to have another geologic masterpiece for so soon
Wrong creator. 😂. That video was by Any Austin
@@VAULT-TEC_INC.there’s two Elder Scrolls video essay people the British guy and the American guy
Having the market district right next to the prison district just sounds like it's asking for trouble tbh.
To be honest they would immediately report any suspicious people, also quick response from the guards
Also if Valen Dreth is right then nobody is breaking free
Like to think they do it to artificially increase crime so the imperials look more responsive 😂
the real crime is that there is a sewer but not a single bathroom.
There's a mod for that.
In lore the imperial city is absolutely massive, like the in game city doesn't even make up for 1% of it. All in all I think they did a good job trying to capture it with the tools they had available in 2006.
True. Sad that we're still saying that to this day. Atleast they did what they could do for Starfield with tools from 2006.
@@nickv1212 That I disagree on, Starfield is just a display of incompetence. You can write a good story with tools from 500BC, all you need is a pen,paper and some imagination. Bethesda is severely lacking in the last ingredient.
I mean it pales in comparison to Peach's Castle in Super Mario 64 a much smaller equally important place that actually made sense sense wise despite being their just for gameplay... Also SM64 came out a dacde earlier on a much weaker console, on a cartridge and was made with less budget...
@@AstrusEminus I mean you don't have to insult the devs just because you don't like their story that is just rude...
@@GreenBlueWalkthrough I don't see how SM64 is relevant to the discussion, ES2 Daggerfall was released the same year, it was programmed by cockroaches on MS-DOS on a budget of 2 pennies and still had a better story than Starfield.
I hated that you couldn't walk along the battlements of the city walls
you can if you drink enough skooma
@@JacobBite Anything is possible if you drink enough skooma
Drives even more mad you cant go to the top of the imperial tower.
There isn't even an inaccessible door anywhere for the top or even the battlements for immersive aesthetic but they do for other places.
@@hakarlrs9817 REEEEEEEE
@@JackJonValois Dupe loads of paintbrushes and build yourself a set of stairs
what's even crazier is that ESO fixed most of those issues. Even the waterway access to the ocean was fixed with the Blackwood chapter. I repeat: ESO FIXED OBLIVION'S MAP
TESO????? FIX?????? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.. teso the same game that fucks up the minerals by putting ebony as mediocre when ebony is the strongest and most expensive metal known in Nirn. teso the same one that puts the Argonian maiden before Crasius Curio exists. teso the same one that puts Dwemer ore when it is made clear to us that Dwemer metal is an alloy with a lost recipe and the only way to get it is from the remains of the dwarves. teso the same one that puts Windhelm on the north coast SHITTING on the skyrim map and practically ignoring the existence of Wintherhold. teso the same one that puts the worst Daedric princess in history with a generic design, a generic story that its mere existence screws up the entire lore. Teso is the same one who trivializes, ruins and burns the image of the Daedra princes and the gods by filling and saturating the second era with PURE divine events every second (in Oblivion, Morrowind and Skyrim there are also divine events) YES but with decades or centuries of difference. TESO does not solve anything, he only ruins the lore. It seems more stupid to me to ignore the existence of Wintherhold than the logic of access to the Sea of Oblivion. Teso, for every thing he fixes, screws up 10 others.
And don't get me started on their stupid, shitty excuses for their stupid mistakes.
So did better cities, it's really not hard lol
@@l0y3lg45
I'd like to get you started.
Why is that crazier?
At least Morrowind had the legion forts occupying each major town. It was so strange hopping into Oblivion on release and seeing the Imperial Province had 0 forts that werent crumbled ruins.
I definitely did notice the weirdly steep terrain on my first playthrough as well as the lack of small towns to visit. Morrowind had its dead end fishing towns and those were fairly absent in Oblivion.
I think Skyrim did a better job with some more farms and settlements here and there, though Solitude kind of repeats the weird overly steep and narrow bridge issue.
Much as I enjoyed Oblivion despite how it wasn't like in the Pocket Guide, the forts were funny since they all were just occupied by anything but the Imperial Legion. Not even a small outpost. And there also could of been a few more farms.
@@Chinothebad That's the part I always found very odd. Yes the odd keep might have been abandoned and subsequently taken over by bandits (or deserter legionnaires just kept the keep they were assigned to) but this is the very heart of the Empire... where the hell are all the troops? The cities don't even have garrisons outside of their guards (who are closer to a Police force than Soldiers).
Like Baron said, at least in Morrowind they had actual forts that were manned and able to overlook the cities they defended. They worked like actual medieval castles would have. Its weird that the Counts of Cyrodiil don't have actual soldiers or knights (outside of a few quest-related Orders) in their castles. Like that is the exact place they would be, just waiting for their Count to send them out.
@@cyqry yeh now tgat you mentioned it, having some knights or the Cyrodilic equivalent would of added more to the courts. And with forts, I can get random middle of nowhere ones going abandoned but one near a main road? It is ridiculous especially if they didn't give a good enough explanation like "they got low on numbers due to Daedra, easy pickings for bandits and the like."
@@Chinothebad The thing is, with the Oblivion Crisis in full swing and the subtle hint in Morrowind that things are reaching a political boiling point and Legions are being actively recalled to Cyrodiil; you'd think the Empire would be actively garrisoning these forts right?
I feel like the events that you say would thin their numbers out should actually suggest a stronger military presence, maybe with peasant militias alongside to bolster the weakened Legions. It also sort of ties into what Chancellor Ocato says during the "aid for Bruma" quest, he can't spare military aid because it would use up military resources he's using to deal with political unrest. I think he says its in Cyrodiil but I may be mistaken on that.
As far as I can tell the only real "military" in the region (aside from the mentioned quest-related Knight Orders) would be the Fighters Guild and Blackwood Company (more like mercenary companies though) and the Imperial Guard in the Imperial City, which now that I think about it seems really weird that its either their military in a Policing role (I guess Cyrodiil is in a state of emergency though?) or their Police force is given extremely heavy military kit (basically a full suit of plate armour which was typically only used by wealthy knights, rarely the average rank-and-file soldier).
The more I think about it, the weirder the Empire's military situation seems.
@@cyqry much as I never cared on writing, thr lack of reinforcements during said Crisis was non-existant. Even Jauffre saying "see if the guilds can help" was hollow since it's all just getting town guards to help. I could get it if it has to do with the tech back then and consoles but it is disappointing nonetheless they didn't have some legionnaries and fighter guild members on the battlefield. That said, plate being for the wealthy deserves suspension of disbelief since iron armor is dirt cheap in these games while more fantastical metal plate armors are actually expensive.
i mean in fairness with all the stairs the citizens of the imperial city must have amazing quads
I like to view the game maps we see in the elder scrolls game as an almost “Lego set” version of the actual city in lore. While not really being to scale or to making sense when you really analyze it, it gets the vibes across pretty well and letting you feel what the city would actually be like.
I love how a crumb suspension of disbelief is enough to get past glaringly obvious world building errors that should break immersion. Loved the info and your level designer perspective. I want more videos like this thanks!
People will independently keep thinking "what do they eat in megaton" about Bethesda games FOREVER
Thanks to magic and radiation respectively crops grow fast af boyyy
Pretty sure this was answered in universe: they shop at Super-Duper Mart, which gets restocked by raiders for some reason.
@mushyroom9569 Raiders are a clone army created and suppliedby the true shadow government, that's the only way you can explain why there are so many raiders after like 200 years into the post-apocalypse
That's why I love about these games you can literally go into their houses and see what people eat. Nuka cola, beer, rad scorpion parts, mirelirk meat, molerat meat, brahmin, bloatfly loafs, swetrolls, and things like mutfruit which is known to grow like a weed.
@@infernaldaedrayou got it wrong. that question is a critique not a praise. Megaton doesn't have the infrastructure to support it's own population.
I really loved the pocket guide to the empires depiction of the imperial city.
Here's the excerpt, it's from the First Pocket Guide to the Empire.
"From the shore, it is hard to tell what is city and what is Palace, for it all rises from the islands of the lake towards the sky in a stretch of gold. Whole neighborhoods rest on the jeweled bridges that connect the islands together. Gondolas and river ships sail along the watery avenues of its flooded lower dwellings. Moth-priests walk by in a cloud of ancestors; House Guards hold exceptionally long daikatanas crossed at intersections, adorned with ribbons and dragon-flags; and the newly arrived Western legionnaires sweat in the humid air. The river mouth is tainted red from the tinmi soil of the shore, and river dragons rust their hides in its waters. Across the lake the Imperial City continues, merging into the villages of the southern red river and ruins left from the Interregnum.
The Emperor’s Palace is a crown of sun rays, surrounded by his magical gardens. One garden path is known as Green Emperor Road-here, topiaries of the heads of past Emperors have been shaped by sorcery and can speak. When one must advise Tiber Septim, birds are drawn to the hedgery head, using their songs as its voice and moving its branches for the needed expressions."
I really appreciate oblivious depiction, and the work the artists of Oblivion put into it. But I love the jungle cyrod depiction of the city, with it being something never really seen in fantasy games or movies. The worldbuilding of TES is awesome and I really hope they bring the more unique elements of its lore to TES VI.
You guys should check out the First Pocket Guide, the stuff in it is amazing. And other works of art that really show off the uniqueness of Elder Scrolls lore such as Only_Bee_00's art on Elder Scroll fashion. This community really is amazing.
if only todd hand't watch Lord of the Rings
@@duruarute5445
If only.
one of my favorites right there. I really wish we could've seen more of this. I'm at the point that I want graphic design and such to go backwards to give us bigger, denser, sprawling cool stuff.
dam.. i love oblivion but that would have been so great, what we got is pathetic in comparison
@@duruarute5445more like if only the game didn’t come out in 2006 on the Xbox 360.
The Leyawiin mages are in charge of levitating ships over the land blocking the Niben River. Nobody gets in or out without approval and assistance.
Fyi levitation magic is forbbiden in the empire. Dont ask me why, I just know its in the lore
But levitation was abolished as a spell since the Nerevarine
@@stargate525 Not for the Empire's own spellcasters, just private mages.
@@stargate525
I think they also use telekenisis magic to move the ships, and levitate magic is specifically for humanoids and allows them to move themselves while under its effects. Levitate magic lets whoever is under its effects move themselves for its duration, compared to moving another thing with magic; which is telekenesis.
@@C00kiesAplenty Then why couldn't I just telekinesis my shoes as I was wearing them?
Thank you for talking about the Trade District.
When I revisited Oblivion two years ago that bugged me the most.
Maybe they did it because it's probably the most exciting place for the player to visit first so they put it at the back to encourage you to see the other districts first.
@@EmperorSigismundletting you fast travel there immediately kinda defeats that
@@notNajimi it's also the closest district to the sewer exit where you start the game
But one only entrance is also one only place to defend. The imperial city would be top tier if it was also self sufficient (with crops growing inside the island)
The lake is also a giant moat in some way. If only the market district were to be in the right place :D
That would only really be the case if the fortifications covered the shores of the island (which wouldn't really be feasible if it was farmland either given obstruction of sunlight behind the walls) if it were otherwise just farmland like you say, besieging forces could still ford the river and the defending garrison would have to continuously sally forth to rout them no doubt sacrificing a few defenders every time. Also, the Waterfront district, a key strategic lifeline for the city in a siege, isn't even connected to the main city's walls making it that much more susceptible in a siege. In our world, the antiquity Greeks would at times build "Long Walls" if a harbor was close enough, Athens' perhaps being the most famous stretched 3.7 miles to the coast, so it isn't unrealistic to say that one of the greatest powers in Tamriel couldn't construct something similar even considering the Imperial City in Oblivion is significantly scaled down from it's in-Universe size
@@evanhamlett6350 I think its worth adding about the Waterfront District, its a notorious den of thieves and the entire city looks down on it. Its not a trade port, its literally the slums of the city. I doubt the residents would trust the Waterfront to deliver the goods, assuming the Waterfront hasn't already switched sides and is smuggling enemy forces into the city in the first place.
You're definitely right about the empires of antiquity having the resources to defend their waterfront settlements though. Considering that the Imperials are supposed to be very heavily influenced by Roman culture, you'd think they'd be taking that concept of "lets actually defend our cities" to the max. I mean Rome literally had a wall spanning its entire northern border in England when they decided they were done expanding... and that shit was manned too.
I don't think that its a valid argument to say that one point of attack is also one point of defence. The enemy could ford across the river literally around the entire city, all it takes is figuring out which point is easiest to get across/less likely to get noticed, get troops to walk around the walls (because remember once they're over the river its all dry land) and they have four different access points into the city which are most likely not very well guarded due to everyone watching that ONE bridge. And like I said before, the Waterfront folk are most likely going to side with attackers. And that's four main gates in, there are three external locations to attack (the Prison is a high priority target due to the attached armoury) AND there are sewers that provide very easy access into the city itself. The Imperial City would be an absolute hell-hole to defend in a siege.
I think shadiversity did a video about it's defensibility, and he summarised it would have been terrible..
He highlighted sections of the island close enough to the mainland that was also shallow enough to simply walk across, the design of the walls left a glaring blind spot directly below with no way to defend against them, and there was no actual way up to the walls, especially the towers on the bridge, just to name a few of his points.
His general summary was similar to this video in that it "looked cool enough to be believable, but wildly impractical"
Still shit for trade though, even if they somehow grow 100% of their food themselves, you'd ideally want your city to be connected to other places, and to be able to receive goods, troops, and messages from the outside, no?
things like silk and other materials, luxury goods, or even the people themselves coming back from business trips or weary guards returning from duty, having a massive fuck-off 80 degree incline after a long giant bridge as your only entrance doesn't seem super fun, seems like any horse and cart would be stopped by it
1:55 It wasn't an oversight, there was no such thing as an Imperial race, the Imperial City was a neutral ground where the races of Tamriel mingled. There was no native population in Cyrodill, in fact, there was no Cyrodill, it was simply called The Imperial Province and consisted of nothing but the Imperial City, with no towns or villages. It wasn't until TES Adventures: Redguard that the Imperial race was introduced into canon and Cyrodill became a real province with a native population.
There technically were Imperials, they weren't playable, and they were called Cyro-Nordics. Later, Nibeneans and more importantly Colovians. Then simply Imperials.
@@Nuniixoyeah, honestly Imperials should just be called "Cyrodiils", the people of Cyrodil
@@TheRealMycanthropeoh, no its actually spelled ”Crocodiles”.
Well, let me tell you something, friend. Cyrodiil is a long way from here, and in Skyrim, we will never forsake mighty Talos!
So, in canon it means, an entire race of men just suddenly vanished at some point to be AWOL for up to 400 years, only to then return within the decade after Daggerfall?
I mean, I could see that, given all the other weirdness happening in the franchise, as that's what "Imperials as race didn't exist in Arean and Daggerfall" would imply.
15:42 I never noticed how GIANT that guard down near the gate is in this FMV, haha
And he didn't mention how the Imperial Palace in the IMPERIAL CITY has no throne for the emperor to sit in.
Not even in the Council Chamber?! No way!
@JohnDoe00107
Apparently ESO added one.
that's the least of the weird things about the palace, like why does the palace have a sub-basement larger than the tower itself that is abandoned and only accessible through the guard quarters, is the bedroom on the top floor the battlemage's or ocato's?, why is there no room for the emperor?, why is there so much wasted space?, where is the room from daggerfall?
@@nawkonoogle I always thought there was a throne but the council seat is cool enough.
Many thanks to the algorithm for recommending this amazing video.
10:11 You neglected to mention that when you have one path into the city, it's also incredibly easy to bottleneck any enemy force that attempts attack the city. A sufficiently large army can cut off all supply routes no matter how many of them there are, and a smaller enemy army can be beaten on the field with the imperial army.
As a sailor, the Imperial City's lack of navigable shipping canals has bothered me forever. Glad to see someone address it.
I did notice the steep hill leading to the city, I never understood how such a massive oversight could be let in the game
that's a refreshing take at the end of the video. in a similar fashion, I never found myself wondering "what do they eat?" while playing fallout 3. I was too busy enjoying the game
I noticed the insane slope on the way to the Imperial City! I remember thinking you'd barely make it up there on foot without going on all fours.
I always have problem when looking at a city and then there's no fields etc beyond the city walls. Especially Skyrim's Solitude or LOTR Minas Tirith. Like, where do they get their food? Sure, Skyrim has hunters, fishers and poachers around and they would sell their catch to the sellers in the city, but I want fields! The people need potatoes, leeks and wheat!
I just imagine Whiteruns farms are bigger than they are and they trade their wheat and other crop yields with the other holds. Just like Falkreath probably provides a lot of the lumber to other holds.
@@MultiSpeedMetal
I treat everything as 1:1. Such a lame excuse.
@@reidparker1848 A realistic representation would be miles of farms bigger than the playable area. Even games like GTA V don’t have a realistic representation of scale. My hometown is bigger than the entire map of Skyrim as are most peoples.
@MultiSpeedMetal
Exactly, and so I don't take much of the setting seriously. No wonder armies are just about 100 men. Tamriel is like 15 miles from Alinor to Vvardenfell. Tiny place, Lichtenstein dwarfs it.
@@MultiSpeedMetalhell at least whiterun had farms at all. I think windhelm is the only other city that has them. (I was going to say morrowind lacked local farms but then I remembered the egg mines, fishing villages, and slave plantations.)
Crazy that this is your first video and i got it randomly recommended
the fact that oblivion came out in 2006 i think its a miracle we got a game that was as good as it was
fàct
Didn't Tamriel originally have more of a Mesoamerican design before it was revamped? That might make sense of it sitting in an inland lake with only a few bridges, if it was based more on Tenochtitlan than Rome.
In Arena and daggerfall it didn't and Morrowind is implicitly stated to be very much an outlier that has a lot of autonomy in both culture and governance.
I assume you mean Cyrodiil/the Imperial City and not Tamriel, but while it was Tenochtitlan it was not necessarily Mesoamerican, with generally more Roman and South-East Asian inspirations. The Tenochtitlan comparison is specifically in the way the city was described in the Pocket Guide to the Empire, 1st edition, which reads as follows:
"From the shore it is hard to tell what is city and what is Palace, for it all rises from the islands of the lake towards the sky in a stretch of gold. Whole neighborhoods rest on the jeweled bridges that connect the islands together. Gondolas and river-ships sail along the watery avenues of its flooded lower dwellings. Moth-priests walk by in a cloud of ancestors; House Guards hold exceptionally long daikatanas crossed at intersections, adorned with ribbons and dragon-flags; and the newly arrived Western legionnaires sweat in the humid air. The river mouth is tainted red from the tinmi soil of the shore, and river dragons rust their hides in its waters. Across the lake the Imperial City continues, merging into the villages of the southern red river and ruins left from the Interregnum."
Ignoring all the purple prose and glorification, it presents it as much like well, Tenochtitlan, a massive city built not on an island in a lake, but over the lake itself. Although it's worth that if we're comparing to Tenochtitlan for defensive purposes, Tenochtitlan was actually /dotted/ in bridges, but they were designed to be easily retracted or dismantled for defensive purposes.
As the other person implied however, this was actually only a brief moment in the irl history of the lore. This description first appeared in the PGE1, which was a booklet included with Redguard, the game which totally overhauled the series' lore into what we know it as today. This also came with descriptions of the whole province being almost entirely jungled. Morrowind then copied a lot of the PGE1's text as description text from npcs (which is part of why a lot of people don't realise these descriptions come from Morrowind), but actually started dismantling the representation of this Cyrodiil within its actual depictions, removing much of the Asian inspiration, and never really depicting the supposedly all-important split between the Colovians and Nibenneans, implying that equestrian knights exist in the supposedly almost entirely jungle Cyrodiil. And then Oblivion almost entirely undid much of it (although it had a bit more of a split of the two cultures, at the very least, than Morrowind's depiction). But people got very, very attached to this depiction of Cyrodiil, and have been bellyaching, both fairly and unfairly, about it ever since.
Also as always, the note is worth making that none of the provinces and their inhabitants have been inspired by a single people, especially after the Redguard revamp.
I think the conclusion on this video really nails it. A well designed game world doesn't necessarily always have to make sense, it has to be good enough to make you enjoy it enough to miss those parts that doesn't make sense.
A lot of Oblivion's size and limitations can be looked past with the suspension of disbelief. The cities are small but in lore are much larger and we can pretend that. The Imperial City is land locked, but in lore it is connected to the ocean and we can pretend that. The Oblivion crisis and the battle against the gates took entire armies to fight, but in game it's at most 50-ish guys, but we can imagine the epic stand the armies take. Because for all the faults Oblivion and its world is just fantastic enough that you can immerse and let it take you on a tale of magic and monsters.
In fact, I've always found that so far all of the Elder Scrolls games have been able to nail that suspension of disbelief and that atmosphere pretty consistently. It's why it's such a shame for me how lazy Bethesda has gotten lately, forgetting that magical mix of effort and immersion that let you submerge yourself in their worlds. You can see in their work, like in Starfield and Fallout 76, that they still know *how* to make them but they don't put in the _effort_ to do it.
The ending of this video is something that current day studios need to take to heart. They underlying game is the single most important part of the experience. The story and gameplay themselves need the most refinement. Focus too much on polishing things that don't really matter and you get the current day AAA games crisis. Buggy, unfinished messes that put way too much attention to detail into things that don't really matter causing the core experience to suffer as a result.
Am I saying that this kind of thing never matters or that details like this shouldn't be polished? Of course not. However, I'd prefer for game studios to focus on making games that are similar in scale to great games that came before first and foremost, and then spend whatever time and budget they have left over polishing the smaller details like the things pointed out in this video. Make the core experience good and polished and refined first and only then put more specific attention into ironing out the smaller problems.
I might've agreed a month ago but after playing Enderal: Forgotten Stories, a full Skyrim conversion mod I have to disagree. The map was entirely handcrafted, albeit using Skyrim's assets, yet completely decorated and polished and offering much more diverse terrains. There's only one main city, but it is massive, with dozens of houses, a museum, bathhouse, massive barracks, huge temple, marketplace, 2 player houses, 3 taverns, etc and a huge underground city as well.
Yet despite the time and effort put into the map itself, the story was phenomenal and was delivered in a manner I've seen many other people compare to the likes of The Witcher 3, or even coming close to Baldur's Gate 3. The characters were well written and felt like real individuals, and the voice acting was performed with passion. Taverns even had bards playing songs the devs composed themselves.
SureAi, the studio that made this full AAA quality game were just a team of 14, and the craziest part is that it's completely free on steam. Obviously they had the entirety of Skyrim's code to work with as a base compared to making something from scratch but I also think companies nowadays just have to deal with too much restrictions on their creative freedoms, which leads to devs with subpar motivation and equally subpar games.
I mean that isn't Besthda's problem though it's scope creep and their enablity to manage it... Like Peach's casle in Super mario 64 a game on a much weaker console, pressed on a cartrige, likly had a much smaller budget and inovated on tons of stuff... Was well made and made sense while being a jungle jim that showed your progress on the story... Like why wasn't the imperal city like that? Why wasn't it a hub from which you explored the wrold from? Like it has the concept of a hub but an implementation of an after thought...
@@GreenBlueWalkthrough jungle Jim lol
although this doesn’t apply too much to the imperial city, where there is no foreseeable immediate threat, when it comes to early modern and pre modern cities and castles/forts, often sprawl would be disensentived, destroyed, or made impermanent for defensive concerns. if you are under seige, its not a good idea to have ready cover just outside your walls. So if there was any, they would be destroyed.
It's "disincentivised", but I respect that you took a crack at it anyway
Except not everyone is going to be living within the castle/fort walls. A city like this would be tens of thousands of people at least. Outside of the city would be littered with structures and farms.
Likewise, a fullscale seige of a city would take an enormous army. It's not a small undertaking.
What? Disincentivized for strategic purposes? Its a city for Christ sake not a fort, people will live outside the walls, until it’s too big and they’ll have to build new walls around the new residential area, and then, again after that.
Case in point, Jerusalem, look at its history. Hell look at history in general, what’s with this warped understanding of how things worked back then.
@@madmantheepic7278 what are you on about? Yes cities do expand and make new walls as needed, but they also regularly DESTROY the sprawl outside of the current walls if a city is under the threat of siege (like if there is a potentially hostile state or raiders nearby).
you know, cities were often sieged in warfare right? not just forts. They are kind of important seats of power. how many sieges did Jerusalem go under? Paris?
Lore: From the shore it is hard to tell what is city and what is Palace, for it all rises from the islands of the lake towards the sky in a stretch of gold. Whole neighborhoods rest on the jeweled bridges that connect the islands together. Gondolas and river-ships sail along the watery avenues of its flooded lower dwellings. The river mouth is tainted red from the tinmi soil of the shore, and river dragons rust their hides in its waters. Across the lake the Imperial City continues, merging into the villages of the southern red river and ruins left from the Interregnum. The Emperor's Palace is a crown of sun rays, surrounded by his magical gardens.
Actual game: BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPFFFFFF
*plonks oblivion portal in your well fortified capital city*
I noticed the sprawl part, but then I DM'd games for my friends for around 30 years, carefully crafting new worlds and such countless times. So, certain things just 'pop' for me. A supposedly bustling city that has definite boundaries only really makes sense, for me, in once case: when the immediate outside of that city is so hostile that all citizens stay inside the walls. And, it's really hard to convince me that the capital city of a major empire has that problem.
I never noticed the water part, though. But, I think that goes back to your earlier comment: Budget.
The lack of sprawl I can forgive in oblivion. The lack of sprawl outside New Atlantis in Starfield is literally unbelievable.
I remember thinking that the oblivion gate in the waterway immediately north of Leyawiin would be the focus of an important quest since surely the game would observe that it blocked the only connection between the Imperial City and the sea but then there was just... nothing
There is a ford across the lake near Vilverin where you start the game. I am certain it intentional too because if you look closely there are paths (poorly defined but there) on either side of it. You can wade all the way across it without ever going into the swim animation.
Oblivion is the game that pulled back the veil on hype for me. Once I saw the technical limitations compared to what I imagined from trailers, marketing tactics to make a game look extraordinary were just transparent from then on
The imperial city is so wierd my device lost framerate and my mobile data crashed when i clicked on this video
10:28 it also only gives attackers on ground only one way in, creating a funnel for archers to fire into 👀
Great video, I haven’t learned anuthing new, or something I don’t know about Oblivion, but it was interesting to hear your opinion and your perspective on the approach to the game dev back in time
Fairly certain lorewise the imperial docks weren't originally docks but an heartland elf shipyard.
If the imperial city were real it would look like the round city of bagdad
Cool vid =)
That Leyawiin concept art look really interesting.
My idea to fix the river there though would be to make it a tide kind of thing, where on low tide you can see a muddy pathway leading to the city.
But yeah the imperial city is weird. Always felt to me like an oversized hallway.
Never realized how weird the city was, nice video.
great video ! really enjoyed it even tho i've never played any elder scrolls game
I can't believe you only have 3 videos. I need more videos like this. This was great.
Oooh this is a cool video!!
you should do one about Vivec (the city, not the guy)
Thanks for watching!! Vivec (The City) is definitely a nightmare city too, though I suspect a lot could be hand-waved by ~deep obscure Tribunal lore-religion reasons~ causing them to just ignore conventional city planning haha
It has ramps, docks accesable from the sea and trade district as the main entry at least. :P Molag Mar would the worst in Morrowind imo.
@@antonisauren8998That's the one that's a single Canton? Those dunmer had a little too much Sujamma making those.
@@JohanKylander Yup. It has a dock with rocky stream leading to the Inner Sea. Bane of real time travel mods.
@@Slaughterneko My understanding is that the city of Vivec was *intentionally* designed to be confusing for anyone that wasn't a local. Vvardenfell has a history of being xenophobic, and they abhor outsiders with a passion. You can even see this with one of the cantons - the "Foreign Quarter." It's as far away as possible from the temple and other structures - almost added as an afterthought.
Also (and this is speculation on my part), it was designed to be as confusing as possible to any invaders. That place is a maze to anyone that hasn't lived there for many years - imagine an invading force trying to navigate their way through in order to take over.
The imperial city never connecting to the ocean was something that has bothered me for years, especially with how the river past leyawiin is so shallow and thin and windy and I always thought that would never work for such a large and important city
As someone who really dwelled in the Lore, loved the details and good worldbuilding Morrowind brought to the table and who had a Pen & Paper and a Fansite going back in the days I recognized all these things. And one of the things we had written in the rules for the RPG: Everything you see ingame is a mere representation of what it should look like, if it would be realistic and as such go with your imagination, not with the actual ingame content, when involving yourself in the games world for the PnP.
I was also into the whole cut content, especially because of these flaws (and some major disconnects with the games lore from the ingame-lore-books like missing two whole important towns in Cyrodiil (one of them is Sutch, they made into a fortress ruin between Kvatch and Anvil), the Arenas that every major town should have like in Arena, the Imperial Palace without any rooms for the emperor or the imperial offices. The different Layouts / designs for some of the cities, the Imperial City missing the famous blue Palace, every village only three of the same ugl buildings (really a major setback after the beautifull farmsteads we had in morrowind sprinkled in). Oblivion was in every aspect cut short and the worldbuilding suffered really, what makes the sentiment back in the days, that it is forgettable generic medieval fantasy to some extent true. But with the years now a lot of people come forward, who have very nostalgic feelings and memories of love and enjoyment for it, because it was the elder scrolls game of their generation, they grow up with, in some cases their first big RPG. And its so lovely now to hear people talk about it, instead of the totally overrated Skyrim.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video. It's really interesting seeing a game I've played for nearly 20 years through the eyes of a professional game designer. You truly gave a remarkable insight, thank you. I'll now never not think about the Imperial city not connecting to the ocean lol.
Never really got in to oblivion but I LOVE this video. Keep up the good work. You deserve many more subscribers
If you're planning to analyse other video game cities, I like to submit Gran Soren from Dragon's Dogma 1.
The city is decently sized (it feels like a real city) and its right on the coast, but has no port whatsoever and it is completely surrounded on the land side by ruins, [with no food source in sight.]*
It sits in contrast with Vernworth from the second game, which has its own port and its surrounded by wheatfields, farms, and sprawl on the land side.
*I forgot about the farming district.
Actually I thought the field near the Pawn Guild was the closest thing to farm land though admittedly I never went to that part of Gran Soren much.
@@Chinothebad I forgot about it. Thanks for pointing it out.
Absolutely agree with you, I to am a level and world builder and I think about things like this all the time, what could have been.
This is why I mod for now lol, in a few more decades I would love to see where were at capability wise with PC's and what kind of worlds we can build! Great vid 👍
I love Oblivion. My favourite ES game. The soundtrack is legendary.
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
I never noticed that there was no waterway to the ocean. And to be fair I literally have the maps of Cyrodiil and Tamriel hanging above my screens, and on there it looks like there is a way around Leyawiin. :D
Part 3 blew my mind 🤯
I would love a remake of oblivion with more areas. But with the rustic charm of the original.
Boy oh boy do I have news for you! The modding team for Skyblivion is doing exactly that
there's a rumored remake supposedly in the works with unreal engine used for graphics. Hopefully if its real it wont just be a graphical update.
When you said "I'm doomed to think about my work" as you play games I immediately imagined how that must suck. I see strange details because of my work too and it ruins my hobbies just as much. Bless you man 😭
The Imperial City always had this squished together style of toys made for really young kids for me.
good thing that giant guard doesn't exist, imagine if that was actually the boss captain of the guard or something
What a brilliant video, the outro was so well written.
There's a channel called sckchui that YEARS AGO did a series about the architecture and urban planning of Morrowind, which I really learn a lot from at the time. He also mentioned how the Imperial City looks weird because it's so rigidly planned and has no sprawl, iirc. This is also an issue with Vivec in Morrowind, for similar reasons (ie. saving on processing), but once you notice it, it's gonna be weird forever. One thing that always bothered me about Oblivion is the complete and utter lack of cows. It just... seems like something that should exist in a medieval fantasy game. Sheep, chickens, cows, at a minimum. (On a bit of an apropos, Morrowind does a really good job showing off the different ideologies and subcultures of its factions through the architectural tileset and town layout, it's worth giving the channel I mentioned a look.)
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.
1:44 it wasnt an oversight. The imperials weren't originally meant to be a race and wouldn't be introduced until Morrowind.
The existence if imperials as their own race was a retcon.
Redguard, not Morrowind. As a rule of thumb, just about everything we usually think was introduced in Morrowind was introduced in Redguard.
I was an imperial in arena
This reminds me of an AnyAustin type video. Love these video game essay videos. Keep it up dude!
A direkt survery!
Keep making videos dude these are great
Great vid man, and I gotta say that yeah, kid me noticed all the weird quirks when I first played it. It drove me crazy as a kid why I had to walk all the way around the damn thing just to sell my gear in the Market District. Or that ships couldn't actually sail the Niben or even the lake since most of it is to shallow to even swim.
Yea maybe the swamps at leyawiin and the shallow waters of the lake are due to historically low water levels
This was very impressive in 2006. Skyrim was actually a downgrade in city design, but it’s my opinion that Skyrim was a downgrade across the board except for that there were more things to do.
Big downgrade was the quest design.
Oblivion had some really cool quests.
Skyrim is 90% in caves fighting bandits and draugr, with the occasional dwemer remnants.
"Skyrim was actually a downgrade in city design"
lmao no
i noticed the lack of sprawl but yeah the hill and the landlocked aspect caught me way offguard!
Oblivion was limited by it's engine and it's creators basically. It's kinda like how fallouts don't have working cars despite their lore saying they do. You basically have to pretend the sprawl is there and think that for ever person you see there's like 1000 more that are there in the background.
And to think, 20 years ago this was a cutting edge game and was used for PC benchmarks for most of the rest of the 2000’s. They had to work with limits of the technology at the time.
@@BriggieIt's that way even now. Developers are more likely to use the extra performance to make compressed world nicer/more detailed than reducing compression. And TBH I can't blame them. If you don't strive for absolute realism, pointlessly lenghtening commute is counterproductive for the game itself.
The biggest thing was Radiant AI. As the video touched on, every NPC had to have their own home, places they could go, day to day lives, and every building should have a purpose as well, usually facilitating those lives. This /vastly/ increases the sheer amount of effort necessary for basically everything. Add a new house to increase sprawl? Well now you need to fill its interior cell, add who lives there, decide on their day-to-day schedule, including accounting for how that would run up against others', and thus the needs that are there as well, since you couldn't add 10 more npcs visiting Oblivion's taverns without making the taverns bigger. Even if you magically gave the Oblivion Team an engine that could achieve everything they ever dreamed of, they wouldn't make their cities /objectively/ big, because even before we account for what it might be like for a player to have to walk those massive distances, they'd just need to put a lot of work in to actually implement everything.
And ultimately, that's a tradeoff for a specific kind of immersion they were going for. They were going for, instead of a giant city that has to fudge the implication that the people there lead actual lives, it's an unquestionably alive city that has to fudge the idea that it's more than a few dozen people. Doesn't work for everyone. Me personally, I absolutely prefer it this way, I'll take a dozen more Imperial Cities and Whiteruns to one city where 99% of the citizens are glorified cardboard cutouts and the only gameplay difference between a house and a boulder is the shape.
@@tanwenwalters7689 Yeah, you'd need and AI to make a story/life/interaction with other pcs for thousands of npcs. But that's another steaming pile of shit I'd rather not get into.
There are definitely a bunch of little towns outside of major cities but they're really not close enough to cities to be called "sprawl". But the world isn't completely devoid of all settlements outside of cities.
Also I think a really interesting thing they could have done for the trade aspect to make more sense in spite of the awkwardness with stairs everywhere and only one bridge etc is if the mages at the arcane university worked with mages at the other Mage's Guild halls to create a teleportation network that made it so goods could be teleported into warehouses. That would grow the wealth of the city considerably faster since you would literally have no travel times.
Though you're still right about all the stairs creating so many other annoyances.
I like to think that the Ayleids are the ones who built all those stairs, and levitation magic was common enough back then that they didn't need to traverse areas by foot.
@@Irisverse well that's fine but still, think about wagons and horses that cannot go up the stairs. Did the Ayleids not need horses and wagons in their cities? Or did they have flying wagons? Either way, I think that after over a thousand years the Imperials would have done something to address that.
@@ArvelDreth The Ayleids totally had levitating wagons IMO.
@@ArvelDreththe Aylieds had slaves
@@jonskillings1258 that doesn't really mean anything in this context.
I still think that Weye is bullshit. There's an inn and a single other house. That's not a town. That's a bandit target.
Furthermore, Weye doesn't make sense. Weye is right outside the city. Just walk for like 20 minutes and you can rest at the high end imperial inn, or whatever it was called, instead of the bandit bait.
Good video, i never even thought about all the stairs 😅 as for sprawl, i feel like a world full of goblins and minotaurs and necromancers might... discourage... people from living outside city walls. They would still need farms, though...
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
Hey good job man, awesome video!
See you soon with 100k subscribers.
AND YET this game is a master piece! The story the side quests the random encounters etc!
The stairs thing isn't entirely unrealistic tbf, there are IRL cities like that - Edinburgh and Luxembourg spring to mind.
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.
Sir Patrick Stewart? 0:54
Yup.
About the steep road from the bridge up to the city gates... I would like to point out some medieval castles that were built on mountain tops, that also have steep roads. It can be seen as a defensive measure. It´s more difficult for attackers (and things like catapults) to get / shoot up to the wall / gate, while it´s easier for archers and war machines to shoot down on the approaching army.
Also, if there is only one way an army could realistically attack through in strength, then that is a plus-point for defense as well. A city (especially a wealthy one) should always have enough food stored to hold out a while.
Great video, would love to see you talk about the city of Vivec.
I would love a series on quirky level and world designs of various games that make no sense once you stop and think about it! :D
The river was perfectly navigable until the Empire banned levitation. After that, a series of exceptions were under negotiations, when, well... # headcanon
With how the capital was built I’m surprised the Empire survived the Aldmeri Dominion
In a lot of european city's it wasn't legal to live right outside the city walls. That could be an explanation for the lack of sprawl.
No Sprawl? What about the inn of ill omen or that small village where everyone is invisible? I'd call that sprawl.
Loved the video, not overly fatalistic.
I think the important thing, as you sorta said, is simulation. Yeah its not a perfect simulation, but if you're there it can work for sure.
I kind of thought the same with Riften. Where is all this trade coming in from and why are we hauling it all up old stairs?
You made me realize I've never gave the imperial city much thought in terms of logistics. It really didn't matter to me but now I can never unsee that the city is landlocked with a single entrance and exit lmao
I have seen some more current images and maps of the Imperial City and it turned the entire island into sprawl. Very cool, and as a European, yeah, outside the city centers is still a lot going on, even in olde times.
For the Leyawiin island situation, I have seen similar things along the Rhine, with castles and towers in the middle of the river on some island. No bridges, they used ferries because said river was and still is a major shipping lane.
Thanks for the video!!
Honored to say that I’m your 100th subscriber. Keep up the good work!
Oblivion is a game which is 2 fifts of ehat it was suposed to be so much cut content its sad really. And its still one of the best games ever made.
Same could be said about Skyrim tbh
@@BlackTacticalVest not at all at all friend. If you research both games and their cut contents oblivion has i would say about 75 precent more cut content
@@DAGGERBLIVION I meant more in the way that both games were much much smaller in reality than the original planned scale/scope of the games was supposed to be, but ik people gotta hate on Skyrim any chance they get
@@BlackTacticalVest what who hates on skyrim i love it whats the metter with you. I only said what is the truth and that is than oblivion was supossed to be a lot bigger than skyrim was
“Step aside, sound planning. Rule of cool is talking.”
I did notice how steep that hill always was, but I never gave it much thought lol
Nice video, please continue with this topic of world building mistakes in games
i never noticed these things! you are so right and now i can't not know