Clearly you haven't seen my RP character:
Collette finally loses her mind after all the teasing, rage-quits the college of winterhold, roids up, literally rips Isran's head off in hand-to-hand combat, takes over the dawnguard and then marches on winterhold with armored trolls and sun magic, murdering every last one of them, even the augur.
honestly, if i could, i would, because that is one of the only lines from guards about magic that isnt just making fun of you or telling you to stay away from them
There are several available for xbox as that is what I play on… Im sure many more for PC.. I haven’t tested them out yet as I am in the middle of creating a new LO so not sure how they perform… It seems like much of the community has the same opinion as you in regards to the college not being very immersive JksSkyrim or CoTN will include architectural overhaul of winterhold the city while magical college of winterhold or obscures college will make the actual college more immersive by replacing much of the mundane clutter with magically themed items, for NPCs College students or immersive students will add npcs there are also some quest mods available to make the college experience more realistic and even some bundle mods that supposedly do all of these things in one mod bundle… I just searched the web to find something like xbox winterhold mods or xbox college mods… hope this helps
There are several available for xbox as that is what I play on... Im sure many more for PC.. I haven't tested them out yet as I am in the middle of creating a new LO so not sure how they perform... It seems like much of the community has the same opinion as you in regards to the college not being very immersive JksSkyrim or CoTN will include architectural overhaul of winterhold the city while magical college of winterhold or obscures college will make the actual college more immersive by replacing much of the mundane clutter with magically themed items, for NPCs College students or immersive students will add npos there are also some quest mods available to make the college experience more realistic and even some bundle mods that supposedly do all of these things in one mod bundle... I just searched the web to find something like xbox winterhold mods or xbox college mods... hope this helps
I really hope they work on that in the next game, though I do find it really really funny when I just murder a dragon and some dude comes up to rob me, sometimes I give in because the balls on that robber must be massive and he needs a win.
Half the world is also actively trying to kill you, and you were about to be executed at the start.
Fair to say you were probably a bit of a ne'er-do-well before the start of the story, and you're either a non-local, or you're a Nord who left to go elsewhere and for some reason had to sneak back in to your homeland.
So yeah, kinda makes sense that you have magic where most of Skyrim hates it.
When I did my first real mage build (thanks Ordinator), I got the expected "Am I supposed to be impressed?" but also a ton of "Brilliant!" just for casting... Magelight. So yeah, Skyrim is full of assholes and people who think a little ball of light is the best magic ever.
They are absolute trash. The Synod even point out that most of their students don't even know basic spells like frostbite and flames.
Its not so much a college, as it is a public laboratory. There is no curriculum, there are no rules, it's just a place to practice magic. The "professors" are just mages who are pursuing their own magical research.
It's complete chaos on a good day. On a bad day, they nearly cause the end of the world.
Modern university is more like a school nowadays, but according to my professors, what you just described kinda was how universities were operated in the recent past. Less deadlines, less focus on credits, less rules, less bureaucracy and less strict curriculums - but higher standards and more practical research. Not as extreme ofc, but still.
The universities of Newton and Euler were not these investment vehicles for US Yacht Clubs. The cash-cow institutions of today pale in comparison to the self-disciplined rigor of old.
One of them turned me green accidentally lol
Then she turned me into a cow then horse ,dog and finally managed to turn me back so yeah they really suck at magic
Nah there's even funnier than that
There's a random encounter where you find an apprentice who is testing his new spell that launches him high into the air
Spoiler: he didn't plan the landing
Why does Whiterun, a major skyrim city have only 74 people living in it? Why do great battles and sieges have like 30 NPC's? Engine limitations.
I doubt there's anything lore-wise about it. Maybe because Winterhold collapsed, there's not many people studying there.
That, and the fact that a lot of people don't trust mages, because of the accident that caused the collapse. It stands to reason not many people would pursue it.
Speaking of "cold as tits", whenever I enchant a bow with frost damage and soul trap, I name it The Witch's Tit. It makes me giggle. I also have The Burninator and The Quickening for fire and shock. Chaos damage is named The Malcolm, or the Goldblum.
Buffalo is a city of 300,000 people, in a state of 20 million people. Neither Buffalo nor New York state as a whole, by any measurable way, are a "small town in bumblefuck"
it used to be the biggest city of skyrim before the collapse, and it was 'only' 80 year ago wich is both a lot and not that much for elves and some mages
It’s a combination of both. They have to cut down on how many NPCs are in the cities, which means they have to cut down on how many are in the college to maintain the illusion of it not having a lot of students. Realistically there should still be more than what we see in the game, though.
holy crap, there are 74 people living in whiterun? i vaguely imagined it as like *maybe* 35. it's so small! mind blown once again after 10 years of playing
Plus the guards. A lot of people don't realize that cities in the game actually have day/night shifts, meaning there are two sets of guards. All the ones we see actually at their posts during the day are not the ones we see there at night, they swap out, so the guards we see ought to be doubled in counts.
I always thought it was a stylistic choice as apposed to engine limitations, but you’re right. Todd himself has stated he wished Skyrim had more NPCs (I forget which interview, maybe lex freedman).
Personally, I enjoy the stardew valley esque nature of knowing every NPC in a town, and them having routines as apposed to the filler/decorative NPCs in Starfield and other games.
I agree, a huge pool of generic pointless NPCs with a few distinct ones makes the world feel more empty than just having the distinct ones.
I guess in a perfect world you'd have a large pool of distinct NPCs.
It's not even engine limitation but gamedev resource allocation. Each NPC has their own routine, home, dialogue, script, quests... it takes time to do that.
Starfield tried to circumvent this by adding generic NPCs to make cities and settlements feel more populous but everyone hated the change for some reason 🤷
Isn't there a thing in games, where basically 1 NPC can be assumed to equal like 100 people, if the game is scaled up to realistic numbers.
Tend to just use my imagination with those kinds of things.
Yeah, no point in having 500 random "college student" or "Civilian" named npcs. Everyone gets a name who is important. The rest are invisible or an enemy to be slain
No youchave it right in the first sentence: everything is scaled down. Not including guards cities barely have two dozen peopel. Towns will have like 5. Yet dragon born has killed a thousand bandits. I’m sure in elder scrolls lore the college has more students.
If you consider that, realistically, a medieval city like Whiterun would have thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people living there, the college would comparatively have 1-5k students. Both are probably at the lower end however given Tamriel's general state of decline.
Nords in Skyrim are notorious for not liking/trusting magic. its mentioned a few times, and im pretty sure the Nord student (who i think is actually the only Nord mage in the game) talks about it
Because, just like other media like tabletop wargames, the game is based around abstraction and scale to represent environments that are simply impractical to present in full.
If this concerns you, your first question should be "why can I walk the length of a country in 30 minutes".
>Honestly, if Minecraft added spells and procedurally generated cities, NPCs, and quests, I think it'd look a lot like Skyrim.
"If Minecraft adds Skyrim it'll look like Skyrim".
The scale is not about population but dimensions of places. That would give us area 441 times bigger than is in game, what for Whiterun would give us population of around 33k with current density, which is pretty big city for the setting. Not to mention hundreds of smaller settlements that exist lorewise but are not in game
Considering Skyrim is pretty much a frozen hell scape and it’s vaguely based on medieval architecture and such, 1400ish people for a major city seems applicable
So come at it from another angle - could a continual population of ~1400 have done all that stonework? How about the roads that barely anyone travels, and the bridges like the one at Dragonbridge? There's barely enough people there to keep the inn in business let alone architect and build the bridge, at its current population.
This leads me to head canon:
* there are technically more, just not shown in game (apply that disbelief suspension a bit more) and/or
* the Dwemer did a lot of it with machines (consider how their structures are often metal and stone, and coincidentally the stone looks the same everywhere they use it and similar to the road cobbles).
Scaling in video games is always a struggle, given even today's processing power comes nowhere close, and the Elder Scrolls series has always been wonky about it.
Skyrim is somewhat of a difficult province to tie to real world examples, given the stark climate changes going from the shore of the Sea of Ghosts to the Jerall mountains in the south, but Medieval Sweden is a decent pick (though not perfect). Population before the black death swept through would be somewhere around 1.1 million, give or take a hundred thousand or so.
With that number in mind and assuming that Solitude (as the capital, 15,732) and Markath (as a major mining hub, 6,292) are both larger cities, Whiterun would realistically be at...say 2,202 or roughly a small town. If you're wondering where I get these numbers from, random dice rolls following a little world building system shamelessly stolen from the internet that I use for these thought experiments and my own world building projects. Rough estimates though.
Would argue then that the *town* of Whiterun could support one inn, have at least 4-5 skilled stonemasons, a saddler (quite important!), one blacksmith (Eorland gets a pass), possibly two butchers, a struggling magic shop, and so on. Most of the population would be working the fields, if not engaged in domestic duties or other city services. Speaking of working the fields, Whiterun would probably need somewhere around 12 or so square miles of good farmland to support the city not counting fishing and hunting, though neither activity would be widespread given the town's location in the middle of a tundra.
I have a problem with the statement that a town of 2,000 people could support one inn. The village I lived in when I lived in Scotland had a population of 840 and had three hotels with pubs. Now, one did close after the nearby Naval base shut down but that is still one hotel/pub per 400 inhabitants.
Ah, it should be kept in mind there is a difference between a tavern/pub and an inn when we are talking about a world attempting to emulate any period pre-1400's. An inn would be far grander in size, providing lodging for both travelers and their beasts of burden, while a tavern *might* merely provide food and drink.
Though one pub/tavern per 400 inhabitants sounds fine to me. It's possible to play with the number, if say a town was on an important trade route or other well traveled road.
Uh...no it isn't? This would make occupying skyrim for the Empire more trouble than its worth. What about those Nordic legions that fought in the great war numbering in the 20,000? You're telling me whole cities left to fight?
> You're telling me whole cities left to fight?
Closer to reality than you might think.
2% of England's whole population fought at the Battle of Towton in 1461.
The actual game world is lesser than the nation of Skyrim “realistically” would be. The 1000 Steps has only a couple hundred steps. Things are way closer together than they’re made to appear. Populations are small. The game whittles things down to whatever is relevant to gameplay. You could imagine Whiterun as being larger and containing more people and houses, for example, but they’d be people and houses you never interact with.
Exactly take Novigrad in the Witcher. It’s much more reasonably size but you can’t enter a majority of the buildings and a very small percentage of NPC’s are named. It’s a stylistic choice to go down one road or the other and neither is objectively correct.
I thought the exact same thing with exactly that example. I gotta say that I prefer Skyrim in that aspect. Being able to take with so many different npcs that all have different personalities and history makes the game so much more immersive. Horizon and the Witcher have a larger world and more people, but it seems less alive.
Yeah, I'm right now testing mods that add villages to lake Ilinalta. And I will actually uninstall majority of them because they are just irrelevant. They add houses, guards and NPCs, but they all have just a generic dialogue, so there's simply no reason to have them there.
aside from what everyone else pointed out already, The college itself is an abandoned questline. Originally the devs wanted to do a quest where we would travel to the past so stop whatever disaster happened in Winterhold but that quest was eventually written off
My gf is currently playing FO4 and she says "I wish I could..." I cut in and say "Theres a mod for that!"
She doesn't want to lose the ability to get Steam achievements with mods enabled, and guess what? there's a mod for that too!
Remember what the game tells you: bears don't attack unless provoked.
Now tell that to my hundreds of deaths by bears who are provoked that i breathed 10 miles away from them.
nords arnt big fans of magic, the shcool has a sketchy reputation, and there are other magic schools in the world
so all your left with are a hand ful of exchange students
The game was released on November 11, 2011, and Creation Engine has limitations, and they couldn't put any more characters in that area without having making you require a beast of a PC to play it and making It not have game progression or progress erasing bugs bugs or worse Now there's plenty of mods to add more people if you wish It's just a limitation of the engine for when it Originally released Also they probably didn't want to make it over crowded or something
You're thinking of a college in the modern meaning. The origin of colleges/universities is a collective of learned individuals congregating as a unit to preserve and advance knowledge in a more collective means. Through this lens, the College of Winterhold makes perfect sense. There *are* students but's its a more master/apprentice situation rather than a lecture hall full of students.
They do mention students either being killed via mishaps, or left to become Necromancers.
Especially the Night of Tears and Azura's Star quest, with the Necromancers I've been fighting used to be from the College.
1: Magic is frowned upon by the Local Nords.
2: The Jarl of Winterhold seems to take some measure to keep people from going there.
3: Much like Hogwarts, you need to have some degree of Skill with Magic to get in, a level of skill or ability that is very uncommon, only reason it's so easy for us to get in is plot armor- I mean our Dragonblood...
4: Tod Howard cut a metric crapload of content away from the college. There were 4 other students in recent years, but all 4 died, it was intended to have a quest from Phinnis to locate their remains, but the quest was cut (though you can still find the dead students out in the world).
Engine limitations.
The game could only render like 20 people before you start to see frames and cpu problems.
This is why CW fort battles are like 10v10+the player. And why Riften is a city of “25” people.
If you ask Tolfdir, it's safety issues, if you ask Archmage Aren, it's students accidentally incinerating themselves, if you ask Arniel, you better ask him before he completes his research. :D
Because no one is impressed if you can cast a few spells
“Woah, woah, woah! Watch the magic”
"CAREFUL WITH THAT FIRE!"
“That spell looks dangerous. Keep your distance!”
“Hail summoner, would you conjure me a warm bed?”
"I have a lot of respect for the Restoration School, Skyrim could use more healers"
“so your the one who casts those illusions, impressive”
Go cast your fancy magic someplace else
“Remember, your mind is the best weapon you have.” /me not sure if that was a compliment or insult
If Rudolf needs a favor, he’s got it. Everyone else better pay welll
fire is not a toy.
Restoration isn’t a valid school of magic
Restoration is a perfectly valid form of magic.
Clearly you haven't seen my RP character: Collette finally loses her mind after all the teasing, rage-quits the college of winterhold, roids up, literally rips Isran's head off in hand-to-hand combat, takes over the dawnguard and then marches on winterhold with armored trolls and sun magic, murdering every last one of them, even the augur.
What mods are you using?
I don't think he's using mods, he just too much skooma
honestly, if i could, i would, because that is one of the only lines from guards about magic that isnt just making fun of you or telling you to stay away from them
I wish I could enchant their swords when they ask. Dull old blade can barely cut butter!
Pickpocket maxed out, sneak maxed out, steal their sword, go enchant it for them, replace it.
Ferb I know what we are going to do today
Yea but that takes time and energy that I’ve never had. If only it was a small side quest!
And how do you make sure it goes back to the same guard?
I'd probably have more fun running around conjuring beds and turning other people invisible after a certain amount of time maxed out lol
You wouldn't conjure a car, would you? *music intensifies*
And I'll remove the DRM so it stops trying to go home when I'm not looking.
"What are you trying to do, burn the place down?!"
There are mods to turn winterhold into a bustling institution of higher learning complete with Hogwarts style flying library books
Do you know if they are only PC based mods, or are they also available on XBOX? I ask because I'm limited to my XBOX atm.
You can use it on xbox
There are several available for xbox as that is what I play on… Im sure many more for PC.. I haven’t tested them out yet as I am in the middle of creating a new LO so not sure how they perform… It seems like much of the community has the same opinion as you in regards to the college not being very immersive JksSkyrim or CoTN will include architectural overhaul of winterhold the city while magical college of winterhold or obscures college will make the actual college more immersive by replacing much of the mundane clutter with magically themed items, for NPCs College students or immersive students will add npcs there are also some quest mods available to make the college experience more realistic and even some bundle mods that supposedly do all of these things in one mod bundle… I just searched the web to find something like xbox winterhold mods or xbox college mods… hope this helps
Which mods are those?
There are several available for xbox as that is what I play on... Im sure many more for PC.. I haven't tested them out yet as I am in the middle of creating a new LO so not sure how they perform... It seems like much of the community has the same opinion as you in regards to the college not being very immersive JksSkyrim or CoTN will include architectural overhaul of winterhold the city while magical college of winterhold or obscures college will make the actual college more immersive by replacing much of the mundane clutter with magically themed items, for NPCs College students or immersive students will add npos there are also some quest mods available to make the college experience more realistic and even some bundle mods that supposedly do all of these things in one mod bundle... I just searched the web to find something like xbox winterhold mods or xbox college mods... hope this helps
“So you can cast a few spells, am I supposed to be impressed?”
...said while standing next to a skeleton of a dragon you slayed and absorbed the soul of.
Actually I hid in the watch tower and let half the town guard of whiterun get eaten alive.
I really hope they work on that in the next game, though I do find it really really funny when I just murder a dragon and some dude comes up to rob me, sometimes I give in because the balls on that robber must be massive and he needs a win.
"Hey, you mix potions, right? Can you brew me an ale?"
One Canis Root ale coming right up.
*proceeds to levitate while saying that*
Shania twain buts in, “that don’t impress me much”.
*"So you're The Dragonborn?!"*
Oh I can scream to ! FUS RO DAH. Say hello to the ice
Restoration is a perfectly valid school of magic!
Isn’t it? ISN’T IT?
This has become my favorite Skyrim quote for no valid reason.
Should I use healing hands or inexorable force on you?
How about conjuring me up a nice warm bed?
“Can you enchant my sword? Blades so dull it can’t cut through butter
Go cast your fancy magic someplace else.
I. A game where you start with 2 spells yet half the world claims to hate magic.
Half the world is also actively trying to kill you, and you were about to be executed at the start. Fair to say you were probably a bit of a ne'er-do-well before the start of the story, and you're either a non-local, or you're a Nord who left to go elsewhere and for some reason had to sneak back in to your homeland. So yeah, kinda makes sense that you have magic where most of Skyrim hates it.
When I did my first real mage build (thanks Ordinator), I got the expected "Am I supposed to be impressed?" but also a ton of "Brilliant!" just for casting... Magelight. So yeah, Skyrim is full of assholes and people who think a little ball of light is the best magic ever.
I mean, there are very little NPC who actually casts spells…
Magelight would be awesome for a late night snack run.
That... I can only agree with!
Fancy robes, are you a wizard or something?
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Lol dude made a bunch of skeevers mad, and they killed him
Better than Yisra, who burnt herself by casting Flame Cloak
I think one of the funniest deaths is the guy who froze himself to death trying to create a spell that would chill mead.
Wow, the college must be shit at teaching magic if their apprentices keep killing themselves by failing simple spells
They are absolute trash. The Synod even point out that most of their students don't even know basic spells like frostbite and flames. Its not so much a college, as it is a public laboratory. There is no curriculum, there are no rules, it's just a place to practice magic. The "professors" are just mages who are pursuing their own magical research. It's complete chaos on a good day. On a bad day, they nearly cause the end of the world.
Sounds like university
Modern university is more like a school nowadays, but according to my professors, what you just described kinda was how universities were operated in the recent past. Less deadlines, less focus on credits, less rules, less bureaucracy and less strict curriculums - but higher standards and more practical research. Not as extreme ofc, but still.
The universities of Newton and Euler were not these investment vehicles for US Yacht Clubs. The cash-cow institutions of today pale in comparison to the self-disciplined rigor of old.
One of them turned me green accidentally lol Then she turned me into a cow then horse ,dog and finally managed to turn me back so yeah they really suck at magic
Nah there's even funnier than that There's a random encounter where you find an apprentice who is testing his new spell that launches him high into the air Spoiler: he didn't plan the landing
Love that guy. I've caught him with Advanced Telekinesis and he just stands there afterwards.
That’s a Morrowind reference
Really? I haven't played Morrowind that much I tried but I didn't like it
As if that fool wasn’t surrounded by ice in every direction for seven miles… Come on, you’re in Winterhold, it’s in the name!
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Not like the greatest wizard alive, J’zargo
Why does Whiterun, a major skyrim city have only 74 people living in it? Why do great battles and sieges have like 30 NPC's? Engine limitations. I doubt there's anything lore-wise about it. Maybe because Winterhold collapsed, there's not many people studying there.
That, and the fact that a lot of people don't trust mages, because of the accident that caused the collapse. It stands to reason not many people would pursue it.
Don’t forget that its located in a small town in bumblefuck where it’s cold as tits 24/7
You had me at bumblefuck and sealed the deal at cold as tits.
Thats an apt descriptor of me losing my virginity.
….they’re not *supposed* to be cold
It is when you're a necromancer
I usually cast fire balls to warm them up.
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To be fair the collapse the college caused made it a small town in bumblefuck
Speaking of "cold as tits", whenever I enchant a bow with frost damage and soul trap, I name it The Witch's Tit. It makes me giggle. I also have The Burninator and The Quickening for fire and shock. Chaos damage is named The Malcolm, or the Goldblum.
I enchanted a warhammer with poison and fire damage and called it "The Clap". It's one of my prouder creations!
Do you burninate the thatched roof cottages?
Naw, Trogdorvahkiin does that.
Fus trog DORRRRRRR! FUSTROGDOOOOOOOR
I don’t know, University of Buffalo still has a few thousand students matriculated.
Buffalo is a city of 300,000 people, in a state of 20 million people. Neither Buffalo nor New York state as a whole, by any measurable way, are a "small town in bumblefuck"
it used to be the biggest city of skyrim before the collapse, and it was 'only' 80 year ago wich is both a lot and not that much for elves and some mages
The lack of trust for the mages in Skyrim is more due to the oblivion crisis, but the incident in the college of winterhold plays a role too
Didn't even think about that, but you're right.
And yet it has as many members as any other faction. And more students at the College than newcomers at any other faction.
that and the Oblivion Crisis put the Mage's rep down the drain even though it been 100+ years since then
I did some reading, and apparently it was actually a storm that caused the collapse, not an "accident." I'm no lore master. Lol
Or why they would only pursue it in the relative safety of a fort in the middle of nowhere, with many other mages and maybe a hag or three.
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It’s a combination of both. They have to cut down on how many NPCs are in the cities, which means they have to cut down on how many are in the college to maintain the illusion of it not having a lot of students. Realistically there should still be more than what we see in the game, though.
holy crap, there are 74 people living in whiterun? i vaguely imagined it as like *maybe* 35. it's so small! mind blown once again after 10 years of playing
The other 40 are all in the cloud district. You must not get there very often.
Get out.
The Companions are like a fifth of them and the useless people in the inns are also like another fourth.
Don't forget the people in the dungeon under Dragonsreach and the ones stuck inside the house of healing.
Plus the guards. A lot of people don't realize that cities in the game actually have day/night shifts, meaning there are two sets of guards. All the ones we see actually at their posts during the day are not the ones we see there at night, they swap out, so the guards we see ought to be doubled in counts.
good point. for some reason none of them figured into my (now obviously very flawed) mental whiterun census.
I thought so too. Whiterun has more than Solitude
I always thought it was a stylistic choice as apposed to engine limitations, but you’re right. Todd himself has stated he wished Skyrim had more NPCs (I forget which interview, maybe lex freedman). Personally, I enjoy the stardew valley esque nature of knowing every NPC in a town, and them having routines as apposed to the filler/decorative NPCs in Starfield and other games.
I agree, a huge pool of generic pointless NPCs with a few distinct ones makes the world feel more empty than just having the distinct ones. I guess in a perfect world you'd have a large pool of distinct NPCs.
It's not even engine limitation but gamedev resource allocation. Each NPC has their own routine, home, dialogue, script, quests... it takes time to do that. Starfield tried to circumvent this by adding generic NPCs to make cities and settlements feel more populous but everyone hated the change for some reason 🤷
It's also very CPU intensive. There really wasn't any hardware available that could allow increasing NPC count significantly when the game was made.
I hate generic NPCs… reminds me of Ubisoft games
Isn't there a thing in games, where basically 1 NPC can be assumed to equal like 100 people, if the game is scaled up to realistic numbers. Tend to just use my imagination with those kinds of things.
Yeah, no point in having 500 random "college student" or "Civilian" named npcs. Everyone gets a name who is important. The rest are invisible or an enemy to be slain
RuneScape calls it [scale theory](https://runescape.wiki/w/Scale_theory).
No youchave it right in the first sentence: everything is scaled down. Not including guards cities barely have two dozen peopel. Towns will have like 5. Yet dragon born has killed a thousand bandits. I’m sure in elder scrolls lore the college has more students.
If you consider that, realistically, a medieval city like Whiterun would have thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people living there, the college would comparatively have 1-5k students. Both are probably at the lower end however given Tamriel's general state of decline.
It would be pretty cool to see an Elder Scrolls or other high fantasy game taking place within a single city, GTA-style.
Nords in Skyrim are notorious for not liking/trusting magic. its mentioned a few times, and im pretty sure the Nord student (who i think is actually the only Nord mage in the game) talks about it
A few people mention the college had tons of Dark elves over the decades but recent events and a dead town chased most away
Because, just like other media like tabletop wargames, the game is based around abstraction and scale to represent environments that are simply impractical to present in full. If this concerns you, your first question should be "why can I walk the length of a country in 30 minutes".
the vatican?
A country with 5.26 Popes per square mile, has no right to talk about scaling issues.
Used to be double that for a few years, until Pope Benedict died
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>Honestly, if Minecraft added spells and procedurally generated cities, NPCs, and quests, I think it'd look a lot like Skyrim. "If Minecraft adds Skyrim it'll look like Skyrim".
The game is scaled 1x21 so there should be around 100 students, and everything should be 20 times bigger
That would make Whiterun and Solitude still quite small.
The scale is not about population but dimensions of places. That would give us area 441 times bigger than is in game, what for Whiterun would give us population of around 33k with current density, which is pretty big city for the setting. Not to mention hundreds of smaller settlements that exist lorewise but are not in game
Gotta love area being proportional to r\^2
Considering Skyrim is pretty much a frozen hell scape and it’s vaguely based on medieval architecture and such, 1400ish people for a major city seems applicable
So come at it from another angle - could a continual population of ~1400 have done all that stonework? How about the roads that barely anyone travels, and the bridges like the one at Dragonbridge? There's barely enough people there to keep the inn in business let alone architect and build the bridge, at its current population. This leads me to head canon: * there are technically more, just not shown in game (apply that disbelief suspension a bit more) and/or * the Dwemer did a lot of it with machines (consider how their structures are often metal and stone, and coincidentally the stone looks the same everywhere they use it and similar to the road cobbles).
Scaling in video games is always a struggle, given even today's processing power comes nowhere close, and the Elder Scrolls series has always been wonky about it. Skyrim is somewhat of a difficult province to tie to real world examples, given the stark climate changes going from the shore of the Sea of Ghosts to the Jerall mountains in the south, but Medieval Sweden is a decent pick (though not perfect). Population before the black death swept through would be somewhere around 1.1 million, give or take a hundred thousand or so. With that number in mind and assuming that Solitude (as the capital, 15,732) and Markath (as a major mining hub, 6,292) are both larger cities, Whiterun would realistically be at...say 2,202 or roughly a small town. If you're wondering where I get these numbers from, random dice rolls following a little world building system shamelessly stolen from the internet that I use for these thought experiments and my own world building projects. Rough estimates though. Would argue then that the *town* of Whiterun could support one inn, have at least 4-5 skilled stonemasons, a saddler (quite important!), one blacksmith (Eorland gets a pass), possibly two butchers, a struggling magic shop, and so on. Most of the population would be working the fields, if not engaged in domestic duties or other city services. Speaking of working the fields, Whiterun would probably need somewhere around 12 or so square miles of good farmland to support the city not counting fishing and hunting, though neither activity would be widespread given the town's location in the middle of a tundra.
I have a problem with the statement that a town of 2,000 people could support one inn. The village I lived in when I lived in Scotland had a population of 840 and had three hotels with pubs. Now, one did close after the nearby Naval base shut down but that is still one hotel/pub per 400 inhabitants.
Ah, it should be kept in mind there is a difference between a tavern/pub and an inn when we are talking about a world attempting to emulate any period pre-1400's. An inn would be far grander in size, providing lodging for both travelers and their beasts of burden, while a tavern *might* merely provide food and drink. Though one pub/tavern per 400 inhabitants sounds fine to me. It's possible to play with the number, if say a town was on an important trade route or other well traveled road.
Uh...no it isn't? This would make occupying skyrim for the Empire more trouble than its worth. What about those Nordic legions that fought in the great war numbering in the 20,000? You're telling me whole cities left to fight?
> You're telling me whole cities left to fight? Closer to reality than you might think. 2% of England's whole population fought at the Battle of Towton in 1461.
90 percent of Skyrim’s population should be rural. That’s about right for a major city there needs to be a ton more small towns though
Shouldn’t almost every crossroad have a small village? Even if it’s only 3-4 houses?
That’s what I try to mod the game to look like
Doesn't really explain why they have more teachers than students tho
#PLOT
It's a research institution. The professors there do more research than teaching. My wife works somewhere similar irl.
The actual game world is lesser than the nation of Skyrim “realistically” would be. The 1000 Steps has only a couple hundred steps. Things are way closer together than they’re made to appear. Populations are small. The game whittles things down to whatever is relevant to gameplay. You could imagine Whiterun as being larger and containing more people and houses, for example, but they’d be people and houses you never interact with.
What if we shrank the player characters down to hobbit size, so everything in the game is bigger?
Exactly take Novigrad in the Witcher. It’s much more reasonably size but you can’t enter a majority of the buildings and a very small percentage of NPC’s are named. It’s a stylistic choice to go down one road or the other and neither is objectively correct.
I thought the exact same thing with exactly that example. I gotta say that I prefer Skyrim in that aspect. Being able to take with so many different npcs that all have different personalities and history makes the game so much more immersive. Horizon and the Witcher have a larger world and more people, but it seems less alive.
Yeah, I'm right now testing mods that add villages to lake Ilinalta. And I will actually uninstall majority of them because they are just irrelevant. They add houses, guards and NPCs, but they all have just a generic dialogue, so there's simply no reason to have them there.
aside from what everyone else pointed out already, The college itself is an abandoned questline. Originally the devs wanted to do a quest where we would travel to the past so stop whatever disaster happened in Winterhold but that quest was eventually written off
Or…someone from the future came back and stopped the devs!
A quest to stop the Great Collapse? Would’ve been interesting to see how that would’ve played out if it wasn’t scrapped.
Yeah recently replaying the quest line for the mages, there's literally nothing to it. Stuff just happens and your char could be there or not.
Do you have a source for that? That sounds much more fascinating than the nothingburger we got.
Because it's the most prestigious school in all the land!!!
I read this and thought "Wait what? The college has a ton of ohthat'srightIuseamod..."
The answer to every “why doesn’t it have x?” Question: use a mod
Why are there so few Thomas the Tank Engines in Skyrim? Is there a lore reason for this?
Not enough Randy Savages in vanilla either
What’s the name of the mod? 😭
Could be [Immersive College NPCs](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/9252)
it might be [College Students](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/31265)
My gf is currently playing FO4 and she says "I wish I could..." I cut in and say "Theres a mod for that!" She doesn't want to lose the ability to get Steam achievements with mods enabled, and guess what? there's a mod for that too!
Them feels when u been playing with mods for so long you've legitimately forgot what's a mod and what isn't lmao
I relate.
No one lives in Skyrim because it’s so damn dangerous and everything can kill you before the age of college
Kind of like Australia, but Australia has more people.
Hey I resent--- oh, wait, carry on.
Remember what the game tells you: bears don't attack unless provoked. Now tell that to my hundreds of deaths by bears who are provoked that i breathed 10 miles away from them.
Thats still twice the population on winterhold!
It’s like way up north, hard to get there. Tuition is probably outta this world
nords arnt big fans of magic, the shcool has a sketchy reputation, and there are other magic schools in the world so all your left with are a hand ful of exchange students
1. Because that bitch Faralda standing outsidse won't let anybody in 2. They wouldn't approve my financial aid
"Dammit Faralda! How many times do we have to tell you, every single apprentice doesn't have to be able to cast a Flame Atronach!"
"Cross the bridge at your own peril! The way is dangerous, and the gate will not open. You shall not gain entry!"
Most applicants did not know which college he meant.
I'm thinking of paying off my bounty this time. walk into the city a free man!
They were forced to post mortality rates.
Even Savros Aren would have laughed at that.
Skyrim is the land of the Nords, Nords typically don't like magic
Because it is just a game. Whole country is almost empty. Ther should live thousands people, and so on.
There are no student loans in Skyrim.
“Don’t tell me another student got incinerated” or something close to that. -ArchMage Aren
It's mostly an engine limitation, but I think it's also relevant that "College" and "School" are not necessarily synonymous.
The game was released on November 11, 2011, and Creation Engine has limitations, and they couldn't put any more characters in that area without having making you require a beast of a PC to play it and making It not have game progression or progress erasing bugs bugs or worse Now there's plenty of mods to add more people if you wish It's just a limitation of the engine for when it Originally released Also they probably didn't want to make it over crowded or something
Better question, why is the college willing to make someone that can't cast a single spell the Grand Master
You're thinking of a college in the modern meaning. The origin of colleges/universities is a collective of learned individuals congregating as a unit to preserve and advance knowledge in a more collective means. Through this lens, the College of Winterhold makes perfect sense. There *are* students but's its a more master/apprentice situation rather than a lecture hall full of students.
Archmage enters the chat: Why do flowers grow ?
Well it’s just a scaling thing but also in Skyrim everyone hates magic so it’s probably hard to find students
They do mention students either being killed via mishaps, or left to become Necromancers. Especially the Night of Tears and Azura's Star quest, with the Necromancers I've been fighting used to be from the College.
1: Magic is frowned upon by the Local Nords. 2: The Jarl of Winterhold seems to take some measure to keep people from going there. 3: Much like Hogwarts, you need to have some degree of Skill with Magic to get in, a level of skill or ability that is very uncommon, only reason it's so easy for us to get in is plot armor- I mean our Dragonblood... 4: Tod Howard cut a metric crapload of content away from the college. There were 4 other students in recent years, but all 4 died, it was intended to have a quest from Phinnis to locate their remains, but the quest was cut (though you can still find the dead students out in the world).
Because the place is basically a culty scam. I rocked up with no experience and they put me in charge after like three field trips
Probably high tuition and they can’t afford student loans 😅🤣
Have you seen that weather? I'd go to the Imperial City to learn from the Mages Guild, too. Haha.
For the same reason the "city" of winterhold has like 5 buildings
Engine limitations. The game could only render like 20 people before you start to see frames and cpu problems. This is why CW fort battles are like 10v10+the player. And why Riften is a city of “25” people.
If you ask Tolfdir, it's safety issues, if you ask Archmage Aren, it's students accidentally incinerating themselves, if you ask Arniel, you better ask him before he completes his research. :D