What do they eat?

Some games have no issues making realistic towns/cities

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That’s all well and good but those are all just bells and whistles that add next to nothing to the overall enjoyment of playing the game. The gameplay in assassins creed is the same bland shit it was a decade ago. Maybe instead of wasting their budget on making a “living, breathing world”, they could have put some time and money towards making the game actually engaging to play.

Also, all those npc activities are only effective for immersion if you don’t spend any time watching them. If you actually spend a minute or two looking at one you’ll notice that they just loop around in circles like a prop in an amusement park ride. That breaks immersion much more than if they didn’t pretend to be living people to begin with.

Everybody realises that they’re playing a video game. Nobody actually gets tricked into thinking that they’re experiencing real life through the eyes of the player character.

>Durrr but I can't INTERACT with every NPC even if they just spew the same dialogue over and over again and I can't enter every house and fling all the plates about so it can't work in TES or fallout

why do you want a unique approach to disappear?

assassins creed is not a massive rpg.

>The gameplay in assassins creed is the same bland shit it was a decade ago.

Sounds like you already have an opinion about the series. Regardless I was not talking about gameplay, as that's not what the thread is about, just small details. If Ubisoft of all studios can make convincing cities with convincing activities then Bethesda should be able to at least try a little harder.

>they just loop around in circles like a prop in an amusement park ride.

Only the early Asscreed games had NPC's walking in circles in crowds doing nothing. Generally speaking in the new games they're doing those tasks I mentioned before.

>its not real so it doesnt have to make sense

The last 2 are RPG's. With more or less the same depth as Skyrim or fallout 4. And just shy of Witcher 3.

And just like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Witcher 3, the gameplay is bland and the world/exploring is more interesting. Which is why those small details come as a nice touch.

Imperial City was better than anything in Fallout 3, 4, and Skyrim. No reason they can't make another decent city

When I walk around my real life city I don’t see farms or factories in my area. I would have to get in a car and drive for at least an hour to find either of those things.

Megaton has stores and there are traders outside the city walking between other towns. It can be inferred that the people in town trade or barter with other settlements and traders for supplies. It’s also possible that they hunt the local wildlife.

If you want to complain about it being a shit abstraction, you’d be better complaining about the fact that you can touch the walls of the city. They would be much better off to use invisible walls with a vast city in the background to infer size (like Midgar in FF7). The way it is, people may consider it to be a literal representation because you can see the walls around the city from both the outside and the inside. This is a common problem in most games though - definitely not something exclusive to fallout 3.

Oblivion actually did do some interesting things with NPC schedules despite how janky the radiant ai is, like one character having an affair and sneaking to sleep with a different woman on certain days or characters journeying out to different cities on certain days of the month. It's a shame bethesda axed a lot of it because it was too much work and not many other games bother to put in unique details to no name npc schedules.

That game came out a 7 years and a full console generation after fallout 3 user.

Sure, but that kind of thing is something you will scarcely notice unless you follow a single NPC around all day, or look at their schedule on a wiki.

Don't get me wrong though, NPC schedules are an easy thing to implement and they should keep it. Just add MORE THINGS for the NPC to do, so their life is more believable. Rather than, you know

>Wake up
>Sit in chair for 3 hours
>Stand in market for 6 hours
>Go to inn
>Initiate 'shove bread towards face animation'
>Go to bed
>Repeat

something youll never know about: pussy.

It's hard doing it for hundreds. Majora's Mask does it, but it's a 3 day schedule, one town

People might scarcely notice it, but that is the point isnt it? Most people in life don't notice the minutia of someone else's schedule. But I mean I would say that it is difficult to implement if you are actually doing a unique, or even slightly differentiated, schedule for potentially hundreds of npc's, and this is something which is unfeasible for most devs with anything larger than bethesda's anemic towns, especially since as you said most people won't notice this detail.

The one brahmin in town is shared by every single local.

I will also say that I do have to give Bethesda credit for the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quests actually encouraging people to notice the NPC schedules.

I won't notice the ins and outs of a particular NPC's schedule

I WILL notice when every NPC's schedule consists of "walk blankly through town, sit in chair, shove bread at face, repeat"

That's where the need for hundreds of small tasks/animations like Asscreed NPC's have comes from.

Sure, if You mean "simply wait until 3am because there's a 99% chance they'll be asleep and then sneak in"

>the NPC schedules
well of course, that was one of their selling points for the game

It did get more complex for characters such as Adamus Phillida

It depends on what the game is trying to convey. For a game like Pokémon, you’re completely right. For a game like Fallout, where survival and rebirth of civilization is at the center of everything you see and do, it’s not “autistic” to wonder where the farms are at. There are many quests that center around the idea of food and water, so it’s not just background theming or something that can be left to the imagination.

The difference is that agriculture is an icon of civilization, and in a game about civilization rising from the ash, it's an important symbol.