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SPOILER INFO
Major spoiler – discussion of many Skyrim settlements. Unless you are familiar with all the hold capitals, please do not read this article.
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(Vanilla) Skyrim towns are largely a disappointment.
You start the game in Helgen, a village that is being destroyed. There will be nothing but ruins. Fine.
Next, you will go to Riverwood which is, like, a nice lively village with various houses and people and things to do. Great.
The next location which you will go to is very likely to be Hviterun. A real town with a defense wall. Shops, inns, a castle – wow. Awesome! You can't wait to see the rest of Skyrim.
After that comes one letdown after another. Windhelm – a grim mountain of rocks. Winterhold – a few hovels between heaps of snow. Morpork – a maze of caves. Falkert – a village so depressed that even the sun won't shine there. After 90 hours of playing in my first serious game, I felt so ripped off.
A mod author wrote (as a justification for his Hviterun overhaul mod): "Whiterun is also the first city the player is likely to visit. Therefore we should be treated to a much larger city to begin our journey." I couldn't disagree more. Your game experience is not supposed to peak in the beginning. Remember how it was in Fallout ? You got to a town and were so impressed, but then you discovered a town bigger still, and so on. As you progressed, things got more and more magnificent. The authors of Skyrim have completely failed in the creation of towns. Vanilla Falkert is like a small completely impotent dick. I wonder the jarl doesn't live in a cave. Dånstar and Morthal, even though not such dismal failures, look nothing like towns, let alone hold capitals.
I was glad to eventually find that it was not a complete rip-off. Bitchen is a real town and Solitud is magnificent. It is a good thing that Solitud will probably be one of the last towns you'll discover. But between your discoveries of actual towns are tens of disappointing hours during which you'll be seeing miserable dumps posing as hold capitals. I don't care how lore-friendly it may be. I want towns that look like towns.
The size is not the only thing that is wrong. The other one is mood. Realistic as the climate may be, what is the point of playing a game in an environment where you don't feel good? Hviterun is a place where you want to go everywhere, talk to everyone and explore every nook and cranny. Falkert and Windhelm are so joyless and oppressing that completing tasks there is a burden. Whenever I had to be there, I kept noticing the constant urge to get away, or even reluctance to continue the very game. Even Bitchen is a far nicer place, in spite of its many nasty inhabitants. At least it isn't so depressingly dark all the time.
Last but not least, it doesn't make sense that there are very few settlements apart from hold capitals. A hold can't consist of a hold capital and one village, or not even that. It's a very lame joke.
Fortunately there is a number of mods on the Nexus site that will make the settlements of your choice bigger, improve their looks and add new settlements. Just write "skyrim windhelm mod" or something like that into a search engine.
[originally published 2017-01-04]
