I made Whiterun in Unreal Engine 5 – at a more realistic and lore-accurate scale!

The purpose of this particular project was to visualise a more real-life scale to Skyrim – specifically the holds and cities. Now with traditional video game technology, that was rightfully impossible, especially eleven years ago. But now we have UE5 – and more importantly – we have Nanite. So let’s see how big we can go!

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Now, there aren’t any hard numbers as to the real-world populations of Skyrim – all we can say for certain is that it was much more than what was seen in-game.

As Todd Howard once mentioned in an interview: “All of our lore is obviously written as ideal, to say X province or city has so many people, but you can’t always actually pull that off on screen, or even store it, so you try to create a scale that feels good in game, that plays well and is fun. So the scale of the terrain and the number of NPCs is always geared to the gameplay more than the lore saying how big or small something is.”

The only concrete number we have for any city in Tamriel is Daggerfall with a population of 110,000 as of 3E 401 - and do keep in mind that even that could have just been a throwaway number.

I found this article in particular to be very interesting: ([ Ссылка ]) and used it along with referencing real-life populations for medieval Scandinavia as a rough base-line, keeping in mind the agricultural situation in a tundra, along with the constant conflicts (and bandits!). Rough neighbourhood, Skyrim.

But, at the end of the day, this is all pure speculation, so take it with a large grain of salt. I’m putting this version of Whiterun at around 9,000 – 10,000 people – with maybe up to 11-12k if you factor in another couple of thousand in outer hamlets/villages etc… plus travelling merchants and people simply passing by and staying in inns. Also factored in was the increased prevalence of multi-generational households in medieval times, as well as the on average higher number of children per family.

I was originally placing it at around 20,000 - 30,000, but I do think that Skyrim’s climate, with bitter winters and permafrost in the ground, would make agriculture difficult – less food=less people, and so a smaller overall population would seem to make more sense. But again, this is pure conjecture...

From a playability standpoint, I’m not sure that you’d actually want something this big – it’s a lot of work for the artists and you run the risks of making a big, empty world with not much to do. But for lore visualisations like this – not really an issue!

Rendered in Unreal Engine 5.2 Preview on a 3060ti at 30fps in a 2:39 aspect ratio. A mix of third-party models and custom assets modelled in Blender, textured in Mixer. Nanite was used for all models and foliage; Lumen for global illumination and reflections.

Please NOTE: This is a FANMADE cinematic tech DEMO inspired by Skyrim.

Soundtrack: “Skies” and “Surroundings” by Helmut Schenker.

Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound.

0:00 – Cinematic
2:04 – First-Person Walkthrough

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