Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-50.72.53.15-20131125223904/@comment-24.175.228.163-20150527212009

You can only really guess. Comparisons based on the actual in-game populations are a bad way of determining the population lore-wise. That's why there's several times as many bandits, necromancers, mauraders, daedra worshippers, and ect. than there are actual people. It really is just limited to the games capacity, back in the days of daggerfall, everything was randomly generated, and the vast majority of NPCs didn't have unique dialog or anything, just a copy-pasted script. Now, everyone has to have at least SOME unique things to say. Can't have everyone just be a generic, personality-less information booth.

My guess is, lore-wise, the in-game populations of cities and NPCs are actually far greater than protreyed in game. There's probably several million, but who knows, really. You can't measure the population based on sheer landmass, population doesn't work that way, else Russia would have a way higher population than India or China. I'm guessing there's probably a pretty decent number, think europe in the roman days.