Skyrim scholar uses geometry to determine how walkable the RPG's best cities are, and the results are terrible: "Worse than some car-centric suburbs in Texas"

News
By published

Windhelm needs to figure out its sidewalks

Skyrim
(Image credit: Bethesda)

Everyone loves a walkable city, even an Argonian, I'm sure. But, according to one Skyrim fan and geographic information systems (GIS) graduate student, Tamriel has some serious geospatial issues.

The grad student, Henry, recently conducted a study they posted on Substack analyzing how walkable Skyrim's major cities Solitude, Windhelm, Riften, Whiterun, and Markarth are. After converting each city's map into a graph and performing statistical analysis Henry came to a conclusion: not very walkable.

"Overall, it appears that while most of Skyrim’s cities are walkable from a connectivity standpoint, they fall short at providing direct, efficient routes between residential locations and amenities," Henry observes. "I think the clear winner here is Solitude, given that it has the median Beta index and much lower average circuity. I guess the Imperial legion knows how to plan a city better than the Stormcloaks (or at least pick a better place for their headquarters)!"

I just don't know how the Stormcloaks plan to lead an insurrection without decent sidewalks…

Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.