Why I love Novigrad

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Why I love Novigrad

I've been playing RPGs since the 1980s starting back with the Ultima series of games, and Novigrad is the first city that actually feels like a city. It feels big, it's continuous with no loading screens, winding alleys and streets and masses of people. The cities in Skyrim/Oblivion were physically small, and you had to use your imagination to make them big, plus they had loading screens whenever you entered a building. There were some isometric games that had large cities (like Baulders Gate), but they were really just several maps linked together that had loading screens between the different sectors. There are no loading screens in Novigrad, it creates a feeling of being in a world and not a game. Just incredible.

I know most of you here have been playing for a couple years, but this is my first time through (currently level 15), and I'm just continually amazed at the world CPR has created.
 
Yes, Novigrad looks like real medieval city and it is amazing to run across it's tall buildings and to observe it from the distance, really beautiful sighting.

But I can't agree with you about imagination - it's quite opposite - in TW3 Novigrad is just a background for many quests, but aside from quests there isn't much reason to visit it - only to upgrade weapons. So you need to think something like "oh it is wonderful that someone finally CGI'd a city which looks like real and imagine that I visit it like tourist..". But without this imagination, city is empty, there are unnamed traders (with nothing useful you can buy from them), unnamed citizens, tons of forever-closed doors everywhere and so on...

If you take Elder Scroll's cities - you are always happy to visit them by gameplay reasons - you have limited weight, so you need to get rid of your loot, you need training because it is limited per level, and then to craft or enchant something then sell it to a trainer to return you money, etc... so everytime you need to go to a list of people and places during rather short daytime and there is no need for imagination - you are doing this while playing. And every door can be opened, every citizen have it's name and place in lore, everybody can be pickpocketed or killed, so despite loading screens and small sizes, those cities feel "alive". But anyway it's just a two dozens of houses and this is disappointing in Skyrim, especially if you ever played Morrowind and there was huge alive city of Vivec.
So nowadays Bethesda created an illusion of city by gameplay means and CDPR made the same with visuals, let's hope that in future games, both developers will made both.
 
yes i like novigrad very much, it's very representative of the northern realsm, there is wealth, poors, crmnals, preachers, you can find anythng in there, fells really active and alive
 
Novigrad has pretty much everything a real city would need to actually function. Did you ever come across a city in an RPG and think: Where do people wash their clothes? Where do they get the materials to build up their houses? Where do they get their food? Who does that kind of work? Where do they dispose of the dead?

Novigrad answers all of those questions and more. Which is probably the thing that is lacking in other RPG's that want their cities to feel alive and immersive.
 

iCake

Forum veteran
The cities are great in the game, probably the best ever created. There is one thing that is blatantly lacking though, that's chatter and the unmistakable noise of many people talking at once, things that are so common to any big city. There is a semblance of it in the game, but in my opinion not nearly that "believable".
 
I love Novigrad and my Geralt goes back there sometimes even when he doesn't need to. But there is one question I have (as with all the games I've played) - where do people go to the toilet????
 
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