I have a confession to make: when I first playedThe Witcher 3back in 2016ish, I never made it to Novigrad. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the game, but I had such a good time exploring the countryside, the woodlands, all those crazy islands and archipelagos in the seas and lakes of Velen, that some 25 hours into the game (before life for some reason got in the way and I stopped playing), I wasn’t really aware that the game even had properly built up urban areas to explore. Villages, towns, Keeps and castles housing sullen kings in grand halls, sure, but living, breathingcities? Just didn’t cross my mind.
So imagine my mirth when last week, on my first proper run through The Witcher 3 (inspired by its Next-Gen update), and after 20 hours of assisting bumpkins with their oversized pest/monster problems, I finally made it to Velen’s capital of Novigrad. Andmanhas it been incredible. Both my arrival in and subsequent experience of Novigrad are an impressive change of pace in a game that’s already blown me away with its scale and storytelling by the time I even got there.
First up: no horses allowed in Novigrad. That means you need to dismount your trusty horse pal Roach, who has pretty much been your main means of transportation for the dozen-plus hours you’ve spent galloping around the wartorn countryside. And considering how you can easily spend the following 10 hours on foot in Novigrad, that changes the dynamic of the game dramatically. Everything gets condensed; you’re suddenly covering much smaller distances, but the amount of stuff happening around you is amplified immeasurably. If you’re playing the Next-Gen update edition, I suggest utilising the new over-the-shoulder camera, which does a nice job of getting you that bit closer to the hustle and bustle of the city–the market stalls, the grimy civilians, the ray-traced puddles sitting lazily in the mud and cobbles.
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Like any good medieval city, Novigrad is surrounded by serf huts and farms fuelling the city (inevitably leaving the city’s poorest to have their homes burned down in the event of an invasion). From here, you don’t quite appreciate the full scale of the city though, with only its most towering and elevated buildings poking over its walls. But once you get within those walls, you can practically smell the mead and the herbs and the meaty body odours of its denizens. The music switches from the melancholy ‘rural’ ambience to more upbeat, lively numbers, and–without having to rely on a single cutscene–you really get the sense that you’ve ‘arrived’ in this vast, buzzing place.
As soon as you step within those walls, Novigrad besets you with its sheer energy. Strumpets looking for custom, drunks shambling through the streets, bands playing, zealots preaching, guards grumbling, and merchants shouting over each other touting wares like at an old-timey English market. It may be a little unfair to compare this toSkyrim–which precedes The Witcher 3 by a good four years–but given its enduring popularity and the relative scarcity of open-world RPGs it’s kind of inevitable. Where in Skyrim even the most bustling cities feel like more like villages in a real-world sense–the kinds of places where everyone knows the smithy and the priest and who’s banging who–Novigrad is far more vast, dirty, and dynamic. There’s a real background buzz to the place, a sense of a crowd, where in Elder Scrolls games–or even more recent titles with notable cities like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Fallout 4, or Dishonored 2–the populations always tend to feel scarce, and overly attentive toyouspecifically. Now, don’t get me wrong, Geralt gets a fair bit of attention, but it all feels narratively integrated–him being a conspicuously yellow-eyed ashen-haired witcher and all–and for the most part you get that urban sense of anonymity you want from a video game city.
Sure, you might start eventually seeing character models repeating themselves, or NPCs uttering the same loops of dialogue, and there are a few too many encounters where you casually cleave four gang members in half in broad daylight then be on your merry way, but the real depth of the city is found below the surface in its politics. Novigrad is effectively run by four feuding gangs who you invariably get involved with if you stick around for long enough. Through this, you’ll uncover impressive cavernous bath-houses where you run into old friends, a manor where a serial-killing gang leader has sequestered himself away, haunted houses, and affluent homes where–being the rakish vagabond that you are–you flirt with wealthy maidens as you teach them how to wield a sword.
Like a great real-world metropolis, you get swept up in Novigrad, heading down alleys that may emerge into courtyards with lush green foliage creeping down the cobbled walls, or onto a trio of clown-faced thugs wearing jockstraps and ready to bludgeon you. Having just read China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and loved its spectacular vision of the festering metropolis in which it takes place, I get some of those vibes from Novigrad–that sense that you never know what weird stuff awaits around the next corner.
Novigrad’s place in the story plays a key part here too. When I first arrived, my objective was simple: find a boat to take me to Skellige. I was ready to go too, having had an amazing time exploring Velen but keen to explore a new land. I didn’t expect Novigrad to be more than a quick stop on my way to new lands and could’ve boarded that ship immediately upon arrival.
Yet here I am seven hours, still wrapping up the myriad side-stories and adventures I somehow got caught up in between the city’s entrance and the docks where my boat awaits. I’m waiting for the local master swordsmith Hattori to finish crafting me a new sword following a lengthy quest in which I sabotaged the production lines of his rivals; I’m preparing to fight the city’s bareknuckle champion after rising through the ranks; I’m tying up loose ends with the various power brokers who have information to help Geralt track down Ciri. It’s been a wild adventure in the urban jungle.
With the exception of games that are entirely set in a single city, I don’t think I’ve ever spent this much time in a video game city without leaving. In fact, when a quest last night led me out to Oxenfurt to meet Geralt’s old pal Vernon Roche, I hadn’t ridden Roach in so long that I momentarily forgot that you double-click the analog stick to call on my trusty steed.
Sandwiched between the narratively rich countryside of Velen, and what I’m expecting to be a whole new land and culture in Skellige, The Witcher 3 could’ve easily got away with making Novigrad a stop-off point–a superficial city with a bit of atmosphere but nothing much happening beneath the surface. The Witcher 3 is vast enough that it didn’t have to be in any way defined by the urban experience Novigrad, and yet here it is: one of the best cities in gaming, pulling you in from the Velen countryside to carve out a whole new (and almost entirely optional) chapter on your journey through the game.
