Novigrad…

… sucks. What a tedious, convoluted buzz kill. Get Junior. Just kill me. Get me the hell out of this city without any more completely pointless redirections

Easy to get lost in there too. After a while I got oriented with landmarks.

I’m just trying to advance the main plot to get out ASAP. Writing and quest design there is pretty substandard compared to what came before it. So many things that could have been done here. Wasted opportunity

Novigrad was my least favorite part.

Really, as I said before, the quests in Velen are the peak along with some elements of the main quest that I won't spoil for you.

Love the Skellige setting. I stuck around long enough in Novigrad to wrap up all the major quests for the core NPC cast from the previous games so that’s good closure. It did improve but I’m certainly happy to be in a fresh area.

Eh? Have you stopped to eat or sleep?

You must be on vacation or something.

My beef with Novigrad is the "find Dandelion" questline. It's too long, and there's too much running around. However, I find Novigrad to be a great city, especially later on during some of the later quests there, once I knew my way around.

Completely agree - hated that part of the game, and it's a big reason I lost interest. It's also what's keeping me from trying again.

Honestly, I felt the same about Skellige - except there's no town to get lost in. But it's full of "political intrigue" which is about the most boring storytelling I can think of.

Whatever.

If you can't get lost in a city, then it ain't a city at all.
Means, TW3 is the only game that does the city right!

You hate it? Go play some "collection of villages", a settlement type Susan Boyle described when explaining where she lives.

You crack me up Joxer

I still think Novigrad is the most impressive city I've seen in a game to date, but I get why some people don't like it from a gameplay standpoint. There's too much running back and forth, and it's not always easy to find what you're looking for.

Yeah I’m not complaining about the City per we. The quests are lackluster. But I do think the map is woefully inadequate for a city this size if you need to backtrack. At one point I lost track of the Arena entrance and it took a long time to relocate it. Too much reliance on quest pathing I guess. Besides setting a single custom marker there should be a custom tag system. Unless there is and I missed it? Otherwise a city this size is a liability on gameplay

Not being able to create custom map markers was one of my complaints back when I played TW3. I'm somewhat surprised that feature was never added.

It's not really Novigrad's fault. I never liked huge cities in RPGs - because they tend to be quest hubs - and they're hard to ignore. I felt the same way about Witcher 1 - and games like PoE and BG.

They give me a strange sort of "quest-claustrophobia" - it's hard to explain.

Visually, Novigrad is among the most impressive. Alexandria in ACO is at the same level, I'd say - if not beyond it.

I loved the Skellige setting too, but after exploring about the twentieth island for basically nothing, I never finished the whole thing. At that point I was totally burnt out on the game's unrewarding exploration, finished the main quest and hung it up. The visual candy had become mundane. One day I will revisit and do the DLC (but I have never done the Skyrim or Fallout 4 or PoE DLCs for the same reasons).

Originally Posted by Thrasher
I loved the Skellige setting too, but after exploring about the twentieth island for basically nothing, I never finished the whole thing. At that point I was totally burnt out on the game's unrewarding exploration, finished the main quest and hung it up. The visual candy had become mundane. One day I will revisit and do the DLC (but I have never done the Skyrim or Fallout 4 or PoE DLCs for the same reasons).

Sounds like we're in the same boat with W3 - except I never finished it.

Curse of open world I guess. It’s a good game for sure but I’d give Witcher 2 the edge at the moment. It’s a bit disjointed having a very story driven series with huge amounts of unrelated content. But it’s a very good game too

Dart, I'd finish it for the main quest and what happens to Ciri, which doesn't require generic exploration, I think…

I thought Novigrad was fine! There were some good quests there, too. Chasing down the murderer, Dajkstra's stuff, getting Zoltran's place going, the haunted house, and Lamert's quest started out there as well. It did get a little silly with having to find Dudu to find Dandelion to find Ciri but it was fun stuff. I only got lost in the place a little bit when I first got there - it didn't take long to learn what was where.