T
he Witcher 3 ’s
Novigrad is a defining
RPG city: a bustling
metropolis on the
brink of catastrophe,
threatened both by invaders
outside its borders and religious
zealotry within them. But this
wasn’t CD Projekt’s first portrait of
a city on fire.
2007’s The Witcher is often
overlooked in favour of its prettier
and better-translated sequels, but the
game that first brought CD Projekt to
international attention remains a
gem, with much of what made those
later games special already fully or
partially realised. Vizima, the city in
which you spend about half the
game, is brimming with as much life
and character as Novigrad, and
foreshadows CD Projekt’s later
success with designing urban
environments.
LOCAL COLOUR
My favourite thing about Vizima is its
layout and structure: it is a low,
cramped, muddy medieval city with
twisting streets and neighbourhoods
divided by function, race, and class,
with landmarks like the main roads
intersecting at St Lebioda’s Hospital,
the curving path to the Burning Rose
barracks, and the large courtyard in
front of the New Narakort inn
making navigation intuitive.
It’s not just the landmarks that
stand out either: even the ‘filler’
buildings you can’t enter look
different from one another. While
taking a tour of my old save file, I was
surprised at how every block looked
unique. Any reusing of building
models to construct the city’s layout
is well hidden.
The shiny seventh console
generation graphics are resting on a
heavily modified version of the
Aurora engine BioWare used to
create the original Neverwinter
Nights, pushed well beyond what you
might expect of it based on that 2001
RPG. The Witcher has a dynamic time
of day system, with NPCs proceeding
through their schedules and even
realistically responding to the
weather – it never gets old seeingthem scurry for cover once it starts
raining – adding to the immersion.ABOUT TOWN
When you first arrive in Vizima
during the game’s second act, you are
restricted to the Temple Quarter, an
impoverished neighbourhood home
to the city’s dwarven and elven
populations. Proceeding to Act 3 ,
you’re allowed to move freely
between the Temple Quarter and the
ritzier Trade Quarter. The class
distinctions are palpable, with betterarmed and armoured guard patrols, a
more well-heeled citizenry, and a
dearth of non-human inhabitants. It
adds to the texture of the city,
building on The Witcher’s fiction at
every level of the simulation.
Like The Witcher 3 ’s Novigrad
under siege, Vizima is an afflicted
city, with a virulent plague and
tensions between oppressed
nonhumans and a fundamentalist
religious movement threatening to
boil over. In Vizima, Novigrad, and
even The Witcher 2 ’s Vergen, CD
Projekt has demonstrated a deft hand
at making players fall in love with a
fictional city, then posing an
existential threat to it. It captures the
fear and anxiety inherent in one of
the great horrors of history: how
cities an be shockingly fragile in the
face of external threats.
Vizima reaches an ignoble end in
The Witcher 3 : the Nilfgaardian
empire conquers the city, and an
early sequence sees you tour the
royal palace under new management,
with craftsmen hacking away at
marble reliefs It’s a sad end to the
city you spent so much time in, but
CD Projekt’s loving recreation of the
space in a new engine eight years
later suggests that the developers
recalled Vizima as fondly as I did.NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
October 26, 20 07
PUBLISHER
Atari
DEVELOPER
CD Projekt Red
LINK
bit.ly/3Ju5n50STREET SMART
Essential RPG citiesNOVIGRAD
The Witcher 3’s
metropolis plays
host to some of the
best quests in the
whole series, and is
contiguous with the
massive rural zone
of Velen. An all-time
great hub for a
modern classic.BALDUR’S GATE
BioWare’ssignature
city set the template
for futureexamples
like Novigrad, and
the game’s rhythm of
low-level country
adventure giving way
to high-level hijinks
in thecityis reflected
in many other RPGs.SIGIL
There’s nothing quite
like the City of Doors,
the architecturally
impossible city atthe
centre of the
universe and primary
setting of Black Isle
Studios’ cult hit,
Planescape:
Torment.THE IMPERIAL
CITY
The Elder Scrolls IV:
Oblivion’s iconic
centrepiece’s
striking, Grecco-
Roman look goeswell
with its interiors, and
it gets props for
letting you explore
every building.MY FAVOURITE THING
ABOUT VIZIMA IS ITS
LAYOUT AND STRUCTURE
EXTRA LIFE
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NOW PLAYING (^) IUPDATE (^) IMOD SPOTLIGHT (^) IHOW TO (^) I DIARY (^) I WHY I LOVE (^) IREINSTALL (^) IMUST PLAY
RIGHT: (^) A fistfight
breaks out at the
high class New
Narakortinn.