The second city in PoE1, the one in the east, was pretty barren IMO. But I don’t mind PoE2’s Neketaka at all.
I’m the opposite. If there are NPCs, then I feel like I need to talk to them just in case they have something useful to say. When I first got to Novograd in The Witcher 3 I tried to talk to each person. Eventually I kinda realized who I could ignore, but they were just clutter to me.
CDPR already did an excellent job with Novigrad imo. The pace in that city felt just right, it had a nice mix of combat, talking and other activities and because of the way the main quest threads were woven the exploration felt very relaxed too. And once you realize that most of the loot in Witcher 3 is pointless and that you don’t have to obsess with breaking into every house and carrying out anything that’s not bolted down the whole thing becomes very manageable. Given the size of the city and how little it bogs down the player I’d probably rank it at the top of list of best designed rpg cities.
I’d agree with that. The actual quests and stuff in the city were good. At first I was just overwhelmed by the amount of people and feeling like I needed to talk to them. Then I turned down the
‘extra people’ setting and it was at least somewhat better.
But it’s more of a GTA or Assassins Creed approach. This city barely has couple of dozens persistent NPCs and almost all of those are merchants. All the others activate on some quest trigger and disappear forever once the quest is done. This, coupled with fast travel and map directions, means that you can have a city of any size, some of it probably randomly generated.
In PoE you have a more traditional city. Every building serves some purpose, you have few NPCs that are just walk around and even they probably have something special to say.
My favorite city in RPGs is probably Tarant from Arcanum. It felt big and used clever tricks to feel bigger. There were isolated districts. There’s undeground system, there’s sewers under the city. You have addresses for various places and they all have big numbers. Nameless people walk outside but they still react to things you do: they laugh if you’re dressed silly or shout and call guards, or tell rumors or even train you. That was a good compromise between traditional city where every character has some purpose and generated city where you have buildings and NPCs for the sake of scale.
Yeah, it all depends on what you want out of the experience. For me cities in rpgs are the number one offender when it comes to killing the pace so the way Novigrad was handled was right up my alley. Other than that, I actually found Athkatla in Bg2 very manageable, especially on repeated playthroughs. But BG2 is a true gem with laser focus so comparing it with other rpgs isn’t exactly fair :)
Could be worse. Dragon Age 2 was a bad, single city for the whole game.
City in DA2 never put me to sleep.
Also, DA2 was the best DA.
FTFY :)
Great, now my game is missing DLC. 4.0.1 applied, I played for an hour, ran errand and came back 45 minutes later and now I can’t load my save because some DLC is missing. Despite all DLC being owned and installed.
There’s some patch shenanigans about. Probably a wrong branch was pushed or something.
This has also revealed that there’s a turn based mode that is/was being worked on.
Whoa, wait, what?! Oh my.
EDIT: Is this maybe to make it work better on console? Ala Divinity 2 and such?
If this isn’t fake, yes
Also this guy
https://steamcommunity.com/app/560130/discussions/0/1744480966986526747/
Yeah, after reading your post I did some sluething and found both those. That’s amazing. I am eager for them to officially announce it, I’ve always felt this game would be all the stronger in turn-based mode - the visuals and the action/mechanics are a lot of fun, but would be better served that way, I think. Though fights would take a lot longer. :)
They pulled an Owlcat, heh.
This would be awesome and hopefully start a trend.
But if it made it easier to see what happened during a round it would be worth it. They have a nice combat log but I can never figure out what just happened in a round because it all blends together. I can’t ever figure out a good auto pause setting either.
There are definitely some edge cases that would be absolute shit turn based, e.g. situations where you aren’t able to get high penetration. Can easily see turn based taking 20 minutes of reclicking attack.
“Hoping.” :-/
I got the update and didn’t have any issues, maybe they already fixed it?