The scale of settlements in RPGs has always been fascinating to me. Developers have always been beholden to the power of consoles, and have often had to compromise on scale to ensure everything runs smoothly. If any of these bustling cities from RPGs were to scale, the game would never be able to run at a consistent frame rate.
The result can often be humorous; a so-called city may end up having a couple of buildings. You have to suspend your disbelief in these moments — Skyrim’s Solitude has to be one of the least-populated capital cities around.
Novigrad is described as one of the largest cities in the North, in The Witcher, and although The Witcher 3 does quite a good job at cheating scale with the city, you may still tell it’s not quite the size it should be.
Dense, Bustling Settlements
Well, CD Projekt Red is looking to address this inThe Witcher 4, harnessing new technology to more accurately capture the scale of the game’s settlements. In the game’s recently released tech demo, we saw Valdrest, a “bustling port town” in Kovir.
Despite Valdrest not being anywhere near the size of Novigrad in-universe, the small town in The Witcher 4 has over 300 NPCs, a scale comparable to Novigrad. In an interview withGamesRadar+, engineering production manager Jan Hermanowicz spoke about the generational gap between The Witcher 3 and The Witcher 4.
“That generational shift, we want to do it right,” he said. “Our ambition is to take full advantage of it and really deliver the next-gen experience.”
To find the density that CDPR is trying to capture with The Witcher 4’s smallest settlements, they studied Novigrad, the largest settlement in The Witcher 3.
“We actually looked at what we did in the past, what was cool about that, and what we couldn’t do at the time,” he explained.
If Valdrest is an example of a small town in The Witcher 4, then I’m very excited to see what the big cities will look like. The tech demo was a proof of concept, so there’s no predicting what technical challenges CDPR may run into in the future, but the early signs are very promising.
The Witcher 4’s release date hasn’t been announced, but it isn’t expected before 2027 at the earliest.
