If you’re a certain age, you may remember the incredible anticipation of finally, at long last, approaching the city of Baldur’s Gate for the first time. In Baldur’s Gate, the eponymous city captured the imagination: A place even more filled with action and adventure than the wild wilderness! Alas, it had its charms, but the city disappointed. It was dense and full of people, and yet there was little to do besides rob houses and do the same quests as always. I felt the same way when I first approached Novigrad in The Witcher 3. And now that I’ve spent a huge amount of time in Novigrad… I feel the same way that I felt about Baldur’s Gate. That’s because Novigrad sucks, and because big cities in RPGs suck, pretty much always.

The Problem With Novigrad

Novigrad sounded fantastic: It’s probably the largest city ever to appear in an open-world game, and it has great variety, from the heights of Temple Isle to the harborside slums to the noble estates and elven camps just outside of city limits. Like Baldur’s Gate, it doesn’t lack for variety. It’s filled with quests and merchants and monster contracts, and feels far denser than the No Man’s Land of Velen.

And yet Novigrad doesn’t feel alive to me the way that Velen does. In Velen, there’s constant tension between the lands of civilization and the great wilderness. In every little village, someone has wandered into the woods for some ill reason and needs to be rescued or defeated. Even the gate at Crow’s Perch is regularly attacked by drowners. Nowhere feels safe; every journey to a new destination brings danger—not to mention a beautiful ride across open country, or through dense forests.

I find I play Novigrad very differently. In Velen, Geralt—or at least my Geralt—wandered from town to town, and did most everything in that town. Played Gwent. Checked the notice board. Marked down all the quests for later adventuring. Then it was off on a quest, off to another remote location and a new chain of activities. Every path opened up three more thing to do.

Novigrad doesn’t feel like that. In Novigrad, instead of journeying to villages, I search for gold exclamation points on the map and beeline for them. I pick a quest and I work on it, instead of wandering to a village and getting distracted by a new quest halfway along the way. And instead of riding across the wilderness or choosing the best highway to take, or mapping out activities that are near me in the vast Velen wilds, in Novigrad I find myself simply holding down the X button and running along the game’s suggested route. I am pointing-and-clicking, not questing. Waiting for Geralt to get one location to another, not taking in what happens in between. I don’t explore. There’s little to find, except more merchants.

In Velen, the most interesting quests are small family tragedies—notice board quests that invariably take a weird turn. In Novigrad, the best questing is the actual main quest itself. Everything else feels like it’s resolved quickly. I spend most of Geralt’s time in the city playing Gwent, seeing if I’ve talked to such-and-such a merchant before, and advancing the actual main plot—something I would never countenance in a game like Skyrim… or even in Velen proper.

I love the idea of Novigrad. I love the way the city looks, and I even like the way it feels, although I could use some more people to talk to. But much of the freedom that I love in The Witcher 3 is gone in the big city. I feel like an errand boy checking quests off a list, rather than a hero alone with his steed in the wilderness. And that’s a shame, and it’s kept me in the city for months.

But I’ll witch on, boats against the current, in the hopes that Skellige feels more like Velen. If not, it’s back to Velen for me, for there is far, far more for me to do there than I have done so far. But until then… Novigrad sucks.