Is Novigrad the largest & busiest city in any open world RPG ever?

[phrozz]

Just finished this game on playstation. I couldn't believe the spectacle of Novigrad, I was blown away... like it seems to put every other RPG city to shame

[MechBFP]

Assassins Creed 2 is way bigger and more active.

[Seishisha]

I don't think it's the biggest city but Novigrad feels very lived in and real, there is always something going on there, be it dock yard brawls, drunks taking over taverns or just people selling crap at various locations. The day night routines of the npcs helps to give it an authentic feel, and the city although still active at night definitely benefits from that change of atmosphere. I do like that a lot of the stuff happening in the city is pretty mundane, minimal monster activity but crime is abundant, and of course the witch hunters causing trouble is a pretty solid narrative for a city, big population of mixed races, distrust and fear of each other, you see it in small side quests and some of the bigger ones. You get the impression that whatever Geralt does or does not do, things in Novigrad will always be that way.

[theo]

Daggerfall had bigger cities LOL.
While Novigrad is presented as big and diverse trade capital it's still scaled like GTA cities and has size of a real-life small town so it doesn't look convincing.
And since AC is as much an RPG as witcher 3, yes, they can be compared.

[Lieste]

It is almost exactly the same size as medieval Bristol, a large English city. Much larger than the nearby Abbey city of Bath. This is smaller than the implications of the source novels, but respectable for a city.

Oxenfurt is pitiful though - the wrong proportions of buildings, too small, lacking the density of housing for those who serve, and those who provide... a city cannot exist on 'upper class housing alone'.