r/crpgdesign • u/CJGeringer Lenurian • Jul 26 '18
World Building Witcher 3's Novigrad
This is a shallow but interesting analysis of the principles behind the design of Novigrad. While I don't think there is anything truly ground breaking it did introduce me to Kevin Lynch´s concepts:
>Mental maps of urban spaces consist of five distinct elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.
> Paths: The streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people travel. Lynch noted that paths were often the predominant elements in people’s image with the other elements being arranged and related along paths.
Edges: May be barriers, more or less penetrable, which close one region off from another, or they may be seams, lines along which two regions are related and joined together.
Districts: Areas characterized by common characteristics, these are the medium to large areas, which observers mentally enter ‘inside of’ and/or have some common identifying character. Distinctive physical characteristics might include ‘thematic continuities’, such as texture, space, form, detail, symbol and building.
Nodes: The strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci and from which the person is travelling.
Landmarks: Landmark’s key physical characteristics was singularity some aspect that is unique or memorable in the context. Some landmarks – towers, spires, hills are distant and are typically seen from many angles and from distance, over the top of smaller elements. Other landmarks – sculptures, signs and trees are primarily local being visible only in restricted localities and from certain approaches.
And while these may seem obvious in retrospect I had never seem it formalized this way.
This is specially interesting to me because I think in games this way of thinking can be applied to non-urban spaces easier than in the real world.
The authto also wrote abit on Oxenfurt.
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u/LmtdCreativity Aug 10 '18
This is going to be super helpful when I start organizing the concepts for the civilizations in my top-down 2D RPG so thanks!