ANANTA Cities: Nova City, Chongxiao, and Longqi Village

Two cities, two design briefs

The launch game is set in two metropolitan areas. Nova City was the only city shown for years: a seaside entertainment hub where the skyline is advertising and the streets are built for traffic. Chongxiao was revealed at Gamescom 2026 as the Captain's home town, and it is larger in scale and very different in temperament.

The producers describe Nova City as a hybrid of Tokyo and Los Angeles, and Chongxiao as more culturally layered with major tourist landmarks. The goal is not two maps with different wallpaper but two sets of verbs: one city is crossed by air and rail, the other by alleys, water, and street vehicles.

Nova City: speed, height, and strangers

Official copy describes Nova City as a place where nobody knows anybody and attention goes to the brightest screen, the most expensive store, and the loudest band. That is both a theme and a level design rule: the interesting routes are above the street, and the interesting fights happen around vehicles.

Traversal here is grapples, wall-runs, rail grinding, gliding, wingsuits, boats, and helicopters. Combat leans on car chases, passenger shooting, and swinging into encounters from height. Testers' fifteen-minute free-roam segment in the TGS build was entirely in this city, and that is where most of the traversal vocabulary was learned.

Chongxiao: the hometown that watches you

Chongxiao is an acquaintance society in the literal sense: people recognise you, remember you, and have opinions about your family. It is the opposite of Nova City's anonymity, and the game uses that for both comedy and pressure. The city is also physically bigger, with hills, water, old streets, and newer development layered together.

Vehicles change accordingly. Out go helicopters and supercars as the default; in come shared bicycles, electric scooters, small trailers, skateboards, and tour boats. Testers rode bicycles around rice paddies and took boats across the lake in playable demo content, which is a good signal that the city is meant to be experienced at a slower pace.

Lingyun is the collision of old and new

Lingyun is the Chongxiao district shown most often: glass curtain-wall towers standing beside low brick housing, waterfront views, and a mix of historic administrative buildings and technology companies. Zenith Tower is its confirmed landmark.

The developers are explicit that the district draws on Shanghai and Hangzhou without copying them. Weilan Lake echoes West Lake, and the pagoda imagery borrows from the same visual tradition, but both are redesigned for the game. Any claim of a one-to-one recreation is wrong, and it also misses the point: the district is meant to feel like a real place with an invented history, not a virtual tour.

Longqi Village and the Longxi trap

Longqi Village is the tea-country settlement where the Cologne demo spent much of its time. White walls, dark tiles, terraced hills, tea gardens, and a market street. It is also confirmed as Wei Yinglong's hometown, which is why the temple and the village are tied to her story.

Place it correctly: Longqi is a village unit on Chongxiao's outskirts, not a third city. Coverage that lists it alongside Nova City and Chongxiao as a separate destination has miscounted, and the mistake tends to travel with other errors about the map.

The naming trap: some English community pages call this area Longxi, and some Chinese coverage uses Longxi as well. The official Chinese character profile uses Longqi Village, and the English spelling Longqi or Dragon Roost is a community translation rather than an official English name. Longxi and Longqi are almost certainly the same place. Do not treat them as two villages, and do not expect an official spelling until the global site publishes one.

The village is also the clearest example of Chongxiao's design philosophy. Testers noticed rooftop solar panels, solar water heaters, shared power-bank stations, and red three-wheeled carts mixed into the old streets. The point is not period costume but a living place where modernity arrived without erasing the layout.

How the two cities play differently

Nova City is vertical and fast. Its content rewards height, route optimisation, and the ability to arrive at a fight from an unexpected angle. Chongxiao is horizontal and observational. Its content rewards knowing which street has which stall at which hour, and its demo included stealth, swimming, and collapsing-platform sequences that deliberately remove your speed advantage.

The vehicle lists follow the same logic. Nova City hands you cars, bikes, boats, helicopters, and a wingsuit; Chongxiao offers bicycles, e-bikes, shared bikes, skateboards, and punts. They are not weaker sports cars; they are the right scale for streets that were never designed for traffic. Losing one is also not a setback: testers who dumped a vehicle in the water reported no penalty, so there is no reason to interrupt a route to save the bike.

That difference extends to combat. Nova City fights are vehicular and prop-heavy; Chongxiao fights are blade, fist, block, and counter, with a martial-arts texture the producers describe as wuxia plus Jackie Chan improvisation. Same underlying combat verbs, different city grammar.

Switching cities is a chapter, not a teleport

Some coverage describes inter-city travel through a "flight ticket" item, or a "quantum beacon" that jumps you instantly. Neither term appears in any playtest report or official material. Both are invented names, and both are a warning sign in a guide, because the rest of that guide is usually invented too.

The demos establish that returning to Chongxiao is a story event: it opens a new chapter and the protagonist's hometown storyline. It is not a free teleport you trigger from a map. Within a city, movement is seamless, and the Chongxiao demo walked from tea fields to a temple to an alley with no loading screen. Seamless inside one city is not the same claim as seamless between two.

Whether the switch itself shows a loading bar, how long it takes, and whether you can return whenever you like are all unpublished. Plan a session around the city you are in, not around hopping between them.

The short version

Nova City is a sprint across rooftops; Chongxiao is a walk through a neighbourhood that knows your name. Learn both, and do not let a community spelling convince you there are three villages.