5662

Well-put. Ambition jank vs incompetence jank.

5663

How many games are there that combine GTA-style open world city with fullblown RPG?

Cause I can’t think of any. It is either sparsely populated medieval/postapo RPG, or GTA-style action game with linear missions and no meaningful RPG elements.

Even making GTA-style open world game is hard enough. Combining it with RPG, with its multitudes of systems (melee, multitude of all kinds of guns, stealth, hacking, nonlinear dialogue, character progression, driving…), on quarter of Rockstar’s manpower, on 9 platforms simultaneously, during pandemic - yeah, no wonder they did not succeed at everything 100%.

Cyberpunk is not as good GTA as GTA, with its insufficient AI, too aggressive streaming system and lacking physics.

And it is not as good RPG as Kingdom Come or New Vegas, with its underbaked progression system and not as wide choice in quests.

But it is the only game to date that at least attempted to combine the two, and it is still pretty damn amazing.

CD Projekt can be accused of some things, but lack of ambition is not one of them.

5664

Skyrim and even Oblivion are dramatically denser than Cyberpunk 2077 in every way that matters. Every room is full of dozens or even hundreds of hand-placed objects that can be picked-up and manipulated.

Night City is much more densely populated, but only by cardboard NPCs without any definition, that disappear when you turn your back. They’re set dressing when compared to Oblivion or even Watch Dogs Legion.

5665

I would argue CP2077 is not “open world” in any sense. On a second playthrough, all the encounters are exactly the same. Everything is scripted and broken. There are no radiant/emergent systems or any that work.

5666

The most ambitious part of Cyberpunk 2077 was the graphical presentation.

Outside of that I was surprised how much of the game systems were just ported over from Witcher 3 even though much of it didn’t make sense in the new genre/context. I rolled my eyes when there was a boxing circuit that was conveniently present in V’s apartment complex. I’m not saying boxing doesn’t make sense in the a Cyberpunk future, but just that we have been doing the silly boxing thing for 3 Witchers now; I would hope that CDPR could’ve thought of a new minigame. The food as consumables was ported over from Witcher 3 even though it didn’t really make much sense in the Cyberpunk world and was made redundant by the magical inhaler. I’m wondering if there was a Gwent knock-off that was cut for time and resources at some point.

I’m not sure if the design started with so many concepts from Witcher 3 or they scrambled and fell back on those well-tread design points when the development timeline became impossible.

5667

Wow, we are now complaining about boxing in megabuildings…ok. This thread has become one big circlejerking whinefest which does not seem to be changing anytime soon.

…to you, maybe. I don’t particularly care about being able to pick up physicalized trash. But even then, these games have obviously completely different structure. It is easier to keep track of that stuff when the game is segmented into hundreds of separately loaded cells.

5668

This is the entirety of CP2077’s loot and there’s so much that’s unlootable because of glitchy placement.

5669

Yeah, I didn’t pick it in there either after a while.

5670

It’s also the by how similar Calling your car is to whistling for Roach, and how the different kinds of grenades map to Geralt s bombs.

5671

I lost an hour and half of progress because a mission NPC spawned facing away from me on some cowering position. Nothing I did could get them to move (passing time or traveling away and back via fast travel) into a usable position. I had to load a much older save game from nearly two hours prior. They had some dialog they kicked off with another NPC but at the end of it they still faced away unless I went back to the older save and changed what mission I did first.

5672

Wake me when I can play this again.

5673

What’s stopping you right now? Standards?

5674

Yeah standards. What ever that is.

5675

Dont let a hate train keep you from enjoying a good game Rich.

5676

Btw why is there so much loot to loot? Dont they know about obsessive-compulsive people? Gaah!

reminds me or the LOTR online game where the developers finally figured out that leveling to level 20 without dying (which gave you a chievo) was sucking in to that particular disorder.

Which I obviously have.

5677

I’ve noticed for myself that if I am enjoying something, be it a game, a movie, a car, whatever, and I read a bunch of negative reviews or comments–which happens a lot for both games and cars!–it can in a subtle way undermine my enjoyment. I think there is something in our psyches that makes us crave reinforcement for our opinions, even when there is objectively no connection between what someone else things of a thing and your experience of the thing. Sometimes I find myself just avoiding commentary on certain things.

In the case of this game, I really think there is a need to differentiate between a sort of critique and general fell-based opinion. Objectively I have a hard time calling this game good, from the standpoint of a critique or industry observer. There are too many fails, in ideas, execution, prioritization, and communications to see it as anything other than an epic Charlie Foxtrot. OTOH, as a gamer, I love this thing, warts and all. It is a heap of fun, and while I’ve put it aside after more than 160 hours, I plan to revisit it once some time has passed and there are some fixes/changes. Sure, there are times when I despair for what could or should have been, but what is actually there can be a real hoot.

FWIW, I’m beginning to think that the issues with the game are more failures in the management of the project and not so much with the design. While there are all sorts of weirdnesses that seem to be poor design choices, I suspect that the actual designs were sound, and it was the way management scaled back from those designs that caused most of the problems. You can see from earlier press materials and what’s in the game now that several systems originally were pretty elaborate and well thought out, but were slashed and severely truncated for various reasons before launch. I suspect that instead of building in graceful fall-back positions, sort of like those runaway truck ramps you see on mountain roads, they panicked and just lopped off whole sections and left it at that, tying up just as many code lose ends as they needed to make sure it actually ran.

I mean, so many of the systems that are wonky now could have been pretty solid, if not as cool as originally intended, if the people running the show had allowed the designers to spend a little time gracefully degrading things rather than just axing whole code branches. The police system could have been pared down to something more logical and less immersion-breaking, the skill trees could have been reconfigured to eliminate dead ends and useless perks, the existing district boundaries and themes could have been leveraged to offer a much better crowd/living city experience, by faking stuff, a lot better than they did. I’m 100% sure the creative people could have done this, but I’m reasonably confident that they were not given the chance. I mean, this company has demonstrated some very strong design chops, so the flaws in the game design here seem most logically to have been primarily imposed from above, rather than organic.

5678

In re: your 1st paragraph, I found that could sometimes can be the case with me with enjoying and judgement of games. If there’s a game that’s announced that I’m really looking forward to, even if it’s a year or more until release, I’ll go on strict media black out until I play it. That includes all articles and trailers, review scores, forum discussions (like here). So when I finally do play the game, it’s completely and 100% with no external bias. It’s been great for me. The only downside is being so far out of the loop on discussion that by the time I do check mainstream info, the world has moved on. Ghost of Tsushima and Cyberpunk are but 2 recent examples.

5679

I think it’s pretty clear to see that what Wombat said is true. There’s a perk on swimming which to my mind has almost no relevance to the game. All the foods are samey with very very few exceptions. The differences in depth between the starting points are surprising.

Maybe it’s dissonance but I can’t accept that the team that turned out Witcher 3 turned this out - I have too much respect for them to accept that the broken systems we got were as-designed and there must be a lot on the cutting room floor because of the deadline issues.

5680

I feel the same as you, which is why I sometimes react a bit too strongly over criticism of games that I like, I am sure. I also tend to just avoid said thread of a game or tv show or what have we ,because otherwise all the griping will get me down.

5681

Even Watch Dogs has scheduled NPCs. They even each have a whole table of meaningless associations. I mean, you can’t tell except from bumping into a random person that has some association with some other person you offended or saved, and nobody is going to camp and watch a character because there’s no point, but it is there, and there are hundreds (thousands?) of these NPCs everywhere.

I mean Witcher 3 is a great AAA game, but Witcher 1 is full of Central European jank and Witcher 2 is a mess of systems and ideas. If anything the polish they managed in Witcher 3 is likely the result of years of iteration. Restarting the process is clearly harder than they expected.