T w e n t y S i d e d
We’ve waited a long time for Cyberpunk 2077 to come out. On one hand, there’s a LOT to talk about for us fans. On the other hand, non-fans are already sick to death of hearing about it.
I did what I could. My Cyberpunk first impressions are less than half the show. That’s as much restraint as I could muster. I could have filled the whole hour with thoughts on the game.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast325
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
00:00 Cyberpunk 2077
Last week I was so wrapped up in other things that I forgot to post the next entry in the Fallen Order retrospective. It was already written! All I needed to do was add some screenshots and do one last round of proofing! Instead I sat there watching YouTube. I was having one of those annoying off-by-one weeks where you spend all Tuesday thinking it’s Monday, and all of Wednesday thinking it’s Tuesday.
How embarrassing. Sorry about that.
Anyway. The game is out now. Like I said on the show: This game reached too high. It wants to be a huge open world AND a huge simulation AND have an enormous long-running story AND feature many complex branching choices with player agency AND feature a huge cast of vibrant characters AND offer the highest graphical fidelity AND use the latest rendering technologies AND be a systems-driven RPG AND straddle two different console generations.
None of these things are bad on their own. But this game would have been better off with a lot more focus and restraint during development.
17:48 Cyberpunk 2077-Review restrictions.
CD Projekt RED wouldn’t allow reviewers to use their own footage in reviews that came out before launch. Instead you had to use their footage. Essentially, you could only show off their promotional trailers. That’s outrageous, and it’s every bit as anti-consumer as the shit EA and Activision do.
This is incredibly dangerous. People cut this company a lot of slack based on the perception that this operation is run by “fellow gamers” who just want to make the best games they can. It won’t take much to destroy that perception, and once it’s gone they will never get it back. They’ll be just another corporate monolith.
Having the audience feel like you’re one of them is precious. You can’t buy that with television commercials. You can’t sustain it with branding deals and sponsorships. You can’t attain it by pandering to the crowd at E3. The only way to have your audience embrace you as a member of the tribe is by setting yourself apart from the corporations you’re competing with. You need to understand / anticipate the audience needs and expectations, and meet those expectations.
That’s nice if you can pull it off, but if customers catch you lying and engaging in deceptive practices then they’ll see all of your previous virtue as a mask. And I can’t imagine anything more nakedly deceptive than forbidding reviewers from showing off footage from an infamously buggy game.
27:24 Mindustry is still awesome
29:23 Molly’s Game
I realized that one of the reasons I liked this movie so much is because Molly Bloom reminds me a lot of Max, the protagonist in my novel Other Kind of Life. (For the purposes of this discussion, I’m thinking of Molly Bloom as a fictional character. She’s based on a real person, but I’m sure screenwriter Aaron Sorkin took creative liberties with the story.)
Both protagonists are circumspect and cautious people, existing in a world where most people are reckless and selfish. In both cases, you’ve got this subculture that tends to attract people who are dishonest, likely to suffer from substance abuse, greedy, short-sighted, and prone to violence. In that world, having foresight, honesty, patience, and planning skills is like having a superpower. In both stories you’ve got a character that immerses themselves in a subculture without really becoming like the people of that subculture.
Anyway. It’s been over a week since I watched this movie and I’m still thinking about it. Amazing story.
38:29 Mailbag: Double Mail: Inverted Controls
Dear Diecast,
Shamus, I read an article in The Guardian that reminded me of you. It turns out that you’re not a lone weirdo for inverting your mouse. There’s a “large minority” who do so, and scientists are starting to study the differences between inverters and non-inverters.
To test my completely unfounded hypothesis: On a mouse or joystick, do you parse “down” as “back”, like tilting your head back to look up?
I hope that this research will raise awareness and finally get the
Satisfactory devs to make Y-axis inversion work in vehicles!Link:
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/02/scientists-studying-why-gamers-invert-their-controlsBest regards,
RFS-81P.S.: They did not say anything about using the numpad instead of WASD.
Dear Casters of the Die,
An IFLS article just came up in my social media feed about scientists studying why some people prefer inverted controls and some people are wrong. Given Shamus’s vocal opinions on the matter, I was wondering if you’ve seen this yet, and what you think of their hypothesis.
Link to article: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/scientists-are-finally-studying-why-some-of-you-nerds-dont-invert-your-controllers/
‘Houiostesmoras
(If you can’t pronounce it, just call me Randy)
54:38 Cyberpunk Reception
Hi,
As you probably heard, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 was less than ideal – the game was (and still is) very buggy and nearly unplayable on older consoles. Given how much hype surrounded that title, do you think that it may lead to some kind of change in the industry, one that’ll force publishers to release more polished games? Especially since titles like Fallout 76 or Anthem were struck with similiar problems? There’s probably a lot of reasons why it won’t happen and I’m curious about your opinion.
Cheers,
Darek
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I invert my mouse because the first games I played with a mouse were flight simulators
I didn’t read the article, but when thinking about inversion or which way you see as up I was wondering how much it might be influenced by flight simulators and the like where pulling back tips up and pushing down points down. I think that might be how I naturally view those things, and I was heavily into flight sims for a while.
I invert my joystick/(mouse) because it’s correct! (smugness :) — all instances of joysticks that I’ve used work in the sense that pulling back raises the nose, lifts the excavator bucket or the crane boom.
Kind of the same for me as well. A friend of mine and I razz each other about our choices here. I’m inverted and he isn’t. It seems to come down to first experiences and the default settings. I’m pretty sure mine were the first Heavy Gear game and Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, which both inverted the mouse look by default. So here I am, 25+ years later, checking the settings whenever I install a first person game. It’s just too late to relearn the muscle memory and frankly, I don’t wanna lol.
I’m one of the people Shamus mentioned, who invert controls for some types of games (or gameplay modes), but don’t invert them for others. FPSs, flight sims, and many types of “cockpit” games – all have forward on the mouse as down for the camera. However, for some games I do it the other way. For example, I played one of the Mechwarrior games back in high-school, where the mouse was moving a reticule on the glass of the cockpit. I think because that’s moving something “outside” of my person / cockpit, it felt natural for it to use world-space “up” for the forward on my mouse. I think some types of games like Myst (or whatever modern equivalent) I also have “up” in the world as forward on the mouse.
Similar. I used a flight stick for mech warrior and wing commander before I learned mouse aiming, so inverted y was natural.
The x axis in third person games seems to be where my main trouble is these days. I’ve played several games in the past few years that don’t let you flip the camera x so I’ve had to use both directions. Instead of making me more flexible, both directions now feel wrong.
I don’t invert my mouse. I just use whatever the game’s default settings happen to be. It’s not something I’ve ever worried about.
Dual-inverted here. I didn’t think about it at first because every other way was so backwards and wrong that it seemed the obvious choice. After a while, I figured out that in my mental model, I’m standing behind a big camera, so I have to pull the back of it left in order to look right and push down on the back of it in order to look up.
I’ve never played any flight simulators, but I did fly the shuttle simulator once, many years before I ever played a game where I could control the camera, and I had no problem getting pitch right (inverted) but kept screwing up on yaw (not inverted). So I guess this is just how my brain is wired. (I did not crash the Orbiter in the simulation. There may, however, have been some *minor* cosmetic damage. But any landing you can walk away from, right?)
It would be a good little detail in a sci-fi novel to have humans operate some physics-bending machinery and they have to create an analogue in their head of what they’re doing to pilot it effectively. I’m sure it’s been done plenty of times.
I like the mental image of ‘pulling a glove inside out’ for anything involving reflections, because humans tend to misunderstand what’s going on in a mirror, but can understand what happens to a glove.
There was one story I remember where the protagonist has an advantage in flight magic because mages are typically taught to generate thrust “forwards” and steer that thrust vector around like they’re a human airplane, while the protagonist (from modern Earth) thinks of it more like a video game with noclip on – you can instantly go to full thrust in any direction you want, without regard for your body’s orientation. Which is obvious to us, but perhaps less obvious when your only flight model is a biplane.
What was the book?
I’m normally not inverting any axis. But when I use gyro aiming, I set it up so that it’s as if the controller is a camera (which tends to be the default). It just feels natural to me to the point that I can’t imagine doing it differently.
I heard cyberpunk 2077 is shorter than the witcher 3. So maybe the prologue is very long compared to the rest of the game.
As for mouse inversion. I only accept up/down inversion for flying and swimming. Other than that its just weird. In ninja gaiden black the only option is inversion, and it feels like tank controls. It makes sense in some way, but for me its just some obstacle i need to learn to overcome.
I’d say the Witcher 3 equivalent to the part of the game Shamus is describing would be the entirety of White Orchard. So the proportion of “prologue” to game is roughly the same for both.
Conversely I was playing an FPS of some sort recently where I had my usual mouse inversion turned on, but got very badly disoriented by a section where you drive a tank, and the mouse inversion option wasn’t applied. It took far longer to clear that section that it otherwise would have, and it was a miserable experience
They couldn’t have delayed any longer. The fanbase was peeved enough as it was. The general opinion of CDPR slipped a bit in the past few months, both from the delays and other reasons. And apparently they received money from the Polish government for shipping this year.
As for the game itself, I got it all downloaded on my relatively slow connection. At launch time, I fire up Galaxy. Great, a multi-hour patch. I start the download and take a nap. I wake up to an even bigger patch! Yeah, that wasn’t great.
Further, I agree that it’s too big. I kind of lost track of the main plot at some point. Right now I’m just following as best I can, but I can’t explain the whole thing. It’ll be interesting to look up a summary once I finish the main quest. There seems to be a lot of find this person to find this other person to find this third person. Or meet up with this person for a brief conversation every hour or so, then go and do something different for a bit. As for the sidequests, some are pretty good. Others, not so much. I liked Panam to start, but she’s grown annoying. I go back and forth on Judy.
I’ve only encountered a couple of bugs. First, I got stuck wearing the cosmetic clothes. I had to go to the backpack to equip the functional ones. And unequipping the cosmetics made me naked. Second, disappearing hair. Third, third-person driving wouldn’t work for a few hours. Nothing gamebreaking, but annoying.
I can’t imagine anyone will stop making ambitious games. There’s a team out there studying CP2077 and wondering how they can exceed it. Maybe the next Dragon Age or Mass Effect, or Assassin’s Creed. But someone wants to create something bigger and fancier, and as a result it’ll have more bugs.
Ah, so it’s the Dandelion quest stretched out to an entire game…
There’s certainly an element of that. At a certain point, it starts to feel like padding. Just get on with it, you know?
I found Shamus’ reaction to Cyberpunk quite interesting! I definitely had a different experience, despite also not encountering that many bugs, and I wonder why. In short, while I agree with shamus that the ‘crafted content’ (main quests, side quests, dialogue, main characters, soundtrack) is top-notch, this game definitely did not leave me the impression that it was SO BIG, nor that it had many interlocking systems.
To me, the game seems a cyberpunk version of Mafia 1 (in terms of structure – obviously production values are better): the story is very good, but the city (while well-crafted and extensive) is mostly window-dressing for the story the game is telling. There isn’t really much going on under the hood: no NPC have routines, you cannot interact with food vendors, there is no ‘reputation’ system with factions, police do not patrol the streets – the NPCs are simply animatronics, they walk up the street, and then turn around. You have some interesting ‘vignettes’, but they are static: for instance, at the bottom of the building where V lives, there are two cops talking about how outmatched they are in front of augmented criminals. The conversation is interesting, but they are ALWAYS there and any time you pass by they have the SAME conversation. So, the city is very pretty, and I like looking at it – but just from a distance. I definitely wasn’t ‘wowed’ by the systems – I mean, I genuinely think there is nothing innovative or special there. In terms of systems, RDR 2 is on a completely different level than Cyberpunk, and blows it out of the water.
Obviously, this is not that bad – I loved Mafia 1, so this is not an issue in itself. However, the marketing had given me a different impression – I thought there would be more interactivity for sure, and some more intricate systems. For instance, a trailer focusing on the cars of night city mentioned that you might need a fast car ‘to flee from the NCPD’. Now, in the game car chases cannot actually happen organically – police do not drive cars, and all car chases you encounter are scripted (the wanted system is barely present, and that was REALLY a negative surprise). Similarly, there is a trailer talking about the 4 distinct dressing styles of the city – but in reality all pieces of clothing have stats unrelated to their appearance, and there is no transmog system, so the gameplay systems actually incentivise you to dress in a completely mismatched way. Another trailer detailed the gangs of the city, but in mechanical terms they don’t matter at all: if you kill some ‘tyger claws’ gang members, the only consequence is that your ‘steet cred’ is going to increase, and all ‘fixers’ in town are going to offer you more jobs (even Wakako, who is associated with the tyger claws!). They are all just differently dressed goons.
Now, I know that normally you should be very diffident of marketing, but I think that (as Shamus) I assumed CDPR to be less of a ‘corporate’ entity that companies such as EA. I am not sure I can really make that assumption anymore.
Is it true that police just spawn in front of you when you are ‘wanted’?
Well, normally they spawn just behind you! Which is worse because they sometimes just one shot you.
How the system works is all follows: if you commit a crime police continue spawning in your immediate surroundings until you go far away enough, and then they forget you ever existed. I think the spawning is due to the fact that the driving AI seems very limited – I don’t think the police is able to actually follow you in a chase.
In my experience, the best way to enjoy the game is to stick to the main story and side quests, and avoid looking for any ’emergent’ gameplay, otherwise your immersion is going to be shattered VERY quickly.
It’s a shame. My biggest criticism of The Witcher 3 is that the world was mostly set-dressing for the quests. I was hoping for something a bit more Grand Theft Auto-like to remedy that here.
My expectations were set by Witcher 3 and ignoring any and all marketing, so I got almost exactly what I expected.
The whole “police instantly spawns behind you” thing was actually foreshadowed in the teaser trailer where a cop comes out of nowhere to shoot the cyborg lady.
Yeah, and what makes it incredibly dumb is that there is a problem for a smooth arrival of cars from outside the player’s view : the system they use when you call your car to you! It works great! They could have just done that with a few patrol cars!
Indeed! Also, there is a side mission which involves a race with other cars – so, there must be some sort of functional driving AI in the game.
Have not played the game but from your description I wouldn’t be surprised if that race was on very scripted rails for the NPC cars rather than an AI that would be applicable to an open city.
Most of those things you mention (particularly with trailers) sound like they started developing systems but then had to cancel those efforts for one reason or another. I suspect the global pandemic had a lot to do with it.
Still looking forward to eventually playing it, myself!
Yes, that was also my impression! Which is why I found Shamus’s comments on the vastness of the game and on its ambition so surprising – after played for a while, my reaction was ‘well, this is fun, but they clearly had to drop most of the open-world features and focus on the narrative’. It was definitely not as ambitious as I thought it would be!
Still, the story/quests are interesting, and the combat is fun enough, and just driving around the city is still enjoyable (even though you don’t DO much in it). So I think it’s still a very good gaming experience.
All of this is 100% accurate, and I agree completely.
I feel like the ambition-level stuff was intended to be there, but they couldn’t make it work, so they fell back on what they knew and worked previously, which in the case of the open world simulation meant: The Witcher 3. They probably thought this would work. After all, people love the Witcher 3! But there’s a lot of rose-tinted glasses around the Witcher 3 and the open world, while beautiful, didn’t serve a lot of gameplay purpose, and Cyberpunk is exactly the same.
Somehow the expectation got set that we were getting a combination of Red Dead Redemption 2 style simulation with Witcher 3 quality RPG content which was going to make the greatest RPG of all time! I think we got the Witcher 3 RPG content, we didn’t get the incredible simulated world. What I don’t know is, since I avoided all media/preview/hype pre-launch, did CDPR set that expectation with the audience or did the audience jump to that conclusion?
‘Did CDPR set that expectation with the audience or did the audience jump to that conclusion?’
I genuinely do not know! On the one hand, CDPR marketed the game as a next-gen open world game, so I set my expectations based on the current AAA open-world games (GTA, AC creed, RDR, Far Cry…). Now, compared to those games Night City is quite more simplistic in its systems – but it is still open world, so it’s not like CDPR lied. And it is ‘next-gen’ in its looks at least.
In general, I cannot point out to specific features promised and not included (i.e., this is not a No Man’s Sky situation). It’s just that the ‘tone’ set by the marketing created higher expectations – but after all, this is probably to be expected by any advertisement.
For instance, the developers were asked if you really could ‘burn down the city with Johnny Silverhand’. They answered ‘of course’, but what does that really mean? Maybe I/other players expected you could go as wild as in GTA, but it’s not like CDPR was actually promising anything definite.
Also, there is the role played by the media/fans – which amplified the message on their own. For instance, in a German podcasts a developer stated that CDPR were planning to improve on Witcher 3 by ‘giving more than a thousand NPCs a handmade routine’. A redditor translated the podcast content in English (link). Then, a website took the redditor post and started an article by stating the following (link):
‘In an attempt to make Night City feel like a living and breathing world, CD Projekt Red created people (some of them are probably far from human) that have daily routines. Just like you get up every day, get dressed and go to work. You then go have lunch in a certain place, take photos of something cool. Perhaps you get a phone call along the way? Well, this can all happen to the people in the game. CD Projekt Red claims that Cyberpunk 2077 will come to life thanks to over 1000 NPCs with handmade routines.’
Which is obviously a completely ridiculous flight of fancy based on a single phrase in a German podcast translated by an anonymous redditor (as an aside, I also love how the article provides 2 links to the same reddit post – possibly to give you the illusion there are multiple sources for what they are stating). In my case, I got excited when I first read that. However, in hindsight, what does ‘handmade routine’ really mean? Having an NPC perpetually walking up and down a street, or stuck banging their hand on a vending machine, is possibly an ‘handmade routine’. The article replaced ‘handmade’ with ‘daily’, but that is not really what the developer was (allegedly) saying.
So, I don’t really fault CDPR too much – they did not stop the hype, but expecting that to happen was probably too much.
Ah, so it’s like No Man’s Sky, it was hyped up far too much and they couldn’t deliver so now they’re gonna go and fix all the everything?
I don’t think it is as bad as No Man’s Sky. The core of the experience (main story and quests) is very good – it’s the surrounding open world which is not as well developed as I thought it would be. In NMS, the core of the gameplay itself was quite boring at release. I hope CDPR improve something in addition to fixing bugs (in particular doing something about the teleporting police, adding a transmog system, and possibly making the loot system slightly less cumbersome), but I don’t expect them to make radical changes to it.
I think it was a bit of both. CDPR definitely hyped the game up beyond anything reasonable, but the fans then took that and ran with it until their imagination turned the game into something resembling the Star Trek holodeck. I’ve been following r/cyberpunkgame on and off for a couple of years, and you’d regularly see posts from cooler heads warning people to temper their expectations, pointing out that Cyberpunk would probably be closer to The Witcher 3 than a genuine ‘next-gen’ game. Of course nobody listened… with predictable results.
Personally I realised CDPR weren’t all they were cracked up to be after the TW3 ‘graphics downgrade’ controversy. Everyone forgave them for this because it was still a great game, but as I’ve been trying to point out to people ever since, that’s not the point: the point is that they blatantly lied to fans about what the final game would look like (and advertised it that way right up until release). And if they can lie about that, they’ll be willing to lie about other things as well – which is exactly what they appear to have done with CP2077. In fact, they seem to have lied even more brazenly than I expected – I clearly remember them hyping up their great AI system, and a whole bunch of other things that aren’t actually in the game.
About that graphics “downgrade” – you can’t downgrade something that doesn’t even exist yet. What you saw in that TW3 video was exactly what you saw in the 2018 Cyberpunk 48 minute playthrough video (and in the first Watchdogs playthrough, and many other examples besides). That was a vertical slice, not the game that you ended up playing a couple of years later. It was a concept demo, a target render, a systems test. What you played in the finished game was a recreation of the original, built to actually run on enduser systems (primarily consoles).
Dang, those animatronic-style NPCs like the cops would rip me out of the experience. Dumber NPCs, that just sit there and smoke a cigarette, or say “What would you like?” when you walk into their shop, those are fine for me. NPCs that have even simple loops of walking between places in town, or around their workshop, and which have a few different voice lines to mix up, like in Skyrim, those are fine too. What you described in Cyberpunk 2077 seem like their exactly in the uncanney valley for me. ^^;
EDIT:
Heck, I forgot this game has all kinds of fancy new ray-tracing and high-fidelity graphics. That puts even more pressure on the non-graphical things to feel real, to keep up with those graphics. Woof. I hope they patch in some extra dialog lines and patrol routes for NPCs.
I probably won’t be playing Cyberpunk anytime soon. I need to do an upgrade, but there are several complications. And as entitled and asshole-y as it sounds, the most frustrating part is that none of those complications are money-related.
Regarding mouse-invert, I’m really glad that I don’t use inverted controls, because I’ve seen a lot of games that don’t support axis inversion. The first 3D games I ever played were Doom, followed by Heretic and one of the Jedi Knight: Dark Forces games. The latter was also my first ever third-person game, and it had a very seamless transition from first to third person.
Inverted controls feel natural to me only when it comes to flight sims. But that’s one of the genres I play the least. And even then, the ones that I play tend to be more arcade-y, and they play just fine with non-inverted controls.
As a kid, one of my favourite (and at the time only) games was Tonic. It had normal movement, but the gliding/flight mechanic had inverted controls, and I found it extremely weird. I think I never got used to it, because I could never beat the final boss, where you had to use said mechanic. To be fair, though, that might have had a lot to do with the game being an early-2000s console port.
CD Projekt should have at least tried to get ahead of the console problem (and low-end PCs). If they’d be more open about this being a ‘next-gen game’ and ‘the best version of this game is on next-gen consoles’ at least their credibility wouldn’t have been so badly damaged. They could have focused on their long-term support plan.
They’re going to make their money back whatever happens, tricking people into buying a game that runs badly will only hurt them in the long-run.
I still don’t think it’s good enough to sell a game that runs at 10FPS at places, whatever approach you took, but the path they took is the worst one.
Been playing for 22 hours so far. I’ve been enjoying myself – I see minor bugs here and there and one actual crash to desktop, but it’s not too intrusive (ryzen 5600x and rtx 3070).
I’m glad that they included a navigation aid, but when I’m driving a fast motorcycle the minimap doesn’t show far enough ahead for me to take a 90 degree turn without breaking and almost falling over.
What I do have an issue with is the conversations. I can see that lines have been moved around, they’ve added lines here and there that do not match the same voice actor. Sometimes characters know things I haven’t told them yet. Sometimes I’m supposedly reacting to things I haven’t been told yet. That makes me feel like I’m not attentive enough, that I’ve missed out on something.
I had planned to play a gunslinger, but when someone dropped a purple katana with more than twice the damage numbers I really noticed that melee seems so much better than gunnery. I take far less damage charging up and slicing their face off than I do standing at range to take pot shots. And there’s no ammo shortage with a sword.
As for “too much”, I don’t agree. Dragon Age: Inquisition taught me not to complete everything, or I’d still be stuck in Hinterlands. Do whatever tickles your fancy.
Learning to only do what you fancy is the most important survival skill in modern gaming. Inquisition is much better when you don’t play most of it.
I still haven’t quite mastered it. If it’s a quest I think the character should be doing (i.e. someone in trouble), I find it weird not to do it even though I have less fun.
Even that is role playing. Choosing not to do something is a valid choice. I choose to help (friendly) characters I know, because it keeps me immersed – even if the quest is boring.
In cyberpunk there’s this fixer (can’t remember her name) that sends me messages every now and then – we were never even properly introduced and she’s just dumped 5-6 mmo-like missions on me (and keeps doing so). I have no involvement with this person, so I don’t feel like doing these missions.
On the other hand, I do have history with certain transportation company, so I’m doing those missions – of which I’m conveniently reminded of when I’m close to so I don’t have to actively seek them out.
Problem is, lots of quests are set-up to feel urgent! And then I don’t finish the game.
I have the opposite problem, where games tend to make their main quest so urgent that I skip sidequests that may otherwise have been enticing. I probably skipped more of TW3 than I “should have” for this reason.
Yeah, I’m one of those people who were trained to always do sidequests first lest they become unavailable, I think this often undermines the pacing of the main storyline*, though on the other hand very often sidequests can be more interesting or better written than the main storyline because the writers are allowed more freedom, or at least they’re not “written by committee” to the same extent.
*I actually respect what ME2 did, even if the system can be exploited or worked around if the player is forewarned.
To be clear:
When I say “It’s too much”, I don’t mean, “This is more game than I can handle.”
I mean:
“Too many resources were spent making content that doesn’t add value to the game. This is a wasteful, risky, and unsustainable way of building games and it creates needless hardships on your team.”
If they cut some of that content there still would have been plenty, and we might have gotten a more stable game, sooner.
In an Ubisoft game, the map markers spewed all over the map just represent random fights and collectibles that were dropped by a map designer. They don’t represent a tremendous number of man-hours. But in Cyberpunk, that avalanche of quests represents writing, voice acting, motion capture, scene scripting, branching dialog, mission design, bespoke encounters, etc etc etc. It’s nice to have, but if it means the game ships a year late and full of bugs after months of crunch, then everyone loses.
This is a great point I thought of when I was doing some of the “gigs” early on.
It was a random message called in by a “fixer” to retrieve a laptop. I go to the location and there are enemies with timed patrol routes, multiple points of entry built around being specced different ways (I could climb and infilatrate through the roof, sneak in, use strength to rip a door, hack a door, or just go in guns blazing). Now there were no cutscenes or anything, but this was clearly a custom-designed encounter. The gigs, which are the lowest-tier quest content are ALL like this. This is crazy to me.
It’s like if you took all the question marks on the Witcher 3 map and instead of just dropping a monster nest and a couple of mooks there, you built an entire mini-Deus Ex mission there. I love it, but it’s insane, and it’s no wonder we got what we got: a delayed, buggy game.
I mean, Watch Dogs does this with a lot of its side missions and collectables but I don’t know what the staff and/or money scale is between whatever Ubi sub-studio was doing WD and CDPR (being from Poland I’d guess not in CDPR’s favour), plus I suspect that whole console generation change is what probably really hit them bad.
It varied. Watch Dogs 1 collectibles were generally custom-built and often gave you some sort of tricky traversal challenge, but they weren’t that numerous. Watch Dogs 2 had a lot more collectibles (money, research, clothes, paints…) but they were mostly of the “scatter a few goons around an area” variety. Sure, they had to put a lot of design work into filling the area with cameras and hackable objects and climbable scenery, but that’s something you kind of have to do anyway since it’s a sandbox game and every single place in the city could potentially be part of a combat encounter.
Still a lot of work, but I have a feeling that looking around an outdoor map for a good hiding spot is less work than designing a whole indoor map for the player to assault.
It’s not really that big a deal to implement quests like those, as long as you have the tools for it. The majority of that sort of thing is really just intern-level stuff. Fire up the editor, add some triggers to start the quest, mark out the boundaries of the quest area, drop some mook entities in, give them some basic pre-scripted AI routines, place some waypoints that the AI will use (either patrol or stand in place), add the objective object loot/terminal/entity, set up the journal entries and quest states. By far the biggest expenditure of effort (and financial cost) would be in any related VO, which is why lot of those quests lean heavily on text messages to pad out the exposition. Most of the other stuff comes for free as part of the groundwork for the rest of the game – all the entity and prop assets, the AI/scripts, etc. The “arenas” where these sorts of things usually take place tend to be fenced compounds of some sort, so they would have had to have been planned as part of the overall level design. But some of them at least appear to be multi-use, getting reused for different quests. And some of the simpler ones just spawn a few new assets into an otherwise generic area for the duration of the quest.
I understand your point – and I agree, to an extent. They made Night City this big because that’s what the ‘lore’ said.
The hugeness of Night City is great at convening this image of the individual citizen as tiny and insubstantial. Night city is deadly, merciless and random – yet full of potential for anyone willing to slaughter their way on top. It speaks volumes of humanity when they put their last ounce of faith in a meat grinder.
But filling such a place up is not like in a fantasy game where you can just randomly place a cave, a shrine, and 2000 trees over a heightmap of dirt. You need buildings, roads, navigation systems, people, hierarchies, gangs, ‘what do they eat’, et cetera. Their ambitions may have been too big.
I guess it’s really a challenge to create a believable city from scratch. It’s easer for games that are set in the real world. The road grid of London is weird, but already finished (for easy mode do San Francisco), also the landmarks, important buildings and the structure of habital, commercial and industrial zones. Basically what you need is not level designers, but city architects that know how cities work.
From what I experienced in my couple of hours, they did a good job on that, it’s fun to walk around. And I guess Cyberpunk scenarios are helpul with their concpet of archologies etc.
Buuuut maybe they went a little too far with the Neon. It’s really more of a contemporary aesthetic, I had hoped for a more depressing tone of 80s Cyberpunk, much rain, darkness and the occasional neon billboard
This seems to point out an industry-wide problem with project management in video games – AAA-level studios seem unable to determine where there’s something that’s just chewing budget for little return. This week it’s Cyberpunk 2077 with tons and tons of bespoke quests that probably didn’t need to be. Last week it was Star Citizen with countless assets that contribute effectively nothing to gameplay.
Another point of similarity between Cyberpunk and Star Citizen that occurred to me as I listened to the podcast is that they are both trying to be the “everything game” for their respective genres.
That’s a fairly universal issue right? For standard civil engineering projects the UK government recommends adding on an extra 20% to any estimate of time it will take and 44% for any projected costs – and these are for the standard projects where people will be doing essentially the same thing over and over.
I mean, there is a Collector’s Edition for Cyberpunk. There just isn’t a digital one. It’s way more than $100, though.
The whole situation is really a shame, and a wake-up call. Giving CDPR the benefit of the doubt, I’d say their reasoning for not allowing the use of people’s own footage is that they panicked. People had already given them crap for crunch are several delays, if they outright atmitted the game still wasn’t ready, they’d have a revolt. Sure, reasonable people understand that’s better to wait to have a finished product, but those are short in stock. Lots of people were already complaining about CDPR losing their trust because they kept delaying. “They broke their promise!” and all that BS, as if game development was something that can be adequately gauge in time needed.
Sure, EA and Ubisoft release games on a yearly basis, but they’re mostly short, cookie-cutter simplistic shooter and sports games with minimal changes (to the point where sometimes they outright just only change the title of a last year game and release full price under a different name), and those are far larger companies. If you really take them as the measuring stick, you’re gonna have trouble. The worst part is that this reactionary behavior by CDPR ended up making those naysayers look reasonable.
On the flip side there are the excusers. The “It’s not CDPR’s fault that you have a crappy system. Upgrade!” guys, who are even more unbearable. The “I don’t see what people are complaining about, I’ve never had an issue”, guys, who hilariously can never see the problems despite the overwhelming evidence all over the internet. Well, they’re the same guys who say “I don’t understand why people have a problem with the Epic Store”. They can’t see beyond their own noses.
And, as usual, the gaming press is not helping matters by making up their own problems, attacking everyone who doesn’t agree with them and all around being as shitty as they’ve been for the last decade or so.
Gaming is becoming too tiresome of a hobby. I’m gonna have to move back to movies. I wonder how those are doing? … Oh.
Oddly enough you’re wrong about at least one thing there, CDPR is bigger than Ubisoft now. Or, at least, their stock was worth more earlier this year, it possibly has dipped back under theirs since it did take a dip after the successive delays. So, no, they aren’t far larger companies anymore, CDPR is a behemoth too at this point. Time they started being judged to the same standards, and with the same expectations, I say.
My trust in stock price as being a valid assessment of anything other than the mood of investment managers has gone through the floor this year.
If you look at revenue, CD Projekt took in £500 million total over the last 5 years, Ubisoft took in £1.5 billion in 2018 alone. So CD Projekt are sizeable, but still in the minor leagues compared to Ubisoft.
Yeah, CDPR stock prices are one massive stock market bubble that just burst. They were unreasonably priced (tbh many video game development studios are, one big hit is enough to send buyers into a feeding frenzy) and their prices just tanked, they lost almost 50% of value in two weeks.
This is the thing about stocks. If they’re a worthwhile assessment of a companies capabilities then events like this shouldn’t lead to massive changes in stock price. The potential that Cyberpunk 2077 might not be flawless should have been priced in already.
It’s not hidden information. We can look at the history of ambitious games, and plenty end up buggy and a little unfinished.
There was plenty of scope for Cyberpunk to be much much worse than it turned out even
Sounds like hindsight bias.
There’s an hypothetical timeline where Cyberpunk works great after the release-day patch, or at least good enough that players are willing to overlook the bugs long enough to be amazed by CP’s amazing storyline and everybody is furiously talking on reddit about “Did you guess that CyborgCorp was actually supplying the Death Circuit gang the secret weapon you were tracking for the entire game?” (no, I didn’t play the game)
That alternate timeline doesn’t look that different from the one we’re in up until the game actually releases. Before you open Schrodinger’s box, you need to take the potential that the game will bomb into account when deciding to buy stock. Once the box is open, the price instead reflects the fact that the game didbomb.
You can say there were warning signs, but… I mean, there Shamus posted about CP’s upcoming release last week and I didn’t see anyone confidently claim the game would bomb, so I guess those warning signs weren’t that clear-cut.
(I knew from the trailers I probably wouldn’t like the game, but that’s different from it being financially successful)
But the game didn’t bomb – this is what I mean. I could imagine a small shift downwards as the potential has been converted to reality.
But the idea you’re suggesting that ‘being a bit buggy but still best-selling’ is so on the low side of expectations that it will lead to a 50% decrease in stock price? That’s just nonsense. What upside were they pricing in? That every person in the world was going to buy Cyberpunk? That Cyberpunk would invent real-world augmentation?
I was wrong, getting delisted from the PS Store looks a lot like bombing.
This does not look like bombing to me:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-12-13-cyberpunk-2077-is-the-second-biggest-retail-launch-of-the-yer-uk-boxed-charts
Stock price means nothing in itself, because different companies have different quantities of shares. You’d need price times shares to get the market valuation.
Mind, that is also prone to all sorts of silliness, but then you’re actually making an oranges to oranges comparison.
It’s almost true when accounting for the number of shares.
As of this writing, CDPR has 100.66M shares at 67.65€ for a market capitalization of 6.8G€. Ubisoft has 123M shares at 76.51€, for a market cap of 9.4G€.
It would have been true last week, when CDPR closed at 99.8€ on December 4th. Its stock has fallen considerably from that mark, presumably on disappointment over Cyberpunk.
So is now the time to buy CDPR shares? I doubt that they’ll get back to 99.8, but as patches and DLC are released they are certain to improve over what is *probably* a temporary low…
At one point CDPR had higher market valuation than the whole Ubisoft. I’d say it was overvalued.
https://screenrant.com/cd-projekt-red-ubisoft-european-companies-value-worth/
Ah, yes. Those guys. Have you run into their brethren, the “all games are exactly this buggy at launch so this is absolutely fine and you aren’t allowed to complain about it” guys yet?
There are also people who say “Well, the crappy Jaguar CPU in PS4 is a potato so noone should have expected the game will run fine on it!”.
Between the “own footage” thing and “only PC review copies” thing I can’t help but fault them a little bit. I mean, someone made that call knowing full well that PC issues are somewhat easier to dismiss on account of hardware not being made equal (and apparently the PC version runs better/more stable on average?).
Game reviewers are also more likely to have high end PCs, which helps hide any low end performance issues.
I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a garden variety Xbox One and here’s the short of it for me: It looks like garbage, it runs like garbage, and I’ve been having a blast playing it.
And when I say “looks like garbage,” I suppose that’s in a relative sense because it looks pretty on par with what you could expect from an Xbox One. But it looks 16-bit in comparison to all of the promotional footage they let us see. If CDPR should be dinged for anything there, it’s in not letting anyone see console footage. They just showed the higher end version of what the game could look like and just let the impression sit out there that this was a reasonable interpretation of what any experience with the game would be like. As for it running like garbage, that mostly just means the occasional crash and a fair amount of stuttering with framerate dips. I have run into the occasional bug and they mostly just make me chuckle.
In a more general gameplay sense, I find the menus to be cumbersome, the driving to be clunky, and my character to always look weird because I’ve gone full “murder hobo” with bits of clothing that have the best stats, but don’t go together at all. Right now, my character would look pretty sweet if he wasn’t also wearing white sequin pants.
And I don’t know if it’s poor map design, or it’s the way that the quest design lets you sort of chain quests together in a way where you’re constantly following a dotted line as opposed to navigating a city, but I find that I don’t really know where anything is or where important locations are in relation to each other. If you showed me a map of Night City right now and told me to point roughly to the vicinity of V’s apartment, I couldn’t do it if my life depended on it.
All of that being said, I’ve been having a lot of fun with all of my shooting and hacking my way through the game.
All of that being said, I’d like to add that this should have been a PC/next gen title. It asks a bit too much of the hardware to run on the currently established consoles. CDPR probably should’ve bitten the bullet on this one and held off on the release.
I think the current install bases of a couple of thousand units each for both PS5 and Xbox XXX (excluding scalpers) might have forced their hands a bit.
The question is whether it plays sufficiently better on newer hardware to justify the several hundred dollars in upgrades or new console it would need.
The game might look current gen rather than next gen -I’m fine with that (I stopped caring about graphical fidelity sometime around Mass Effect 1). But if the game is actually stuttering enough to be unplayable, that’s a different story.
I looked at that Wikipedia article about Molly Bloom and was struck how it’s apparently now OK to substitute the word “entrepreneur” for “criminal”.
I propose “felontrepreneur” as a way to minimise confusion in future.
I am absolutely going to use this.
What about “felonthropist”? Makes it sound like “philanthropist”, and could lead to hilarious hijinks!
Double felontendre: A grave criminal suggestion made under the guise of surface level innocence.
Felontological argument: A rhetorical proof of the existence of The Man.
Felornithologist: One who studies foul fowl.
Obviously Wikipedia is making an implicit statement about capitalism.
All investment is indisputably, literally equivalent to gambling and also cocaine abuse.
According to Wikipedia’s recent style guide update, we’re now allowed to substitute all occurrences of “cocaine abuser” with “visionary”.
For the record: That’s kind of the point of the story. She was arrested and thrown in with various mobsters and lowlifes, but when the evidence came together it was obvious she didn’t belong with those other people.
Imagine Bob gets arrested for smoking a joint. But because Bob knows people in the drug business, he gets arrested by a SWAT team and tried as if he’s some dangerous cartel leader. So the DEA buries him in charges. They don’t actually want him to go to jail, they just want him to testify about all the people he knows.
According to the Movie / book, that’s what happened to Molly. Yes, she’s a convicted felon. But when it comes down to it very few people would consider her a “criminal” in the sense of being a public menace.
Sure, I was just tickled by Wikipedia’s use of language. I’m still not convinced that “doing only things which other people don’t usually do because everybody knows they’re federal crimes” counts as being an “entrepreneur” (note weasel words to exclude the majority of ‘real’ entrepreneurs who also do illegal stuff).
Interestingly (according to IMDB’s trivia section) in real life she got off pretty lightly and the size of the fine was greatly inflated for the film; which I think is another case of Aaron Sorkin bending reality to make his point. Reading between the lines, it’s also not hard to imagine that she got off more lightly because of who she knew, in a way that Joint-Smokin’ Bob wouldn’t have.
I agree. Molly isn’t a public menace, but there are a lot of people who meet that description who are serving time. She came from wealth, there’s power in the family, and she consorted with the super-rich and (in)famous. If she’d just been some nobody, she’d be in prison now.
Still, it’s a really interesting story.
I watched Molly’s Game last night based on your recommendation. I had never heard of it either. I want to leave an overall positive review but I’m having difficulty couching my words. Although I believe you can understand and empathize with my feelings given what you’ve had to say about anger & media in the past.
Molly’s Game is a movie I could not “enjoy.” It had my attention but I did not “like” it. I was not “entertained.” Reason being it made me *angry.* A low grade simmer of anger for the entire runtime that made my jaw a little sore after watching it. Pretty sure that was the emotion the movie was intending to invoke too. It might be the first movie I’ve seen where I (1)did not like any of the characters, (2)left feeling emotionally unsatisfied and yet (3)have a favorable overall opinion of the movie itself. So good on the director, it worked. It is a “good” movie. I certainly can understand why it stuck with you. Problem is that I don’t enjoy feeling that way. If it had been TV series I would have turned it off the same way people delete Twitter. Therefore I’m conflicted on what to say…
Hated it. Thanks for the recommendation! Two thumbs up! Viewer discretion advised.
Is that why Bob isn’t posting a whole lot nowadays?
That puts his drunk Witcher 3 playthru in a different light.
I personally think Cyberpunk 2077 makes for a decent Bethesda kind of open world game (imagine Skyrim but it actually has engaging quests and good writing) but is a terrible Rockstar kind of open world game. I’ve noticed a lot of rants on Reddit where people are constantly comparing this game to something like RDR2, focusing almost completely on the artificiality of the open world and dismissing most of the gigs in this game as filler content, so most of people who expected that kind of game are probably going to be the ones who will hate Cyberpunk 2077 the most. As someone who is already quite familiar with Eurojank RPGs and avoided all the marketing of this game from this year, I feel I managed to personally enjoy the game despite having a lot of flaws because I kept an open mind and tempered my expectations.
I think the core of Cyberpunk 2077’s problems are a result of the game’s chaotic development which seems to be a classic case of a bunch of game developers seeking to make something ambitious without realizing the limitations or having a solid foundation to tie all of it together. A lot of the gameplay systems and mechanics in this game are broken or even outright bad because of CD Projekt Red’s inexperience with designing them for the first time. This is why I still feel The Witcher 3 was a better game, probably because it had a clearer vision and tighter game design during its development.
To be fair, Aaron Sorkin takes a lot of liberties with how people talk in real life. Like I can’t imagine Sorkin’s Mark Zuckerberg to be the same guy who acted like a malfunctioning lizard robot during a senate hearing.
I just hope he gave her an amazing soliloquy.
Regarding CD Projekt Red and losing the audience that they appeal to:
It’s worth noting that the game contains single-player only cosmetics that are NOT included in the standalone installer, but are only able to be redeemed through GOG Galaxy, GOG’s online launcher (source: – FAQ located here: https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/goodies#goodies).
Meaning that a company that prides itself on DRM-free titles contains single-player only cosmetics gated behind online-only DRM.
That’s pretty greasy. :|
Wow, that’s just baffling. You’d assume that they’re aware that weirdos* who care about stuff like this are the reason why GOG does more than sell retro games. You’d assume that they would prefer to lean into the things that they do better than Steam.
*I don’t mean this as an insult, I’m a weirdo about this too ;)
Oof, I didn’t even know about this, and I’ve been more against CDPR than most around here for a while, whilst still being totally for GoG. Damn, is that a really, really bad precedent to set, and a really, really worrying trend.
I’m fine with default mouse behavior most of the time. But when it isn’t what I expect, I have difficulty even switching between inverting options.
Like what mouse input is Street View in Google Maps? The input control is always wrong to me. I can’t even figure out which axis is flipped (or both). Being able to describe how it is opposite to the way I want is the first step to fixing it. But I can’t even do that. So anyone know the proper description of the mouse in Street View? All I know is I hate it and it is always making me look at the wrong thing.
It’s click-and-drag, except 3D.
Yeah, the dragging behaviour in Street View seems pretty weird to me, because I can’t think of a metaphor that would be appropriate, to remember this with my human brain. Like, I’m dragging the world up or down in my view? I’m an infinitely strong person reaching out into the world here?
I prefer to think of it as being inside a sphere with the outside world projected on to it. You can grab and move the sphere around yourself.
Regarding mouse camera controls, what about people who don’t play games? People who have never gamed and have no preconceived notions nor learned behavior? If that academic study has any merit they must have ensured some people fit into that category.
I was thinking about this just the past week due to a youtuber I’m subscribed to: Razbuten. He has a series where he forces his non-gamer wife to play games. Just to see what is taken for granted by gamers. The most common problem she had was with the camera. So much of her playtime was staring at the sky or at the ground. Watching her play felt exactly like me and my own intuition’s incapability with Google Maps.
Shamus, your theory explains most people, but not non-gamers. So I can’t quite agree with your take on it. Only because people like her exist.
Yeah, controlling the camera was something I struggled with, back when 3D games were new. Didn’t help that games didn’t have any kind of standards for camera controls in the early days. :)
I have trouble thinking of CD Projekt Red as “the good guys”. GOG is my preferred digital games store because the games are DRM-free, I get to keep the installer, and the client is strictly optional. But, man, I can’t take the spam any more. Weekly sale! Monthly sale! Themed sale! New game! Limited time discount on some game, but we’re not going to tell you what it is so you have to click on the link! Pre-order Cyberpunk 2077! Have you pre-ordered Cyberpunk 2077 yet? Why aren’t you pre-ordering Cyberpunk 2077? Okay it’s out now, buy it! Cyberpunk 2077! Cyberpunk 2077! Cyberpunk 2077! I really should just unsubscribe instead of deleting everything, but I’m afraid that I might miss the occasional actually desirable e-mail about a game on my wishlist going on sale. The kind of honest, earnest, good-hearted fellows described by Shamus and Paul would not do this to me.
I do not say this to make light of the more serious issues related to the studio. I didn’t learn about those until just recently, and they’re depressing enough that I’m not going to get into them now except to say that Upton Sinclair was right and I did not want to know how the metaphorical sausage gets made.
I’ve been using GOG for years and something I’ve found equal parts irritating and amusing is how the storefront will push TW games as “similar” to what you’re currently browsing with little regard to how similar they actually are.
This could easily come from a naive “people who bought this also bought that” algorithm. A lot of people on GOG have bought The Witcher, for obvious reasons. This means that when the site looks up which games to recommend based on a particular game, that series ends up near the top every time from sheer popularity.
Honestly, the biggest mistake on the part of CD Projekt Red was announcing that the game was starting development, rather than waiting until they’d already had something to show. Witcher 3 wasn’t even out yet, so it’s not like people needed to know what the next project was.
When they had the big reveal in 2018, people already knew the game was coming, and they wanted it ASAP. Sony and Microsoft weren’t open about their next-gen plans yet, but I have no doubts that both companies were at least communicating with CD Projekt about the next piece of hardware, even if there weren’t any dev kits distributed. So CD Projekt would have known new hardware was coming out.
They should have announced “next-gen platforms” or just said nothing about platforms at all. However, when you’re finally revealing the game after six years of nothing to show, fans are going to be hungry. Simultaneously, them pre-orders are cash in the bank, right? But you can’t issue a pre-order for a game on a platform that’s not in existence/been announced. So they shot themselves in the foot. This was not a current-gen game, and it was never going to be. But they decided it would be, perhaps out of desperation to make back some of those development costs since there’d be more current-gen owners than next-gen.
And that was a mistake. It should have been a next-gen game. PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PS5 would have been a lot more simple. Instead, they also had to take into account the base PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X. That’s a lot of optimization.
If nothing else, they’ve hopefully learned a lesson about announcing games way too early.
From trusted insider info I have (I’m a Polish game developer and the industry is small) development on Cyberpunk was scrapped multiple times, there were countless engine, scope and feature shifts, and there was very little work done for YEARS. I know for sure that by 2017 there wasn’t even a gameplay prototype. One again, like with Anthem, the game we ended up with was frantically cobbled together in the last 1.5 years. This uses to be a norm, but nowadays games demand more and more fidelity, that’s why more and more AAA projects made this way turn out a mess. I hope we’ll get a Shrier report on CP2077.
This doesn’t sound all too surprising, though naturally I gotta dash a big ol’ “allegedly” in front of it all. Hopefully this has taught CD Projekt not to announce stuff before you have something real to show.
” by 2017 there wasn’t even a gameplay prototype.”
That sounds about right, I wanted to correct Shamus when he said “they worked 8 years on that game”. At best, proper work started after Witcher 3 and its DLCs were wrapped-up. So in 2016.
I think the most disappointing thing I’ve read so far is that the lifepath is essentially tacked on. That roleplaying angle was exciting for me and I was looking forward to playing a corporate operator type. Unfortunately, it sounds like after 15-20 minutes of prologue, your choice no longer matters. Dragon Age: Origins did a better job of weaving your backstory into the game, and it came out in 2009.
Shamus, if you read this, what did you think of the writing? Dialogue and story?
If you have the tree/bushes bug where they are in front of everything, you can try updating your drivers. It worked for me. That particular issue is really bad on the nomad start.
This also worked for me and other people I know who had the problem. It does seem to be driver related.
CP’77 so far surprised me quite well. My expectation were that it will be as shallow rpg-wise as TW3, with meaningless rpg syste. Basically, a GTA game with a slight sci-fi paint job. But it turned out deeper than that. And playing stealthy hacker character as delightful as it was in Deus Ex games.
Plus, the game really sold me on the atmosphere. For example, while doing gigs I realized that I wasn’t just doing them stealthy, mostly ghosting (trying only to just use reset enemy optics), not just because this is playstyle that I like, but because it would make sense for the character to act like that. In this world, crossing gangs is a dangerous business, you never know when you’ll have a surprise visit at night. So do your business discretely and don’t give a cause to look for a perpetrator (so, no kills). And when the story moved to the countryside, and I listened to night sounds and looked at the stars I actually felt like I myself was there (it reminded me a lot of my trips to nature, that I actually started to miss it). And a side story with Voodoo boys, despite being quite short, I still was uncomfortable, feeling how I was unwelcome on their territory (not many games were able to pull off such genuine adversity against player).
It’s really weird, because I can’t really say, that it tries harder to do it, than Kingdom Come Deliverance. That game, arguably, tried way harder to be as authentic as possible to sell the world (and its rpg-system is deeper in a good way), but I still mostly approached it as a game. (KCD seems like a good comparison to CP’77 in many ways, come to think of it; I actually recommend KCD, because I can’t any other game quite like that).
So far, my gripes are few – too long of a prologue (again – KCD), crashes / overall junkiness (KCD, yeah) and empty streets on PS5 and too much wub-wubs in the soundtrack (and just two rock/metal radio stations to offset that; and a jazz station too). Probably, should also pile up a tacked on way of how district bosses are introduced.
P.S. As for poor optimization. Someone compared it to Thi4f. That game was poorly optimized mostly because the project was restarted several times, and the junk of older prototypes was just left in the engine, growing bigger and bigger. Considering, that CP’77 was also restarted few times – seems likely that it resulted in struggling engine. Plus new console generation pushed things to the limit
P.P.S. I like male voice of V, so far. Seems really suitable for the character, and he feels relatable in some ways
Paul describing this as the “Mall Ninja gun of video games” cuts deep. It’s the metaphor I didn’t know I needed. True to that metaphor, it sounds like none of the greeblies actually lived up to what the expectation was; the bipod doesn’t lock into place consistently, all the fancy hex-pattern mags don’t hold open on the last round, and the red dot has a battery life of 37 minutes. It’s one thing to try and do too much and clutter your rifle, but it’s another when all the clutter is also half-baked UTG/NCStar junk and now your rifle is heavy and cumbersome *and* it’s malfunction-prone.
Sorry, gun nut impulses took over and needed to run away with that for a second. But man is this whole thing kind of a bummer. I’ve been waiting on this thing for a while now. Upgraded my PC to make sure I could run it. Bought and downloaded it as soon as the pre-load period began. I was in the middle of a big project at work so I couldn’t play on day one… and then the initial impressions started rolling in and apparently it’s a bugfest, and even after the upgrades it seems I’d be looking at running on low settings to have any kind of frame stability. Bought Ghost of Tsushima the next day and now I’m probably not going to actually fire the thing up until A.) a bunch of patches come out and B.) GPUs actually come back in stock. I’m sure that a lot of the negativity is overhyped, but even so, bugs can really take me out of a game world so I’m willing to wait and have the experience a little less marred by jank. I came to The Witcher 3 late, as well, and that seemed to clean up okay so hopefully this does as well. Hoping there’s some “how is it now?” pieces and follow-up out there in the coming months to take the temperature a little as we go.
Indies are where all the boring, durable SKS and AK-games live. (I mean, there’s also blow-your-finger-off pipe-guns…games, but at least it’s easy to avoid those.)
(Full disclaimer, I mostly know guns from YouTube, so maybe those aren’t the most durable guns. ^^; )
Nobody consciously sets out to build a mental model of controls before playing a video game but it’s something that sort of passively builds up, and I think it’s interesting to look at that. It’s funny how arbitrary and silly everything is in game controls. For example, “up” on an analog stick is only up if you hold the controller in front of your face which you never do.
I wasn’t aware that there seriously are people fighting about it on the internet, but I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.
I never want to build the model, but it’s what helped me remember the controls while I was learning. Memorizing thirty completely different things is hard, but remembering that thirty things are similar to a dozen other things you already know – that’s much easier. :)
Hey Shamus, is this the blinking, glimmering tree bug you are experiencing?
I have an alternate theory on the Cyberpunk release date and delays…
What if CDPR aimed for the PS4 hardware but could not hit it? Where they planned for future optimizations to hit 60 fps on the PS4 when the game launched. But they couldn’t hit it. Then they aimed for 30fps. When that became unrealistic they decided to wait until after the PS5 launch. A launch date that wasn’t set in stone by Sony due to Covid, with hardware shortages expected even after that.
My theory is that CDPR needed to wait until new console hardware was in people’s hands. For the past ~year (or w/e) the date the game went gold was always going to be after the PS5. It would also be another reason why there was so much content. You’ve got programmers finding and squashing bugs. The rest of the artistic team not working on optimization and bugs still is going to want to be paid. Might as well have them add more content in the meantime.
I’m not basing this on anything other than a supposition.
I look forward to reading about your journey to the realm of knitting!
I don’t envy the dark day when yet another Internet culture war chooses Twenty Sided for its next battleground. Woe be to Shamus when the fell tides crash upon us.
Be warned — the crocheters are coming.
As both a crocheter and a knitter (more recently) this should be interesting.
Shamus, you mentioned you would have purchased a special edition of Cyberpunk if one had existed. You may be happy to learn a collector’s edition of Cyberpunk exists.
For people who claim flight simulators caused them to want Y axis of mouse movement to map to negative Y-axis motion, do you also map X axis of mouse movement to clockwise roll?
I just discovered that Cyberpunk works surprisingly well* in VR using VorpX. An RTX2080 and an i5 are good enough for high settings using DLSS and with raytracing disabled. Cutscenes and close-ups have the usual issues, but my goodness the city looks absolutely stunning. Even more so than the GTA5 VR mod, and that’s saying something.
* in the context of VorpX – which is a hack to make games which aren’t designed for VR appear to have depth and head tracking – “surprisingly well” means it took several dozen restarts of the game, three restarts of my computer and disabling the CDPR launcher via the launch options in Steam. And I’m not entirely sure it will ever work again.
Never invert, never surrender…
Until you’re flying and non-inversion makes you control like Solid Snake if you plugged in the old PS 1 controller with no secondary joystick
All trees draw on top of the scene?
Update your nVidia drivers. This is a known problem with anything but the newest drivers. By now it’s pretty common knowledge that for a large AAA release updating the GPU drivers is mandatory. nVidia fixes a ton of bugs on their side for every big game that’s out there.