You're comparing an entire Engine to a video game. UE not only a game engine, but is also used in Cinema, ArchViz, Animation, Automotive ... It's got thousands of people working on it.
I just don't get all the hate about this game. I completed it on PS4, including every single side quest, and hardly had any bugs.
On the other hand the storyline was probably the best I've ever played, with the possible exception of the original Deus Ex. The rock star turned terrorist sounds completely absurd the first time you hear it, but they really make it work with the character. And that's just a small part of a great story.
The visuals are absolutely amazing, I've never felt like a tourist in awe in a game before, but it happened in Cyberpunk. They really did build an amazing world to play in.
This patch makes me hopeful that there will be more quests and maybe a follow on game at some point. It would be a really big shame if there wasn't.
It's mostly FUD driven, after CP there were worse quality releases of eg. Battlefield, GTA but they didn't gain that much media coverage and somehow Sony didn't pull them out from their store to "protect players from bad purchase decisions"
My understanding is that the whole hate around the game is the fact that it got over-hyped with everyone just raising the expectation to then finish with a suboptimal release that was worse than dog shit on a sidewalk...
Everyone that stepped on it, obviously, got frustrated and reacted on it.
Can't blame people for getting angry and reacting on something that was NOT what they paid for. We can blame them however for supporting this type of hyped releases by throwing money at game companies before they even give proof that their product is solid or even close to what they advertise.
The expectations weren't just high, they were completely bonkers.
People were seriously expecting that a console released in 2013 - almost a decade ago - could run a fully realized city with an unique AI for every person in there, with huge crowds you could get lost in.
Rockstar still did a better job on the Xbox 360 than Cyberpunk did at launch on PC IMO. There was more stuff on the screen in cyberpunk but it felt extremely inconsistent and ungrounded
I'm still occasionally amazed how Rockstar could make such an incredibly big open-world game (GTA 5) actually run on the Xbox 360. I think that was more of a miracle outlier in the industry than anything else, they were probably stretching the limits of what that small machine can do. Still, Rockstar's advantage was that they were making a GTA game with a well-tested formula, compared to what Cyberpunk was trying to do everything well and then failed because of a lack of proper direction.
The 360 had some rather insane releases towards the end of it's life, GTA 5 was just one of them.
Watch Dogs and Risen 3 were very capable open-worlders, that shouldn't run on such low-end hardware and I'm still not sure how Bioware managed to pull off Dragon Age: Inquisition or how Konami made MGSV run as well as it did.
From what I've heard, ther was some similar wizardry going on with the PS4.
Well, cd project red did said multiple times that the PS4 version had no issues, do not blame consumer for not knowing technical details about game development
I've completed Cyberpunk 2077 twice, and although I really like the game and would recommend it to anyone who finds it interesting, there's most definitely bugs.
I've had a quest line be incompletable because some script trigger didn't happen (I think the NPC got stuck), I've had to reload an autosave because a story mission would not progress (most likely a missed trigger again), escort NPCs have followed me for hours after completing the escort mission they were involved in, I've had cars instantly stop from 200 km/h after hitting an invisible barrier in the middle of a road, jumping over a barrier has sent me flying into space, NPCs have had objects stuck to their hands, NPC voice lines have duplicated, I've gotten stuck in a finisher animation, I've gotten stuck in a car that spawned inside an object, NPCs have walked through parked cars during missions, and a lot of random T-posing.
And these are the bugs that I remember off the top of my head, or remembered by having a cursorary look through my YouTube uploads.
Luckily, most of the bugs are funny and only visual, but it was pretty annoying that the only way I would've been able to continue that one side quest was by reloading a save and losing hours of progress.
People were expecting GTA: Night City it was more of an open-world RPG. People are still butt-hurt about it.
Streamers were seriously running out and shooting the first civilian and were disappointed at the lack of police chases. Some people even complained about the car modeling realism (lack of traction when you drive one corner of the car over a bollard etc).
At its current price (25-30€ish sales everywhere) it's fully worth playing just for the story. It's not the best fighting game, it's not the best driving game, but the story is damn good and some of the endings really gut-wrenching.
Just the dive with Judy is something I haven't seen in a game in a long time. No explosions, no shooting, just characters talking about their feelings.
The police chases are there, but A) there's an intentionally significantly reduced police presence than a GTA (which makes sense from an environmental storytelling sense: Night City having fewer overall cops implies a certain lawlessness to the city; it's also a staple of the genre, with fewer but worse cops a Cyberpunk "tradition"), and B) yeah it did launch buggy, and was one of the earlier things corrected in patches but not early enough for a lot of people that wanted police chases.
I really wanted to like it (and I still like bits of it quite a lot) but I just thought narratively it was not very good, and the gameplay was nowhere near as thorough as (say) GTA V.
Keanu also can't act which is a shame.
Visually the game is definitely astonishing, but I could never tell what the game is actually trying to be. If they'd made a very pretty game mulling over (say) the kind of deep sci-fi you get in something like blade runner 2049, then I'd probably still be playing to this day, whereas what they actually ended up with felt a bit incidental.
It's kind of unfair, so I don't hold it too much against the game, but even though the visuals are very good, the overall world doesn't feel as real as it could do IMO. The obvious comparison is with GTA V (which is why I say it's slightly unfair because GTA V is based on LA in ~2013), which just feels so much more real to me. The radio stations are a good example, they're such heavy handed satire, but that satire lets your brain fill in the detail about Los Santos whereas in Night City I was mostly being shown things that would never happen again or being made to pick choices that would have no effect etc.
because pre-release the developers made the GTA comparison, every video game media outlet made the comparison, and every press piece regarding the game pre-release focused on the 'open-world' elements, while promising post-release multiplayer.
let's not pretend this was billed as a single-player RPG fantasy; it wasn't. It was toted as a GTA competitor in nearly every single way.
The post release narrative shift of "well it's a story-driven game from a well known story-driven 'RPG studio', it was YOUR expectations that were wrong! " was totally drawn hastily after release to try to assuage angry and disappointed fans during a rocky release.
Because I never really got the impression I was playing an RPG ever since I made a choice but was then immediately funnelled into the same path as everyone else
I honestly can't fathom how you could possibly make it through the entire game with hardly any bugs. When I played on my PS4 it crashed quite regularly (hourly, probably). It was only slightly better on my PS5. And bugs were everywhere. I don't see how you could play this game for 5 minutes and not at least encounter numerous visual glitches (T-poses, NPCs walking into and through walls or 5 feet in the air). Most bugs weren't game-breaking (though I ran into some of those). But they were certainly plentiful and unavoidable.
The character building in the story and the themes are really good, and I also enjoyed V and Johnny Rotten and their relationship tremendously. However, the way the game is structured and the story combined with the open-world game are atrocious.
The intense time pressure that the storyline badgers you with at every beat becomes absurdist comedy when the story missions finish and you start doing side quests. This is especially bizarre in the tone difference between the main story quests and the companion quests which have a huge influence on the story itself, but usually make little to no reference to the extreme time pressure.
I launched the game on PS5 with 1.5, and during the first few minutes of the Streetkid storyline, saw several characters T posing. This is a year and a half after original release, for a game that has several major delays as it is before release.
This kind of jank wasn’t acceptable in the 90s and 2000s, let alone in 2020-2022.
It’s amazing how incompetent this team has become.
The animations are fine but the game fails to load them. As it fails other assets too, for example you might see your main character in a cutscene with her tits out because the clothes didn't load. [1]
At launch the game had you T-pose without pants while riding a motorcycle...
Game engines typically spawn character model entities with this pose by default. Which means if you see this then the NPC's scripted loop hasn't even been initiated at this point. This can be a bug obviously but it could also be due to performance since a lot of game engine pipelines are async and some of these tasks might not have been completed in time.
It's not exactly an easy problem to solve (simulating crowds in a huge city without any organic view distance portals) but I guess they could have also saved themselves a lot of pain by not targeting legacy systems or maybe make less ambitious claims about their game.
I think this is a problem that is specific to the animation system, not necessarily the entire scripting system, as the characters are still following their scripts and driving/shooting; it’s just that their animation is broken.
It's been ages since I've left gamedev, but generally characters and creatures are animated by constructing an actual skeletal structure inside their body (usually called a mesh). Points on the mesh are then mapped with various weights to the bones in the skeleton. When a bone moves, points on the body are moved along with it depending on the weighting. You can think of it like attaching muscles to bones, which determines how the "flesh" moves when bones move/rotate.
What you animate then is not the "flesh", but the skeleton. You tell the hand to move to a certain position, and then a constrained optimization problem is solved to extend the arm and hand while keeping the joint limits in mind.
The most convenient default shape to set up the skeletal structure of a humanoid is the T-pose, so this is usually the shape humanoids take in games before any animation logic is applied to them. If you see a T-pose in a game, odds are that the animation system crapped out. The animation system may have crashed but the error was swallowed to keep the game chugging along.
T-pose is the default/neutral stance for character rig/skeleton iirc, makes it easier for modelers etc to work on the asset as they don't have things hidden by the model.
I think there was also a ragdoll that spazzed out against some props after a takedown during the pre-recorded next-gen preview video that was shown at the beginning.
It seems that the devs are experiencing some serious stability issues with their physics engine (which is likely homebrewed), and is causing most of the bugs the players are complaining about (the next problematic being character AI and animation). Which I understand, since I also spent some time implementing my own physics engine and encountered the sorts of bugs similar to these... (though I still expect veteran engine devs to do a lot better than me!)
It's like everyone's forgotten entirely about the (wonderful) madness of Havok which characterises basically every Bethesda and Source Engine 2 game... The sound of agressive slapping and thumping as a corpse or four hundred cheese wheels get caught in the ground is music to my ears, bringing me back to the halcyon days of my youth when times were simpler and video games were...... Still a humongous crunch culture and populated with vocally angry impatient dorks for fans, but physics glitches were apparently just part of a game's charm back then?
We took what we could get. Back then, the sound of 4000 cheese wheels rubbing ominously against other surfaces was one of the most glorious experiences available. Just the fact that it resembled any functionality at all was impressive to us.
You're right, physics simulation are still the most jankiest part of a game engine and for good reason. And these buggy parts are what brings humor to many games like the one's you've mentioned.
Still, I never expected ragdolls to be THAT buggy in Cyberpunk. I thought ragdolls were mostly a solved problem, they're still funny to look at but aren't that glitchy anymore. You can probably eliminate most of the stability issues of ragdoll systems (which have lots of constraints between rigid bodies) by damping the hell out of them (along with adding some realistic joint constraints). But I really don't understand what Cyberpunk's engine is doing, the 1% of cases when things align well it looks very realistic, but most of the time it glitches out weirdly (unrealistic poses) in ways I don't expect. Looking at the way how characters can get stuck to objects it seems like there are some serious issues with contact resolution...
Yes, but the best studios minimize these glitches to a minimum. Compare this game with GTA5 or RDR2. Rockstar uses its own proprietary engine that works together with the animation engine. When taking into consideration how much interaction there is with game world in GTA5 and RDR2, the glitches are fewer and farther between. Rockstar is the gold standard of technical game development these days.
They may have been the gold standard, but not anymore since the GTA remaster release last year... that was so bad they had to apologise for releasing it.
The Definitive editions were developed by a mobile game studio (Grove Street Games) rather than in-house by Rockstar. Rockstar still published them though, so they do bear some responsibility for the quality issues.
I think people were too busy being amazed to nitpick the jank. My own experience with “realistic” physics in games at that point was limited to Elastomania and Worms, so Source was mind-blowing. I remember spending more time in the CS:Source beta throwing grenades at piles of junk than playing the actual game.
There were patches in the 90s, and certainly in 2000s. Perhaps not on consoles, but certainly on PC. What I meant was certain notorious PC RPG games, which became cult classic despite their bugginess (Gothic, Elder Scrolls, etc.)
Let's be more empathetic to the developers than call them "incompetent". It might be that they are burnt out from years if crunch, investor expectations and harassment from fans.
Incompetent is defined by Merriam-Webster as „lacking the qualities needed for effective action“ and „unable to function properly“. Incompetent is the correct word, all things considered. Protecting the feelings of the people involved by mincing words is not going to help them very much in the end.
But we don't know that the developers are lacking those qualities? It's certainly possible that the only problem at CDPR and the only problem with the development of Cyberpunk 2077 is that the programmers and artists are bad (or "lacking the qualities needed for effective action"). But it's certainly also possible that the artists, developers and maybe even low-level managers are perfectly capable workers but placed in circumstances where even the most competent workers would produce a sub-par product, no?
This isn't about mincing word, this is about correctly attributing blame.
Notice I didn't only blame the developers. I said "team". Management is part of that team. But where there is smoke, there usually is fire, and probably some of the blame of this technical failure of a game lies with developers also.
nobody needs your merriam webster definition. you never even spent a day as a developer in this company and somehow you think you have the credibility to back a comment on their competence?
Your emotional comment is inappropriate. You seem to think that calling a team incompetent is the same as calling individuals incompetent, which it isn't.
I'm so glad I got it for PC and not for my PS5! I had one bug in a complete play-through - where I had to reload to trigger a quest - otherwise the game worked as intended from release day.
I had a few that looked silly, like a floating cigarette I encountered within the first minute of playing or a car clipping into the ground or various T-posing models. But they weren't so game-changingly bad that they ruined anything for me
> apparently more budget, more advanced technology and team members a game has, crappier it gets.
That's just not fair. Expectations have changed, technology has changed and team sizes have grown to accomodate the desires of the audience. With this extra scope comes extra risk which has been poorly managed.
> but most main stream titles were quite polished.
This is your nostalgia talking, and there's a huge amount of survivorship bias at play here. There were plenty of games from the 80s and 90s period that were anything from crap to just straight up unplayable, and they were just left in that state.
I agree there is a lot of survivorship bias, but it seems like every triple AAA game that releases is an unfun buggy mess. It feels like they like passion and have become too corporate. Like they focused on what features the game has to have instead of being a fun game. And by having so many features of course you have more area for bugs.
Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.
> but it seems like every triple AAA game that releases is an unfun buggy mess.
Horizon forbidden west released late last week and is a AAA title that has been well received, is polished and great fun. There are still many AAA titles released that aren't unfun buggy messes.
> Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.
> They might not suck, but they are so often bland and unoriginal.
There's plenty of original and not-bland AAA games releasing regularly. Teams take risks, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't.
> Like they owe it to their 100 million dollar investors not to rock the boat too hard.
This is just shitposting, frankly, and is the sort of comment I'd expect ot see on reddit, not here. Cyberpunk is many things, but unoriginal and bland is not it. It definitely _tries_, and there's not really anything else like it (Deus ex is maybe the closest thing). That doesn't mean it's fun, and that doesn't mean that all AAA games are unoriginal bland and unfun either.
The end result of Cyberpunk is that the world is bland. The city is empty and lifeless, the AI that is there, is really brain-dead. We are not in the PS1 era of open world games, where pioneers in the genre were happy to just have a few people and cars on the street. In 2020, this is some of the worst open-world implementation in recent AAA game development.
> Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.
It's all about expectations. 99% of what makes vampire survivors fun is that it's a $2 indie game. If the same exact game was released by a AAA studio for $30-$60, everyone would say it's shit, has terrible graphics, doesn't have enough content, etc. It would completely change your perception of the game.
In that vein, I played through cyberpunk and had a lot of fun. I didn't rage quit the first time I encountered a physics bug. I allowed myself to have fun, which is something a lot of gamers can't seem to do anymore.
Not just survivorship bias imo. You had to ship a stable game because you couldn't patch it later. And the scope of games was much smaller, in complexity and game length, so it was easier to QA. End result is that on average games were much more stable than modern games are at 1.0.
> And the scope of games was much smaller, in complexity and game length, so it was easier to QA
Agreed on this point.
> End result is that on average games were much more stable than modern games are at 1.0.
Have you got an actual source for this? I think you're missing a large amount of pure crapware that was released. I have memories of playing the Sierra adventure games being incredibly unreliable for example. Ports for DOS were unbeatable without cheating because they were so sloppily done[0]. E.T. [1] which has been associated with the fall of major games companies and is widely known as the worst game in history, or Bubsy 3d which is literally meme material. 95% of boxed games that were released were complete and utter crapware.
> Expectations have changed, technology has changed
This I agree, nowadays people start with a lot already done, no need to write a custom audio codec, or image compression trick or whatever, not only there is plenty of code ready for doing so, but there are plenty of computational resources to use on runtime.
Back then you would see advances first in the games and later on being documented, now they are released as papers, you hope that it will be implemented on some engine somewhere, and games using these techniques will be at least 5 years away from the paper release.
In the past graphics APIs like OpenGL and old Directx leaked a lot of structural information, so almost every big game release was followed by a driver update where the GPU vendors fixed any bugs in the games that where visible on their GPUs. They still do that for widely used engines. Write your own engine that throws around binary buffers in Vulkan or modern DirectX? Tough luck, no one will spend months trying to reverse engineer a fix for every bug you wrote.
In the 90s and 2000s console makers still did strict quality assurance for all games on their platform, mostly as a consequence of the video game crash of 1983, which was in large part caused by bad games. Something as buggy as Cyberpunk 2077 wouldn't have been allowed. Since then those checks have relaxed considerably, basically to a level of "if it runs, you can ship it".
I don't necessarily think they only had higher QA standards back then. Back then you delivered the game on a physical medium, i.e. CD/DVD-ROM and could not expect the customer to be 24/7 online. If you did mess up your Golden Master or did not catch game breaking bugs, this could severely damage your revenue during your main sales window.
As far as I can tell, there's really just one bug underlying most of the issues, and its that there is so much content in the game, that it messes up trying to load and unload objects. And a lot of it is failed attempts to adapt it for consoles.
I’m not saying they changed more or less. But the title claims the patch notes are gigantic, and the site says they are the biggest they ever pasted. And that just sounds very wrong.
That said, stuff like "Fixed an issue when combat mode was triggered while roaming." sounds like a similar granularity, but I haven’t played CP2077 yet, so I don’t know.
I wonder how big is the impact of the pandemic on the industry.
CP is not the only game that had many issues after covid virus spread all over the world.
Personally I see that the productivity(and especially products quality) had decreased in the company I am working for.
Halo got delayed because of the pandemic. Well worth the wait. It’s not perfect but the campaign is the best it’s been in years and the multiplayer is amazing
I think Jason Schreier had the right take on this: the day this patch dropped is the day the game should have been released. For me the game was perfectly servicable on PS5 (minus some crashes) but some missing features were real head scratchers because you've come to expect them from similar immersive RPGs.
I played it on stadia on day one and I loved it , but then again I also enjoyed alpha protocol. Not sure if the patch list is so big that it really changes much. Would love to see a expansion
Will NPCs finally resist when you rip open their car door, pull them out and drive away in their vehicle? That always bothered me the most of all - in a town with violence at every corner, people leave their car doors unsecured and when someone attempts to hijack them, every single one goes "oh noes please" instead of shoving a weapon in your face.
I did play through this recently, heavily modded with amazing community mods that completely rebalanced the rubbish combat and economy and fixed numerous bugs. I did enjoy it a lot (the world building is amazing and the story well written), but wouldn't have unmodded. One reason I'd never bother with consoles where modding isn't available.
Gameplay: Full gameplay rebalance (the most important one) https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/3010 , Reduce fall damage, Stop false attacks, Disable reveal position hack (NPCs don't automatically know where you are at all times), NeureSpec, Smarter Scrapper
Visual: Alternate character creation lighting (removes green tint), Crouch vignette effect remover
I'm not quite sure if this is a right content for the HN.
I'd rather discuss about challenges in the production or testing process. Perhaps discuss future of the base old gen consoles (This is a first title that has quite different content between PS4 and PS5).
Discussing about game itself is polarizing, I know people hate this game, I know people love it and people don't care.
I don't go back and replay any of the sandbox games I've completed, and that's very likely to include Cyberpunk. By the time I finished this game in detail I had more than enough, which is usual for these behemoths. The dozens and dozens of almost identical side missions were a lot of fun for a while but a slog by the end. I did enjoy the overall game. Same with Ghost of Tsushima and RDR2. But enough is enough. There's just too much else out there to sample.
Are many of you getting a lot of replay value from the big sandboxes?
I agree with you 100%. I haven't played Cyberpunk (yet) but I did finish Tsushima and just last weekend I finished Far Cry 6. At the start I usually pick the quests carefully and watch all the cutscenes. By the end I'm hammering the skip key and just want to be done with it. I wish the games were about half as long as they are.
GTA5 was probably the last big game that, when I finished the main story, I was still having fun and that's mostly because it was pretty short for a AAA game.
Katamari on the PS4 is a game that I wish I could buy more levels for. I had so much fun with that one.
> At the start I usually pick the quests carefully and watch all the cutscenes. By the end I'm hammering the skip key and just want to be done with it.
I've felt the same with many games. I don't think length is an issue per se, rather it's that they achieve that with filler and padding. I can imagine a bunch of young lowly paid game developers mass-producing low-effort side quests and other stuff to fill the world with. Like its only purpose is to give the player something to do (and some reward, for the loot & xp addicts) rather than to tell an interesting, compelling story and make you part of it.
Length is an issue for other reasons but the urge to skip forward and just get on with it is, for me, 100% due to repetitiveness and boredom and lack of lasting quality.
I played around 120 hours on 1.4 and I absolutely loved the game. I didn't have much bugs (almost none) but then I am running on a quite powerful box, so there is that.
That being said, I'm a bit disappointed by the release. My main grievance about Cyberpunk is the very short story line. The game can be completed in 60-70 hours. There is very little to do on the open world (except hitting on other gangs and collecting their gear). It gets boring really fast. I'd have liked if the game had 120-150 hours of story line and 30-50 hours of open world exploration.
I was expecting more quests, a stock exchange/bank, ability to buy/sell businesses, more cyberware tech or hacking puzzles.
For anyone interested: Ignore the negative reviews. The game is amazing and with a capable PC (and with 1.5) you'll have a good enough playing experience. It's not a fake sci-fi game (though it borders on that) and it's not a more realistic GTA. It has a great and challenging story that makes you go online and read and play again to figure out stuff. The public is still intrigued about the ending. It might have been annoying at first but then I figured that all GTA missions go almost linear with no surprises in between. In essence, GTA is forgettable and CP is memorable despite all the stuff it lacks.
>For anyone interested: Ignore the negative reviews.
As I replied elsewhere, it is strange to see another echo chamber in action. The sales number seems to be doing fine. And reviews were extremely polarised.
I think the negative reviews are warranted for gamers but not for software developers. The game is complex. It introduces tons of new stuff (like hacking, cyberware gear, scanning, brain dances, etc...) that makes it a programming challenge.
The team did definitively over-extend themselves and failed to deliver a perfect? product but I don't see why this is being shunned here. They pushed the limits where it comes to Open World games and GTA has to up their game a LOT in the next release.
Haven't played CP so I can't comment on this specific aspect, but actions like hacking, taking over cameras, robots, or augmenting your character were already present in earlier tiles. Specifically, Deus Ex can be praised here. The hacking mini games were great, while augmentations opened many new ways to complete the missions, dramatically changing the gameplay.
> It introduces tons of new stuff (like hacking, cyberware gear, scanning, brain dances, etc...) that makes it a programming challenge.
I'm sorry, but as a software dev with some hobby experience in game development, I disagree with this.
* hacking: tons of other games have a hacking component, either as a hack this computer, or break this lock, or make an enemy turret be friendly, or control this enemy. Fallout has hacking, Batman Arkham series has hacking (and enemy control), PoE has enemy take over skills etc
* cyberware gear: there is no difference between a "cyber deck" and a "helmet of might". Also, I think Deus-Ex has cyberware gear...
* scanning: Arkham games have a beautiful implementation of the concept. Horizon Zero Dawn has scanning.
* brain dances: this is simply playing a pre "recorded" 3d scene with some elements removed based on the "mode" selected. This is not a very hard thing to do, from a software development perspective, but requires lots of content. And guess what, there are like 4 brain dances in the game: the tutorial, the find the chip mission, the find the voodoo lady mission and the side mission with the cow dude.
And this is a recurring thing with Cyberpunk 2077, lack of content. I wish they'd spent less on getting Keanu Reaves to "star" and more on adding more clothing options or side missions, or give the beggars more lines. It would have been really cool to stay a while and listen to a beggar about that time their tank got blown up and they had to trek back from behind enemy lines...
Here is the thing, you can both like the game and critique the technical aspects.
Those may be "common" features across a number of games, but no one is sharing code in games. The hobby experience is shifting with respect to how broad the Unity marketplace is starting to be in pluggable modules, but AAA games is still mostly the land of massive NIH and almost every game is still much more a bespoke artisanal thing with very little reused under the hood from game to game than any game player imagines.
This seems especially so in CDPR's case: they aren't using Unreal or any other off-the-shelf engine, they developed their own engine bespoke for The Witcher. Cyberpunk 2077 was the first game to use that engine for something that wasn't The Witcher series. A lot of their technical hurdles seem almost entirely related: it doesn't seem like it should be a huge surprise that a game engine originally built for a setting where the fastest traveling vehicle is a horse starts to fall down with performance problems when you introduce cars and sky cars and planes.
(Some small credit where credit is due: Rockstar at least started with GTA and then moved to RDR. Cars to horses seems to make more sense as a transition for a game engine than the other way around.)
Absolutely there are probably technical things CDPR could have done to avoid some of the problems they've had, but it was way more of a "programming challenge" than "why didn't they just copy and paste the hacking component from Fallout [Bethesda/Microsoft] and scanning from Arkham Asylum [Rocksteady/Warner Brothers] and call it a day?" (They couldn't, there's no way to access those components from other companies. There's no "Unity store" for that sort of stuff. There's not even a "Unity" here: all three of those franchises have extremely different bespoke game engines that never leave the doors of their development companies or publishers.)
Watchdogs already did all those ideas brilliantly. Cyberpunk took most of those ideas and gave them a half-assed clunky implementation that should have been embarrassing for them in comparison. Every time Cyberpunk introduced a new concept I got so excited, thinking about all the potential for fun and how they might develop the ideas as the game progressed. And then there was no follow through.
It's a wonderful world/backdrop/setting. I like the story. There's 50x as much cutscenes and consequence-free dialog choices as there needs to be. I occasionally had fun with the missions. But overall it was a big basket of good ideas that they dropped on the floor.
Is it? If you play 3-4 hours per day, you'll finish the game in less than a month, and the open world is quite poor, so you'll have little to do in between.
What sort of ROI do you expect from your entertainment? Videogames right now are absolutely one of the cheapest $/entertainment-hour markets in the world right now. Assuming you paid a full $70 at launch, "only" getting 60 hours of gameplay out of that is still not much more than $1/entertainment-hour! You aren't going to find many better deals for your entertainment time.
For comparison, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is currently estimated to take about 51 hours if you only focus on the main story. https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=10270
I'm very grateful that the game was not longer, I loved playing through it, but I don't have the time for a +100 hour story.
I'll pay extra for a shorter and more interesting story line any day.
I completed the game before the second patch came out, I didn't really hit any bugs, maybe once or twice I had to save and reload it.
An intense and ACTUALLY INTERSTING main story of about 10 hours, with no grind or "let's waste your time with these menial tasks" in between, that is my preference.
Context: If I'm lucky, I can squeeze 1 or 2 hours in maybe 3 or 4 evenings per week, at the evening when I'm maxmially tired from the demands of real life, and at that point, I have very little tolerance for a game trying to waste my precious time.
The Witcher 3 took me 150 hours with all the DLC, I enjoyed every minute of it and didn't want it to end. I don't understand "I don't have time for a 100 hour story", if you enjoy the game why do you want it to be short?
Because even if it was actually 150 hours of densely packed, highly entertaining, engaging story, there's no version of the universe where I'd be able to keep all that in my head when it's chopped up into about 100 short evening sessions.
Sure, if I had all the time in the world, sure, but even if people enjoy grinding, nobody is going to convince me that these games provide 150 hours of intense, solid entertainment, they "merely" take 150 hours to get through. I've gone through long games back when I had the life to waste, and of course I enjoyed that, but I'm under no illusion that there was generally more "work" in them.
Witcher 3 has a robust quest system, an in game encyclopedia, and a lot of great use of narrative and dialog options to remind the player where they are in the trilogy of games storywise.
It's something than can be improved with practice. I can now read a few dozen books at a time and have no trouble keeping them straight, and I'm sure I've benefitted from that in other ways in my day to day life. Remember that humans relied on oral tradition for hundreds of thousands of years. Give yourself some credit!
Thing is, I also enjoy the satisfaction of having been through a story, having the feeling that that I know the story well, that I've been there and enjoyed myself and seen the end.
I don't get that when I spread it out too thin. I enjoy movies and tv shows for different reasons, and often, for story-based games (as opposed to multiplayer games and pure-skill games) I enjoy the "movie" version more, "short" sweet, dense and intense.
For the other types, I play OSU! and whatever the popular FPS is at the moment it's Apex Legends, but those I play for different reasons than games with a good story.
>For anyone interested: Ignore the negative reviews.
Most of the negative reviews are not only perfectly legitimate but address structural issues in the game not fixable with quality of life patches and the adding of a bunch of new weapons and cars, one year after the release of the game, which by the way were never lacking. This game has so much cut content that some quests feel like a demo version and main characters like Adam Smasher (a primary antagonist) behave like an afterthought with barely no presence, feeling as lifeless and predictable as the rest of Night City.
The excusable tragedy of Cyberpunk it's that it miserably fails to deliver in every different aspect it touches, excelling in none of the many ambitions it had. The unexcusable part is its unplayable console release, that felt like a borderline scam.
>It has a great and challenging story
Disco Elysium or Pathologic 2 have memorable stories; Cyberpunk is a painfully mediocre experience at best, in my opinion.
I still remember the enormous backlash on Cyberpunk 2077. And yet it turns out the game was selling exceptionally well. 18 million copies so far and may be soon 20 million. The only people not happy were those expecting it to be a 30 million IP.
Of All the information I read, Graphics Asset and Design is by far the biggest spending. I dont understand why Game quality cant be better by giving more resources to Dev. What am I missing?
Me neither. Most recent triple A games are all filled with bugs. My guess is bad management, stressed out developers who work 10-12 hours per day while getting same payday.
Well at some point you can't make a baby in 1 month with 9 women. Adding resources to the project, especially if done late in the cycle when it becomes apparent deadlines will be missed, is likely not to help much, and can even slow things done.
I don't know their setup, so maybe they're just understaffed, but just adding resources without changing anything else rarely work, you just step on each other toes and communication becomes a huge overhead. Assets development is much more parallelisable on the other hand.
Pretty much every game changes completely with a year of patching and tweaking.
I distinctly recall Dragon Age Inquisition patch notes and I pity the people who had to play that on release!
That was the title that made me stop playing games in the release window. It's just not worth it.
I'm always conflicted when developers patch their games. It's great for us patientgamers who refuse to play videogames on release but I wonder if it actually matters to the mainstream market. Games make their sales in the first few months of release.
The problem with Cyberpunk and other similar titles is the disconnect between marketing requirements and the reality of developing such insanely complex software projects.
If any software developer reading this was working on a similarly complex project — $100m budget, 200 strong team, etc. — and was asked a year or more in advance, to commit to an exact release deadline, a laundry list of features, a promise of zero major bugs, they would say it was impossible. They would say that the way to deliver such a project is through an agile and iterative process, without hard deadlines and with only gradual rollout of features to progressively larger numbers of users.
But AAA games need to be an "event". They require a huge marketing campaign with a specific release date. They need a completed, polished product that overnight goes from being played by a relatively minuscule number of users to everyone. This is impossible, but the economic realities of the games industry means companies try it anyway, again and again, with predictable results.
On the other hand, smaller, indie studios have created a much better model: early access. Players pay a reduced price for the chance to play and help shape incomplete versions of the game. The game is gradually expanded and refined, just as any game is nowadays post-official release, except this is an explicit part of the arrangement between players and developers. It's not a flawless approach, of course, but it's still a much saner way to create games. And hits like Hades prove that it doesn't mean you can still have a big, successful final release once you've got a finished product.
Early Access is probably the most significant development in the video game industry. Complex titles like Factorio, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft wouldn't be possible without it, both from a design perspective (continuous player feedback) and a financing perspective (derisking by getting early market validation). Before Minecraft popularized the only ways to get that kind of depth was in an MMO (which is more or less the same thing as a subscription model) or to a lesser degree in a game that iterated a lot by releasing sequels or extension packs (both of which are much slower to iterate).
Unfortunately Early Access only work good for specific kind of games where continious support make sense. If your project is not built with unlimited replayability by design then it's doesn't work, e.g if your game is story-driven.
EA work realy well for titles that managed to get some community or media attention. For most of other indie game developers primary target is to attempt to get promition from platform itself (e.g Steam or console) since it's only way to sell something.
Also releasing in Early Access require very specific development pipeline where from very beginning you have to deliver stable builds with constant production quality (graphics quality, no placeholder art, etc). Most of players dont really give a damn about how game development works neither they want to play game that look incomplete or crashes often.
PS: My point is that early access work for some titles, but for every Rimworld or Factorio there are literally thousand of games that failed miserably because early access dont work for them.
It certainly requires a different development model and doesn't fit every game (though I would say it's more about being "cinematic" than "story-driven", there are plenty of Early Access visual novels). There are also a lot of games that get stuck in perpetual feature creep for years without really moving forward. But I think the fact that we see so many failures is more because the failures are more visible, not because early access fails more often. Lots of games get cancelled somewhere between idea and release, for the bigger studios many more than get released, but unless it happens in the last year or so of the development cycle you never hear about them. With early access all these failures suddenly become visible
This game was already had several significant delays. It should have been pushed for several more years. Even at 1.5, it's clearly not yet ready at the basic, fundamental level, let alone all the marketing BS they threw over the many years of hyping.
The Rockstar system is the correct system to use. Don't speak publicly about a project until it is almost complete, then start the "event" by slowly showing more and more of the game and its world. Instead, CDP made all the mistakes possible—over hype, lie (surely they knew by the last two years how broken their game is) and severely underdeliver.
>It should have been pushed for several more years.
My speculation is that they wanted to hit a 2020 release because the name of the Cyberpunk 2020 edition of the original RPG, and the fact that Cyberpunk 2020 celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2020.
Nah, they were targeting previous gen consoles, probably signed deals with Sony and MS to deliver on those platforms.
They rushed to meet deadlines and got burned by the scope of the project.
Problem with C2077 is verticality of the game, Witcher was laid-out horizontaly on large plains. C2077 must have been optimization nightmare especially when you suppose to down-port it to last gen consoles.
They even sold cyberpunk themed limited edition Xbox One X, a cyberpunk themed PS4 controller.. so I'm guessing the pressure to release for these consoles before they're completely obsoleted by the new gen must have been immense.
Apple also generally follows a "don't announce until it's ready" approach (these days it means they have shipping hardware compared to press releases providing perf figures for future products - as long as review sites continue to give free press for future announcements with unavailable hardware this will continue).
The one time I recall apple pre-announcing something was the AirPower nonsense, and I'm 90% sure you can't buy that yet :D
Personally I’m not excited for huge title releases anymore. Plenty of early access games that I’m down for. Recently picked up Project Zomboid for $20. It needs some work on the performance side, but playing a zombie survival game with friends is very fun. We haven’t even bothered doing any modding or other changes.
> Reworked throwing knives - knives are not lost after each throw, but automatically return to V's hands after a set cooldown time (dependent of knife rarity). It's also possible to pick up thrown knives, resetting the cooldown.
Hmmm thats lame. Should get them a few points in the gaming experience though.
Why would there be a dedicated PS5 release? This includes the next-gen updates, for both PS5 and Xbox Series consoles but anything that's not console-specific also applies to PC.
That's what I wasn't getting... This is the next-gen release, a lot of PS5-specific features. It's not exclusively for the PS5 though, but that wouldn't make any sense.
Yes it's the dedicated PS5 release. You need to uninstall the PS4 version from your PS5 and download the new PS5 version. Updating won't work, you'll still have the PS4 version.
152 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadhttps://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/WhatsNew/Builds/Rel...
And they turn them out release after release.
You're comparing an entire Engine to a video game. UE not only a game engine, but is also used in Cinema, ArchViz, Animation, Automotive ... It's got thousands of people working on it.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30426333
On the other hand the storyline was probably the best I've ever played, with the possible exception of the original Deus Ex. The rock star turned terrorist sounds completely absurd the first time you hear it, but they really make it work with the character. And that's just a small part of a great story.
The visuals are absolutely amazing, I've never felt like a tourist in awe in a game before, but it happened in Cyberpunk. They really did build an amazing world to play in.
This patch makes me hopeful that there will be more quests and maybe a follow on game at some point. It would be a really big shame if there wasn't.
I completely understand why people with high expectations were disappointed with the game.
People were seriously expecting that a console released in 2013 - almost a decade ago - could run a fully realized city with an unique AI for every person in there, with huge crowds you could get lost in.
Watch Dogs and Risen 3 were very capable open-worlders, that shouldn't run on such low-end hardware and I'm still not sure how Bioware managed to pull off Dragon Age: Inquisition or how Konami made MGSV run as well as it did.
From what I've heard, ther was some similar wizardry going on with the PS4.
I've had a quest line be incompletable because some script trigger didn't happen (I think the NPC got stuck), I've had to reload an autosave because a story mission would not progress (most likely a missed trigger again), escort NPCs have followed me for hours after completing the escort mission they were involved in, I've had cars instantly stop from 200 km/h after hitting an invisible barrier in the middle of a road, jumping over a barrier has sent me flying into space, NPCs have had objects stuck to their hands, NPC voice lines have duplicated, I've gotten stuck in a finisher animation, I've gotten stuck in a car that spawned inside an object, NPCs have walked through parked cars during missions, and a lot of random T-posing.
And these are the bugs that I remember off the top of my head, or remembered by having a cursorary look through my YouTube uploads.
Luckily, most of the bugs are funny and only visual, but it was pretty annoying that the only way I would've been able to continue that one side quest was by reloading a save and losing hours of progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omyoJ7onNrg
Streamers were seriously running out and shooting the first civilian and were disappointed at the lack of police chases. Some people even complained about the car modeling realism (lack of traction when you drive one corner of the car over a bollard etc).
At its current price (25-30€ish sales everywhere) it's fully worth playing just for the story. It's not the best fighting game, it's not the best driving game, but the story is damn good and some of the endings really gut-wrenching.
Just the dive with Judy is something I haven't seen in a game in a long time. No explosions, no shooting, just characters talking about their feelings.
And if you shoot the wrong someone, cops and jail time are the smallest of your problems.
Keanu also can't act which is a shame.
Visually the game is definitely astonishing, but I could never tell what the game is actually trying to be. If they'd made a very pretty game mulling over (say) the kind of deep sci-fi you get in something like blade runner 2049, then I'd probably still be playing to this day, whereas what they actually ended up with felt a bit incidental.
It's kind of unfair, so I don't hold it too much against the game, but even though the visuals are very good, the overall world doesn't feel as real as it could do IMO. The obvious comparison is with GTA V (which is why I say it's slightly unfair because GTA V is based on LA in ~2013), which just feels so much more real to me. The radio stations are a good example, they're such heavy handed satire, but that satire lets your brain fill in the detail about Los Santos whereas in Night City I was mostly being shown things that would never happen again or being made to pick choices that would have no effect etc.
Why do you keep comparing it to another genre?
because pre-release the developers made the GTA comparison, every video game media outlet made the comparison, and every press piece regarding the game pre-release focused on the 'open-world' elements, while promising post-release multiplayer.
let's not pretend this was billed as a single-player RPG fantasy; it wasn't. It was toted as a GTA competitor in nearly every single way.
The post release narrative shift of "well it's a story-driven game from a well known story-driven 'RPG studio', it was YOUR expectations that were wrong! " was totally drawn hastily after release to try to assuage angry and disappointed fans during a rocky release.
aside : "rpg studio" is a thing now?
The intense time pressure that the storyline badgers you with at every beat becomes absurdist comedy when the story missions finish and you start doing side quests. This is especially bizarre in the tone difference between the main story quests and the companion quests which have a huge influence on the story itself, but usually make little to no reference to the extreme time pressure.
This kind of jank wasn’t acceptable in the 90s and 2000s, let alone in 2020-2022.
It’s amazing how incompetent this team has become.
At launch the game had you T-pose without pants while riding a motorcycle...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/sx031p/start...
It's not exactly an easy problem to solve (simulating crowds in a huge city without any organic view distance portals) but I guess they could have also saved themselves a lot of pain by not targeting legacy systems or maybe make less ambitious claims about their game.
What you animate then is not the "flesh", but the skeleton. You tell the hand to move to a certain position, and then a constrained optimization problem is solved to extend the arm and hand while keeping the joint limits in mind.
The most convenient default shape to set up the skeletal structure of a humanoid is the T-pose, so this is usually the shape humanoids take in games before any animation logic is applied to them. If you see a T-pose in a game, odds are that the animation system crapped out. The animation system may have crashed but the error was swallowed to keep the game chugging along.
I'm not entirely certain but I believe the T-pose is the "default" position for characters before their animations start.
So it's just really sloppy game dev work. As if the game suddenly only has lego characters that don't have animations anymore.
https://clips.twitch.tv/FancyTenuousLatteBloodTrail-QuTfEAEz...
EDIT: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1298832987?t=00h21m33s
Remembered correctly
Still, I never expected ragdolls to be THAT buggy in Cyberpunk. I thought ragdolls were mostly a solved problem, they're still funny to look at but aren't that glitchy anymore. You can probably eliminate most of the stability issues of ragdoll systems (which have lots of constraints between rigid bodies) by damping the hell out of them (along with adding some realistic joint constraints). But I really don't understand what Cyberpunk's engine is doing, the 1% of cases when things align well it looks very realistic, but most of the time it glitches out weirdly (unrealistic poses) in ways I don't expect. Looking at the way how characters can get stuck to objects it seems like there are some serious issues with contact resolution...
Even if I entertain your nitpicking, the former definition (lacking qualities) is still unfair.
This isn't about mincing word, this is about correctly attributing blame.
For those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-pose
90s games were simpler due to lot of restrictions, but most main stream titles were quite polished.
this company sure made several mistakes on the hiring process and team management, I just can't imagine how something like this went to production.
That's just not fair. Expectations have changed, technology has changed and team sizes have grown to accomodate the desires of the audience. With this extra scope comes extra risk which has been poorly managed.
> but most main stream titles were quite polished.
This is your nostalgia talking, and there's a huge amount of survivorship bias at play here. There were plenty of games from the 80s and 90s period that were anything from crap to just straight up unplayable, and they were just left in that state.
Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.
Horizon forbidden west released late last week and is a AAA title that has been well received, is polished and great fun. There are still many AAA titles released that aren't unfun buggy messes.
> Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.
That doesnt mean all AAA games are bad.
They might not suck, but they are so often bland and unoriginal. Like they owe it to their 100 million dollar investors not to rock the boat too hard.
There's plenty of original and not-bland AAA games releasing regularly. Teams take risks, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't.
> Like they owe it to their 100 million dollar investors not to rock the boat too hard.
This is just shitposting, frankly, and is the sort of comment I'd expect ot see on reddit, not here. Cyberpunk is many things, but unoriginal and bland is not it. It definitely _tries_, and there's not really anything else like it (Deus ex is maybe the closest thing). That doesn't mean it's fun, and that doesn't mean that all AAA games are unoriginal bland and unfun either.
It's all about expectations. 99% of what makes vampire survivors fun is that it's a $2 indie game. If the same exact game was released by a AAA studio for $30-$60, everyone would say it's shit, has terrible graphics, doesn't have enough content, etc. It would completely change your perception of the game.
In that vein, I played through cyberpunk and had a lot of fun. I didn't rage quit the first time I encountered a physics bug. I allowed myself to have fun, which is something a lot of gamers can't seem to do anymore.
Agreed on this point.
> End result is that on average games were much more stable than modern games are at 1.0.
Have you got an actual source for this? I think you're missing a large amount of pure crapware that was released. I have memories of playing the Sierra adventure games being incredibly unreliable for example. Ports for DOS were unbeatable without cheating because they were so sloppily done[0]. E.T. [1] which has been associated with the fall of major games companies and is widely known as the worst game in history, or Bubsy 3d which is literally meme material. 95% of boxed games that were released were complete and utter crapware.
[0] https://kotaku.com/that-time-a-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtle-g... [1] https://www.npr.org/2017/05/31/530235165/total-failure-the-w...
This I agree, nowadays people start with a lot already done, no need to write a custom audio codec, or image compression trick or whatever, not only there is plenty of code ready for doing so, but there are plenty of computational resources to use on runtime.
Back then you would see advances first in the games and later on being documented, now they are released as papers, you hope that it will be implemented on some engine somewhere, and games using these techniques will be at least 5 years away from the paper release.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
For fun, I looked at the latest major patch notes for Stellaris [0] and Wrath of the Righteous [1]
CP 1.5: 300 lines, 24.6 kb
Stellaris 3.3: 380 lines, 34.6 kb
PF:WotR 1.2.0e: 416 lines, 30.8 kb
I did nothing but paste the patchnotes into a txt file, so empty lines are still counted for all 3 games.
[0]: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellar...
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1184370/view/3137321...
That said, stuff like "Fixed an issue when combat mode was triggered while roaming." sounds like a similar granularity, but I haven’t played CP2077 yet, so I don’t know.
Personally I see that the productivity(and especially products quality) had decreased in the company I am working for.
I did play through this recently, heavily modded with amazing community mods that completely rebalanced the rubbish combat and economy and fixed numerous bugs. I did enjoy it a lot (the world building is amazing and the story well written), but wouldn't have unmodded. One reason I'd never bother with consoles where modding isn't available.
Gameplay: Full gameplay rebalance (the most important one) https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/3010 , Reduce fall damage, Stop false attacks, Disable reveal position hack (NPCs don't automatically know where you are at all times), NeureSpec, Smarter Scrapper
Visual: Alternate character creation lighting (removes green tint), Crouch vignette effect remover
UI: Purify UI (clear up UI shaders), flib's UI improvements, Hide read shards, Highlight known specs, Muted Markers Cosmetic: Hide headgear
Vehicle: No Camera Autocentering TPP, realisticdrivinexperience
Other: No Intro Videos, Cyber engine tweaks (stability), redscript, RED4ext (CET compatible), Speed up time acceleration (skip unskippable cutscenes you've already seen), TweakDBext
https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/sxjb5f/just_...
I'd rather discuss about challenges in the production or testing process. Perhaps discuss future of the base old gen consoles (This is a first title that has quite different content between PS4 and PS5).
Discussing about game itself is polarizing, I know people hate this game, I know people love it and people don't care.
Are many of you getting a lot of replay value from the big sandboxes?
GTA5 was probably the last big game that, when I finished the main story, I was still having fun and that's mostly because it was pretty short for a AAA game.
Katamari on the PS4 is a game that I wish I could buy more levels for. I had so much fun with that one.
I've felt the same with many games. I don't think length is an issue per se, rather it's that they achieve that with filler and padding. I can imagine a bunch of young lowly paid game developers mass-producing low-effort side quests and other stuff to fill the world with. Like its only purpose is to give the player something to do (and some reward, for the loot & xp addicts) rather than to tell an interesting, compelling story and make you part of it.
Length is an issue for other reasons but the urge to skip forward and just get on with it is, for me, 100% due to repetitiveness and boredom and lack of lasting quality.
That being said, I'm a bit disappointed by the release. My main grievance about Cyberpunk is the very short story line. The game can be completed in 60-70 hours. There is very little to do on the open world (except hitting on other gangs and collecting their gear). It gets boring really fast. I'd have liked if the game had 120-150 hours of story line and 30-50 hours of open world exploration.
I was expecting more quests, a stock exchange/bank, ability to buy/sell businesses, more cyberware tech or hacking puzzles.
For anyone interested: Ignore the negative reviews. The game is amazing and with a capable PC (and with 1.5) you'll have a good enough playing experience. It's not a fake sci-fi game (though it borders on that) and it's not a more realistic GTA. It has a great and challenging story that makes you go online and read and play again to figure out stuff. The public is still intrigued about the ending. It might have been annoying at first but then I figured that all GTA missions go almost linear with no surprises in between. In essence, GTA is forgettable and CP is memorable despite all the stuff it lacks.
As I replied elsewhere, it is strange to see another echo chamber in action. The sales number seems to be doing fine. And reviews were extremely polarised.
The team did definitively over-extend themselves and failed to deliver a perfect? product but I don't see why this is being shunned here. They pushed the limits where it comes to Open World games and GTA has to up their game a LOT in the next release.
I'm sorry, but as a software dev with some hobby experience in game development, I disagree with this.
* hacking: tons of other games have a hacking component, either as a hack this computer, or break this lock, or make an enemy turret be friendly, or control this enemy. Fallout has hacking, Batman Arkham series has hacking (and enemy control), PoE has enemy take over skills etc
* cyberware gear: there is no difference between a "cyber deck" and a "helmet of might". Also, I think Deus-Ex has cyberware gear...
* scanning: Arkham games have a beautiful implementation of the concept. Horizon Zero Dawn has scanning.
* brain dances: this is simply playing a pre "recorded" 3d scene with some elements removed based on the "mode" selected. This is not a very hard thing to do, from a software development perspective, but requires lots of content. And guess what, there are like 4 brain dances in the game: the tutorial, the find the chip mission, the find the voodoo lady mission and the side mission with the cow dude.
And this is a recurring thing with Cyberpunk 2077, lack of content. I wish they'd spent less on getting Keanu Reaves to "star" and more on adding more clothing options or side missions, or give the beggars more lines. It would have been really cool to stay a while and listen to a beggar about that time their tank got blown up and they had to trek back from behind enemy lines...
Here is the thing, you can both like the game and critique the technical aspects.
This seems especially so in CDPR's case: they aren't using Unreal or any other off-the-shelf engine, they developed their own engine bespoke for The Witcher. Cyberpunk 2077 was the first game to use that engine for something that wasn't The Witcher series. A lot of their technical hurdles seem almost entirely related: it doesn't seem like it should be a huge surprise that a game engine originally built for a setting where the fastest traveling vehicle is a horse starts to fall down with performance problems when you introduce cars and sky cars and planes.
(Some small credit where credit is due: Rockstar at least started with GTA and then moved to RDR. Cars to horses seems to make more sense as a transition for a game engine than the other way around.)
Absolutely there are probably technical things CDPR could have done to avoid some of the problems they've had, but it was way more of a "programming challenge" than "why didn't they just copy and paste the hacking component from Fallout [Bethesda/Microsoft] and scanning from Arkham Asylum [Rocksteady/Warner Brothers] and call it a day?" (They couldn't, there's no way to access those components from other companies. There's no "Unity store" for that sort of stuff. There's not even a "Unity" here: all three of those franchises have extremely different bespoke game engines that never leave the doors of their development companies or publishers.)
It's a wonderful world/backdrop/setting. I like the story. There's 50x as much cutscenes and consequence-free dialog choices as there needs to be. I occasionally had fun with the missions. But overall it was a big basket of good ideas that they dropped on the floor.
https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=2127
For comparison, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is currently estimated to take about 51 hours if you only focus on the main story. https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=10270
I'll pay extra for a shorter and more interesting story line any day.
I completed the game before the second patch came out, I didn't really hit any bugs, maybe once or twice I had to save and reload it.
An intense and ACTUALLY INTERSTING main story of about 10 hours, with no grind or "let's waste your time with these menial tasks" in between, that is my preference.
Context: If I'm lucky, I can squeeze 1 or 2 hours in maybe 3 or 4 evenings per week, at the evening when I'm maxmially tired from the demands of real life, and at that point, I have very little tolerance for a game trying to waste my precious time.
It's something than can be improved with practice. I can now read a few dozen books at a time and have no trouble keeping them straight, and I'm sure I've benefitted from that in other ways in my day to day life. Remember that humans relied on oral tradition for hundreds of thousands of years. Give yourself some credit!
I don't get that when I spread it out too thin. I enjoy movies and tv shows for different reasons, and often, for story-based games (as opposed to multiplayer games and pure-skill games) I enjoy the "movie" version more, "short" sweet, dense and intense.
For the other types, I play OSU! and whatever the popular FPS is at the moment it's Apex Legends, but those I play for different reasons than games with a good story.
Most of the negative reviews are not only perfectly legitimate but address structural issues in the game not fixable with quality of life patches and the adding of a bunch of new weapons and cars, one year after the release of the game, which by the way were never lacking. This game has so much cut content that some quests feel like a demo version and main characters like Adam Smasher (a primary antagonist) behave like an afterthought with barely no presence, feeling as lifeless and predictable as the rest of Night City.
The excusable tragedy of Cyberpunk it's that it miserably fails to deliver in every different aspect it touches, excelling in none of the many ambitions it had. The unexcusable part is its unplayable console release, that felt like a borderline scam.
>It has a great and challenging story
Disco Elysium or Pathologic 2 have memorable stories; Cyberpunk is a painfully mediocre experience at best, in my opinion.
I recall that No Man's Sky had a community made list that showed the progress in its ambitions, and led to people being amazed at the turn around.
Of All the information I read, Graphics Asset and Design is by far the biggest spending. I dont understand why Game quality cant be better by giving more resources to Dev. What am I missing?
I don't know their setup, so maybe they're just understaffed, but just adding resources without changing anything else rarely work, you just step on each other toes and communication becomes a huge overhead. Assets development is much more parallelisable on the other hand.
That was the title that made me stop playing games in the release window. It's just not worth it.
If any software developer reading this was working on a similarly complex project — $100m budget, 200 strong team, etc. — and was asked a year or more in advance, to commit to an exact release deadline, a laundry list of features, a promise of zero major bugs, they would say it was impossible. They would say that the way to deliver such a project is through an agile and iterative process, without hard deadlines and with only gradual rollout of features to progressively larger numbers of users.
But AAA games need to be an "event". They require a huge marketing campaign with a specific release date. They need a completed, polished product that overnight goes from being played by a relatively minuscule number of users to everyone. This is impossible, but the economic realities of the games industry means companies try it anyway, again and again, with predictable results.
On the other hand, smaller, indie studios have created a much better model: early access. Players pay a reduced price for the chance to play and help shape incomplete versions of the game. The game is gradually expanded and refined, just as any game is nowadays post-official release, except this is an explicit part of the arrangement between players and developers. It's not a flawless approach, of course, but it's still a much saner way to create games. And hits like Hades prove that it doesn't mean you can still have a big, successful final release once you've got a finished product.
EA work realy well for titles that managed to get some community or media attention. For most of other indie game developers primary target is to attempt to get promition from platform itself (e.g Steam or console) since it's only way to sell something.
Also releasing in Early Access require very specific development pipeline where from very beginning you have to deliver stable builds with constant production quality (graphics quality, no placeholder art, etc). Most of players dont really give a damn about how game development works neither they want to play game that look incomplete or crashes often.
PS: My point is that early access work for some titles, but for every Rimworld or Factorio there are literally thousand of games that failed miserably because early access dont work for them.
The Rockstar system is the correct system to use. Don't speak publicly about a project until it is almost complete, then start the "event" by slowly showing more and more of the game and its world. Instead, CDP made all the mistakes possible—over hype, lie (surely they knew by the last two years how broken their game is) and severely underdeliver.
My speculation is that they wanted to hit a 2020 release because the name of the Cyberpunk 2020 edition of the original RPG, and the fact that Cyberpunk 2020 celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2020.
They rushed to meet deadlines and got burned by the scope of the project.
Problem with C2077 is verticality of the game, Witcher was laid-out horizontaly on large plains. C2077 must have been optimization nightmare especially when you suppose to down-port it to last gen consoles.
They even sold cyberpunk themed limited edition Xbox One X, a cyberpunk themed PS4 controller.. so I'm guessing the pressure to release for these consoles before they're completely obsoleted by the new gen must have been immense.
The one time I recall apple pre-announcing something was the AirPower nonsense, and I'm 90% sure you can't buy that yet :D
Hmmm thats lame. Should get them a few points in the gaming experience though.
instead of doing a cross platform compromise version, doing a new-gen specific version
many publications retain ongoing speculation of that
I’m waiting for a resolution on that personally, sounds like it would be a better game