To tell you the truth, playing these games taught me that I really don't care for quest-dependent games. I feel like CDPR games have no way to interact with their pretty worlds outside of the heavily scripted quests. You can generally just go anywhere you want, take anything, even loot the entire office of the captain of the army, and nobody even reacts.
Contrast this to Bethesda games, where the entire game is an elaborate simulation that can be poked and prodded as you please. In fact I've never even completed a main quest in a Bethesda game, I just spend all my time exploring and dicking around and it's WAY more fun than the on-rails theme park rides that are CDPR games.
Morrowind was pretty close. Clunky by modern standards, and I remember playing it on Xbox years ago and having no f-ing clue where to go or what to do -- a lot of GameFAQs helped -- but it really made it feel like a real world.
I like simulation-like open world games, but Witcher 3 was one of the very few games with a good story. To be honest I think the only one that I cared about. Especially the bloody baron questline was amazing storytelling. Heart of Stone was also great story based on Polish ballad Mr. Twardowski.
Cyberpunk is unfortunately nowhere near as good in terms of the story as the Witcher.
Hard disagree, cyberpunk had a fantastic story, compared to the witcher 3 that I've tried to finish about 4 separate times and failed every time - the side quests are fantastic, the main quest is just unbelievably dragged out and boring.
Everyone mentions the blood baron quest - and yes, it was great, outstanding even. I've never seen anyone mention anything after that point - it's just a mess of narrative that gets in the way of some other great content in that game.
Cyberpunk has great main quest and memorable side stories.
I played the Witcher 3 twice trough leaving a small bit of the second expansion unfinished just because I don't want this game to end.
I lost interest in Cyberpunk quite early. To me Cyberpunk is too American with overdone themes. Although the Cyberpunk anime is great. Simple story, but has really well put together characters and delivers emotional punch. I will have to try to get back to the game. Maybe on second try it will be better.
The Cyberpunk anime got the fact that the environment was a character while the video game didn't.
A tremendously important point in the Cyberpunk anime was the fact that their world was really horrific to live in. You could live semi-miserably and go out in an untimely fashion--possibly even in a blaze of glory--or you live completely miserably and could go out in an untimely fashion with a whimper. Living well and pleasantly was really never on the table.
Whereas, Cyberpunk the video game is the standard, kinda-generic power fantasy. You never really feel "oppressed" by the overall system as you're kind of outside it.
Frankly, I think they're both bad. CDPR gets a lot of stuff right, but their self-insistence on their world and storytelling is only rivaled by Final Fantasy. Cyberpunk's main quest feels like Fallout 4 with a fake veneer of moral ambiguity, and the sidequests are either penis-based or another car who wants to lecture me on their philosophy of the week. Almost every single mission in that game had me cringing, to the point that I'd mute the dialogue and still wince as I read the subtitles. It's... pure suck. As for my review of the gameplay... it's just Borderlands again. I can't be fooled like this, sorry.
The Witcher 3 is weird, relative to Cyberpunk. I haven't finished it, but it's writing is a lot more grounded and less... bad. The gameplay feels clunky, though, and the pacing is completely fucked (cutscene -> fetch quest -> cutscene -> fight -> GOTO 0;). Neither of these games really deserve commendations for the way they handled questing, and even the most heralded RPG interactions like Dark Souls and New Vegas leave plenty of room for improvement.
I've played the game a year ago and I still remember:
- the story where a guy agrees to be crucified on live TV
- the whole detective sidequest - it's a shame you only remember him being annoying, the entire story about family, about finding your relative, about solving a horrendous crime mystery - absolute masterpiece.
- the whole Panam sidequest - she grew from someone I didn't care about to being a close companion. And the quest where her and the rest of the aldecaldos go to steal the neural-link driven tank is just epic. Also her relationship with the aldecaldos.
- whole Judy storyline, where she comes to gripes with the death of her close friend and how the system doesn't care about any of them. The moment when you sit with her at the edge of a poisoned lake and talk about life will always be in my memory.
- the side quest with destroying the prostitution gang owners so that the women could basically get revenge and run it themselves - 10/10 for some moral choices.
- the entire Rogue + Johnny content that wasn't necessary for the main mission. Damn that character goes through a redemption arc like no other.
- the AI taxi quest was actually stupid and it felt like an excuse to make some out of universe jokes(with one taxi being voiced by Glados from Portal if I remember correctly). But I mean....meh. The final choice was cool.
All of the above adds to the fact that at the end of the game you actually care about the characters that surround you and you want to see them there with you. I've gone back and played through every possible ending(other than the secret one because it's so bloody hard) just to see what happens. And in the endings where you don't contact Pam or Judy...man it's actually heartbreaking. Like it makes you feel like shit. None of this would happen if their sidequests weren't actually good.
I realized this rather spectacularly with MMORPGs.
I've long been a fan of open world MMOs with basically next to no mandatory quests. Think Runescape, Ragnarok Online, MapleStory, etc. Loved them, and Ragnarok Online is to this day still among my top favorite games of all time.
One day, Guild Wars 2 dropped to great hype and fanfare and I bought it to try it out.
Good fucking god damn hell in a shit basket, I fucking hated it. Quests everywhere. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests.
Walk around a bit? Here's a side quest! Pan the camera? Here please take this quest! No? How about this quest?!
It is still the worst use of $60 bucks that I've ever spent.
As someone who likes Guild Wars 2 the game makes the distinction between quests (i.e. the Story) and Events which are constantly occurring in the world.
As you wander through zones in the world dynamic events will spawn for example you might run into a merchant in need of an escort between villages or you'll run across a farmer who needs you to defend his flock or whatever. Many events are simply on a timer and some are triggered by specific actions you (or another player) have done elsewhere in the world.
The events can be simply once off events or they can be more complex with multiple states. I.e. an event can spawn where a bunch of npc soldiers want to take back a mine from monsters - players can escort them to the mine help them clear it out. If successful then later on other NPC's will move into the mine new vendors will become accessible etc. Later still the monsters will congregate and launch a new offensive to retake the mine an event will spawn to help defend the new settlement.
I like the feeling this gives the world. For me at least it makes the game world feel like it's fresh and things are constantly happening even when your character is not around the world is alive and things are changing all of the time.
This is different from my experience playing an mmo like World of Warcraft, which had static NPC quest givers in zones and once you'd done the content, which tended to be stuff like kill 15 of this enemy and then report back to me - there was little reason to revisit the zone again.
The questline in guild wars 2 which reveals the larger narrative and your characters personal story is instanced content, separate from the event system.
None of the events in Guild Wars are mandatory you can ignore all of them to your heart's content - don't feel like escorting the merchant you can walk past him on the road. Don't want to help the farmer defend his flock from the wolves - you can go right on ahead and ignore it. So it's strange you would get hung up on that aspect of the game. If you wanted to run around and explore the open world going from zone to zone as you please you can go right ahead and do just that.
The thing is I couldn't just go from zone to zone: I was inundated with quests everywhere I went. I couldn't ignore them, they were in my face every chance they got.
It's kind of like trying to use the internet today without an adblocker. Much like how the internet spams ADVERTS ADVERTS ADVERTS ADVERTS ADVERTS ADVERTS in my face every chance they get, Guild Wars 2 spammed QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS in my face every chance it got. I couldn't stand it, I fucking hated it; I refuse to call Guild Wars 2 an open world.
The similarities are exactly why I enjoyed GW2... Are you talking about the hearts or the events? The Achievements? The main difference is that the world the player experiences is more "coherent" in GW2 because of the Elder Dragon threat and their involvement in it (ie their hero's journey).
Also, what are "quests" to you?
There's so freeform stuff you can do in the game. Most of the Hearts you can complete without ever really caring about them. It's just a nice little exp bonus. Events? People can just not do them. Go to a different area (as in, hold W for 10 seconds, or use a waypoint?).
>Are you talking about the hearts or the events? The Achievements? The main difference is that the world the player experiences is more "coherent" in GW2 because of the Elder Dragon threat and their involvement in it (ie their hero's journey).
I didn't even get that far because I was inundated to my armpits with QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE with literally any action I took. It was nauseating and quickly drove me mad.
What makes me wonder to this day is if I had a different client from everyone else, because quite literally noone I ever talk to about this seems to be able to relate (case in point).
>Also, what are "quests" to you?
The kind you would find in RO, Runescape, Skyrim, and so on. Scripted things to do, but not particularly conspicuous and in the way if I'm not interested in pursuing them.
Hmm. To me it seems like you maybe didn't get out of the new character instance. That thing is basically a 20-30 minute (depending on race) racial story instance.
Those tend to have linear progression most of the time, and I think you maybe mistook the instance's progression objectives as quests. Once you get out of that, it's an open world and you can do what you want, though.
I think it's worth giving it another try, it's a great game.
OOT: You've just described my exact most memorable gaming experiences over the last two or so decades. I've been struggling to find something I liked enough of late.
Would you mind sharing what you're into these days?
Japanese mobile games, namely Fate/Grand Order and Princess Connect! Re:Dive. Playing on the Japanese home servers, mind, since I speak Japanese.
(RIP English Priconne, Crunchyroll is bad civilization.)
I don't have the kind of time or energy to devote to grinding anymore like I used to in RO and the like, but I'm always a sucker for good writing which FGO and Priconne give me in spades.
And before anyone mentions it: Yeah yeah, they're gacha games. Gambling. I don't care. Japanese gachas are generally good, and I'm getting my money's worth when I whale. :V
This is the first mention I've seen of RO in a long long time and I totally agree. There were a lot of small stories that you could take but you never felt like you were just going from point to point in some big directed path. If you didn't like an area you could skip it and never feel like you lost much.
I've yet to find a game that got me anywhere near the same sense of freedom and sense of being part of the world instead of one of a bunch of people going through the predetermined Disney ride.
The original planetside had a similar feeling with a more shooter lens on it where you were always part of a changing world.
Calling Bethesda games "simulation" is a bizarre exaggeration. You mean the games where NPCs will let you rob them if only you place a bucket on their heads? That's a no from me. I don't think any games I've ever played did world-scale simulation well. I've heard good things about Dwarf Fortress, though. I'd rather have tightly constrained but well executed experience than an unconstrained experience where everything is dumb.
DF simulation goes to crazy degrees of detail, that's the fun part in it.
Even for combat where two ASCII characters are fighting they have actual physiology in play calculating hit locations and the effects of different weapons on different parts of the body and even internal organs.
All for a line of text in a combat log most people won't read.
Wow, I clearly have a different view on games than you (nothing wrong with that of course). To be honest, I thought the bucket head on NPC thing was a fantastic example of how you can interact with the systems of that world in creative ways.
The hell is he talking about? Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 are way past the golden age of gaming. They have nothing worthwhile to contribute here.
It's reminiscent of mobile game designers from the 2010's, and how they were making "engaging" games. Lots of presentations about making engaging experiences that immerse players into the lore of the game world. Actually, just mediocre manipulation tactics pushing people into skinner boxes.
It's all bullshit, and indie game devs would do well to stay naive and simply try to make fun games.
If anything, a much better example of this stuff is in Disco Elysium.
The golden age was when most modern game design principles and techniques were established, between 1993-2005 (roughly).
My criticism is that this presentation by CD Projekt is not helpful but harmful to indie developers. It's clear in the presentation that their mindset is similar to the mobile game era of manipulation and control of the player. Ostensibly in this case to "make them want to continue".
Engagement is skinner box jargon used by companies like Zynga and has nothing to do with making a good game.
Because the presentation promotes this mindset and because it's about two games that mostly were made possible by golden age game design, and not their own innovations, I don't believe they have anything meaningful to contribute on this topic.
The quest design in Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk is neither innovative, nor very fun. It may be effective in the manipulative sense, but that doesn't contribute to the artistry of making games fun.
I initially closed the tab in disgust but reopened it to hate read it further to even more completely confirm my own disgust. This is why modern "gaming" which is closer today to flashy fantasy oriented story telling (where you press (x) to advance the story) just doesn't appeal to me. I have nothing wrong with movies or RPGs of the old sort where it's just one drawn out story, but I usually expected most of a "game" to be playing a game, where there is skill involved, where you can lose, where there is difficulty, where there is fun. I literally ctfl-f'ed "fun" and it doesn't appear in the article at all, what is the point of a game that isn't fun?
It's good to see game "designers" from the big studios really are to blame here. While I've long since grown out of my teenage elitist disgust concerning "top 20" music the truth is games continue to a good place where "popular" usually defaults to "bad."
Are slot machines fun? I think it's pretty clear the answer is yes. Diablo 2 is a glorified slot machine, most RPG mechanics are slot machine-y. Play the slot machine while you upgrade the slot machine (via gear) which reduces your chance of losing is a clearly popular gaming category that is able to gather entire conventions of fans. Is there strategy? Kinda, I guess, but not at a core mechanic level.
There is a spectrum between slot machine (try until you get a lucky roll) and chess (pure strategy) for what losing means.
The idea of fun is just dopamine manipulation: Creating a state of wanting and then playing with a person's ability to get there.
Some people enjoy the chat room. Some people enjoy the feeling of dominance. Some people enjoy uncovering the story. Some people enjoy checking every box or getting the best gear.
The fact that you don't find exploration fun doesn't mean other people can't find exploration style play fun.
The problem of modern gaming is much less about the strategy vs slot machine continuum, but about the motivation of game companies to monetize micro transactions or reduce production costs (namely by minimizing novelty or quality). Games are less of an artistic endeavor and more of a money endeavor.
Are games born out of an idea to make a game and ultimately make money to support the life style of game creation or are games born first out of an idea to make money and the desire to promote fun secondary? Are games art or are they cigarettes?
What you feel in modern game is the corrosive and corrupting force of "next quarters profits" culture. What you feel is games being built for shareholders first and gamers second.
That's a very postmodern take on the art of gaming. So, supposedly slot machines are on par with chess?
"Just dopamine manipulation" and "glorified slot machine" are overly deconstructive and cynical beliefs, to the point where I doubt having this mindset could ever lead to creating a good game like Diablo 2. You could deconstruct all of human behaviour to dopamine spikes, but that kind of thinking usually leads to a race to the bottom; like what you're not necessarily defending but excusing.
Most of the games we love were at the very least heavily influenced by game design developed by naive artists and programmers who wanted to "make something cool".
Doom is the perfect example, in terms of both game design and tech. id Software wanted to blow everyone out of the water with that game, and so they focused on making it as fun and impressive as possible. There was no mentality of skinner boxes there, just inspired ambition and love of play.
Yes, almost all games are made to make money. That doesn't preclude artistic ambition, and good games are primarily about making something fun.
This article is about the story parts of the quests. To make progress you also have to win action-RPG fights, build and counter correctly, find hidden items, etc.
This is right on the money for games which are impactful for me, and I noticed the writing being on-point in CP2077's decisions entirely: there were plenty of moment in my playthrough where I didn't have to stop and think about what a dialogue option was, it felt entirely natural to hit one of the prompts the moment I saw it because the way I was playing my character, that's what they would've done.
That felt great, compared to say, Mass Effect which did tend to suffer from a mismatch between the prompt and what would actually happen - it's a credit to CDPR that I never felt betrayed by a dialogue choice (except one, at the ending).
Interesting, I felt the opposite - consistent mismatches between the expectation and reality of Cyberpunk’s dialogue choices. A lot of optional dialogue was just cues to make the NPC roll their eyes and explain obvious “subtext” to the biggest dork in Night City, instead of a cue to play out two inhabitants of this world just naturally discussing and elaborating on a point of shared understanding. V’s lines in mandatory dialogue weren’t much better, though, so perhaps it’s a problem with CDPR’s rigid vision of what “V” is supposed to be like - simultaneously a cyberpunk native and a fish out of water. Either way, I had to politely ignore and headcanon most of it to get any actual role-playing satisfaction.
I think it's more about Mike Pondsmith's vision than CDPR's vision. It's not the kind of setting where you tell stories about competent and successful characters. The main characters are supposed to be losers and misfits who often turn to crime because they don't have other options. They are good at some things and bad at others, and they have far more ambition than common sense. The expected outcome is a failure, and there are no happy endings.
Perhaps. The setting and themes are certainly bleak. But the dialogue I’m thinking of feels more like complete lapses in common sense / social skills / street smarts one would expect even from a loser/misfit, given any of V’s background story options. I’d chalk some of it up to awkward exposition, but stuff like “background check” equivalents tend to feel stilted too.
The many gameplay and plot concessions made towards run-and-gun action and power fantasy cause 2077 to stray far from the “you’re not special” theme of “proper” cyberpunk stories, in general. Especially with the defeat of a certain character at the hands of V.
I can imagine Disco Elysium with ChatGPT instances per skill/object (for those who didn’t play DE - every thing, including skills according to their points, speaks with you and this gameplay mechanic is amazing)
Idk about Disco Elysium since I haven't played it, but I think there's some cool opportunities for generative text with carefully crafted prompts. Imagine a game like LA Noire where you can interrogate suspects about anything, instead of having to choose between 3 options.
>"Be sure to make your consequences clear and visible. When consequences are too subtle, players won’t see them. Bring back stuff from earlier in the game at the least expected time. Design for the visibility of consequences; investing in something not telegraphed well is mostly not worth it. Figure out how to the player visibly see what the consequences will be."
Disagree with this and I think interestingly enough even large amounts of mainstream players have started to disagree with it. This gamification, ironically enough not a good thing in a game, does not take the player seriously. If you have to put exclamation points or guardrails around your game you are taking responsibility away from the player. It's like riding a tricycle.
Contrast this with Elden Ring which deliberately ditches almost all of this. You can miss 80% of the game on your first playthrough but that's entirely up to you. And the experience of finding some gigantic world below the surface that just exists, with entire stories in it but completely unadvertised makes it seem incredibly mysterious, like nobody even designed it, you just stumbled over it. It gives an incredibly level of depth to a game world. There's this underground area full of gigantic trees that looks like a Hieronymus Bosch painting with a gigantic corpse in it and my first thought finding it was basically "am I the first person here?, do the developers know this exists?". A world having that much of a life of its own is a hug feat for a work of fiction.
Yeah count me as someone who thought Elden Ring’s quests sucked hard. It’s only up to you to miss 80% of the game in the sense that you absolutely will miss 80% of the game unless you look it up on a wiki. And then when you do them it has basically no impact on anything.
Like… you could have been able to do something really light touch like ask the merchants if they’ve heard any rumors on where characters are.
As a huge fan of From Software games, I don’t bother with the character quests. They are incredibly obtuse. You can ignore them entirely and still enjoy the main experience. Exploration and combat is what really counts for me.
I think From needs to evolve their approach to quest design (it hasn't really changed since Demon's Souls), but it's also an intentional design choice that much of the content of their games is easily missable.
It was, however, MUCH worse in Elden ring because the environments were so big and often so empty. while they were fun to explore once, they tended not have to have anything in them aside from a cool aesthetic.
I think the only quest I managed to naturally find all the plot beats for was Jar Alexander.
Sekiro was their best work. I’ll say this to the end.
> Sekiro was their best work. I’ll say this to the end.
Agreed, 100%. Sekiro is a masterpiece.
I think they did it a disservice by adding the online messaging system to it post release though. I like the system in Souls, but it just really doesn't belong in Sekiro and ruins the mood.
> It’s only up to you to miss 80% of the game in the sense that you absolutely will miss 80% of the game unless you look it up on a wiki. And then when you do them it has basically no impact on anything.
....What? I mean you might miss the quest lines but this isn't Skyrim. The questlines are a teeny tiny portion of the content in a From Soft game. The quest lines are fun little bits of interactivity and current plot but the overwhelming majority of the game is just in exploring the areas, fighting the enemies, and finishing the game. You could miss all the sidequests in Elden Ring but still see almost all of the game if you were willing to just wander around looking at stuff
> and my first thought finding it was basically "am I the first person here?, do the developers know this exists?". A world having that much of a life of its own is a hug feat for a work of fiction.
My favorite example of this was Ash Lake in Dark Souls 1. In one of the most difficult and miserable places in the game there's a random tree with a chest in it. If you happen to hit the wall behind it, you'll find it's actually illusory, and be rewarded with another chest. At that point you probably think you've already found the secret, but if you move being the second chest, you'll find this wall is illusory as well.
You'll walk down a path and find that this tree is actually hollow, and proceeds into the ground for hundreds of feet. You can try to make it down, but it's quite the gauntlet: you have to deal with irritating platforming, and enemies that will curse you and remove half your health.
If you have the patience to make it all the way down, you emerge from the tree and are greeted with one of the most spectacular vistas in the game: a seemingly endless lake stretching to the horizon, filled with gigantic trees, each hundreds (if not thousands) of feet tall. If you then make the journey all the way down the beach, you'll encounter an amazingly bizarre (but peaceful) dragon.
All of this hidden at the bottom of a miserable swamp behind two unassuming illusory walls. It's so magic the first time you find this, and it reminded me of playing games as a kid, where the possibilities of what might be around the next corner felt endless.
I don't see the connection between the quote you cited, and your response?
The quote is about making consequences obvious. Elden Ring does this in spades. Hell, at one point in the game, a huge section of the map becomes a giant hole, and at another part, the massive tree that is visible throughout the game begins to burn, dropping ash across the whole world.
I thought the Cyberpunk story was pretty good, but the game mechanics pushed you toward the next quest in the main storyline all the time. This resulted in me burning through the main story quickly, then being presented with "touching" messages from all the characters during the credits. Except I barely knew who any of these characters were, since I'd hardly done any of the side missions where you get to know them.
So yeah, pretty great story scripting, voice acting, and character animation, but it was heavily undercut by some core mechanics in my opinion.
It just says something like "you can't go back after this point", not "this is the final mission and the end of the game". Maybe that's got an obvious meaning to a more seasoned gamer.
Not that it matters, since I could just load the save game just prior and do the side missions, but it still kind of ruined the impact of the end of the game.
Keep in mind that the main story isn't all that long, so from my perspective the game was just getting going.
This sort of pacing is one of the problems with many open world games. The narrative pushes you towards saving the world and the final epic battle, while filling the world with tasks and sub plots that are trivial and non-urgent. And then the general will wait under heavy enemy fire for years as her troops are massacred and city after city burned while the character back tracks to kill rats and plow fields as part of their romantic interest's subplot. But if the narrative provides a lull in the action, you can encourage players to pursue subplots and even make that easier and more in character than to pursue the main plot. And you would have less of a problem dealing with under leveled characters who have rushed through the game in keeping with the main narrative, and over leveled characters who have dawdled through countless sub quests and DLCs oblivious to the urgency you were trying to convey in the story.
Yeah, it's honestly an amazing ride assuming you ignore the main conceit that you're facing a ticking clock. If you take your time and experience all those side stories then you can feel an emotional connection, but if you listen to the plot the game REALLY wants you to rush through. You miss out on a ton of great characters and moments that way.
Mass Effect 3 had this same problem. The game starts off with the apocalypse beginning and there are constant reminders during the game how millions are being killed every day, but also loads you up with time consuming sidequests.
Subverted in the end by killing off everybody no matter how well you play.
In the case of Mass Effect 3 you also remember from Mass Effect 2 how you got punished with dead crew members if you continued with side missions after they got abducted.
I did the the first time I played and then I realized the mistake. If you pick the highest difficulty in the game, you won't be able to rush through the main storyline because your character is under-powered. You'd then need to play the side mission in order to accumulate gears and cybernetic stuff. That makes the game even more interesting. Try it again with the hardest mode.
> but the game mechanics pushed you toward the next quest in the main storyline all the time
I didn't feel this pressure, which resulted in the opposite problem. I played all of the side missions before anything else where they were available. By the time I finished those and got back to the mainline, I was all powerful and the story was an unchallenging walkthrough.
imho since gamasutra became "gamedeveloper", the quality of its content went way down, to the point of becoming a soulless mouthpiece for the industry on one hand and the now standard for a for-profit online publication an engagement and metrics driven words sweatshop on the other.
the article is a chatgpt summary of Paweł Sasko's cd projekt red lead quest designer's presentation on lead quest design. "lessons learned" are in the form of "we did a thing, and by virtue of doing the thing the way we did it, we have an experience doing this thing our way." there's not a single element of self-reflection. it says quest director, but Pavel wasn't one until, the actual Cyberpunk 2077 quest director, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, quit in 2021, a year after the game was released.
In my experience these days talks like that are heavily filtered by the PR (or some informal equivalent of), and having sat through my fare share of them they seem to make up the dull corporate background noise of GDC and co. Pavel is a cool dude though, he was responsible for the Red Barron in Witcher 3 that people keep bringing up in the comments.
I think real cyberpunk 2077 design retrospective would've been interesting to read. If somebody knows an in-depth one I'd appreciate a link. The game is very very uneven. There's a first rate B-grade Hollywood blockbuster hiding there, staring Keanu Reeves, Goro's subplot, etc. which suffers from very basic design issues ("show don't tell" "show don't tell" "jeez that tell is the opposite of the show" "show.. oh fuck it"). Tell us how to awkwardly wrap up your story lines under crunch, Pavel.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadContrast this to Bethesda games, where the entire game is an elaborate simulation that can be poked and prodded as you please. In fact I've never even completed a main quest in a Bethesda game, I just spend all my time exploring and dicking around and it's WAY more fun than the on-rails theme park rides that are CDPR games.
I don't think Bethesda has ever quite lived up to that ambition even in the days of Daggerfall and Morrowind, but they have at least tried.
Cyberpunk is unfortunately nowhere near as good in terms of the story as the Witcher.
Everyone mentions the blood baron quest - and yes, it was great, outstanding even. I've never seen anyone mention anything after that point - it's just a mess of narrative that gets in the way of some other great content in that game.
Cyberpunk has great main quest and memorable side stories.
I lost interest in Cyberpunk quite early. To me Cyberpunk is too American with overdone themes. Although the Cyberpunk anime is great. Simple story, but has really well put together characters and delivers emotional punch. I will have to try to get back to the game. Maybe on second try it will be better.
A tremendously important point in the Cyberpunk anime was the fact that their world was really horrific to live in. You could live semi-miserably and go out in an untimely fashion--possibly even in a blaze of glory--or you live completely miserably and could go out in an untimely fashion with a whimper. Living well and pleasantly was really never on the table.
Whereas, Cyberpunk the video game is the standard, kinda-generic power fantasy. You never really feel "oppressed" by the overall system as you're kind of outside it.
The Witcher 3 is weird, relative to Cyberpunk. I haven't finished it, but it's writing is a lot more grounded and less... bad. The gameplay feels clunky, though, and the pacing is completely fucked (cutscene -> fetch quest -> cutscene -> fight -> GOTO 0;). Neither of these games really deserve commendations for the way they handled questing, and even the most heralded RPG interactions like Dark Souls and New Vegas leave plenty of room for improvement.
I struggle to remember any aside from the cowboy detective (because he was so unimaginably annoying) and the magic taxi.
Magix taxi was fun, but the ending was fairly unsatisfying.
- the story where a guy agrees to be crucified on live TV
- the whole detective sidequest - it's a shame you only remember him being annoying, the entire story about family, about finding your relative, about solving a horrendous crime mystery - absolute masterpiece.
- the whole Panam sidequest - she grew from someone I didn't care about to being a close companion. And the quest where her and the rest of the aldecaldos go to steal the neural-link driven tank is just epic. Also her relationship with the aldecaldos.
- whole Judy storyline, where she comes to gripes with the death of her close friend and how the system doesn't care about any of them. The moment when you sit with her at the edge of a poisoned lake and talk about life will always be in my memory.
- the side quest with destroying the prostitution gang owners so that the women could basically get revenge and run it themselves - 10/10 for some moral choices.
- the entire Rogue + Johnny content that wasn't necessary for the main mission. Damn that character goes through a redemption arc like no other.
- the AI taxi quest was actually stupid and it felt like an excuse to make some out of universe jokes(with one taxi being voiced by Glados from Portal if I remember correctly). But I mean....meh. The final choice was cool.
All of the above adds to the fact that at the end of the game you actually care about the characters that surround you and you want to see them there with you. I've gone back and played through every possible ending(other than the secret one because it's so bloody hard) just to see what happens. And in the endings where you don't contact Pam or Judy...man it's actually heartbreaking. Like it makes you feel like shit. None of this would happen if their sidequests weren't actually good.
I've long been a fan of open world MMOs with basically next to no mandatory quests. Think Runescape, Ragnarok Online, MapleStory, etc. Loved them, and Ragnarok Online is to this day still among my top favorite games of all time.
One day, Guild Wars 2 dropped to great hype and fanfare and I bought it to try it out.
Good fucking god damn hell in a shit basket, I fucking hated it. Quests everywhere. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests. Quests.
Walk around a bit? Here's a side quest! Pan the camera? Here please take this quest! No? How about this quest?!
It is still the worst use of $60 bucks that I've ever spent.
As you wander through zones in the world dynamic events will spawn for example you might run into a merchant in need of an escort between villages or you'll run across a farmer who needs you to defend his flock or whatever. Many events are simply on a timer and some are triggered by specific actions you (or another player) have done elsewhere in the world.
The events can be simply once off events or they can be more complex with multiple states. I.e. an event can spawn where a bunch of npc soldiers want to take back a mine from monsters - players can escort them to the mine help them clear it out. If successful then later on other NPC's will move into the mine new vendors will become accessible etc. Later still the monsters will congregate and launch a new offensive to retake the mine an event will spawn to help defend the new settlement.
I like the feeling this gives the world. For me at least it makes the game world feel like it's fresh and things are constantly happening even when your character is not around the world is alive and things are changing all of the time.
This is different from my experience playing an mmo like World of Warcraft, which had static NPC quest givers in zones and once you'd done the content, which tended to be stuff like kill 15 of this enemy and then report back to me - there was little reason to revisit the zone again.
The questline in guild wars 2 which reveals the larger narrative and your characters personal story is instanced content, separate from the event system.
None of the events in Guild Wars are mandatory you can ignore all of them to your heart's content - don't feel like escorting the merchant you can walk past him on the road. Don't want to help the farmer defend his flock from the wolves - you can go right on ahead and ignore it. So it's strange you would get hung up on that aspect of the game. If you wanted to run around and explore the open world going from zone to zone as you please you can go right ahead and do just that.
It's kind of like trying to use the internet today without an adblocker. Much like how the internet spams ADVERTS ADVERTS ADVERTS ADVERTS ADVERTS ADVERTS in my face every chance they get, Guild Wars 2 spammed QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS in my face every chance it got. I couldn't stand it, I fucking hated it; I refuse to call Guild Wars 2 an open world.
The similarities are exactly why I enjoyed GW2... Are you talking about the hearts or the events? The Achievements? The main difference is that the world the player experiences is more "coherent" in GW2 because of the Elder Dragon threat and their involvement in it (ie their hero's journey).
Also, what are "quests" to you?
There's so freeform stuff you can do in the game. Most of the Hearts you can complete without ever really caring about them. It's just a nice little exp bonus. Events? People can just not do them. Go to a different area (as in, hold W for 10 seconds, or use a waypoint?).
I didn't even get that far because I was inundated to my armpits with QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE QUEST IS AVAILABLE with literally any action I took. It was nauseating and quickly drove me mad.
What makes me wonder to this day is if I had a different client from everyone else, because quite literally noone I ever talk to about this seems to be able to relate (case in point).
>Also, what are "quests" to you?
The kind you would find in RO, Runescape, Skyrim, and so on. Scripted things to do, but not particularly conspicuous and in the way if I'm not interested in pursuing them.
Those tend to have linear progression most of the time, and I think you maybe mistook the instance's progression objectives as quests. Once you get out of that, it's an open world and you can do what you want, though.
I think it's worth giving it another try, it's a great game.
Would you mind sharing what you're into these days?
(RIP English Priconne, Crunchyroll is bad civilization.)
I don't have the kind of time or energy to devote to grinding anymore like I used to in RO and the like, but I'm always a sucker for good writing which FGO and Priconne give me in spades.
And before anyone mentions it: Yeah yeah, they're gacha games. Gambling. I don't care. Japanese gachas are generally good, and I'm getting my money's worth when I whale. :V
I've yet to find a game that got me anywhere near the same sense of freedom and sense of being part of the world instead of one of a bunch of people going through the predetermined Disney ride.
The original planetside had a similar feeling with a more shooter lens on it where you were always part of a changing world.
Even for combat where two ASCII characters are fighting they have actual physiology in play calculating hit locations and the effects of different weapons on different parts of the body and even internal organs.
All for a line of text in a combat log most people won't read.
It's reminiscent of mobile game designers from the 2010's, and how they were making "engaging" games. Lots of presentations about making engaging experiences that immerse players into the lore of the game world. Actually, just mediocre manipulation tactics pushing people into skinner boxes.
It's all bullshit, and indie game devs would do well to stay naive and simply try to make fun games.
If anything, a much better example of this stuff is in Disco Elysium.
This is a summary of a presentation by CD Projekt employee talking about the two games he's worked on, so naturally it's focused on those two games.
My criticism is that this presentation by CD Projekt is not helpful but harmful to indie developers. It's clear in the presentation that their mindset is similar to the mobile game era of manipulation and control of the player. Ostensibly in this case to "make them want to continue".
Engagement is skinner box jargon used by companies like Zynga and has nothing to do with making a good game.
Because the presentation promotes this mindset and because it's about two games that mostly were made possible by golden age game design, and not their own innovations, I don't believe they have anything meaningful to contribute on this topic.
The quest design in Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk is neither innovative, nor very fun. It may be effective in the manipulative sense, but that doesn't contribute to the artistry of making games fun.
It's good to see game "designers" from the big studios really are to blame here. While I've long since grown out of my teenage elitist disgust concerning "top 20" music the truth is games continue to a good place where "popular" usually defaults to "bad."
There is a spectrum between slot machine (try until you get a lucky roll) and chess (pure strategy) for what losing means.
The idea of fun is just dopamine manipulation: Creating a state of wanting and then playing with a person's ability to get there.
Here is a classic of game design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
Some people enjoy the chat room. Some people enjoy the feeling of dominance. Some people enjoy uncovering the story. Some people enjoy checking every box or getting the best gear.
The fact that you don't find exploration fun doesn't mean other people can't find exploration style play fun.
The problem of modern gaming is much less about the strategy vs slot machine continuum, but about the motivation of game companies to monetize micro transactions or reduce production costs (namely by minimizing novelty or quality). Games are less of an artistic endeavor and more of a money endeavor.
Are games born out of an idea to make a game and ultimately make money to support the life style of game creation or are games born first out of an idea to make money and the desire to promote fun secondary? Are games art or are they cigarettes?
What you feel in modern game is the corrosive and corrupting force of "next quarters profits" culture. What you feel is games being built for shareholders first and gamers second.
"Just dopamine manipulation" and "glorified slot machine" are overly deconstructive and cynical beliefs, to the point where I doubt having this mindset could ever lead to creating a good game like Diablo 2. You could deconstruct all of human behaviour to dopamine spikes, but that kind of thinking usually leads to a race to the bottom; like what you're not necessarily defending but excusing.
Most of the games we love were at the very least heavily influenced by game design developed by naive artists and programmers who wanted to "make something cool".
Doom is the perfect example, in terms of both game design and tech. id Software wanted to blow everyone out of the water with that game, and so they focused on making it as fun and impressive as possible. There was no mentality of skinner boxes there, just inspired ambition and love of play.
Yes, almost all games are made to make money. That doesn't preclude artistic ambition, and good games are primarily about making something fun.
I unashamedly play all games at the lowest difficulty setting and will look at guides online if I get stuck for more than 60 seconds on a puzzle.
I'm there to experience the story, not hone my skills at dodging bullets or doing 720 noscope headshots or getting microsecond jump timings correct.
Some people enjoy those things, I don't.
That felt great, compared to say, Mass Effect which did tend to suffer from a mismatch between the prompt and what would actually happen - it's a credit to CDPR that I never felt betrayed by a dialogue choice (except one, at the ending).
The many gameplay and plot concessions made towards run-and-gun action and power fantasy cause 2077 to stray far from the “you’re not special” theme of “proper” cyberpunk stories, in general. Especially with the defeat of a certain character at the hands of V.
Disagree with this and I think interestingly enough even large amounts of mainstream players have started to disagree with it. This gamification, ironically enough not a good thing in a game, does not take the player seriously. If you have to put exclamation points or guardrails around your game you are taking responsibility away from the player. It's like riding a tricycle.
Contrast this with Elden Ring which deliberately ditches almost all of this. You can miss 80% of the game on your first playthrough but that's entirely up to you. And the experience of finding some gigantic world below the surface that just exists, with entire stories in it but completely unadvertised makes it seem incredibly mysterious, like nobody even designed it, you just stumbled over it. It gives an incredibly level of depth to a game world. There's this underground area full of gigantic trees that looks like a Hieronymus Bosch painting with a gigantic corpse in it and my first thought finding it was basically "am I the first person here?, do the developers know this exists?". A world having that much of a life of its own is a hug feat for a work of fiction.
Like… you could have been able to do something really light touch like ask the merchants if they’ve heard any rumors on where characters are.
I think the only quest I managed to naturally find all the plot beats for was Jar Alexander.
Sekiro was their best work. I’ll say this to the end.
Agreed, 100%. Sekiro is a masterpiece.
I think they did it a disservice by adding the online messaging system to it post release though. I like the system in Souls, but it just really doesn't belong in Sekiro and ruins the mood.
....What? I mean you might miss the quest lines but this isn't Skyrim. The questlines are a teeny tiny portion of the content in a From Soft game. The quest lines are fun little bits of interactivity and current plot but the overwhelming majority of the game is just in exploring the areas, fighting the enemies, and finishing the game. You could miss all the sidequests in Elden Ring but still see almost all of the game if you were willing to just wander around looking at stuff
My favorite example of this was Ash Lake in Dark Souls 1. In one of the most difficult and miserable places in the game there's a random tree with a chest in it. If you happen to hit the wall behind it, you'll find it's actually illusory, and be rewarded with another chest. At that point you probably think you've already found the secret, but if you move being the second chest, you'll find this wall is illusory as well.
You'll walk down a path and find that this tree is actually hollow, and proceeds into the ground for hundreds of feet. You can try to make it down, but it's quite the gauntlet: you have to deal with irritating platforming, and enemies that will curse you and remove half your health.
If you have the patience to make it all the way down, you emerge from the tree and are greeted with one of the most spectacular vistas in the game: a seemingly endless lake stretching to the horizon, filled with gigantic trees, each hundreds (if not thousands) of feet tall. If you then make the journey all the way down the beach, you'll encounter an amazingly bizarre (but peaceful) dragon.
All of this hidden at the bottom of a miserable swamp behind two unassuming illusory walls. It's so magic the first time you find this, and it reminded me of playing games as a kid, where the possibilities of what might be around the next corner felt endless.
The quote is about making consequences obvious. Elden Ring does this in spades. Hell, at one point in the game, a huge section of the map becomes a giant hole, and at another part, the massive tree that is visible throughout the game begins to burn, dropping ash across the whole world.
So yeah, pretty great story scripting, voice acting, and character animation, but it was heavily undercut by some core mechanics in my opinion.
Keep in mind that the main story isn't all that long, so from my perspective the game was just getting going.
Subverted in the end by killing off everybody no matter how well you play.
I didn't feel this pressure, which resulted in the opposite problem. I played all of the side missions before anything else where they were available. By the time I finished those and got back to the mainline, I was all powerful and the story was an unchallenging walkthrough.
the article is a chatgpt summary of Paweł Sasko's cd projekt red lead quest designer's presentation on lead quest design. "lessons learned" are in the form of "we did a thing, and by virtue of doing the thing the way we did it, we have an experience doing this thing our way." there's not a single element of self-reflection. it says quest director, but Pavel wasn't one until, the actual Cyberpunk 2077 quest director, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, quit in 2021, a year after the game was released.
In my experience these days talks like that are heavily filtered by the PR (or some informal equivalent of), and having sat through my fare share of them they seem to make up the dull corporate background noise of GDC and co. Pavel is a cool dude though, he was responsible for the Red Barron in Witcher 3 that people keep bringing up in the comments.
I think real cyberpunk 2077 design retrospective would've been interesting to read. If somebody knows an in-depth one I'd appreciate a link. The game is very very uneven. There's a first rate B-grade Hollywood blockbuster hiding there, staring Keanu Reeves, Goro's subplot, etc. which suffers from very basic design issues ("show don't tell" "show don't tell" "jeez that tell is the opposite of the show" "show.. oh fuck it"). Tell us how to awkwardly wrap up your story lines under crunch, Pavel.