I Think I Figured Out Why Cyberpunk Sux

If cdpr released it as early access/beta, they would have 0 backlash and same sales, don't know why they were so hellbound to name it a 1.00 release.

It would solve all their issues and they could continue to develop it in peace. Baldurs gate 3 devs did similar, gave 60 euros early access and people knew what they were getting into.

We can blame the bad upper management decisions for the backlash, 99% of company is otherwise innocent and doing their best.
Spreading salt since 2006
Fair enough. While I don't believe they could have released an open world game without a plethora of bugs they could have labelled it "early access" and only released the first act (it already keeps you within a single part of town anyway). However, even if this was done, the bugs in the other parts would have persisted and it'd only increase the tension because it wouldn't be the first time the game would be delayed.

It is kind of weird to release a whole complete game and to call it "early access". There won't be big changes related to the fundamental mechanics so doing it just because of the bugs seems silly.


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Johny_Snow wrote:

This doesn't matter. Is Skyrim an open world RPG? It is. How other games implemented their quests is meaningless when we are arguing about definition.


Who's arguing about definitions? I'm talking about the game's quality as an open world RPG. (PS: Skyrim is not a good example of high quality, it's a standard Bethesda mile wide inch deep puddle). This is, after all, the game where you can become the boss of the wizards guild without casting a single spell and the head of the thieves without stealing anything.

"

Not entirely true. There are side missions that can be completed more easily if you have certain skills. For opening doors for example. Others provide you with better rewards. I had a mission where I had to sell a shard. 10 intelligence was required to get a better price but I didn't have it. Finally, a whole part of a mission was based on whether I had enough intelligence to find an IP. Since I didn't, I got access to more content because there was more work to be done to reveal a location.


Yeah, but there aren't missions that can be completed in meaningfully different ways. There are occasional ones where it asks for non-lethal or no alarms, but nothing with a genuine sense of outcome variation. Here's an example of what I'm talking about executed well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM1yR7WYqgM


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Personal opinion. One quest that has nothing to do with the main one involved tracking a serial killer's hideout and saving kids from slowly dying. To me, this is some hard stuff.


Yeah, I already said that the main quest and romance character stuff is generally well written. But most of the stuff outside of that isn't so much. It's a lot of "go to this building and assassinate/rescue/steal/sabotage" where there are few goals repeated in different environments. Whereas Witcher 3 even the incidental side content (like the werewolf quest early on, or the first noonwraith, or the guard troll that wants paint, or the lighthouse banshee, and so on and so on) tended to have a lot more writing and there was almost no generic copypaste content.

And this is, ultimately, part of the letdown (the part that isn't about the bugs, and CDPR's performance art piece as a dystopic cyberpunk corporation in its treatment of its employees). People were expecting something more like CDPR have demonstrated they can do. Not something like they'd expect from a middling effort Ubisoft title.
Last edited by GloatingSwine on Dec 29, 2020, 5:56:04 AM
Hot Take: The graphics aren't even that much better than other AAA titles. The main thing that gives the illusion of great graphics is just the size of that mindless pointless crowd lumbering about the city like fashion disaster zombies.

Spoiler Alert:
Spoiler
And the way they handled Jackie's death is so much less impactful than say... Aerith in FF7 and that game came out what 20 years ago? In FF7 they had the patience to let us care about her. But in CP they couldn't wait to off him. They couldn't wait long enough to unglue that gun from his finger tips either.


Ahhh... I'm just so done with this game. And it's $10 cheaper for a physical copy of it at Walmart. That's like another f-you to 99% of people who bought it digitally.
"
Who's arguing about definitions?


The entire argument is whether the game is open world or not. This cannot be subjected to personal opinion because there are clear definitions. If Cyberpunk is not open world then games like GTA are also not open world which is ridiculous.

"
Yeah, but there aren't missions that can be completed in meaningfully different ways. There are occasional ones where it asks for non-lethal or no alarms, but nothing with a genuine sense of outcome variation.


Definitely not true. You are thinking of the one-off quests, not the meaningful side quests. Yesterday I goaded a person involved in such quest to attack me and killed them. I am 100% sure that there is an outcome where they survive. This is one example, I am sure there are more.

"
Yeah, I already said that the main quest and romance character stuff is generally well written. But most of the stuff outside of that isn't so much. It's a lot of "go to this building and assassinate/rescue/steal/sabotage" where there are few goals repeated in different environments. Whereas Witcher 3 even the incidental side content (like the werewolf quest early on, or the first noonwraith, or the guard troll that wants paint, or the lighthouse banshee, and so on and so on) tended to have a lot more writing and there was almost no generic copypaste content.


A matter of perspective. Cyberpunk in general seems to have more quests which means that more of them will be of lower quality. It is understandable. It comes with the more intricately constructed world because, lets be honest, Witcher 3 was mostly green plains and trees with only one notable city.

"
And this is, ultimately, part of the letdown (the part that isn't about the bugs, and CDPR's performance art piece as a dystopic cyberpunk corporation in its treatment of its employees). People were expecting something more like CDPR have demonstrated they can do. Not something like they'd expect from a middling effort Ubisoft title.


Depends on the person. I wouldn't want a Witcher 3 copy, I was glad to see that they've deviated a bit. Besides, it seems like the cyberpunk Witcher 3 niche is already filled by Deus EX.
"
DarthSki44 wrote:
1. It was never gonna live up to the hype.

2. They should have never developed it for Ps4, Xbone, and Stadia, but likely the board members wanted that cheddar.

3. 8 million preorders and nearly 14 million copies sold...it doesnt even matter what the reviews are, or edgy takes from game "reviewers".

4. The original Witcher wasnt that great, and subsequently got much better. I think Cyberpunk will get better in general.


Spoiler
Note I dont have or have played Cyberpunk on any platform as of yet.


I finished the game, by finishing I mean doing every main quests, and enough secondary quests to a point I now just try to do some Parkour jumping from a building to another taking pictures.

Cyberpunk was a very good experience on PC in my case, and matched what I expected for its early days.
Strong basis, lot of rooms to improve it over time and add cool content.

I'm just disapointed by the way they marketed it, not by the game itself in short. Also think it was a wrong move to publish it on PS4, Xbox and so on, a stupid one.
Hf :)
Last edited by Heli0nix on Dec 29, 2020, 7:35:49 AM
"
Johny_Snow wrote:
"
Who's arguing about definitions?


The entire argument is whether the game is open world or not. This cannot be subjected to personal opinion because there are clear definitions. If Cyberpunk is not open world then games like GTA are also not open world which is ridiculous.


Well no.

The argument is about whether it's good. It's unambiguously an open world game, but it's not a good open world RPG because the open world and the RPG are two separate experiences crammed into the same executable and neither benefits from the presence of the other.

And they actually meaningfully detract from each other, because if you do too much open worlding you end up comically overpowered for the RPG content. (To the extent that they had to make bosses just cheat and be immune to headshots, quickhacks, and sneak attacks because otherwise a player who had done too much wandering would just one-shot them. And you can become absolutely immune to bullets with enough armour mod stacking).

"

A matter of perspective. Cyberpunk in general seems to have more quests which means that more of them will be of lower quality. It is understandable. It comes with the more intricately constructed world because, lets be honest, Witcher 3 was mostly green plains and trees with only one notable city.


Yeah, and that's bad. Less quests with more quality and writing involved in each one would be better. (Not that you have to have less quests, of course. See again Fallout New Vegas which has all the things I'm talking about and absolutely scads of sidequests.)

Again, this is what makes me think CP2077 was scrapped pretty recently and started again for everything but its scripted content, because this does not feel like the output of the same team that was capable of Witcher 3's level of consistent depth in quest writing.

"

Depends on the person. I wouldn't want a Witcher 3 copy, I was glad to see that they've deviated a bit. Besides, it seems like the cyberpunk Witcher 3 niche is already filled by Deus EX.


Of course there's no accounting for taste, but in general most people were expecting an experience on the quality and writing level of Witcher 3 not Watch Dogs.
Just a few observations regarding what I've seen in video-game clips and somewhat critical reviews where a lot of "glitches" are featured:

1) Animation Blending - Animation looks excellent, but animation blending is problematic in some of these glitch vids. In some cases, it doesn't happen at all and the NPC glitches out, not "knowing" what to do.

2) T-Pose = Meh - These issues could be anything to do with rigging or animations. But, it's expected if the animation blending glitches out. That could result in a default pose since a character/rig has to have something loaded.

3) Physics - This is the biggest issue that gamers notice and put up vids about. It's not unexpected, to be fair. How many gamers have bouced their horses off of cliffs in Skyrim or been sent to the moon by a giant? I'm no coder or game dev, but I imagine they'll do a "simple fix" pronto and just turn off certain multipliers/variables to place a hard limit on what the physic engine can do. They could even turn it off for certain things, which will make the outrageous "glitches" disappear, but players will start to notice issues with other physics-enabled things and they probably won't like that. (They'll "fix" it using a big hammer, at first, then work on getting it fine-tuned for a follow-up patch, I bet.)

4) Object/Animation Interactions - When characters move to interact with an object and they're some nonsensical distance away from it when they begin their interaction-animation, it's usually a "center" problem between where they're supposed to sit and what the animation for sitting says the NPC's "center" is. A sign of a hasty animation job, but very easy to fix. This is also often a problem with "scaled" characters, so you see it happening a lot in games with very customized character creation features. (Height, weight (width/depth), limb length, etc)

5) Animation triggers - Some animations aren't getting triggered properly. Dunno why, since it's not my job. I saw a clip where an NPC gets their head cut off and they were walking around in their idle/twitch animation.. without a head. Removing heads as an "effect" can be problematic/complicated depending on what is required. In that clip, the trigger for NPC death or an animation, perhaps even some kind of PhysX trigger, just didn't happen. Easily fixable.

Why go through those?

Because they're all relatively easy to fix. If someone who doesn't get paid to do this stuff, but enjoys it as a hobby, can make some reasonable interpretation of these issues, the poor schlub sweating bullets and downing horded Jolt Cola during Crunch can "easily" fix them.

That means two things:

They should have been fixed before release, but someone decided the extra time to wade through them all wasn't worth the impact that delay would have had. Considering this project was likely an "all hands on deck" development, it shouldn't have taken long to fix these.

And, once they're fixed, a very large portion of the player community will declare it the "BEST GAEM EVAR." Why? Because that's all they're really noticing in terms of issues because the glitches are "in their face."

"AI" - The more problematic issue has to do with behavior sets/triggers and "AI." That "police chase" clip linked above, somewhere, was pretty... gnarly "AI." Other "AI" issues also seem to get easily broken, especially in combat. NPCs should adopt certain "behavior" but it seems, at least to someone who does not own/play the game, that some behavior/AI is... "fudged." IOW - It seems that a lot of the quest encounters are "staged." In those encounters, NPCs appear to be designed to do certain specific things or have a set of constraints placed upon them that limit what they can do and where they can go. IF another glitch prevents them from doing that, they end up adopting some default behavior or none at all. (ie: An NPC running to "cover" during combat is following what is more or less a "script." If it can't be completed due to problem_x, their default behavior set takes over or they glitch out.

Eg: Some of the "AI" in certain situations seems more "A" than "I."
I am making a whole gallery with bugs for the funzies.
Spoiler
"
Morkonan wrote:
Just a few observations regarding what I've seen in video-game clips and somewhat critical reviews where a lot of "glitches" are featured:

1) Animation Blending - Animation looks excellent, but animation blending is problematic in some of these glitch vids. In some cases, it doesn't happen at all and the NPC glitches out, not "knowing" what to do.

2) T-Pose = Meh - These issues could be anything to do with rigging or animations. But, it's expected if the animation blending glitches out. That could result in a default pose since a character/rig has to have something loaded.

3) Physics - This is the biggest issue that gamers notice and put up vids about. It's not unexpected, to be fair. How many gamers have bouced their horses off of cliffs in Skyrim or been sent to the moon by a giant? I'm no coder or game dev, but I imagine they'll do a "simple fix" pronto and just turn off certain multipliers/variables to place a hard limit on what the physic engine can do. They could even turn it off for certain things, which will make the outrageous "glitches" disappear, but players will start to notice issues with other physics-enabled things and they probably won't like that. (They'll "fix" it using a big hammer, at first, then work on getting it fine-tuned for a follow-up patch, I bet.)

4) Object/Animation Interactions - When characters move to interact with an object and they're some nonsensical distance away from it when they begin their interaction-animation, it's usually a "center" problem between where they're supposed to sit and what the animation for sitting says the NPC's "center" is. A sign of a hasty animation job, but very easy to fix. This is also often a problem with "scaled" characters, so you see it happening a lot in games with very customized character creation features. (Height, weight (width/depth), limb length, etc)

5) Animation triggers - Some animations aren't getting triggered properly. Dunno why, since it's not my job. I saw a clip where an NPC gets their head cut off and they were walking around in their idle/twitch animation.. without a head. Removing heads as an "effect" can be problematic/complicated depending on what is required. In that clip, the trigger for NPC death or an animation, perhaps even some kind of PhysX trigger, just didn't happen. Easily fixable.

Why go through those?

Because they're all relatively easy to fix. If someone who doesn't get paid to do this stuff, but enjoys it as a hobby, can make some reasonable interpretation of these issues, the poor schlub sweating bullets and downing horded Jolt Cola during Crunch can "easily" fix them.

That means two things:

They should have been fixed before release, but someone decided the extra time to wade through them all wasn't worth the impact that delay would have had. Considering this project was likely an "all hands on deck" development, it shouldn't have taken long to fix these.

And, once they're fixed, a very large portion of the player community will declare it the "BEST GAEM EVAR." Why? Because that's all they're really noticing in terms of issues because the glitches are "in their face."

"AI" - The more problematic issue has to do with behavior sets/triggers and "AI." That "police chase" clip linked above, somewhere, was pretty... gnarly "AI." Other "AI" issues also seem to get easily broken, especially in combat. NPCs should adopt certain "behavior" but it seems, at least to someone who does not own/play the game, that some behavior/AI is... "fudged." IOW - It seems that a lot of the quest encounters are "staged." In those encounters, NPCs appear to be designed to do certain specific things or have a set of constraints placed upon them that limit what they can do and where they can go. IF another glitch prevents them from doing that, they end up adopting some default behavior or none at all. (ie: An NPC running to "cover" during combat is following what is more or less a "script." If it can't be completed due to problem_x, their default behavior set takes over or they glitch out.

Eg: Some of the "AI" in certain situations seems more "A" than "I."


Well yeah. A lot of people are aware of that. But these systems are not isolated and it's how they are entangled with one another that makes them difficult to iron out. Every game or game engine has its own esoteric methods that look great from one angle but horrible from another. So these problems may not be as easy to fix as you think.

Some game engines have the animation directly intertwined with the physics engine or the in game clock or some aspect of the renderer itself so it may not be that simple as fixing animation orientation - depending on how ambitious the programmers were with being cutting edge-lords of optimization and features.

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