Cyberpunk 2077 Review thread - Umm....

[Gordon_4]

Or you can like put $5 per week/fortnight/month in a jar and pay for it that way. Or you can set up your account to auto move the money into say your PayPal account and only use that account for gaming purchases. Or you can just not get say that $5 Starbucks once a week (or whatever your daily vice is if you have one). There's many ways of paying for something over time that doesn't involve giving your money to another company that they make money off of.

Yes I could. But paying money to the store directly is the more efficient way for me to do it and I prefer it. Especially since at anytime I can change my mind and get my money back. I do things my way because they work for me, I'm not interested in this limp dick corporate spanking spectator sport the rest of you get yourselves off to.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

 

[Phoenixmgs]

I'm not interested in this limp dick corporate spanking spectator sport the rest of you get yourselves off to.

Huh?

 

[BrawlMan]

Huh?

I think the "you" in this case is not you personally nor most people on this site, but idiotic and crazy people/gamers in general that get wrapped up in to the deep rabbit hole that is pre-order culture.

 

[Kwak]

A good and fair summary of what people were sold vs what they got.
I wonder if the game could be remade in a year or two to actually be the rpg it was meant to be.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

A good and fair summary of what people were sold vs what they got.
I wonder if the game could be remade in a year or two to actually be the rpg it was meant to be.

Informative clip, thanks. It sure would be a hell of an “Enhanced” Edition if they could fix everything that fell majorly short of their claims. To be fair it was a much more complex game than anything from The Witcher series; even Wild Hunt. But if they learned anything they’ll probably refrain from hyping something up like this for whatever follows it.

 

[CriticalGaming]

This is a very interesting read.

 

[BrawlMan]

This is a very interesting read.

Neat, I still won't be playing. Why didn't they just release it in June in the first place is beyond me. Note, that was sarcasm on the second sentence. Thanks for the news.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Yup figures...the big bad execs fucked up another hugely anticipated game. Execs nuuuts roasting on an open fire has a nice ring to it for all the people they screwed over this holiday, but they’re probably too arrogant and stupid to ever have their mistakes sink in and learn from them. Maybe while they’re roasting them Sony can instill some pointers on letting developers make the game they want.

Wonder if CDPR is kicking themselves for going public?

I really hope they can still deliver the game they set out to make, their way.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

A good and fair summary of what people were sold vs what they got.
I wonder if the game could be remade in a year or two to actually be the rpg it was meant to be.

Watched 15 minutes of the video. Not going to watch the whole thing.

I've played about 50 hours of Cyberpunk so far, and what I've heard in the video is pretty dead on to my experience.

Honestly, bugs aside it's actually a pretty good game. I'm surprisingly engrossed by the world and find the gameplay fun. The bones of a really great game are here, but they're only bones.

The game isn't anywhere near to what was promised, nothing is fleshed out.

As someone who had no hype for the game because I didn't think CD Project could pull off anything of what they were claiming, the game is actually better than I was expecting. It's the first CD Project game that I actually like playing. For those that bought into CD Project's bullshit lies, yeah I can definitely see why people are upset and demanding better.

After I finish the game I'll be interested to see how much they actually support it to make it better, or if they're just going to release some bug-fixes and call it a day. Their reputation is shot either way and I don't think they'll ever be able to do all the things they claimed they would.

 

[deleted20220709]

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[Dirty Hipsters]

I'm sort of with you. But I also liked Mafia 2, the grandfather of barebones, pointless open worlds, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. The video is dead on about misleading marketing but I am kind of surprised they felt the RPG mechanics were robust and kinda good, because my experience is the exact opposite. A few examples:

* There are a bunch of "trap" perks, that pretty much do nothing or are worthless in the grand scheme of things. The stand outs here are the strength perk to increase carrying capacity, a stat they could have dropped altogether considering how easily you can sell or scrap weapons and pretty much a quarter of the stealth tree that focuses on poison. Since damaging but not killing an enemy will put them in alert mode and blow your stealth, there's absolutely no point in having a damage over time effect in the stealth tree. Either you alpha strike them dead or you are no longer sneaky and once stealth is blown you can only use a quick hack (a legendary one or heavily perked at that) to restore it.
* Cold blooded requires a massive investment to return anything but modest buffs. An investment so large that you better be doing all side content. Just doing story? You are better off not caring at all about it. If you do anyway, you are just gimping yourself (or giving yourself an actual challenge).
* Crafting. All of it. Whoever thought this crafting system was good should never work with game system design again.
* Skill leveling is just way too slow. If you only use one kind of weapon and seek to murder everything you meet with said weapon, you might be at level 10-12 if you don't do much side content when the credits roll. If you do all side content, you can get maybe two or three skills up to 20 if you really work on cheesing out xp for them (ie. stealth hacking everyone for lulz before taking them down with your weapon).

The basis of the system is solid, but they need to really tighten it up and give it a overhaul if it is to be an RPG system worth its name.

Cold Blooded is actually pretty good, it's just not good for a stealth build. The cold blooded perks are awesome for a run and gun build in combination with berserk.

I agree the crafting system isn't good, and there are definitely trap perks (like the perk that makes you undetectable underwater), but perks are also given out like candy. You earn perks by leveling, and by using your skills, and you find skill shards out in the world that give you more perks.

You're definitely expected to be doing the side content to get a decent build, but the side content in this game is literally 80% of the game. When you think you've maybe 30% of the way through the story you're actually 75% done, so you definitely should be doing the side content.

I definitely agree that I would over-hall the skill system though, there's quite a bit that can be dumped, tuned, or re-balanced.

Edit: I think poison is supposed to be useful for bosses and mini-bosses, since point damage is percent based and scales with enemy health. In theory this makes sense for a stealth build to have since a stealth build typically wouldn't be high damage. Thing is, there are barely any bosses in the game so it's totally pointless to spend skill points on it.

 

[Fieldy409]

Yup figures...the big bad execs fucked up another hugely anticipated game. Execs nuuuts roasting on an open fire has a nice ring to it for all the people they screwed over this holiday, but they’re probably too arrogant and stupid to ever have their mistakes sink in and learn from them. Maybe while they’re roasting them Sony can instill some pointers on letting developers make the game they want.

Wonder if CDPR is kicking themselves for going public?

I really hope they can still deliver the game they set out to make, their way.

Why would the execs learn a lesson? They haven't been punished in any way really. They got a shitload of preorder money, they keep their jobs and what is there to punish them? Angry internet comments, articles and videos? Big deal after a while the internet will move on and it'll all blow over.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Some good quotes from the video/comments -

You can’t make a baby in one month with nine women.

Perfect plans are a perfectly stupid idea. They are in the realms of magic.

Apple doesn’t pre-announce their products.


Mad Joe
I worked as a game programmer for 7 years on 2 AAA games at Ubisoft.
All delay problems, all software quality problems were coming from basically one source: constant changes by game designers.
When you keep asking modifications, but don't change milestone dates, the code suffers a lot (you have to make quick changes/fixes), so you get more bugs and they are harder to fix.
Game designers are the weakest link in game development. Their constant changes waste a lot of time.

 

[Baffle]

My arms are swords. Just killing everyone. Snickkity Snick micro chip.

 

[deleted20220709]

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[hanselthecaretaker]

I wouldn't put too much stock into quotes like this (I do agree that bad software engineering and repeatedly changing design specs are to blame for CP77 though). The old adage of " the last 10% of coding takes 90% of the time" talks about how it takes a lot of time to finish and debug complex code and Shamus Young constantly re-iterates his own experiences with how hard it is to hit milestone dates even when you aren't interrupted, because programming is seriously tricky business.This quote also forgets why you keep getting new specs from the game designers: Not because designers just love to fine tune forever, but because different departments run into various problems they can't solve.

If you're an entry level programmer in the AI department you won't know what's going on with the gunplay, physics or netcode programmers. If a feature of your game is meant to guns that can shoot around walls, you code for that. But it turns out that coding curving bullets is really hard (you have made a really nifty AI that will attempt to hug the corner so the bullet curves around them though), so instead the designers talk to the gunplay coders and decide that bullets will now travel through walls instead. Guess what AI has to do? Scrap all your cool wall hugging and rewrite the AI for wall penetration instead. So you do that, but netcode is having real problems with getting your advanced crowd AI to function in MP because it requires too much bandwidth. Design comes back to you: Resdesign the crowd AI. Then you realize that the bouncing physics for pilates balls is causing some really wonky physics for tires which messes up driving AI. You talk to physics, they can't figure it out and game design intervenes: Physics have to change how pilates balls work.

For all of the above, the problem is not feature creep or indecisive game designers, but naturally occurring problems during game development. Game design will have final say about what to keep, what to cut and what to change so naturally it will seem like they are constantly changing their mind. In reality, they are often just reacting to problems that crop up and trying to keep the game with as many cool features as possible. For the average coder or artist it might seem as if game design are indecisive and neurotic, but they are trying to juggle the competing demands of an ambitious design document and hundreds of people who are running into hard to solve problems every day.

I guess that’s why implementing software tools that each department can understand and use independently are becoming increasingly important and necessary. IIRC it was one of Sony’s studios that talked about this (Guerrilla Games or maybe Naughty Dog? Probably both now since they share tech) where artists/animators/etc. can now change things on the fly instead of having the pipeline screech to a halt because they presented the coders with some variable that would’ve previously crashed the build.

Of course, not every company has those kinds of resources, but considering the alternative long term damages it makes sense to invest in the kinds of solutions that will mitigate critical workflow issues.

 

[deleted20220709]

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[hanselthecaretaker]

For sure. To be clear though, I think a lot of CP77's issues stem from bad management not being able to manage feature creep and taking on way too grand a vision. As some people have pointed out, CDPR got a 3 million USD grant from the Polish government for work on AI breakthroughs and kept boasting about how advanced their crowd and NPC AI was. It is very likely that they have a really, really advanced AI prototype laying around that just didn't work in-game and thus it was a mad scramble for the AI coders to get at least basic functionality AI out the door for release.

Yeah about that...


An interesting read about the man behind the money -

Meet The Mysterious Former Billionaire Behind The Video Game Disaster Cyberpunk 2077

Polish developer CD Projekt Red just released the most-anticipated game of the year, making its top executives very rich. Then it became the latest debacle of 2020—costing cofounder Michał Kiciński half a billion dollars.

www.forbes.com

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Cyberpunk 2077's Launch and Ongoing Fixes Investigated By Consumer Protection Agency - IGN

Poland's consumer protection agency is looking into Cyberpunk 2077's launch and ongoing development, and has the power to fine CD Projekt up to 10% of its income.

www.ign.com

The hits keep on comin’. I wonder at what point everyone involved with the project got the wake up call not to ever try pulling that shit again.