Sardukhar;n8204210 said:
That's a huge and totally incorrect assumption. Unless more than one dev is lying to me, (kind of unlikely, since I already like the W3 gameplay, they don't need to change my mind) they've said many times W3 gameplay took for-EVER to get right, with many, many, many attempts, balances, changes, changes again, more balances, more fine tuning. Forever. It was a huge timesink before they were (mostly) happy with it.
Someone else comes along later and changes it to their preferences doesn't make them brilliant, just different in taste.
The issue isn't the gameplay - it's what people like in gameplay. I loved it. My kids loved it. Every one of my friends, including huge DS fan, loved it. Because it's fun and exciting and makes you feel like a monster-hunting badass. *
The devs went with it because it was what they wanted. And I'm pleased, if they'd gone with something like Bloodborne or DS I would have been disappointed.
*Crossbow under water part was stupid and sucked. Arguably crossbow altogether sucked. Apparently that was a whole other issue.
Imo, it suffers from both actually... not committing itself fully to a specific design goal/developed to fullest potential while being over-engineered at the same time.
CDPR main problem (when it comes to designing gameplay and gameplay mechanics) isn't their developers being "lazy"...it is lack of overall clear "identity", goal and coherency in it's systems. Their biggest mistakes are at most fundamental aspects of design and how they correlate to one another.
Example: Witcher leveling system.
From the start it was designed as +++ linear system of largely passive upgrades to player character: through direct level ups, acquiring loot and mutagens: which conflicted more open structure of the game ( when it comes to questing and exploration), and should have used a more "branching" ( into variety of different playstyles) design instead.
* With well designed games, their narrative and gameplay systems follow the same principles
And they tried to fix this with artificial restrictions, but ended up creating a chain reaction of problems with other systems, by:
- Restricting access to abilities through "slot skills" system...but this had a negative impact on leveling once player acquires enough skills( and is illogical and inorganic way to bar progression)
- Restricting access to equipment based on player "level"...which is illogical and combined with crafting makes plenty of loot simply useless, when you actually reach the requirement ( as by then, you will often already acquire something better)
- Enemy de/buffs based on their difference to player level...which created inorganic approach to enemy and player/encounter design, instead of using accurate visual/audio clues to distinguish level of threat
- Acquired Loot being based on player level, instead of that of enemy ...which had a negative impact on open world exploration and artificially "stiffled" progression
- Quests giving experience based on player level( which becomes a bigger issue when player is eventually over-levelled, hard to avoid in games of this size)...exactly the same as above
- Lastly, global level scaling ( along with New Game +)...which contradicts player's narrative set role in the world ( as even a common rat becomes more powerful than "legendary monster hunter")
Ironically none of this corrected the main problem( game being simply too damn big) and all this could have been avoided with better planning of leveling system from the start (that is better suited to the open world structure of the game)...with far
less effort, they would have better results.
And similar issues we can see in individual systems... Combat: crossover between Souls/Arkham systems , Loot/economy( at the same time designed "light" as to require little use of investment in resources while continuously offering massive amount of it), crafting ( missing the basic premise ( see Morrowind spell crafting ), while making it too convoluted with busywork and shoehorning as many ingredients to make vast quantities of loot "more useful").
Why am I mentioning this here? Because each of these systems will be hundred times more complex in Cyberpunk and they will need to work together far better to emulate moment to moment gameplay
decision making that this kind of setting will require.
And for this, imho, their approach to gameplay design has to be completely different than in Witcher series, instead of simply trying to do better/putting more work into it.