Add diversity in mission/quest design

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A big problem with any open world game is graphics.

In the case of say Fallout for the most part there wasn't a huge variety in what you could see from any given location so the graphics that needed to be loaded, processed, and displayed were manageable without undue lag. But if CP2077 goes for a "real" city the sheer volume of graphics required is going to be a very VERY significant issue when it comes to game play. And the larger the area the more that needs to be loaded, processed, displayed, reloaded, overwritten, displayed etc. And in the case of slower PCs (and most consoles) this is a significant issue developers must deal with.

Hubs can help if each has certain unique to itself but similar throughout the hub elements. And yes, hubs can certainly be used to convey/imply the time and distance needed to travel from A to B without needing to generate all content between A and B, making the game world seem larger then it necessarily is. But in to many cases the hubs themselves are small or one use throw aways.

Go to a location, see the immediate area (maybe), enter the location, do what you need to do in the location, never return.

How about something like; go to a location, enter a living-breathing neighborhood, some of the NPCs provide additional information or opportunities in regard to your target address/mission. Many of the non-plot building in the neighborhood are able to be entered but others are locked/guarded at this time. Do your mission. Later in the game you return to the same neighborhood, NPCs you didn't kill the first time are still there, possible doing something different (easy since you can tailor their AI to multiple independent time sequences), and now they have info/assistance relevant to your currant target location which is unlocked. The previous location is now locked/guarded/a smoking pile of rubble dependent on what you did.

If each neighborhood is large enough to contain 2-5 mission locations, and has content relevant to your current mission that hub feels alive, and saves the developers TONS of time and effort since all the exterior areas and still living NPCs can be reused.
 
kofeiiniturpa;n7733320 said:
Nor woud I. Obviously.

That's partly why I still (likely in vain) advocate for (relatively) large hubs in an abstracted "worldmap" instead of a large sandbox map that either feels too crammed or too empty.

I agree with this 100%. The hubs in dues ex worked very well for me, you don't need a large open world for a good game.
 
That is partly why Guild Wars 1 was able to have a game which still looked fairly good even though they did what they could to make sure the graphics was not to high for people on computers with bad internet. Smaller hubs for all the getting and handing in quests, where most people could meet... and then the instanced worlds outside of that which where pretty large, but where (if I do not remember it wrong) only you and your party could be in. No other player could enter the same instance as you and your party.

City of Heroes, my favorit MMO of all time (I played that game almost every day for 3 years, from mid 2005 and forward, and then playing less and less during my 4th year), was more of an open world type of a game, where all people ran around in all of those areas (most missions took place in smaller isntanced areas though, which you entered somewhere on the open world maps)... but they devided the game world into several seperate areas which you had to load into... which means that you could pump in more graphics in each area (not that CoH was all that high in graphical quality, but it was good enough for me damn it... XD ).


Anyway... CP2077 is not going to be an mmo of course... but what I am getting at here is that if you have smaller areas, rather then one big open world with no loading screens, that should mean that you could pump better graphical quality into everything in each area, AND have maybe more NPC's and items per area[SUP]2[/SUP]. Of course, there are ways to deal with this in open world games to... but nothing works as well as having a single area compleatly locked of from every other area in the game. Sure, you would have to load between each area, and some people don't like that... but I think that is a very small price to pay in comparison what you can do if you have smaller areas with loading screens between them. You just have to make sure that you do not have to travel back and forth between the areas all to often.

Maybe it had been better to use singleplayer games as an example instead... but it did not turn out that way. XD


Man... I miss CoX... (City of Heroes (CoH) and City of Villains (CoV) where together known a CoX). It was THE mmo for me. I have not managed to find anything as good as it since (or befor) then... granted I stopped looking for one somewhere around 2010-2011 or so, had grown really tired of mmo's, I mean that was mostly why I slowed down towards the end of 2008 and then finally stopped playing CoX back in 2009 to begin with... but I doubt there has come one along which can beat it. Champions Online (made by the same company, they sold CoX to NC Soft at some point and then went on to make CO) exists of course, and is pretty good, but it was still not as good as CoX in my mind. Maybe I should try CO again one of these days, it's still up and running after all... because unfortunatly CoX was closed down at the end of 2012. :(
 
Suhiira;n7774040 said:
A big problem with any open world game is graphics.
In the case of say Fallout for the most part there wasn't a huge variety in what you could see from any given location so the graphics that needed to be loaded, processed, and displayed were manageable without undue lag. But if CP2077 goes for a "real" city the sheer volume of graphics required is going to be a very VERY significant issue when it comes to game play. And the larger the area the more that needs to be loaded, processed, displayed, reloaded, overwritten, displayed etc. And in the case of slower PCs (and most consoles) this is a significant issue developers must deal with.

I think you will find that graphics loading in a city is much easier done than in an outdoor landscape. This is because in an outdoor landscape such as Witcher 3, the visibility range is much larger and more assets have to be loaded to create that sense of scale and distance. NPC's and moving objects such as turning windmills also have to be loaded at quite a large distance.
In a city, they only really need to load assets in the location the character is in. Because you are most likely going to be surrounded by high buildings which means visibility range is much smaller, there is no need to load large areas because they are not visible to the player. Loading anything like NPC and flashing neons and clutter etc. even as far as 2 blocks away would be pointless because they are not visible. Unless you are going to be able to run around on rooftops....that would be a different matter altogether.
Most structures are also square by nature so loading distant objects will not suffer as much from the obvious low resolution as a a-symmetrical object like a tree.
World building is also in a sense easier because there are a lot more repeating structures in a city.

That is my theory anyway....
 
It's not really the visibility range, but the amount of objects within that range that need to be rendered that matters.

In outdoor situations a tree is a tree, sure you have to deal with some distance and scale issues, but it's still the same tree used multiple other places in your line-of-sight. In a city if you see the same piece of sidewalk or wall poster replicated multiple times at the closer line-of-sight distances it jumps out at you.
 
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What a lot of people here are missing is night city won't be the only open area we play in the game. What about the surrounding wasteland or whatever is being implemented outside night city. We already know megacorporations are a huge aspect of the lore in cyberpunk so expect a lot of power struggle stories you'll likely be dragged into, as far as smaller quests there's a lot of low life meets high tech aspect so maybe a few go here grab tjis make a decision to end the quest with insert grey moral decision. This will likely make up alot of cyberpunk s quests outside the main story which we all admittedly know nothing about.
 
Well ... I think we can assume the Combat Zone just outside Night City (what use to be the suburbs) will probably be represented in some fashion ... probably. Beyond that it's pure guesswork.
 
I just hope they don't call them "quests" since this isn't Fantasy RPG. It's a major peeve of mine, seeing "quests" instead of "missions" or "assignments" in Sci-Fi RPG.
 
E71;n8355900 said:
I just hope they don't call them "quests" since this isn't Fantasy RPG. It's a major peeve of mine, seeing "quests" instead of "missions" or "assignments" in Sci-Fi RPG.

Right? IRL, I don't do "quests", I do "jobs" so I get "paid". Because life.

Same thing for 'punks. Who the ^%$! "quests"? I'm robbing guys for money for drugs and ammo! That's not a quest! Even if I'm doing it because the Yaks told me to!
 
Suhiira;n8361000 said:
So no risk.
Nay, none whatsoever . . .


 
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