Save the date: Night City Wire - Episode 5

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Walking long distances is a similiar case of pressing and holding the "move forward" button for prolonged periods of time... and the only fix to that seems to be to add some combat at steady intervals. Why just combat? I would try to figure out what all "would" an inquisitive and/or creatively built character (inquisitive, because not everyone needs to) do along their trek that would also give it a systemic flavor. Be the trek through a city or a wilderness. And I don't mean checking containers here either - game being littered with boxes to loot is one form of intense irritation because slows everything down, devalues everything you find in them, and still demands attention because "you never know".

Im quite confused exactly how youd want the mechanics from the skill trees you are asking for to work. All the examples you have given seem to be something that would require the game to be point and click to implement.

For the game to have your character decide to search for and find something based on stats it needs to take your agency away, and make the journey for you.

These things.. In an open world video game, are things you just make the decision to do your self.. No stats required.

So.. I guess its more of a question of what kind of game do you want.

An open world you can freely explore

Or something more like a choose your adventure point and click or something isometric that has a pop up to tell you your stat has activated and you find something on the ground.
 
I'm happy to wait, say, an additional 30 minutes... :D

(But, I full of @#$%. I've been so busy lately, one or two conversations like this are all I can reasonably engage in.)

It's been quite a busy fall here too. And it's a sort of habit of mine to "bow out" if I start to feel like I'm being a pest in a thread because I don't really wish to have prolonged "fights" over things... given that I do seem to have pretty unorthodox opinions on things compared to most others. :D

Exactly. See, what is weird is that "downtime" is what's missing from a lot of RPGs. If it's all one amazingly epic, blockbuster adventure to the next, that's the trouble. When diving off of a dragon to fight an entire horde of Orc warriors single-handedly before facing off against the demon / legendary warlord / secret wizard nemesis is just another day in the life...it loses its luster rather quickly. BUT! I also want that part of the game to feel that impactful and engrossing. Hence, I'll need pretty intricate systems to pull all of that off -- whether I use it 15 times over the course of my game...or only 3 -- the mechanics need to be in place.

Well this we certainly agree on.

You have these big event-battles you train for during the game with smaller fights ad nauseam, and it's all full of systemic progression and guidance, but then.... it all drops down to near zero when you holster your weapon.

Downtime from combat shouldn't mean "dead" gameplay. It should be calmer and more relaxing, but (optimally) not any less systemically or mechanically interesting -- and it shouldn't merely consist on preparing for a next battle. This is what developers seem to neglect - even Bethesda with their "do what you want" mentality, as all their extra systems aim to improve your damage output and resistances (be it alchemy, crafting, cooking....). Environmental interactivity or interactivity beyond the afore mentioned and speaking to NPC's to get you back fighting is somehow "not a thing".

And it seems to me, that this will very much be the case with Cyberpunk too.

I try to immerse myself in the actual sense of day-to-day life in-game as realistically as I possibly can. To me, that experience, that sense of distance and scale as it would feel in real life is more important to me than maxing my DPS or hundred-percenting achievements.

Same here. But, it's not easy the get the enjoyment out of it, if covering those distances don't offer any incentives to cover them beyond a subjective desire to willingly do so. And then you get the awful, awful fast travel teleportation points to keep the player away from the tedium of walking through the "empty" spaces. Sometimes it almost feels as though they lovingly created the visuals there, but then got tired and threw a "bypass" mechanism in. Even an abstracted travel isn't used anymore, just fade-out--fade-in.

I get a strong impression that this is going to be one of the things that puts CP2077 through the roof. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong.

I'm not convinced about it getting even all the way to the roof. There's some nice ideas going on there, and it might actually deliver something fun, but somehow it feels as if the thought process at designing them was abruptly cut before reaching to where it was actually going.

Learning how to cook, for example, being the true artform it is, is still far less time-consuming than learning how to become a master hand-to-had combatant, a master of the sword, a master of the bow, and a master of battlefield tactics. Each of those "combat" skills would take about as long as it would take to teach someone to be a master chef once.

Thaaat's a bit far fetched, don't you think. There's a big difference between, for example, being a patissier or a poissonier. Being a chef that's masters every form of cooking is kinda the same thing as being one who masters many different forms of combat.

You are giving combat just the sort of attention here that it doesn't need, by elevating it over other things.

All the examples you have given seem to be something that would require the game to be point and click to implement.

For a good portion of it, yes.

For the game to have your character decide to search for and find something based on stats it needs to take your agency away, and make the journey for you.

These things.. In an open world video game, are things you just make the decision to do your self.. No stats required.

No, this is not true.

You can give a character an order to "search" or "be focused" just as you can order him to shoot by pressing a button.

I haven't, and I don't think anyone has, suggested a stat the determines "willingness" to do something. The stats determine the success rate of your given orders to do something.

So.. I guess its more of a question of what kind of game do you want.

An open world you can freely explore

Or something more like a choose your adventure point and click or something isometric that has a pop up to tell you your stat has activated and you find something on the ground.

I don't know how those two would exclude eachother out.

You can "find something" on the ground based on a stat check without a popup telling you so.

And about that point and click thing. You have it in already. Whether it is visible or not, the cursor is there in the middle of the screen, and with it you point and click as you interact with the gameworld, be it talking to NPC's, pressing elevator buttons, picking something up or shooting your gun.
 
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I don't know how those two would exclude eachother out.

No, this is not true.

You can give a character an order to "search" or "be focused" just as you can order him to shoot by pressing a button.

I haven't, and I don't think anyone has, suggested a stat the determines "willingness" to do something. The stats determine the success rate of your given orders to do something.

You can "find something" on the ground based on a stat check without a popup telling you so.

And about that point and click thing. You have it in already. Whether it is visible or not, the cursor is there in the middle of the screen, and with it you point and click as you interact with the gameworld, be it talking to NPC's, pressing elevator buttons, picking something up or shooting your gun.

This doesnt really answer what I asked, though. They do exclude each other out, because in an open world game you can explore, the stat isnt needed because you can just.. look around and find it yourself.
 
This doesnt really answer what I asked, though. They do exclude each other out, because in an open world game you can explore, the stat isnt needed because you can just.. look around and find it yourself.

Then I’m not really sure what you are asking specifically.

What I have been talking about does not prevent the player from walking around and finding stuff, quite the opposite, it tries to encourage doing it more.
 
Then I’m not really sure what you are asking specifically.

What I have been talking about does not prevent the player from walking around and finding stuff, quite the opposite, it tries to encourage doing it more.

Im asking how you would want these things to be implemented into the game, since I would say, and you agreed, that the things you are talking about would require an isometric or point and click game to work.
 
I would say, and you agreed, that the things you are talking about would require an isometric or point and click game to work.

I definitely didn’t agree to it ”requiring isometric projection”, because it is not true at all.

I agreed that a point and click mechanism is required to some length and then I tried to explain that you have a cursor in the game (CP2077, or any other FPP game) already with which you point’n clickety click on the objects in the gameworld.

Finding something through a skillcheck might be handled as simply as there being a certain (invisible to the player) radius around the PC inside which something partially visible (or audible to some degree) might appear (at a succesful check) just at the edge of the screen (so that items don’t appear as if manifestating out of thin air right under the players eyes) and then give a subtle HUD feedback for the player to react to if he wishes (or if he notices; and it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t).

An alternative could be that the said radius is enabled for a certain amount of time by a press of a dedicated key.

So there’s two options for starters.
 
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