While some people (including myself) was expecting a "city simulator" and hoping to have a truly dynamic, alive, immersive (as in emergence, Embodied agent, etc) I'm still happy that Cyberpunk 2077 was released and look forward to the future upcoming bug fixes, feature enhancements be it in the form of DLC or community modding or some combination of all three...
Having had the (aesthetic) pleasure of driving and walking around in various locations in Nightcity, both in daytime and at night, I've come to realize that as far as eye-candy goes, right now as we are closing out the awful year of 2020 that no other game comes even close to how beautiful the city looks, especially at nighttime...
Thinking back, as a young kid the Christmas present that I wished my parents would have purchased me was the full boxed version of Microsoft Midtown Madness, so that I could continue to cruise around and roam the streets of the virtual city of Chicago and get lost in those wonderful moments... Up until then I had played the demo of Midtown Madness (a 35mb download that took me hours on my family slow 56k dialup modem / AOL) and tried all sorts of tricks including rewinding the system clock on our Windows 98 computer in hopes that I could bypass the trial limitations (3 minutes?) during the cruise inside the demo... At the time as a kid I imagined what it would be like someday to drive around in a city that was photorealistic, that literally I couldn't tell the difference between in-game and real-world... obviously I'm not that kid anymore but it made me wonder what he would have felt it he could have been transported to December of 2020 and get to play experience Cyberpunk in 4k on a RTX3000 series GPU!
A lot of times I play games for the "ASMR" effect... For example Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 added two new features, one is the AI pilot (which is different from 'autopilot' which still has to be managed by the user, AI Pilot does everything 100% including taxi, pushback, etc) and the second is default built-in window view from the perspective of a passenger... So I set up my destination airport, and arrival airport, pick an airliner (usually the Boeing 787 with the American Airlines livery) and then engage the AI Pilot, and sit back and relax and enjoy the view from the perspective of a passenger... for the first time in Flight Simulator's history the graphics are actually real enough that one can enjoy such a perspective in full, usually I like to set it to night time and just let the ambiance sink in and get lost in the pervasive beauty of it all... all that is missing is the attractive flight attendants walking up and down the aisles... As for Cyberpunk, just walking down the street at night has the same effect on me!
Likewise there are people who paid big bucks for the walking simulator known as Death Stranding... while I never got into that game (mostly because I dont care much about walking in nature and prefer urban areas and dense city centers etc) I can't imagine a better walking simulator for urban environments than Cyberpunk 2077... While I enjoyed the game "Control", I struggled to see what was the benefit of ray-tracing for a game like "Control" because to me it didn't really make a difference and 90% of the time I couldn't even tell if ray-tracing was on or off... There is currently no game better to showcase real-time ray-tracing than Cyberpunk... I recall way back in 2014 when Nvidia first debutted its GTX900 series it was hyping up a then-new technology called VXGI which is basically a cheap-mans ray tracing and to me I was very excited to try the Nvidia Apollo moon landing demo that showcased this VXGI technology on my GTX980, and looking back, although the technology never took off nor gained adoption, even at the time I was wondering /doubting if we would ever get to see VXGI truly implemented at large scale inside a AAA title... Well, DXR is better than VXGI, and while the Nvidia moon demo was just a very small landing site scene, Cyberpunk is a massively large city.. so in that regard my dream from half a decade ago also came true recently...
This year many of us didn't get to travel, myself included... I had wanted to go overseas to visit some cities like Auckland, Sydney, maybe Hong Kong, or even Tokyo / Seoul etc etc... domestically Vegas, Orlando, SoCal, would have been nice... I'm not much of a outdoor nature type of person so suburban and urban environments are definetly more my thing and typically I enjoy walking and explore the city, how alive it looks and feels at night, and the whole ambiance of it all esp in busy city centers... I had been YouTube surfing for 4k night videos of many cities, people get their gimbal stabalized cameras and record walking footage (some even in 3d vr) of prominent cities/towns tourist spots and upload them online... it a vicarious way of enjoying places that one hasn't gone in person before and a good way to reminsence nostaligically of spots one has already visited fondly in the past.... So althought NightCity is a fictious city, it does have the same effect on me, much more so than the likes of Watchdogs or GTA series... maybe its because of ray-tracing, maybe its because of the way the city is designed and the density and verticality of it all, I think in the end its a combination of everything that adds up to be more than the sum of its parts in terms of portraying the sort of ambiance, scale and visual aliveness of the city...
Lastly, given the massive sales of this game, we all benefit from the "economies of scale"... it would take most of us 1000s of years to come up with a game like this on our own, and even looking to Unreal Engine Marketplace, all you have to do is a quick search for Cyberpunk themed streets and cities assets to realize there are no better offerings out there right now, even as a purely walking simulator from an aesthetic standpoint... many of the assets on sale are twice as expensive as this entire game, and they cover only a few blocks at the most, and don't even support ray tracing out the box... if you go on turbosquid and other 3d asset sites its even more ridiculous, often charging thousands of bucks for 3d models/assets that you then have to convert to a gaming engine (be it Unreal or whatever) and don't even look remotely as good as Cyberpunk...
The fact that CDPR released this on GOG and made it truly DRM free (no worrying about activation servers someday going down, or not being able to download it again someday because Steam went bankrupt etc) and the game maxed out stresses even the RTX3090 means that aesthetically its still future proof for another good decade or so... While game-streaming (Stadia, etc) are going to take a larger chunk of the pie in the future and does have legit use-cases, the moment your internet starts having problems or Google shutdowns the platform you are SOL, so its much appreciated Gog provided users with offline installers that can always be used regardless of circumstances or what the future may hold.
I never got Midtown Madness as a Christmas gift as a kid but now that I have Cyberpunk 2077 in DEC 2020, better late than never...
As far as empty cities goes:
Having had the (aesthetic) pleasure of driving and walking around in various locations in Nightcity, both in daytime and at night, I've come to realize that as far as eye-candy goes, right now as we are closing out the awful year of 2020 that no other game comes even close to how beautiful the city looks, especially at nighttime...
Thinking back, as a young kid the Christmas present that I wished my parents would have purchased me was the full boxed version of Microsoft Midtown Madness, so that I could continue to cruise around and roam the streets of the virtual city of Chicago and get lost in those wonderful moments... Up until then I had played the demo of Midtown Madness (a 35mb download that took me hours on my family slow 56k dialup modem / AOL) and tried all sorts of tricks including rewinding the system clock on our Windows 98 computer in hopes that I could bypass the trial limitations (3 minutes?) during the cruise inside the demo... At the time as a kid I imagined what it would be like someday to drive around in a city that was photorealistic, that literally I couldn't tell the difference between in-game and real-world... obviously I'm not that kid anymore but it made me wonder what he would have felt it he could have been transported to December of 2020 and get to play experience Cyberpunk in 4k on a RTX3000 series GPU!
A lot of times I play games for the "ASMR" effect... For example Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 added two new features, one is the AI pilot (which is different from 'autopilot' which still has to be managed by the user, AI Pilot does everything 100% including taxi, pushback, etc) and the second is default built-in window view from the perspective of a passenger... So I set up my destination airport, and arrival airport, pick an airliner (usually the Boeing 787 with the American Airlines livery) and then engage the AI Pilot, and sit back and relax and enjoy the view from the perspective of a passenger... for the first time in Flight Simulator's history the graphics are actually real enough that one can enjoy such a perspective in full, usually I like to set it to night time and just let the ambiance sink in and get lost in the pervasive beauty of it all... all that is missing is the attractive flight attendants walking up and down the aisles... As for Cyberpunk, just walking down the street at night has the same effect on me!
Likewise there are people who paid big bucks for the walking simulator known as Death Stranding... while I never got into that game (mostly because I dont care much about walking in nature and prefer urban areas and dense city centers etc) I can't imagine a better walking simulator for urban environments than Cyberpunk 2077... While I enjoyed the game "Control", I struggled to see what was the benefit of ray-tracing for a game like "Control" because to me it didn't really make a difference and 90% of the time I couldn't even tell if ray-tracing was on or off... There is currently no game better to showcase real-time ray-tracing than Cyberpunk... I recall way back in 2014 when Nvidia first debutted its GTX900 series it was hyping up a then-new technology called VXGI which is basically a cheap-mans ray tracing and to me I was very excited to try the Nvidia Apollo moon landing demo that showcased this VXGI technology on my GTX980, and looking back, although the technology never took off nor gained adoption, even at the time I was wondering /doubting if we would ever get to see VXGI truly implemented at large scale inside a AAA title... Well, DXR is better than VXGI, and while the Nvidia moon demo was just a very small landing site scene, Cyberpunk is a massively large city.. so in that regard my dream from half a decade ago also came true recently...
This year many of us didn't get to travel, myself included... I had wanted to go overseas to visit some cities like Auckland, Sydney, maybe Hong Kong, or even Tokyo / Seoul etc etc... domestically Vegas, Orlando, SoCal, would have been nice... I'm not much of a outdoor nature type of person so suburban and urban environments are definetly more my thing and typically I enjoy walking and explore the city, how alive it looks and feels at night, and the whole ambiance of it all esp in busy city centers... I had been YouTube surfing for 4k night videos of many cities, people get their gimbal stabalized cameras and record walking footage (some even in 3d vr) of prominent cities/towns tourist spots and upload them online... it a vicarious way of enjoying places that one hasn't gone in person before and a good way to reminsence nostaligically of spots one has already visited fondly in the past.... So althought NightCity is a fictious city, it does have the same effect on me, much more so than the likes of Watchdogs or GTA series... maybe its because of ray-tracing, maybe its because of the way the city is designed and the density and verticality of it all, I think in the end its a combination of everything that adds up to be more than the sum of its parts in terms of portraying the sort of ambiance, scale and visual aliveness of the city...
Lastly, given the massive sales of this game, we all benefit from the "economies of scale"... it would take most of us 1000s of years to come up with a game like this on our own, and even looking to Unreal Engine Marketplace, all you have to do is a quick search for Cyberpunk themed streets and cities assets to realize there are no better offerings out there right now, even as a purely walking simulator from an aesthetic standpoint... many of the assets on sale are twice as expensive as this entire game, and they cover only a few blocks at the most, and don't even support ray tracing out the box... if you go on turbosquid and other 3d asset sites its even more ridiculous, often charging thousands of bucks for 3d models/assets that you then have to convert to a gaming engine (be it Unreal or whatever) and don't even look remotely as good as Cyberpunk...
The fact that CDPR released this on GOG and made it truly DRM free (no worrying about activation servers someday going down, or not being able to download it again someday because Steam went bankrupt etc) and the game maxed out stresses even the RTX3090 means that aesthetically its still future proof for another good decade or so... While game-streaming (Stadia, etc) are going to take a larger chunk of the pie in the future and does have legit use-cases, the moment your internet starts having problems or Google shutdowns the platform you are SOL, so its much appreciated Gog provided users with offline installers that can always be used regardless of circumstances or what the future may hold.
I never got Midtown Madness as a Christmas gift as a kid but now that I have Cyberpunk 2077 in DEC 2020, better late than never...
As far as empty cities goes:
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