The main and the most important problem of the game

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If you read threads on this forum, you will notice that many players think they know what the main problem of the game is. And if you add together the most common complaints and suggestions, it turns out that everything about the game is bad and there is a need to redo it completely. But I'm not getting at the idea that we have different preferences and criteria for evaluating experience. It seems to me that I groped for what really matters, and in the best traditions of this forum, I myself want to now speak out about what is the main and the most important problem of the game, the problem of all problems.

Cyberpunk 2077 does not seem to have a clear center, a core. Can we say that this is a cinematically presented story? Yes, but only if you completed solely the main quests on easy difficulty. Is Cyberpunk a looter shooter? Of course, however, the game, in this case, looks like a mediocre looter shooter. Is cyberpunk 2077 an immersive sim? More likely it isn’t, because you cannot flush the toilet. Is there enough stealth action in the game to say that it belongs to this genre? Yes, but the game is constantly moving beyond stealth action and becoming a simple shooter. Is a Cyberpunk after all a good shooter? Well, it is generally not (although entertaining at first): there is too bad balance of difficulty and weapons, very mediocre AI. I won't even touch on the RPG topic...

Horizon Zero Dawn is an example of a game in which not everything works well either, but a clearly presented core allows the shortcomings not to have such a strong impact on the overall impression. The game has plenty of weaknesses: a banal plot (although the lore is very good) and implausible characters; the whole world revolves around the player; there are a lot of marks on the map, but there is nothing to explore; a lot of unrealized mechanics (infection zones – why are they in the game?); bad combat with human opponents; stupid ideological propaganda... Nevertheless, the game has a heart: the hunt for robotic dinosaurs in the setting of a beautiful post-apocalyptic world with tribes that do not understand the technology of their ancestors. This core saves the day because it's just fucking awesome!

It is obvious that Cyberpunk 2077 still has its own core, but it seems to me that CDPR somehow forgot about it when they began to assemble the game piece by piece in a hurry. Cyberpunk 2077 is a very deep in ideas and philosophy and an unprecedentedly well-presented story set in an incredibly detailed scenery of a dark future city. Cyberpunk 2077 is breathtaking quests plus a dialogue with NPCs, in which you catch every word. This is the atmosphere of the metropolis of the future, where no one gives a shit about you, however, you still want to prove to this city that you are worth its attention. And most importantly, Cyberpunk 2077 is a lie that must be believed for a while, and not a real-life simulator.

This game does not need real variability of walkthroughs and dialogues, because the price of its creation is lowering the quality of each story branch. You also don't need a real RPG component, as in a board game or as in Skyrim, for example, because it is impossible to make a mission good and equally suitable for both a machine gun and a katana, both for stealth and for open combat (all games that tried – failed). You don't need a real simulation of crowd behavior and the daily routine of individual NPCs, because in normal situations there is nothing to do in such a city. Otherwise, why are you sitting here and reading this text – go talk to passers-by on the street, it's so interesting!

Most of what the marketing department promised us and what many of you are missing have nothing to do with the most important thing in this game. If you want to turn Cyberpunk 2077 into a mixture of GTA, Deus Ex, Skyrim and SimCity, then you have come to the wrong developer. Everything that CDPR can do really well is either already in this game or will soon appear (if there are DLCs, of course).

The main problem with Cyberpunk 2077 is that there are too many unnecessary things in this game. For example, all these mediocre and non-working player progression systems only distract from the strong points of the game, drain developers' time and energy, and create weaknesses out of the blue.

Why does the game need random loot? Why bind the stats of enemies to the player's level? What is craft for? What's the point in different gangs and random encounters in which you can kill 3-4 bandits just out of boredom? Why split the weapon leveling into several skill trees if it turns the gameplay into a dull repetition of one template? What for was the choice of appearance and why do we need all these clothes if there is no need to look at the character and there is no potential for roleplay in the game?

I can continue the list for a very long time, and I can go over each item very thoroughly, backing up my words with the theory of game design, psychology or UX, with links to a dozen conferences such as GDC, 4C, DevGAMM and others. I can provide a qualitative structural analysis of gaming systems. Hell, I even tried to do this at first! I was writing this post for several days, I have two drafts of 5-6 pages! That's how hooked I was by all the good and bad things in the game!

The game needs to focus on its strong points, on what CDPR does better than others! The history and philosophy behind it, characters and dialogues, worldbuilding and visual presentation, immersiveness of non-interactive locations. All other gaming systems must support all of this, and not compete with the core of the game for the player's attention. At the moment, the game is trying to create a simulation of life in Night City, but instead it should provide an experience of immersion in a fictional world, and this is not the same thing at all.

And something more. My position has nothing to do with the thesis “this project was too ambitious”. It doesn't matter if the game has the ability to use your penis_2 or not, whether the loot and prices in stores are well balanced – all this should be part of the whole and work together. Even if the developers managed to implement each idea separately, the game with this approach simply would not work.

However, we must admit the obvious: the promise of features meaningless for such a game sells the game better than the promise of a good and adult story in a beautiful believable world. And if you fix bugs and fix the balance, the game will be a solid middling among the mediocre open-world action games created according to the Ubisoft model, and this will be enough for those who need money and restoration of their reputation.
 
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This happens when you gut the original core of a game in favor of making a former side quest it's main focus... I'm convinced this game once had a very solid, defined core: You are a mercenary new to the city, making your way through society, influencing the lifes of everyone around you, and forming your unique story to it's ultimate conclusion.... a simple, solid premise with infinite possibilities, played out in, and facilitated by the backdrop of a fully realized, simulated cyberpunk metropolis.

...and then CDPR realized they couldn't do it, so they simply half-assed it enough to make the marketing work and called it quits.
 
To sum it up instead of doing everything mediocrely the game should've just focused on certain aspects and made them as good as they could be.

Unfortunately I think most mechanics/features in this game exist solely for marketing purposes to overhype the game. It's why you can customize your genitals. Because it hyped up the players into thinking "holy crap not even the most customizable games in the world would let you do that, if Cyberpunk puts this much detail in genitals imagine what the rest of the game will be like". CDPR prioritizes making money over a good game, it's why they covered up the console versions state. So basically all these mediocre half-done mechanics are intentional.
 
A small and maybe too simple and general conclusion - my opinion -
The technical department was really not able to keep up with the creative (art, story) department and thus cdpr needed to find a way to mash it together.

If you read threads on this forum, you will notice that many players think they know what the main problem of the game is. And if you add together the most common complaints and suggestions, it turns out that everything about the game is bad and there is a need to redo it completely.

Please don't generalize everyone who are suggesting things, proposing ideas that want to help get the game on the right track and make it what it should have become from the get go.
If you add together everything, all of us have our own opinions and ideas what this game should have been.

Does this make this game bad? - No, of course not.
-> But everything from now on would probably make it better. (except censoring or sth, you know what i mean)
Would this game be better with said promise/advertisement? - Hell yes it would.
Does this game and CDPR deserve critizism? - Yes, of course they do.
Do they deserve the ongoing hate-train? - Not to that extend, no. It's at a rediculous point where lot's of people just "hate" to hate or parrot what others say. (maybe that's IN nowadays, dunno)

Does it mean it will stay at it's current state? - No I don't think so.
Do they need to work on it? - Damn yes, they do.
Do they need to drop this game? - Is your brain glitching? WHAT, No, why?!

Sometimes I dunno what to say anymore, well one thing: Let's hope we are able to enjoy Night City and Cyberpunk together soon. And as good and much as we can (and deserve? ;) )
-> At least that's my opinion <-
 
It would be nice if they had started by cementing the basic features of the game first before going all creative-mode. Also, biggest mistake they made should have been the most obvious to their development team... a "next-gen game" made for "last-gen tech", like seriously... how dumb do you have to be to think that was a good idea (thinking outside of profit margins and market shares - but what exec does that ever).
Outside of the above, the biggest problem isn't any particular issue with the game but that the CDPR team obviously doesn't work well or communicate well with one another (as a lot of the content/features show). For example, I woke up from the scene where Johnny tries to kill me and I take the first pill and pass out. Then I leave my apartment and get a message that my car is ready for pickup in the garage. I want wheels, so of course my first stop is my car - cue now the Delamain scene "Beep beep motherfucker", my cars destroyed and suddenly Johnny is sitting next to me and I'm engaged in dialogue with him as if we've been buddies for as long as Jackie and myself. At first thought, (ignoring the retarded dialogue with Johnny) I was like OK.. they want to push me to walk and/or use mass transit options for a bit but then I get another message on my phone saying there is a car for sale and guess where it is.. literally in the same parking garage I'm already in. This is also kind of hilarious since if your car is damaged in the open world, you quite literally just need to walk out of range and then call it again and it is magically repaired.. yet for the "story" you have to wait until you finish some side play first... like WTF?! So many of these little quirks make it so that the game world makes absolutely no sense, everything is literally for the convenience of the very linear storyline.

It's as if they had their development, creative, etc. groups all working in silos and communicating through middle managers and execs. I've seen this happen a lot in the corporate world and it destroys both the creative and development processes. You ultimately get a load of people all doing their own thing, being driven by people who typically care more about their annual bonuses rather than the product. For a relative example, at one company I've worked for in the past - their sales team will go out and literally sell services that we do not provide, write up a contract stating that we will provide those services for anywhere from 1-5 years and then they drop the client on the technical staff and say "figure it out". I have a feeling there was a lot of "figure it out's" being said around the CDPR offices.
 
If you removed random loot, different gangs, random encounters, crafting and multiple skill trees from this game, I likely would not be interested enough to buy it. They bring complexity to the gameplay, which is what is interesting to me personally.

I would not enjoy an interactive-movie-game that mostly focuses closely on a story instead of interesting gameplay and player freedom/options/character progression. One example of these kind of games would be the Walking Dead series by Telltale Games: it's mostly about just watching the story and every time the player has to do something the gameplay is very very simple. That's an example of the least interesting kind of game to me. The story was just about interesting enough for me to speed through some of them, but I could never spend 60 hours playing a "game" like that; there has to be way more to a game than the story, environment and immersion.

Also let's not forget that this game is based on the tabletop RPGs. It is very good as it is and just needs some finishing touches (mostly bug fixes).
 
If you removed random loot, different gangs, random encounters, crafting and multiple skill trees from this game, I likely would not be interested enough to buy it. They bring complexity to the gameplay, which is what is interesting to me personally.

I would not enjoy an interactive-movie-game that mostly focuses closely on a story instead of interesting gameplay and player freedom/options/character progression. One example of these kind of games would be the Walking Dead series by Telltale Games: it's mostly about just watching the story and every time the player has to do something the gameplay is very very simple. That's an example of the least interesting kind of game to me. The story was just about interesting enough for me to speed through some of them, but I could never spend 60 hours playing a "game" like that; there has to be way more to a game than the story, environment and immersion.

Also let's not forget that this game is based on the tabletop RPGs. It is very good as it is and just needs some finishing touches (mostly bug fixes).
You say it's based on tabletop RPGs but it has zero tabletop mechanics and the RPG stats barely have a factor outside of combat. The game has the same RPG progression as the likes of Destiny, the Division, or Warframe.
 
If you read threads on this forum, you will notice that many players think they know what the main problem of the game is. And if you add together the most common complaints and suggestions, it turns out that everything about the game is bad and there is a need to redo it completely. But I'm not getting at the idea that we have different preferences and criteria for evaluating experience. It seems to me that I groped for what really matters, and in the best traditions of this forum, I myself want to now speak out about what is the main and the most important problem of the game, the problem of all problems.

Cyberpunk 2077 does not seem to have a clear center, a core. Can we say that this is a cinematically presented story? Yes, but only if you completed solely the main quests on easy difficulty. Is Cyberpunk a looter shooter? Of course, however, the game, in this case, looks like a mediocre looter shooter. Is cyberpunk 2077 an immersive sim? More likely it isn’t, because you cannot flush the toilet. Is there enough stealth action in the game to say that it belongs to this genre? Yes, but the game is constantly moving beyond stealth action and becoming a simple shooter. Is a Cyberpunk after all a good shooter? Well, it is generally not (although entertaining at first): there is too bad balance of difficulty and weapons, very mediocre AI. I won't even touch on the RPG topic...

Horizon Zero Dawn is an example of a game in which not everything works well either, but a clearly presented core allows the shortcomings not to have such a strong impact on the overall impression. The game has plenty of weaknesses: a banal plot (although the lore is very good) and implausible characters; the whole world revolves around the player; there are a lot of marks on the map, but there is nothing to explore; a lot of unrealized mechanics (infection zones – why are they in the game?); bad combat with human opponents; stupid ideological propaganda... Nevertheless, the game has a heart: the hunt for robotic dinosaurs in the setting of a beautiful post-apocalyptic world with tribes that do not understand the technology of their ancestors. This core saves the day because it's just fucking awesome!

It is obvious that Cyberpunk 2077 still has its own core, but it seems to me that CDPR somehow forgot about it when they began to assemble the game piece by piece in a hurry. Cyberpunk 2077 is a very deep in ideas and philosophy and an unprecedentedly well-presented story set in an incredibly detailed scenery of a dark future city. Cyberpunk 2077 is breathtaking quests plus a dialogue with NPCs, in which you catch every word. This is the atmosphere of the metropolis of the future, where no one gives a shit about you, however, you still want to prove to this city that you are worth its attention. And most importantly, Cyberpunk 2077 is a lie that must be believed for a while, and not a real-life simulator.

This game does not need real variability of walkthroughs and dialogues, because the price of its creation is lowering the quality of each story branch. You also don't need a real RPG component, as in a board game or as in Skyrim, for example, because it is impossible to make a mission good and equally suitable for both a machine gun and a katana, both for stealth and for open combat (all games that tried – failed). You don't need a real simulation of crowd behavior and the daily routine of individual NPCs, because in normal situations there is nothing to do in such a city. Otherwise, why are you sitting here and reading this text – go talk to passers-by on the street, it's so interesting!

Most of what the marketing department promised us and what many of you are missing have nothing to do with the most important thing in this game. If you want to turn Cyberpunk 2077 into a mixture of GTA, Deus Ex, Skyrim and SimCity, then you have come to the wrong developer. Everything that CDPR can do really well is either already in this game or will soon appear (if there are DLCs, of course).

The main problem with Cyberpunk 2077 is that there are too many unnecessary things in this game. For example, all these mediocre and non-working player progression systems only distract from the strong points of the game, drain developers' time and energy, and create weaknesses out of the blue.

Why does the game need random loot? Why bind the stats of enemies to the player's level? What is craft for? What's the point in different gangs and random encounters in which you can kill 3-4 bandits just out of boredom? Why split the weapon leveling into several skill trees if it turns the gameplay into a dull repetition of one template? What for was the choice of appearance and why do we need all these clothes if there is no need to look at the character and there is no potential for roleplay in the game?

I can continue the list for a very long time, and I can go over each item very thoroughly, backing up my words with the theory of game design, psychology or UX, with links to a dozen conferences such as GDC, 4C, DevGAMM and others. I can provide a qualitative structural analysis of gaming systems. Hell, I even tried to do this at first! I was writing this post for several days, I have two drafts of 5-6 pages! That's how hooked I was by all the good and bad things in the game!

The game needs to focus on its strong points, on what CDPR does better than others! The history and philosophy behind it, characters and dialogues, worldbuilding and visual presentation, immersiveness of non-interactive locations. All other gaming systems must support all of this, and not compete with the core of the game for the player's attention. At the moment, the game is trying to create a simulation of life in Night City, but instead it should provide an experience of immersion in a fictional world, and this is not the same thing at all.

And something more. My position has nothing to do with the thesis “this project was too ambitious”. It doesn't matter if the game has the ability to use your penis_2 or not, whether the loot and prices in stores are well balanced – all this should be part of the whole and work together. Even if the developers managed to implement each idea separately, the game with this approach simply would not work.

However, we must admit the obvious: the promise of features meaningless for such a game sells the game better than the promise of a good and adult story in a beautiful believable world. And if you fix bugs and fix the balance, the game will be a solid middling among the mediocre open-world action games created according to the Ubisoft model, and this will be enough for those who need money and restoration of their reputation.
There's also lots of players with very few or no complaints, their opinion is also valid.
 
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