Tin Foil Hat Time

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I have a new theory after the new concept art was released today.
https://magazine.artstation.com/202...edium=toprow&utm_campaign=1840-cyberpunk-2077

With that reddit post that came out a little after two weeks ago today that CDPR came out and said it was not true. (Which I will still deem to be untrue due to response from CDPR, but lets be real they never said what was false like Badowski did to Schreier's article) may have a little substance to it. (Yes I know a contradiction within a claim, but hear me out)
The redditor claiming this says, "Our original Johnny was heavily inspired by David Hayter's Solid Snake from the first MGS and believe it or not "
And here is a concept art of Silverhand by the Senior Concept Artist at the studio,
1611131120469.png

And pair this concept art with some johnny silverhand lines in the voice of the OG solid snake David Hayter, if you need a refresher of the voice (
)

With further concept art he really does look a bit like snake from MGS1 just older, crankier, smokes a crap ton rockerboy.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GaVKWN

This claim sounds super plausible to me and getting keanu changed the face of Silverhand since most of everything else of this concept is true to the Silverhand Model that exists now.

And a month ago someone managed to actually get the police ai to do a chase which normally doesn't happen in the game since the police spawn on you would fit the claim that, "Police pathfinding script worked wonderfully until somebody screwed the pooch" and this person managed to have it happen to them by crashing into the police car after being detected and have a warrant put on them.

The claimed redditor also mentioned, "There should be some whistleblowing in the coming weeks if the step downs". Not sure if the step downs was referring to higher ups at the company, but I don't think that would happen. Although the whistleblowing did happen with Schreier's Article.

Schreier's Article said, "Although Cyberpunk was announced in 2012, the company was then still mainly focused on its last title and full development didn’t start until late 2016, employees said. That was when CD Projekt essentially hit the reset button, according to people familiar with the project." (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...at-caused-the-video-game-s-disastrous-rollout)

So all the pre-development/early development would be scrapped and repurposed starting with the reset of the project in late 2016. Scrapping and reusing 4 years of work. And the claimed redditor said, "The game was jumbled together for 2019's E3. The last dev comp before the scrap was 160Gb alone." Maybe this meant after scrapping the 4 years of work and they were trying to make up lost time and jumbled together a build for e3 2019.

Schreier also claimed, "Studio head Adam Badowski took over as director, demanding overhauls to Cyberpunk’s gameplay and story. For the next year, everything was changing, including fundamental elements like the game-play perspective." The build scrapped before the reset on the project in 2016 may not of been flourish with 160 gb of game content, but when Badowski came in supposedly many things about the project drastically changed which would fit the claim of the jumbled build for e3 2019 since the devs are trying to rebuild a game that Badowski was changing drastically from what was already finished before him becoming studio head.

With change came Keanu, now you add star power to a game that is already been in overall development since 2012. Which would encourage a restart of the project to make the star power more apart of the main narrative and overall game. Not saying Keanu was bad for the game I do like him filling the role. Just kinda wished Silverhand still looked like the concept, just a little bit.

Maybe the multitude of drastic changes ultimately caused the last minute sloppy release version of the game because the devs had spent so much time just trying to rebuild what was reset into a new foundation or newly changing/updated version of the engine (RedEngine). Which fits because Schreier stated, "One member of the team compared the process to trying to drive a train while the tracks are being laid in front of you at the same time."

As I said this is very tin foil hat like, but some of these pieces just overlap a little too well to me and I feel like within a month or two we will get the full scoop of what really happened in detail about the production of this game because a lot of people really do what to know exactly how production went wrong. And I would hope it would because the studio's own government gave them $7 million USD (30m zloty) in funding for this game. (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...rom-polish-governments-usd27-4m-research-fund)
 
So all the pre-development/early development would be scrapped and repurposed starting with the reset of the project in late 2016. Scrapping and reusing 4 years of work. And the claimed redditor said, "The game was jumbled together for 2019's E3. The last dev comp before the scrap was 160Gb alone." Maybe this meant after scrapping the 4 years of work and they were trying to make up lost time and jumbled together a build for e3 2019.

Schreier also claimed, "Studio head Adam Badowski took over as director, demanding overhauls to Cyberpunk’s gameplay and story. For the next year, everything was changing, including fundamental elements like the game-play perspective." The build scrapped before the reset on the project in 2016 may not of been flourish with 160 gb of game content, but when Badowski came in supposedly many things about the project drastically changed which would fit the claim of the jumbled build for e3 2019 since the devs are trying to rebuild a game that Badowski was changing drastically from what was already finished before him becoming studio head.

That change was already documented back then. You can find posts about it on these very forums. It was all about making the decision to switch from 3rd to 1st person. From what info we had, it came in an organic way when devs were having trouble with cameras in smaller, closed environements. 1st person came as a solution to a recurring design problem. Yet it also came with more challenges for them as they weren't familiar with how 1st person perspective works. This is most probably the reason why they had to come up with something in 2019, even if they weren't sure of all the features which would make it into the game.

Nothing really new in the article from Schreier IMO, it's more like a mash up of all the pieces of information one could have gathered and connected throughout the years.
 
That change was already documented back then. You can find posts about it on these very forums. It was all about making the decision to switch from 3rd to 1st person. From what info we had, it came in an organic way when devs were having trouble with cameras in smaller, closed environements. 1st person came as a solution to a recurring design problem. Yet it also came with more challenges for them as they weren't familiar with how 1st person perspective works.

Nothing really new in the article from Schreier IMO, it's more like a mash up of all the pieces of information one could have gathered and connected throughout the years.

I could see a change like that one being more natural compared other changes throughout development.
 
I could see a change like that one being more natural compared other changes throughout development.

Agreed, and given how the game looks now visually and in a gamepad in hand, I think it was the right decision.
Even though, and it is the reason why I brought that up, it definitely affected the whole development process. What works in 3rd person may not work in 1st, and we're talking about an inexperienced studio in that matter.
So in my opinion, all the other changes/lack of features/missing content we can find about the game are a consequence, direct or not, from this major one.
 
Agreed, and given how the game looks now visually and in a gamepad in hand, I think it was the right decision.
Even though, and it is the reason why I brought that up, it definitely affected the whole development process. What works in 3rd person may not work in 1st, and we're talking about an inexperienced studio in that matter.
So in my opinion, all the other changes/lack of features/missing content we can find about the game are a consequence, direct or not, from this major one.
Yeah camera perspective changes a lot espcially since it was their first time doing first person.
 
That change was already documented back then. You can find posts about it on these very forums. It was all about making the decision to switch from 3rd to 1st person. From what info we had, it came in an organic way when devs were having trouble with cameras in smaller, closed environements. 1st person came as a solution to a recurring design problem. Yet it also came with more challenges for them as they weren't familiar with how 1st person perspective works. This is most probably the reason why they had to come up with something in 2019, even if they weren't sure of all the features which would make it into the game.

Nothing really new in the article from Schreier IMO, it's more like a mash up of all the pieces of information one could have gathered and connected throughout the years.


That's what the most infuriating about that article.. every single youtube channel, every single game mag just blindly copied the article and pushed it over and over without any kind of investigation or just looking back at articles published by that time.. At the same time, they completely ignored Devs post on twitter who backed up Badowski claims and even explained that Iwinski did not throw QA team under bus.. Why nobody except for LastKnownMeal noticed those tweets??? It all is very one sided from Schreier who is just pushing his agenda without giving any option for discussion (he is actively blocking people who disagree with him - no insults, just different opinion and you are blocked)
 
That's what the most infuriating about that article.. every single youtube channel, every single game mag just blindly copied the article and pushed it over and over without any kind of investigation or just looking back at articles published by that time.. At the same time, they completely ignored Devs post on twitter who backed up Badowski claims and even explained that Iwinski did not throw QA team under bus.. Why nobody except for LastKnownMeal noticed those tweets??? It all is very one sided from Schreier who is just pushing his agenda without giving any option for discussion (he is actively blocking people who disagree with him - no insults, just different opinion and you are blocked)

Completely agree.

That's the problem with nowadays media, and CDPR happens to be facing a lot more than "just" some backlash about a half baked game. They're in the middle of something far bigger. I guess we got what we deserve as for the press and informative medias : by watching/reading only "free" content sponsored by ads, we encourage the press (be it professionnal or not) to look for clicks rather than for the impartial truth. Schreier is just doing the same thing every other gaming website has been doing (that's why you've been able to notice websites giving 10/10 for CP then slowly starting publishing articles about how they couldn't play CP for more than 5 hours because it was filled with bugs and unplayable and not fun). After all, there are only two options on social medias and in nowadays press : you're either good and popular, or bad. No middle grounds.

Same thing happened with... Game of Thrones for example. Before the season 8 finale ? Oh, it was the greatest show ever. You just couldn't say anything wrong about it without being called a troll or names. You could only find wonderful "in depth reviews" about how great it was (even when it wasn't), and cool quick to read-quick to forget articles about how cool it made you to watch the show.
As an avid reader of the books, I did find it to be a good adaptation but a very lackluster one when coming to more complex stories (Dornish plot for example) and I found the series to be not that good by the start of season 5. There had been some smaller problems with the adaptation all along too. But, expressing that was just going against the mass media and you just couldn't say such things on social medias. If you did, you faced tons of people calling you with whatever insult they could. Those who try to go against whatever buzz there is are made inaudible by the mass medias and their followers.
Yet they all turned their coat after two questionable episodes. Now it's a running joke, just as CP has become in a matter of weeks. And the two poor showrunners (who have shown some very strong qualities at adapting a series of books despite some mistakes) are now nowhere to be found, and their careers have faced an abrupt end. And the best in all of that ? If you come now with the slightest opinion of "well, it isn't THAT bad", you're being called a white knight on the internet... the same internet which called you a troll back then when you dared saying it wasn't perfect.

So, people should learn a bit to take all of those articles, review videos, pieces of "analysis" with a huge grain of salt.

It pours through our daily lives, from this particular gaming field for example, up to political spheres. As long as we'll, as a global society, continue using ad sponsored "free" content over paid ones, as long as we'll give credit to people only looking for revenues while not caring at all for the slightest integrity, we'll have more and more of situations like this one. I just wish people would play the thing, document themselves, forge their own opinion instead of just following whatever thing is thrown at them. We're all better than this, and we all deserve better information, better content, that what we get right now when opening the internet, where everything is about chasing traffic and clicks to make easy money.
 
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Concept art is just that, a concept.

Silverhand had a defined look already, they just took that look and moved it more into punk. This is after all how Johnny looked in CP2013 and reprinted into 2020.
1611142714257.png

I’m grateful they revisited his design and grunged it up a bit.

The rest is just speculation and click baiting, which is just the same stuff that caused people to have false expectations (or worse outright beliefs) about what the game would offer before it’s release.
 
Completely agree.

That's the problem with nowadays media, and CDPR happens to be facing a lot more than "just" some backlash about a half baked game. They're in the middle of something far bigger. I guess we got what we deserve as for the press and informative medias : by watching/reading only "free" content sponsored by ads, we encourage the press (be it professionnal or not) to look for clicks rather than for the impartial truth. Schreier is just doing the same thing every other gaming website has been doing (that's why you've been able to notice websites giving 10/10 for CP then slowly starting publishing articles about how they couldn't play CP for more than 5 hours because it was filled with bugs and unplayable and not fun). After all, there are only two options on social medias and in nowadays press : you're either good and popular, or bad. No middle grounds.

Same thing happened with... Game of Thrones for example. Before the season 8 finale ? Oh, it was the greatest show ever. You just couldn't say anything wrong about it without being called a troll or names. You could only find wonderful "in depth reviews" about how great it was (even when it wasn't), and cool quick to read-quick to forget articles about how cool it made you to watch the show.
As an avid reader of the books, I did find it to be a good adaptation but a very lackluster one when coming to more complex stories (Dornish plot for example) and I found the series to be not that good by the start of season 5. There had been some smaller problems with the adaptation all along too. But, expressing that was just going against the mass media and you just couldn't say such things on social medias. If you did, you faced tons of people calling you with whatever insult they could. Those who try to go against whatever buzz there is are made inaudible by the mass medias and their followers.
Yet they all turned their coat after two questionable episodes. Now it's a running joke, just as CP has become in a matter of weeks. And the two poor showrunners (who have shown some very strong qualities at adapting a series of books despite some mistakes) are now nowhere to be found, and their careers have faced an abrupt end. And the best in all of that ? If you come now with the slightest opinion of "well, it isn't THAT bad", you're being called a white knight on the internet... the same internet which called you a troll back then when you dared saying it wasn't perfect.

So, people should learn a bit to take all of those articles, review videos, pieces of "analysis" with a huge grain of salt.

It pours through our daily lives, from this particular gaming field for example, up to political spheres. As long as we'll, as a global society, continue using ad sponsored "free" content over paid ones, as long as we'll give credit to people only looking for revenues while not caring at all for the slightest integrity, we'll have more and more of situations like this one. I just wish people would play the thing, document themselves, forge their own opinion instead of just following whatever thing is thrown at them. We're all better than this, and we all deserve better information, better content, that what we get right now when opening the internet, where everything is about chasing traffic and clicks to make easy money.
But CP is missing some things and GoT-Ending was kind of meh.
I don't know why we are all influenced by media, if we just can look and see what is wrong. At this point, online-journalist jumps up, bc they know: Hot Topic!

Btw.: Printmedia had to earn money, too.
 
But CP is missing some things and GoT-Ending was kind of meh.
I don't know why we are all influenced by media, if we just can look and see what is wrong. At this point, online-journalist jumps up, bc they know: Hot Topic!

Btw.: Printmedia had to earn money, too.

Hey, I'm by no means saying that it doesn't miss some things. Just that the amount of backlash is nowhere near the size of those missing/broken things. To question one game, or some marketing issues, is perfectly fine. Pouring oil on a dumpster fire, hoping the whole city will burn, is another entirely. Everyone's doing their laundry with this game, yet they made quite a lot of money just for hyping it to no end with biased documentation and getting traffic from it. Just as those putting together "fun" (not so fun IMO) montages of the game bugs are making money from bashing it without bringing any bit of reflexion or solution to avoid these situations to the table. They don't care about anything related to the industry poor state, the lack of creativity. They live and make money thanks to that poor state. They live and make money thanks to those tabloid like unproven rumours.

And I'm also stating that integrity should be a part of medias. Those stabbing CDPR right now are the same who didn't say anything before the game released about missing features for example. it's easy to jump on the bandwagon to make easy clicks.
 
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I think this is a little deeper than journos not doing a good enough job. Good Journalists are almost like detectives for this sort of thing, that's kind of what they do in the News media world. They sniff out the stories behind the rumours. I still believe the only reason Schreier got a response from CDPR, because lets face it many many big name blogs/mags/websites bashed them after release, was because he was close to the truth of what happened. Going out and responding almost puts the brakes on the story he was coming up with that way.

About the dev tweets supporting the company stance, I'm sure any of us would have done the same thing in their shoes. Once you blow the whistle its hella hard to get back in afterwards. They were likely scared of where this project was going, its no surprise we saw more and more devs/company people coming out afterwards.

Lets be honest here too, IF none of this started to come out by journos etc. If CDPR managed to have a perfect PR run, they would have almost certainly covered alot of this stuff up. The overhauls, the working conditions, the devs leaving, all of it.
 
I still believe the only reason Schreier got a response from CDPR, because lets face it many many big name blogs/mags/websites bashed them after release, was because he was close to the truth of what happened. Going out and responding almost puts the brakes on the story he was coming up with that way.

I've got a different opinion on that. Schreier got an answer because of his name and because of other topics he bought up during major controversies (Anthem for example). The industry knows how influencial the guy is and that if you don't answer to his claims, rumors will spread even quicker.
 
I've got a different opinion on that. Schreier got an answer because of his name and because of other topics he bought up during major controversies (Anthem for example). The industry knows how influential the guy is and that if you don't answer to his claims, rumors will spread even quicker.
That's kind of what I mean, his reputation was bad news in itself but not company threatening. The message he was saying must have had substance, like the Anthem ones to have pulled a response from them. Lets not forget even with Anthem it was when the devs started being let go and leaving we learned what actually happened.
Capture.PNG

"beloved AAA studios" i wonder who he could mean. I guess this is why its a Tin Foil Hat thread :giveup:
 
That's kind of what I mean, his reputation was bad news in itself but not company threatening. The message he was saying must have had substance, like the Anthem ones to have pulled a response from them. Lets not forget even with Anthem it was when the devs started being let go and leaving we learned what actually happened.
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"beloved AAA studios" i wonder who he could mean. I guess this is why its a Tin Foil Hat thread :giveup:

I get your point better now, thanks. Well, his post in regard to CP isn't false, but it isn't some inside intel either. He's just recapping what we already know. Most people didn't pay attention to this game development because they didn't care/were overhyped or whatever, but most of the things people are now finding odd or newsbreaking, in fact aren't at all. The fact that the game was scrapped, that some features were removed (Mantis blades and wall walking, lack of subway... to name a few) were known well before the game released. That's why to me, he's acting more like he's jumping on the bandwagon and making an easy article to ride along with the backlash and get some attention, instead of providing more real information we lack (how did the teams work together ? what about those streaming problems CDPR aknowledged ? how about telling us more about the development issues facing a switch from 3rd to 1st person ?)
 
I get your point better now, thanks. Well, his post in regard to CP isn't false, but it isn't some inside intel either. He's just recapping what we already know. Most people didn't pay attention to this game development because they didn't care/were overhyped or whatever, but most of the things people are now finding odd or newsbreaking, in fact aren't at all. The fact that the game was scrapped, that some features were removed (Mantis blades and wall walking, lack of subway... to name a few) were known well before the game released. That's why to me, he's acting more like he's jumping on the bandwagon and making an easy article to ride along with the backlash and get some attention, instead of providing more real information we lack (how did the teams work together ? what about those streaming problems CDPR aknowledged ? how about telling us more about the development issues facing a switch from 3rd to 1st person ?)

I get you, you feel he wasn't really doing much investigating just taking what other people said and put it in to a report. You're right, that is lazy and poor from Schreier. Hot-Topic journalism.

I also think you're right with the info from the company itself. I believe the quicker they own this mess the easier of a time they will have in the long run. I don't know why they didn't do a Schreier type article themselves, compiled the common issues and addressed them head on. They could have even brought a few of those devs in to speak about the issues they faced directly to the fanbase, that would have carried an awful lot of weight for most people I would think. They could have told us directly if they had issues with perspective switching or the story development or whatever.

I really hope they sort this out. I was excited to play this game over the last year or so. I even waited to play until 1.06 was out to hotfix most of the issues so I could at least get the best possible experience. I guess we just have to do a little more waiting to find out what actually happened there. I hope they can fix these issues though because if this first patch doesn't, and the doors start opening with people being let go, that'll be it for CDPR I think.
 
I really hope they sort this out. I was excited to play this game over the last year or so. I even waited to play until 1.06 was out to hotfix most of the issues so I could at least get the best possible experience. I guess we just have to do a little more waiting to find out what actually happened there. I hope they can fix these issues though because if this first patch doesn't, and the doors start opening with people being let go, that'll be it for CDPR I think.

I agree completely. Thank you.

They need to step up and I honestly believe they will, even though it'll probably won't match the sheer amount of features people want. At this point, they've got all the cards in hand to play it right. But I think understanding what went wrong and admiting it is the first step towards working on a solution.
 
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