What’s new in Night City? [Patch 1.2 development insight]

[TONSCHUH]

Well.. I'm with you in terms that nowadays most developers seems to rush to release their game.
However this problematic was also present in certain games in those "old days",. I remember buying Star Wars: Battlefront (2004) for PC on release date, and being unable to advance beyond a certain level. After several tries, I went to the game shop to try to return the game because it was obviously a game bug. Later the shop dealer contacted EA salesman and I was right, it was a known bug who was fixed in a post-release date patch available at their website. So not every version 1.0 retail game in history was free of bugs.
Another example of unplayable "old days" game who was broken at release date: Enter the Matrix (2003). Pokemon red & blue for GameBoy (1996) were also famous for being a little bit buggy (and is worse since its a non-patcheable platform).

Being able to fix the game post release is a clear advantage for developers and gamers. As long as dev teams stays in contact with the gamers, listen to them instead of their shareholders, everything would be better.
I would prefer that rather than years and years of infinite developing. Or worse, to see how a developing path is cancelled and rebuilt from scratch again and again because the new standards, better engines, or trend changes,. I mean... Do you remember Duke Nukem Forever? xD

Yep, I was one of the stupid ones, who actually bought Duke Nukem Forever.

The period I'm talking about is much earlier.

I started with computers, when I was 10 years old and before that, I had a Pong Console and Atari Console and also started coding, before I left school to do my apprenticeship.

Pong => Atari 2600 VCS => ViC-20 => C=16 => C=64 => Schneider CPC 464 => C=128 => Amiga 500 => Atari 520 / 1040 ST => 386SX20 => 486DX2-66 => PC's with Cyrix / Intel / AMD CPU's ...

But I don't even want to go so far back and ignore the Pre-PC-Aera.

I'm talking about games like Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, where the biggest hurdle was, to create a boot-floppy-disk, to have sound etc. That game came on 5 CD's, back then.

 

[++NEO++]

You're making the wrong association.

Complexity doesn't come hand in hand with poor product quality.

Complexity comes hand in hand with more things that can go wrong.

The more things that can go wrong, the more things that will go wrong. Whether you manage to fix this in time is the real challenge. That's true of any product development, not just video games. Far more powerful tools do allow you to do a lot more but it also allows you to push things much further and the further you push the more complex and hard to fix things tend to get.

There's a reason games are costing exponentially more to produce.

[...]

Or so called "POWERFULL tools" are only made to create more problems instead of being MORE POWERFULL in FIXING/avoiding them at first place?

With this kind of inherited logic [...]... We should assume that all our modern transportation vehicles... cars/planes etc should be inherently less reliable... Aka wheels flying off the cars and wings dropping off planes on every other drive/flight. Yet the opposite is true.

And the reason for it is, mostly, regulations and people held accountable for their screw ups and sandbaging attitude towards their job.

So no I don't buy the BS excuse that everything MODERN and COMPLEX should inherently be FAULTY & BUGY [...].

But I DO buy the fact that anything non-regulated & everything we let "others" to get away with, CAN & WILL be faulty until people with "cojones" speak up and held them accountable for their screw ups.

 

[TONSCHUH]

It's more about will this things ever get fixed at all.

I have no hurry or hate in terms of the game and its polishing, but I'm afraid a lot of issues just will be left because fixing them will be too much effort.

That's a concern too.
Like Dead Space 1 + 2, which has a rotating camera bug, which forces you to uninstall every piece of Logitech Software and to unplug every USB-Device, apart from your mouse and keyboard.
That bug got never fixed, so you have two options, to do all the stuff I mentioned or to just play it on XBox, which I personally dislike, as it plays much better with a keyboard and mouse, than with a controller.

Post automatically merged: Mar 24, 2021

Just logged to give my humble opinion on the entire situation.

First of all - i do not excuse CDPR for many absolutely poorly made aspects of the game - no basic functions like dedicated dodge or minimap zoom, no even basic customization, poor AI of wandering around citizens, lack of god damn night vision or even basic flashlight, broken talents/cyberware and list goes on.
Some of this crap sometimes pisses me off really hard.

But for christ sake people, what's wrong with you?
Don't you see great emotional story, awesome charismatic characters, amazing voiceover, beautiful city (which feels and looks alive), beautifully made cars and bikes (tho with poor controls), very well made FPS with beautifull animations (especially considering it's their first aproach in that area), solid core of talents and variety of possible ways to play - from quickhack to pure face puncher (unlike beloved witcher where u only have your sword as main sourse of damage) which just needs to be tweaked and fixed.

The CORE of the game is great. Yes it needs a lot of work here and there but the foundation is there already and it's solid.

Why do you keep mocking them for their mistakes (which obviously have been made) while completely ignoring everything good about the game? Frankly the storyline alone and voiceover already overweights for me all these countless broken things i have encountered during the gameplay

This toxic behaviour of community is just mind boggling, if i would be in their place i would be discouraged to even try to fix anything.

If the game would be a complete turd without potential, I wouldn't be here anymore and would have moved on already.

You are right, it has a somewhat good core, interesting setting and looks pretty good, but it's also rushed, hollow and full of bug's.

I would also like to see, that they add a proper purpose, for buying / owning all that car's and motorbikes, which are not cheap and I can't see the point in buying them all and then only to be able to drive from a to b.

 

[Maranares]

Meanwhile i've just finished my second playthrough. Waiting for the patch to start the third run. Gonna try some shotgunner/gorilla arms/berserker street kid, all muscles and no brain. Better for those cops to spawn REEEEALLY far, 'cause i'm gonna smack' em HARD the moment they get anywhere near me.

 

[TONSCHUH]

[...]

Or so called "POWERFULL tools" are only made to create more problems instead of being MORE POWERFULL in FIXING/avoiding them at first place?

With this kind of inherited logic [...]... We should assume that all our modern transportation vehicles... cars/planes etc should be inherently less reliable... Aka wheels flying off the cars and wings dropping off planes on every other drive/flight. Yet the opposite is true.

And the reason for it is, mostly, regulations and people held accountable for their screw ups and sandbaging attitude towards their job.

So no I don't buy the BS excuse that everything MODERN and COMPLEX should inherently be FAULTY & BUGY [...].

But I DO buy the fact that anything non-regulated & everything we let "others" to get away with, CAN & WILL be faulty until people with "cojones" speak up and held them accountable for their screw ups.

Finally someone, who is on the same page with me.

Well said !

Just install and play around with Visual Studio as an example.

VS shows you all the possible parameters and the right format of every command / instruction, as you type.

When I started coding and forgot a simple comma in a Basic-Script or had other typos, then I had to figure out what was wrong, pretty much myself, because only simple errors got flagged with some hint, about what was wrong, especially if you used Basic to write / generate a machine code script / routine etc.

As I mentioned before, I wrote machine code completely in hex, because I couldn't afford an Assembler, which means, that I had to learn and know, what the equivalent hex code to a normally in Assembler written command was, plus going through ROM-Listings, to be able to use hard coded routines / registers / commands of the OS, which was stored in a ROM-Chip. I bought special editions of certain magazines and tought me all that stuff myself, with the help of that magazines.

When I left school, there were no real IT-Apprenticeship's or easy ways to study that stuff, because that were the early day's of computing.

 

[Spockprime]

I'm old enough to remember the times, where games got released in a finished and working state and no patches, updates or hotfixes afterwards, because yeah, they actually worked straight out of the box as advertised and therefore I'm reluctant to accept, that I have to live with deceiving advertisement and the releases of unfinished and totally buggy games / products, because the so called excuse is, that they are more complex these days, but they forget to mention, that they can rely on far more powerful tools now, than game Devs in the "old day's" and I can't see, how more complexity has to come hand in hand, with poor product quality !

As am I. And while I agree with your general sentiment, I also remember games that didn't work out of the box, and which never got fixed. EA was notorious for this. So, I have resigned myself to a market in which things are now released unfinished (although hopefully not very often in the state of CP2077), and are patched to proper intended functionality over the next six months to a year. And realizing that this is the new market, I now just wait for games to be out for a while, and pick them up on sale. CP2077 is the only exception to that purchase strategy for me in several years, and will be the last one. So overall, I guess that the lazy approach that developers have taken has saved me a bunch of money.

 

[GoldInfinit7]

For the police response, I think it should be added in the option regarding how quick and aggressive they are in response to a crime being committed. Some might not prefer a slower and less aggressive police response. I think how they currently are is just fine. It just needs to be tweaked for accidents, such as missing and accidentally hitting a civilian while not intending to do so, especially during a police work mission. It might not necessarily be a bad thing for police to suddenly appear. It might provide a challenge and motivates players to play the game properly as a role playing game. It also should be noted that in Cyberpunk 2077 is unlike Grand Theft Auto 5 in which gaining wanted levels is required as part of the gameplay in GTA 5. This is not the case in Cyberpunk 2077 which can be completed without ever gaining a wanted level.

I also want to add, that police do not play much of a factor in Cyberpunk 2077's gameplay and I believe that is a good thing. They only become relevant when the player decides to play the game as GTA 5. Aggressive police removes the incentive to play the game in this way and I believe it is a good thing to make people play it as a role playing game and to focus on the story, not on committing crimes and then trying to circumvent the police.

 

[Kriptz197]

When is it coming out? My game is lagging like crazy when I'm driving cars around the city. This game is SO poorly optimized I can get 60 FPS all day everyday but as soon as I drive a car or get to certain zone in the game the FPS drops down to like 20 or something.

 

[KunoichiRider]

The CORE of the game is great. Yes it needs a lot of work here and there but the foundation is there already and it's solid.

I agree with your view somehow, but Czembro already addressed all the issues I have with your post.
One addition to Czembro's post.
Why fix something which is a 9 or 10/10 already on PC, which is CDPR's stance.
This is what worries people about the procedure, since patching of glitches and bugs will not be enough.

 

[Didacgomez]

[...]

Or so called "POWERFULL tools" are only made to create more problems instead of being MORE POWERFULL in FIXING/avoiding them at first place?

With this kind of inherited logic [...]... We should assume that all our modern transportation vehicles... cars/planes etc should be inherently less reliable... Aka wheels flying off the cars and wings dropping off planes on every other drive/flight. Yet the opposite is true.

And the reason for it is, mostly, regulations and people held accountable for their screw ups and sandbaging attitude towards their job.

So no I don't buy the BS excuse that everything MODERN and COMPLEX should inherently be FAULTY & BUGY [...].

But I DO buy the fact that anything non-regulated & everything we let "others" to get away with, CAN & WILL be faulty until people with "cojones" speak up and held them accountable for their screw ups.

Car recalls because there are whole batches with faulty parts,exploding batteries in laptops mobile phones(was Samsung who had to kill a complete phone for that?),Microsoft Windows auto-updates,Intel shipping a processor thar made mistakes multiplying(pentium 60/66),Boing messing with the software and crashing (2 or 3 times)... We can continue several pages if you want,but the point is: no is not easy to verify a complex system(either hardware or software) and if you are not lucky,some stuff might appear well beyond after launch. This game had a peak of I think 1 million concurrent players,do you think CDPR could do 1 million test hours?,multiply that number by 2 or 3 days and you will find why in any open-world game players find bugs not seen by devs.

 

[OvermindRUS]

This is very nice. kinda... So police now is just boys for fun? i mean if you just corrected spawn points (which is awesome) - it is peace a cake just shoot them all. But whatever, it doesn't matter if you can just get in any car ride for a few seconds and "poof" - no more police.
----------
What is really important:

Did you corrected item mods that seems not working?

Did you improved stupidness of AI? At max difficulty playing is kinda boring as there are absolutely no challenge...

Did you put AT LEAST ANYTHING in environment? you can walk at, let's say badlands, and find NOTHING but kactuses or wind mills. there are LITERALLY ZERO objects you can interact besides missions.

ALL your world is like EMPTY HOLOGRAM .... Doors are locked, ppl are manikins .... open world with nothing in it =\
i understand - you cannot compete with Fallout 4, but add at least something!

 

[_Fender_]

If you say that locked doors are really important than you will be dissapointed with 1.2...

I really dont understand people who complain about locked doors - do you imagine creators to make every interior in a city available for players? I mean, wake up Samurai.

Adding extra objects at this point is not a goal - a goal is to have a stable game in which most people can play without glitches and crashes. Patch is not DLC.

Its about fixing stuff which is not working or works not as intented (there we might expect some AI improvements, broken skills, item mods etc).

 

[reaper1]

I really dont understand people who complain about locked doors - do you imagine creators to make every interior in a city available for players? I mean, wake up Samurai.

No, but I do expect the difference between a "fake" door that is there for show and one that may become accessible at some point to be obvious. Otherwise, it could be seen as very misleading and make it appear that there is more content there than there actually is.

 

[homafromptz]

I really dont understand people who complain about locked doors - do you imagine creators to make every interior in a city available for players? I mean, wake up Samurai.

just a reminder
25:40 - 26:07

 

[_Fender_]

We are going away from 1.2 topic now but if someone is naive to the point where he really believes that every shop/restaurant/service store will be open to enter just like in real life than I guess he will never be happy with CP2077 and its time to move on.

 

[Guest 3847602]

No, but I do expect the difference between a "fake" door that is there for show and one that may become accessible at some point to be obvious.

How would you communicate that to the players without breaking the 4th wall?

 

[AnuragParcha]

Awesome! Love to see that finally we are getting improvements and fixes on what the players are asking for! However as others said, moders did already solve most of these, I really hope there are more updates. Also will there be any content wise updates? Or newer features? Because it just seems like a hotfix up till now.

 

[incomingdamage]

How would you communicate that to the players without breaking the 4th wall?

Well, he actually might have some point here as well - I noticed that there's a bit of a mess with how doors are presented in the game. Many have this interaction prompt on them ("closed") and say "failed" when you try to interact, but there are also many doors being just a part of the design, without any hint to interaction. So there's actually some inconsistency. I myself had a thought a couple of times that maybe indeed it would have been a better idea to set all doors as "closed" and interactible or all of them just plain world design element. The ones that are interactible, seem to suggest that there were some interiors initially available, but in the production process turned into closed areas? Who knows? On the other hand, there's quite a lot of them, so seems impossible that they intitally designed so many additional interiors.
Oh well, just my usual babbling

 

[Guest 3847602]

Well, he actually might have some point here as well - I noticed that there's a bit of a mess with how doors are presented in the game. Many have this interaction prompt on them ("closed") and say "failed" when you try to interact, but there are also many doors being just a part of the design, without any hint to interaction. So there's actually some inconsistency. I myself had a thought a couple of times that maybe indeed it would have been a better idea to set all doors as "closed" and interactible or all of them just plain world design element. The ones that are interactible, seem to suggest that there were some interiors initially available, but in the production process turned into closed areas? Who knows? On the other hand, there's quite a lot of them, so seems impossible that they intitally designed so many additional interiors.
Oh well, just my usual babbling

I didn't mean to say he had no point, I was genuinely curious about how would the potential solution look?
Best alternative I could come up with is to remove "open" option for every single non-operable door in the city, for the doors to be nothing more than recoloured area of the wall (which they essentially are right now), but this method they're using in Cyberpunk right now is exactly what they've used in TW3 for about 90% of the doors in Novigrad and Beauclair, it didn't look unnatural to me back then and I don't remember locked doors being brought up as anyone's gripe with the game.

 

[Harrison_Deckard]

after all this ping-pong between opinions... shouldn't be there simply some sort of a constant vote-system for bugs? so that we simply could vote for a FIX ORDER?
the most common AND annoying problems could show in top 10, top 20, top 50 ... you know what I mean. we can add and vote bugs up, here and there some of the admins could merge doubleposts in communication with the devs, who should pick for every patch at least a chunk of the upvoted bugs and fix them together with their own goals and needs in order to fix this, at core (at least for me), so lovable game!?!

so I couldn't care less about this whole police system talk and bashing shit tbh. shooting civilians and then fight the police doesn't interest me and there is no other need (at least at this point) to pick up a fight with them. its pointless. I mean of course, car chases with them would be cool in the future but it definitively shouldn't be a main focus now!

the balance of the difficult levels (very hard is very soft at higher levels), functionless perks, legendary schemes missing after first visits in stores, no sounds in clubs or two soundtrack mixed together, adjustable mini-map ... these are just some of the bugs (or fixes) I would vote up.

I love, and so far defend the game - I absolutely see the potential - but I can't get why there isn't such a global BUG-FIX-ORDER-VOTE-SYSTEM! this would be my absolutely preferred option for somewhat of a transparent communication with CDPR.

or do I missing something here?