I've been following the news around the development of the newer updates and trying to form my own opinions with what little was able to be gathered... and frankly I've been wrong about the timing many times if you read my past posts... but I still don't think any of the core ideas have been wrong.
Especially the speculation from CDPR that says that they're not willing to disclose which franchise will get multiplayer sooner, even though it all seemed pretty obvious that Cyberpunk would be the first.
When I heard the news about downscaling I was little puzzled, as it's been known for at least 10 months by now how CDPR has been silently (well it's in their jobs page) recruiting people to work on their online multiplayer experience.
With the new updated roadmap I think I could figure out the "confusion" with what was being presented in both scenarios.
When you look at the old roadmap, it appears to only show the work directly aimed at finishing the quests, as probably portion of the work was already done from voice work and acting even possibly prior to release, but because of the launch and reorganizing the staff, considering the launch of Witcher and it's 4 months leading to first expansion, it seems all to indicate that this expansion is vastly larger in scale and in ambition, even with the 1 year delay until even patch 1.5 came out, and the expansion is still 1 year off.
So what could explain this change in roadmap? Well... perhaps the multiplayer was not originally intended (or intentionally hidden for PR reasons, since CDPR is single player focused company) as something that would be directly connected to the expansion.
Due to some outrage in the community, what was considered as part of the expansion might have been shifted and now is showing the work done on BOTH expansion and the multiplayer.
So the last bar could look something like this if my theory is correct.
Considering all the prior statements where CDPR considered multiplayer to be it's own independent production, and how it's been in the works for close to 3 and half years, it'd be fair to assume it could've gained tremendous steam as it's clearly something that could gain a large attraction if implemented correctly.
Especially with the announced delay to the next year, where some speculations (Tyler McVicker, IGN) were stating that Expansion would be out this summer... this strongly seems to indicate that work was delayed, partly due to what's happening in the world, partly with the Witcher 3 being taken back into their wings to finish, maybe some other factors that could be linked with other development... to get that all ready to make a big punch next year.
So what do you think? Was it just a simple calculation error, or was there something else that caused them to reconsider the sizes of each development size? Am I completely off the grid and just waving my hands and screaming at the void, or is there some logic to what I'm saying?
I think it might be entirely possible that vast amount of work on expansion has been already finished or close to being finished, so there's no requirement for all the staff to work on the hand/head/body/walk animations for each quest and cutscene (if they're going to try to do it in 3rd person angle, where there's been some speculation due to the job listing that 3rd person is being worked on) and most of the remaining work is for some more technical that requires still few more patches to execute correctly... like car customization garages vehicle combat (as shown by the vehicle combat mod, but likely requires a lot of work with the controller support), gangs engaging in combat and police chases... races, minigames etc...
Especially the speculation from CDPR that says that they're not willing to disclose which franchise will get multiplayer sooner, even though it all seemed pretty obvious that Cyberpunk would be the first.
When I heard the news about downscaling I was little puzzled, as it's been known for at least 10 months by now how CDPR has been silently (well it's in their jobs page) recruiting people to work on their online multiplayer experience.
With the new updated roadmap I think I could figure out the "confusion" with what was being presented in both scenarios.
When you look at the old roadmap, it appears to only show the work directly aimed at finishing the quests, as probably portion of the work was already done from voice work and acting even possibly prior to release, but because of the launch and reorganizing the staff, considering the launch of Witcher and it's 4 months leading to first expansion, it seems all to indicate that this expansion is vastly larger in scale and in ambition, even with the 1 year delay until even patch 1.5 came out, and the expansion is still 1 year off.
So what could explain this change in roadmap? Well... perhaps the multiplayer was not originally intended (or intentionally hidden for PR reasons, since CDPR is single player focused company) as something that would be directly connected to the expansion.
Due to some outrage in the community, what was considered as part of the expansion might have been shifted and now is showing the work done on BOTH expansion and the multiplayer.
So the last bar could look something like this if my theory is correct.
Considering all the prior statements where CDPR considered multiplayer to be it's own independent production, and how it's been in the works for close to 3 and half years, it'd be fair to assume it could've gained tremendous steam as it's clearly something that could gain a large attraction if implemented correctly.
Especially with the announced delay to the next year, where some speculations (Tyler McVicker, IGN) were stating that Expansion would be out this summer... this strongly seems to indicate that work was delayed, partly due to what's happening in the world, partly with the Witcher 3 being taken back into their wings to finish, maybe some other factors that could be linked with other development... to get that all ready to make a big punch next year.
So what do you think? Was it just a simple calculation error, or was there something else that caused them to reconsider the sizes of each development size? Am I completely off the grid and just waving my hands and screaming at the void, or is there some logic to what I'm saying?
I think it might be entirely possible that vast amount of work on expansion has been already finished or close to being finished, so there's no requirement for all the staff to work on the hand/head/body/walk animations for each quest and cutscene (if they're going to try to do it in 3rd person angle, where there's been some speculation due to the job listing that 3rd person is being worked on) and most of the remaining work is for some more technical that requires still few more patches to execute correctly... like car customization garages vehicle combat (as shown by the vehicle combat mod, but likely requires a lot of work with the controller support), gangs engaging in combat and police chases... races, minigames etc...
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