CDPR vindicated those who doubted their promise

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I dont think they were fully aware of how bad it would be on the non pro consoles and most sales were on PC atleast at release.

I agree with your post outside of this part. They were testing the game internally - they had to know how bad it was on last gen consoles. I didn't play it on a last gen console or even a current gen one. I played it on PC and it was still buggy, but it was something I could tolerate. But from what I saw from last gen consoles it was outrageously bad.

I wont say its impossible. But even if the Expansion sells well it might be a fools errand too keep people working on it, if the plan too implement more then just story missions that is(new systems for example like mutations/runewords in W3). If they just release story missions with already completed stuff they could probably keep going forever exept for the voice acting (been reading some stuff about that, wont say anything more in case its true).

Also depends on price of the expansion and how big it will be, theres info about it but its very shady and im not sure its true. If its a shorter expansion they cant really charge too much and must still make a profit, been working pretty hard on it with quite a lot of people according too the distribution charts. They could take a short time loss for a long time gain in reputation and goodwill i guess. But thats not really what most companys does today....

I also agree on a few points here too.

1. If the expansion is wildly successful then I could see them making another one. It is hard to believe it will be a smash hit though given the bad reputation the game has and how long it will take after release. But maybe the marketing hype train gets everyone going. But then on top of that it has to be legitimately good.

2. I also agree that new content and systems would (and should, for timings sake) just be axed from the release. If they are going to make another big expansion just make it story based content on top of the existing systems in the game so that you aren't spending a ton of time tweaking the engine and stuff. I think it would even make sense to just put it directly in Night City rather than building out a whole new area and stuff - as cool as that might be.

3. Some of it depends on the size of this expansion too. If we get a Blood and Wine size expansion I highly doubt we get anything else, regardless of how successful it is. I think they'll use that as a way to wash their hands of Cyberpunk 2077 and focus on Witcher 4/Cyberpunk 2 while keeping people occupied with whatever Molasses Flood is doing, the new GWENT thing coming out soon and Witcher 4 hype.
 
I agree with your post outside of this part. They were testing the game internally - they had to know how bad it was on last gen consoles. I didn't play it on a last gen console or even a current gen one. I played it on PC and it was still buggy, but it was something I could tolerate. But from what I saw from last gen consoles it was outrageously bad.



I also agree on a few points here too.

1. If the expansion is wildly successful then I could see them making another one. It is hard to believe it will be a smash hit though given the bad reputation the game has and how long it will take after release. But maybe the marketing hype train gets everyone going. But then on top of that it has to be legitimately good.

2. I also agree that new content and systems would (and should, for timings sake) just be axed from the release. If they are going to make another big expansion just make it story based content on top of the existing systems in the game so that you aren't spending a ton of time tweaking the engine and stuff. I think it would even make sense to just put it directly in Night City rather than building out a whole new area and stuff - as cool as that might be.

3. Some of it depends on the size of this expansion too. If we get a Blood and Wine size expansion I highly doubt we get anything else, regardless of how successful it is. I think they'll use that as a way to wash their hands of Cyberpunk 2077 and focus on Witcher 4/Cyberpunk 2 while keeping people occupied with whatever Molasses Flood is doing, the new GWENT thing coming out soon and Witcher 4 hype.
True i excluded that part, i still cant even wrap my head around wtf they were thinking and i tend too go too ignorance instead of knowingly doing something that dumb..

1. Im not sure on this, were just gonna have too wait and see.

2/3. But if what ive read is true (and its a big if) it sounds like were getting a smaller expansion. its a couple of months old very shady info so im not sure. It can also have developed much more now with more content. We will probably not know untill end of q2/q3 earliest sadly if we will even know then. Trailers cant really be trusted and i doubt they will do another 2018-2019 "gameplay trailer" (atleast i hope not).

Sadly im not that exited for anything in the pipelines atm, exept perhaps w3 next gen. Some other good games on the horizon tho so im putting my hopes on other studios for the moment.
 
I wont say its impossible. But even if the Expansion sells well it might be a fools errand too keep people working on it, if the plan too implement more then just story missions that is(new systems for example like mutations/runewords in W3). If they just release story missions with already completed stuff they could probably keep going forever exept for the voice acting (been reading some stuff about that, wont say anything more in case its true).
That's my point, indeed they won't work on the Red Engine anymore, so for everything that the engine can't handle in its current state, that's "dead". But for everything else, it's just whether it's worth doing or not (profitable or not, or if it's better to move on), the Engine is not an issue by itself (like you said, in theory, they could add quests indefinitely).
(maybe I'm wrong too, but I don't remember any "real new feature" in HoS expansion like B&W expansion had)
 
That's my point, indeed they won't work on the Red Engine anymore, so for everything that the engine can't handle in its current state, that's "dead". But for everything else, it's just whether it's worth doing or not (profitable or not, or if it's better to move on), the Engine is not an issue by itself (like you said, in theory, they could add quests indefinitely).
(maybe I'm wrong too, but I don't remember any "real new feature" in HoS expansion like B&W expansion had)
They added runewords i think in HOS. it was around that time the free dlc finished too if im not mistaken(NG+ and so on). Theres some cool tech having too do with voice acting nowdays too, that can similate speach pretty much. Question is how happy the actors would be and how good it can be made. Since this game is Voice acted(in alot of languages too) it might be hard too make more story missions and will be very expencive.

One of the reasons im kinda against this many translations. it also seem kinda hard for modders too make quests since ive not seen a single quest mod (Skyrim has alot of huge mod made expansions for example) The mod tools that they were talking about isent out (might have been canceled?). thats kinda the issue, zero info and alot of guesswork or secondhand sources. Speculating can be really fun tho :D
 
They added runewords i think in HOS. it was around that time the free dlc finished too if im not mistaken(NG+ and so on). Theres some cool tech having too do with voice acting nowdays too, that can similate speach pretty much. Question is how happy the actors would be and how good it can be made. Since this game is Voice acted(in alot of languages too) it might be hard too make more story missions and will be very expencive.
Just a guess too, but you're right, voice acting seem to be more an issue than the Engine and by far :)
 
That is very likely. I have to mention that it is not 100% that it will be only one expansion (DLC is small stuff like new apartment or new guns or something like that and expansion is 'hearts of stone'/'blood and wine' from the witcher 3).

I think it might be just one. They initially said that the major DLC's would be like that of the Witcher 3, but looking at the DLC leaked info, it doesn't seem that way to me.

And if they do only release one sub-par DLC then that's weak af.
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Maybe CDPR will release only one expansion, but I don't think it would be related to Red Engine. Not need to work on the "current state" of Red Engine to provide more content I suppose :)

What?

If they are moving to UE5, then they won't be leaving resources for the DLC which requires the RedEngine. You can't release DLC in UE5 for a game running in the RedEngine :LOL:
 
If they are moving to UE5, then they won't be leaving resources for the DLC which requires the RedEngine. You can't release DLC in UE5 for a game running in the RedEngine :LOL:
You're sure they can't add "Unreal Engine DLC" to Cyberpunk...!? :rolleyes:
Joke aside, like I said in my previous posts, CDPR probably can add quests/contents indefinitly to the game if they want. At least, anything that Red Engine can handle in its current state, and that, without invest any ressources or improve the Red Engine itself...
From what I know, the expansion will run on Red Engine, The Witcher 3 "next-gen" will run on Red Engine. And they will probably continu to support/update/patch these "Red Engine" games for a little while after, because I'm pretty confident that some bugs will still be present in these games :)
 
One other thing I will say about the engine situation.

If they have had as big of a team on the game as reported since release (yes, they have said all along a pretty sizeable team has been working on the expansion and now the team is apparently enormous)... and have ramped it up to the size it is now for at least a year or more before the release of the expansion... and all they come out with is an expansion that is the size of Hearts of Stone (or less)...

Then the engine really does have to be a problem. Because that will be 2+ years worth of work with quite a few resources on it to produce like ten hours of main story content and four-five hours of side content. That would be pretty pathetic in terms of time spent vs. content produced.
 
Then the engine really does have to be a problem. Because that will be 2+ years worth of work with quite a few resources on it to produce like ten hours of main story content and four-five hours of side content. That would be pretty pathetic in terms of time spent vs. content produced.
Has CDPR said that they started working on the expansion before the game release? Because the game is not that old...people tend to think 2020, but they should really consider it 2021 (it came 10 dec 2020 if I remember right).
 
Has CDPR said that they started working on the expansion before the game release? Because the game is not that old...people tend to think 2020, but they should really consider it 2021 (it came 10 dec 2020 if I remember right).

Yeah. On the graphs they show during their earnings call a pretty sizeable team has been assigned to the expansion ever since the initial release of the game. On top of that the team's size has become massive in the last few months.

Which is to say by the time it actually comes out a ton of people will have been working on it for 2+ years.

So if all they come out with is a 10 hour main story addition that is already in Night City (so for the most part the environment was already done outside of hollowing out some buildings and adding assets to it) and 4-5 hours worth of side content where the main area (Night City) was already completed... then that is pretty brutal.

I imagine that could be because the engine is complicating things, they released it on so many different platforms, etc.

But 2+ years (let's be honest, if they were going to originally announce the expansions with the release of the game they were likely developing parts of it pre-release... I mean AT LEAST the trailers were completed) to only create 10 hours of main story content/4-5 hours of side content is pretty pathetic. By the time the expansion comes out it will have been in development for about 2/3 or half the time of some full fledged AAA titles.
 
You're sure they can't add "Unreal Engine DLC" to Cyberpunk...!? :rolleyes:
Joke aside, like I said in my previous posts, CDPR probably can add quests/contents indefinitly to the game if they want. At least, anything that Red Engine can handle in its current state, and that, without invest any ressources or improve the Red Engine itself...
From what I know, the expansion will run on Red Engine, The Witcher 3 "next-gen" will run on Red Engine. And they will probably continu to support/update/patch these "Red Engine" games for a little while after, because I'm pretty confident that some bugs will still be present in these games :)

CDPR are peeling staff away from CP77 onto new projects, moving to UE5, and they have now suggested only one DLC .. don't count on lots of support for CP77 :LOL:

CDPR seem to want to move on rapidly and away from CP77 too.
 
Kinda agree that if the leaks are true it will probably be a pretty small Expansion for the time and effort spent. The cost of it must be pretty massive tho so im hoping it will be good.

I would like more story content tbh too flesh out the game more (too short main story IMHO) and a Expansion could remedy the points i feel are lacking. Combat for example just feels so boring for me. Feels like it needs much more Cyberware options. More body options and for the love of all holy fix the V beeing a vampire ingame -.-
 
CDPR are peeling staff away from CP77 onto new projects, moving to UE5, and they have now suggested only one DLC .. don't count on lots of support for CP77 :LOL:

CDPR seem to want to move on rapidly and away from CP77 too.
Honestly, it always makes me smile that kind of assumption.
It reminds me some:
- After the 1.2, CDPR gave up Cyberpunk and indeed, we really shouldn't count on future updates nor seen Cyberpunk back on the PS Store one day.
- After the 1.3, CDPR gave up Cyberpunk and indeed, we really shouldn't count on future updates nor on the next-gen update.
- After the 1.5, CDPR gave up Cyberpunk and indeed, we really shouldn't count to see an expansion.
- Now, indeed, CDPR give up Cyberpunk but still working on it, for at the very minimum, the next 6 months.

So we will see I suppose :D
And as far as I know, staff "slowly" move to future/other projects which is quite obvious, like all of those who were working on the engine itself. But there are a good part who still working on Cyberpunk.
 
Honestly, it always makes me smile that kind of assumption.
It reminds me some:
- After the 1.2, CDPR gave up Cyberpunk and indeed, we really shouldn't count on future updates nor seen Cyberpunk back on the PS Store one day.
- After the 1.3, CDPR gave up Cyberpunk and indeed, we really shouldn't count on future updates nor on the next-gen update.
- After the 1.5, CDPR gave up Cyberpunk and indeed, we really shouldn't count to see an expansion.
- Now, indeed, CDPR give up Cyberpunk but still working on it, for at the very minimum, the next 6 months.

So we will see I suppose :D
And as far as I know, staff "slowly" move to future/other projects which is quite obvious, like all of those who were working on the engine itself. But there are a good part who still working on Cyberpunk.
Yea people are gonna speculate. We will atleast get support for 6 months minimum or untill expansion is out and probably some bugfixes in it too. Perhaps 1.6 before we get more news on the expansion(i dont count on it since patching crew seems too be pretty small atm. perhaps a 1.55 with just bugfixes?). When they start too drop support it will probably happend fast tho since they need too swap over too UE5. Hopefully we will get a proper announcment when they know what there doing.
 
Then the engine really does have to be a problem. Because that will be 2+ years worth of work with quite a few resources on it to produce like ten hours of main story content and four-five hours of side content. That would be pretty pathetic in terms of time spent vs. content produced.
I feel a need to comment after much on this subject I've read here. It's not specifically aimed at you in it's entirety, nor is it meant as an attack; your comment was simply the last straw.

An engine is only a problem in that resources required, ie people time and money, to support it outweigh it's effective use. The reason some things "just can't be changed" in a system is that the team(s) lack the intellect and/or time to do so. It's why some issues often persists in a studios games from release to release. It could be lacking visuals, controller/keybinding options, or even the ability to exit the game without having to load the title menu once again. Often it's caused by time compounded on lack of skill. When you're hustling from project to project, being overworked, *in the case of Asia specifically* being underpaid, you lack the time or even willingness to really dig in beyond what's required unless you have a passion for that certain element. Some issues are considered so small that the work to fix them may not be worth the costs. I don't mean just upfront man power/money, but the impact to other projects. I'm going to prattle on for a minute about why an engine is almost never bad per se.

An example in CDPR's case - AI. Mediocre at best. They just are not good at AI programming, or at least getting it to work efficiently. These systems are well known. Sometimes they're not necessary for a game, it's arguable about what's necessary for 2077. The issue is they really talked up this side of the game. Until months before release, even as they were still making changes, finishing features, making the game turn on, they bragged about their AI and police system(s). Why does this game have bad AI after a year of nearly absent AI though? It's likely that it wasn't working properly and they lacked the skill to make it work on top of all the other broken systems. There was a 'better' police system at one point, there were at least plans at better ped AI, and I doubt they want city infrastructure to come to a complete standstill when you sit in the middle of the road. This still happened every time the last I played the game. Switching engines will not fix it. I would still lean toward the notion I've carried that they prioritized fidelity to such an extent that other systems suffered. Even at release, with all the problems the game suffered across platforms, that it could run at all is notable. The game, still being a bit of a mess and lacking marketed features, being able to run and in many cases run well is an achievement worthy of praise. REDengine is not a piece of crap. If they can get good, even decent, ped/drive/police/enemy AI all working at once on top of everything else - it will be absolutely lamentable that they're throwing away such impressive technology. It can be replicated though if they manage their resources properly in the future.

An example of this in terms of fidelity - Fromsoft games, most of which I adore, appear as a previous gen title at release in terms of visuals. No exception. This isn't simply 'da engine is bad', the programmers simply lack the time or skill to make wowy graffix work efficiently. Almost any engine can do the fancy rendering, artists can place the lights with grand effect, and the tech art side can write juicy shaders easily. They've shown the ability to make fantastic rendering with the Lord of Hollows ending in DS3, but they aren't capable of doing that at real time it seems. Shadows and rendering seems to be what really keeps their games from having that grounded look. The only title of theirs, which still looked a bit dated at release, where these things weren't a persistent issue is Sekiro. The community has often propped up the idea that if they just change engines their graphics problems will be solved, and we'll finally have a visually spectacular game to truly create the atmosphere proposed by the content. Not true. Fromsoft made a UE title a few years ago. Guess what? It did not look visually impressive. It didn't look 'bad', but nothing special in pure graphical terms. It looked old, again, just like all of their other games. Gameplay and Aesthetics over fidelity any day for me, but objectively they lack in the graphics department. They've stated this openly themselves.

These long winded examples are not insults to the studios or their teams, they're intended to make the point that the engine is only as good as the people working it.

Those impressive videos of one-man built UE5 "games" on youtube? They're asset flips where no one can do anything. Start adding proper physics, physics cancellation areas, interactive objects, character customization, vehicles, mounts, decal systems, ai, ui, sub ui, consumables, inventory, etc, etc. These captures of "gameplay" don't mean much of anything really. When multi-billion dollar corporations put out fake demonstrations, how real do you think some random dude's game on youtube is?

The best reason to move to UE5 is management has driven the legacy developers away - people with deep knowledge that could really get things going aren't there. Now you have a lot of people with UE experience in the market, the engine is complex yarn of systems on top of systems(before and after 1.5 I made long post about how the entire rendering pipeline from release until February 15th was out of order. It was objectively utter trash), so it's a no brainer to switch. That's sad, but it's really the best case scenario because it means there is potential to recover based on management's future decisions. The worst reason would be that people at the top of the food chain saw the Metahuman and Matrix demo, paused, then thought "Wow, let's just use that." not considering that a demo of an uncanny valley person is room with perfectly staged lights.

TL;DR - An engine, and games created with it, is only as bad as the studio allows it to be.
 
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TL;DR - An engine, and games created with it, is only as bad as the studio allows it to be.
I do agree in most of what you said. its like this with any tool (especially a upgradeble one). That beeing said i think it was time too move on for CDPR, they bleed staff it seems and having too make people learn there own engine is probably really really hard compared too UE5. Ue5 also has the benefit of having modularity and having a team working on the engine without CDPR having too develop everything, it seems pretty scaleble too. Im quite curious too see what they manage too do, the artists and modelers are quite good in CDPR so with a decent baseline engine the sky is the limit (not really but).

The tech demos are like you said probably not real world gameplay and thats true for most AAA games too. We should have learned this ages ago when the E3 trailers started too look too good too be true. Hopefully this will improve AI and some other things im pretty unimpressed by in Cp2077. Also hopefully they can keep there cinematic feel going too, with the nice animations they have got. But we shall see.. Theres also the console/pc ports too consider. Im starting too get a bit worried with the leaked next gen gfx card beeing x2 the power of current gen. The latest consoles are already wayyyy behind in processing power compared too current gen gfx cards (atleast the top ones) so i hope it will not negativly effect development in games (sadly nothing new, bu tnext gen consoles are probably 5+ years away).

Anyways im just rambeling!
 
TL;DR - An engine, and games created with it, is only as bad as the studio allows it to be.

I appreciate the explanation and I do not work in game dev - so some of what I say is definitely an 'arm chair quarterback' type of perspective. That being said you seem to know more about the subject than I do. I an genuinely curious on your take...

By the time the expansion for Cyberpunk 2077 releases the game will be 2+ years old. Since the release of the game a sizeable team has been working on the expansion and the number of people assigned to it has increased dramatically as of late. If that 2+ years worth of work that will likely be set in Night City (so an already pre-finalized environment, they are not recreating a new city) results in about ten hours of main story gameplay and only five'ish hours worth of side content...

Would you say that development effort is a disaster? Or do you think that is a realistic timeframe for that amount of content?

If they were building a new game from the ground up with ten hours of main story content and five hours of side content it seems reasonable that it could take 3-4 years to complete such a thing. Perhaps longer if the systems and stuff are very ambitious. But when you are working in a city already built, skill systems already in place and a game that is already done... that would seem excessive for that amount of content (unless they are adding a TON of new systems to the game along with it), correct?

Or am I mistaken?
 
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