That's a grim future but I can totally see it happening unless CDPR management is bought under control soon.
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I think people put too much weight in few names to say a game will be good or bad, while over and over developers have delivered masterpieces and next project being crap with the same "guru" in the project.
People that wrote the "Bloody Baron" quest worked in Dying Light 2 and even Chris Avellone-Planescape:Torment- worked on that game-some quests,don't know if they finally made into the game-...nobody seems to be praising the story of that game.
And i can think of other examples like John Romero "Daikatana"...
People that wrote the "Bloody Baron" quest worked in Dying Light 2 and even Chris Avellone-Planescape:Torment- worked on that game-some quests,don't know if they finally made into the game-...nobody seems to be praising the story of that game.
And i can think of other examples like John Romero "Daikatana"...
Considering that engagement with expansion content is typically 20-25%, when the base game is well received, they're dropping REDengine, the expansion will release beyond any post launch attention they could cultivate - it looks grim. I just hope they really learned something from all of this and are genuinely doing better by the team(s) this time around.
Remember that graph from the investor call; the one where barely anyone was working on the expansion, but later they said that wasn't right and nearly everyone was working on it? Ponder the implications of them screwing up in front of everyone, again, and giving out almost entirely incorrect development information to the people financing this whole ordeal or damage controlling public perception that they've practically shelved the game after spending a year just to get it in a decent state. I'm ambivalent about either scenario, but why an 'incorrect' graph existed in the first place really sticks out to me.
Sounds about right.
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what if the graph was right and just changed after the investors freaked out about such a small team working on the expansion, so a new graph was generated to put them at ease
Both of these things are interesting and I also find it incredibly shady that they had to swap the graph around.
However I think you also have to consider the consequences of them legitimately lying about this. Wouldn't that be considered purposefully misleading shareholders?
Although I guess they could get around that by 'technically assigning' all of those resources to the expansion team for a day or something and then swapping them back over to the new Witcher game or something.
But either way - I agree that made me uncomfortable as well. I think it may end up being true if we get one expansion and that expansion is pretty small too. Because either they are the least efficient developers ever or they just flat out didn't spend much time or many resources on the expansion. That doesn't mean it can't be good. It might be short, but still good... but if it is short and a one-and-done type scenario I think it begs the question of... why did it take 2+ years and were those resources really on the expansion?
Avellone's job was deleted from DL2 prior to release.
The guy who wrote the bloody baron is still in CDPR.
Was not Karolina Stakhyra writer of Bloody Baron(or parts of)?, Pawel Saszko was quest designer i think but its two different roles. Maybe i misread the info, but Techland was heavily advertising both .And yes Avellone work maybe was deleted (he didn't claim lead writer).
Yeah this game has had issues for sure but I still believe this is and hopefully will continue to be a great game. So many people just get so hyped they can't sit back and enjoy it. It will never live up to the hype. Was there stuff that was promised that is still not in game. Yeah. Does it really matter? Meh in my opinion no. I have spent 625+ hours having a blast. Not bad for 60 bucks. Part of me misses the original days of the game being busted. Made this video 7 days after launch and was loving the hell out of it! Gotta find good in the bad...and o boy were the bugs a wonderful source of good funny times.
Yes, I remember something very profound like that with Fortnite I believe. It became a huge succes (dont know why myself) and all of sudden (but not really) every game that was in development that time had to had a battle royale 'mode', trying to lift on that bandwagon.
That's what I was implying following 'or'.
I don't think that would be the case. If anything; the investors would be relieved they aren't dumping money into a gamble. The chances are decent that nearly everyone on this forum, myself included, will get the expansion. That's not a lot of people. I will spoil the experience by watching some actual post-release gameplay this time before buying though, and I expect a lot of people will do the same. As well, I would expect many of the people on Steam and consoles that returned will likely buy in so - it just depends on how much it costs and how much it sells with regards to success. They're gonna put out what ever they put out and that's that.
They certainly allowed however many people working on patches to iron it out and considerably improve the experience. Yes, it shouldn't have been released and even after being largely fixed it doesn't quite stack up to expectations, many of which they hyped up themselves, but the effort deserves recognition. And that means reminding yourself that they've screwed up many times, but they've also put out real effort to turn things around. Either the expansion will be satisfactory or not. There's certainly going to be a sequel, they're making a animated series, toys, and so on. Everyone should just temper their expectations and wait patiently.
Another thing to note is that support has been unusually responsive to bug reports and even notes I've sent regarding some visual issues. "X doesn't seem to be working half the time, such and such only works at this time but not this, Y is missing from B but not A so this is likely happening, etc" I haven't made reports lately since I've not played the game since March, but I still get responses to some reports that they didn't reply to in the following days. That's exceptional.
I saw some comments on the updates to the game/expansions seemingly taking a lot of time to develop and I think it's worth remembering that RED Engine was originally not an open world engine and had none of the tools to support this. The Witcher 3 was a learning experience for a lot of the developers, many of whom left after The Witcher 3 was done, and the result is the foundation for what the Cyberpunk team has/had to work with - jerry-rigged tools, likely undocumented, put together in a rush to try and combat shortcomings with the rushed development process.
Here is an example form a GDC talk on some of the tools created for The Witcher 3:
It's really cool to see how passionate the team is, coming up with interesting solutions on the go to the problems they've faced during development, but there are also a lot of red flags in this presentation. Mainly:
- Rushed development, with QA tools only being put in place mid-production as the team discovers they need a lot of optimisation with no data on problem areas.
- Seemingly no QA team involvement at any stage of the process. The focus is on adding things as quickly as possible, then cleaning it up after the fact. In the Q&A section he even mentions that there were no testers involved in the optimisation process and it was up to artists writing their own SQL statements...
- Lack of real-time feedback on optimisation work. Mention of needing to wait for a weekly report before you find out how the process went.
- Tools created by people with no prior knowledge in the skillset required to create them. While the dev dedication is admirable, it does highlight the lack of organisation on the project.
Now, imagine rushing through development on a second title, with this sort of tooling as your foundation, trying to support 5+ platforms, all while a pandemic is going on, and I think it is easy to understand why there may be issues in terms of delivery time and quality.
It seems clear to me that CDPR either need to completely refactor their engine and the tools around it, which would take a very long time and effort, or they need a different, proven solution with lots of support and a big talent pool - they seem to have opted for the latter.
Back to the original topic - I still don't understand the comparisons with NMS and the like, or these expectations of long-term support for a single player RPG. It makes me think people thought this would be the next GTA Online and I just don't get why that is.
Here is an example form a GDC talk on some of the tools created for The Witcher 3:
It's really cool to see how passionate the team is, coming up with interesting solutions on the go to the problems they've faced during development, but there are also a lot of red flags in this presentation. Mainly:
- Rushed development, with QA tools only being put in place mid-production as the team discovers they need a lot of optimisation with no data on problem areas.
- Seemingly no QA team involvement at any stage of the process. The focus is on adding things as quickly as possible, then cleaning it up after the fact. In the Q&A section he even mentions that there were no testers involved in the optimisation process and it was up to artists writing their own SQL statements...
- Lack of real-time feedback on optimisation work. Mention of needing to wait for a weekly report before you find out how the process went.
- Tools created by people with no prior knowledge in the skillset required to create them. While the dev dedication is admirable, it does highlight the lack of organisation on the project.
Now, imagine rushing through development on a second title, with this sort of tooling as your foundation, trying to support 5+ platforms, all while a pandemic is going on, and I think it is easy to understand why there may be issues in terms of delivery time and quality.
It seems clear to me that CDPR either need to completely refactor their engine and the tools around it, which would take a very long time and effort, or they need a different, proven solution with lots of support and a big talent pool - they seem to have opted for the latter.
Back to the original topic - I still don't understand the comparisons with NMS and the like, or these expectations of long-term support for a single player RPG. It makes me think people thought this would be the next GTA Online and I just don't get why that is.
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Personally, I think CDPR was just dishonest about what systems the game was designed for. CP77 was not designed for older hardware, period and it clearly showed and still shows for those on base Xbox One's and PS4's and for those who have inferior PC hardware.
Agreed. I imagine they thought they could get it to work, said it would be on both platforms and didn't want to go back on that promise to the community... even once they knew it was a mess. They need to learn from that going forward.
Cat-like medallion in the snow teasing a game? Good.
Animated trailer for a game? Good.
Gameplay showing the world and the basics of what is being put together? Good.
Deep diving into details about the game and promising things that aren't definitely going to make it to launch? Bad.
In addition - another thought on us getting a single expansion rather than multiple:
The graphs showing resource allocation were brought up. CDPR went out of their way to correct that and make sure everyone understood it was wrong. There have been plenty of articles and community buzz about there just being one expansion and CDPR has done nothing to correct that perception.
I think they said when they announced the game pretty much that it was coming on current gen (ps4) at the time. Kinda hard too go back on that. Also they uped the gfx pretty hard during development, thats gonna be hard too scale down is my guess...
I mostly agree with this, dont show things that are not in the game right now period! Planned or not dont matter, things will fall trough and be impossible too do. Better too surprise people in a positive then a negative way(the way hacking worked, location specific animations on takedowns, Wall climbing and so on).
Im not sure how much blame in this is on marketing and so on tho.. But even the trailers show stuff and characters thats not in the game. Car chases, luxury mansions and so on. If its for setting or worldbuilding then be clear about it!
I think some of , more obvious, disappointment with the game can be attributed to technical difficulties, but majority really comes down to bad game design. Lot of people expected deeper, more authentic rpg, and there are one-man-team indie games out there made with 0.001% budget of Cyberpunk that are vastly more complex and better designed on that front.
Good mechanics is all about coherency of design and overall sense of composition with the rest of the game, and CDPR simply does not have a capable, talented rpg team that knows how to do this. Or, I would say, does not even try to do this.
As for comparisons with other games and public expectations, well, by their own words, they directly stated, in promotional video, right before release:
Welcome to the next generation of open world gaming..
If you know that "public hype" is through the roof for your game, then you'd better have something to back that up.
Does is have any new or upgraded technologies? Systems and mechanics? Different or more creative ways of implementing existing ones? Interactivity? AI and simulation elements? Variety and quality of content? Etc, etc..
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You bring up a great point. Almost as if the DLC should have been the JS story while the base game was about V and Jackie. Would have allowed more connection the city and it's gangs. Once that world building had been established you throw on the terminally ill thread while Jackie V's best friend deals with his impending death.
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Are you sure lot of people expected deeper,"more authentic"-not sure what you mean,because i can post 10 contradictory RPG definitions just crawling in this forum-?
Most of the anger post-release was: console players-that I think were quite right about the anger- and people expecting a CyberGTA.
Taking into account The Witcher III, I don't know why some people was expecting an Arcanum level of mechanics and quest design. We ended with a game quite similar,although TW3 makes a better use of the open world(the quest giving mechanism specially).
I would go even further, unless CDPR tones down the "cinematic storytelling"-which is what gaves them their biggest hit- I would not expect significant changes on their game design...because they cannot do it. There is a talk(by Pawel Saszko if I recall correctly,but is general company philosophy) were he shows a chart for quest design, is based on beats of low/high tension points and then assigns the points to either cutscene/dialog and combat/exploration... with this approach, is simply impossible to design quests with 8 solutions based on different character builds,allowing sequence break or grant lot of freedom...and this is a side effect of their approach to storytelling.
No he doesn't. Please stop trying to take away our custom character and replace it with one that is not.
Can you give examples (what RPG mechanics you find so lacking or barely even there (if at all) )? Or these small games that have done it sooo much better
How does giving player more freedom in shaping V's story takes away anyone's custom character?
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