In a perfect world we would all like the perfect game, and I'm sure everyone can think up of a comprehensive list of things that they would want out of the perfect Cyberpunk game and the perfect NightCity etc... The reality is that there are constraints, time, budget, economic constraints and so if CDPR had to strategically target certain areas first and focus on them to get Cyberpunk the most broad/massive improvements in the shortest amount of time what would they be?
In terms of bang-for-buck and low-hanging-fruit and applying the 80/20 (Pareto) principle to Cyberpunk 2077 "as-is" in its current state with all the bugs and lack of features, what do you guys think if push came to shove and CDPR had to work down a prioritized list what would you fix/implement first and foremost?
To me, bug fixes are a given and foregone conclusion so I won't even list them, but more specifically in terms of adding (or in some cases adding back promised features that were removed etc) features goes... this is what I have so far:
1) Bring back customizations (even if only for the PC and/or only for the PC initially) such as car, weapons, apartment and character customizations... In a game like Cyberpunk, the character, his tools, the car and his apartment(s) are central core to the game... and although there are some limited character customizations they are by no means what was promised or initially illuded to in the beginning...
2) Implement a real AI for NPC driving, and fix the cop chases, add in car chases, in other words the current non-existent NPC driving AI in which all cars are basically driving down a linear static invisible-"rail" is not good enough. GTA III from two decades ago had better technology than this, heck Midtown Madness (the original) had more realistic AI cop chases! How is it CDPR took 7 million in funds from the Polish government/EU for developing AI in its Cyberpunk game and we get this empty shell of a mess? I'm not asking for Cyberpunk to be another GTA game, but having a baseline minimum of NPC driving AI (even basic "AI") is a bare essential requirement for a game in a genre such as this!
It is totally immersion breaking when I'm walking down the street or crossing the street and constantly get hit and knocked to the ground by NPC cars because they lack the bare minimum "AI" driving to slow down, to swerve or to try to go around me... the fact is 100% of the time they are following a linear scripted 'rail' system and do not even hit the brakes or try to do anything at all... And to make matters worse, I've seen on dozens of occasions in which two oncoming cars making left turns don't have enough clearance to pass (because the rails obviously didn't have enough clearance etc) and they would just sit there for all eternity at the intersection until I looked away and then when I looked back they both disappeared into thin air! Absolutely no open-world game in 2020 should be so aweful like this!
The Cop system is the same way, the main reason the cop system is so lacking is because the game currently doesn't have NPC AI driving...
Seriously for the funds the Poland government gave to CDPR for developing AI in games, I would have expected something like this:
www.pcmag.com
web.archive.org
But at the very least, there is no excuse in 2020 for a supposedly game of the decade open-world to have no NPC driving AI!
3) Bring back the ride-able train system and implement some sort of automated air-taxi system that can autofly the player point to point from anywhere in the map. While quick travel can be convinent, there is no excuse in 2020 to force the user to use loading screens... Bring back the train ride system as originally showcased/pitched and also implement some air-taxi system... An automated air-taxi system would fit right in in the Cyberpunk world of 2077, and being point to point it would both be faster than the train system (since you don't have to walk to "the last mile" to a terminal and it would be more direct pathing than a train rail system) and give the player the oppurtunity to see the city from a height and perspective that afforded to him on foot or even by the lower altitude train rail/system heights... Having both a working train and airtaxi system would reduce the need for Quick travel and the immersion breaking loading screens, as well as it would help highlight and emphasis the much bragged about 'verticality' aspect of NightCity... its one thing to see the tall buildings on foot from the perspective of the ground, but something else altogether to be able to arbitrarily fly from any point on the map to any other point in the city and view the scenery of the flights..
4) Multiple apartments, more building lobbys, skyscraper observationn decks...: giving the player the ability to own multiple apartments throughout the city or at least the ability to move into different apartments as part of upgrading in gamelife is a nobrainer. But in addition to that, please add in some 'observation decks' to some of the taller skyscraper buildings in NightCity so that the player can visit these decks and see NightCity from that high vantage point perspective... Also, most of the buildings are not enter-able in NightCity... I understand even with procedural magic (see games like Space Engine, No Man's Sky, etc) its not feasible to make every room of every floor of every building come to life, but at a bare minimum CDPR should make more of the major buildings in NightCity have a base interior in the form of a first floor lobby... in some instances having a lobby that has working doors on more than one side of the building means the player can use it as a shortcut to get to another street without having to go or traverse the long way... in addition adding basic first floor lobbys to more of the main buildings paves the way for in the future in DLC and other situations to implement other floors of the buildings, after all its the lobby elevators in the main lobby that provides the means for players to access other floors of the building.. this all ties in which having more observationn decks and other potentially interesting applications... for example I'd like to be able to swim in an open outdoor swimming pool with clear glass that hangs from a tall skyscraper and look at beautiful women in the pool as they appear suspended high above in NightCity with the busy city below them... this would give raytracing a deeper purpose...
5) Being able to have a job, work a career path, and earn money (with the player having a bank account in the game and an economy in NightCity), and the 'office/desk' being another quasi-apartment type of abode in which the player can customize, and can switch between (change jobs), and can fast foward time (just like sleeping in bed fast forwards time)... Sleep takes up 1/3 of all our lives, and in Cyberpunk there is an apartment bed in which we sleep and when we do sleep it fast-forwards for approximately eight hours skipping to the morning... Implement something like this for the "work" system... so a player has a corporate job in some tall skyrise somewhere... well if CDPR implemented more building lobbys and lobby elevators (see #4 above) this would make it easier to also implement select floors of a particular skyscraper building to give the player access to these floors in which different companies rent these out as office space... so the user can report to work every morning and arrive at his/her office/desk, the player can customize his own office/desk, and then when he is ready to go to work hit the "work" button and it fast forwards eight hours and becomes five oclock and then he can exit the building and go party or go roam the city or otherwise go home and netflix and chill in his apartment until the next day... rinse and repeat and every two weeks he gets a paycheck and money deposited in his bank account... if he wishes to make more money he can use the computer in his apartment to search and apply for higher paying jobs, he can take college course or online courses to advantage his knowledge and skills to improve his upwards mobility in his career, in life, on the job... or even change careers and get jobs in new industries altogether... Make money mean something in the game, so that if he loses his job he might have to downsize to a lesser apartment and sell some of his cars and toys to make ends meet... This means there should be a rent system, and also the player must eat/drink food to stay alive and these also cost money. On the macroeconomic level implement some form of economy in Nightcity... so say there is a downturn in the economy, then certain companies might be forced to layoff, and that would trickle down and effect the ability of the player to sustain his current standard of living if he got fired from his job in a layoff and/or lost all his money in the crashed stock market etc... Basically add in more emergent gameplay that affects at a high level the interactions between different systems in a scale invariant way such that it retains a broader permanence...
6) Apparently CDPR already broke even shortly after launch and recouped the entire costs... So release an open SDK and welcome the modding community... in fact I would say open source your Red engine under a certain agreeable license and to that extent that you can, open source and/or public domain as much of the Cyperbunk 2077 assets as possible to help aid and assists the community in more advanced and robust bugfix, troubleshooting and modding/enchancements of this game. This wouldn't really affect your total sales so do it for the community good will that you would stand to gain from this.
7) Add a in-game settings mini-overlay to quickly adjust RTX/DLSS/daynight cycles without going to the menus... Take a page from Micrsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and implement a settings overlay in the game itself... A lot of people are playing around with turning Ray-tracing on/off and tweaking DLSS, and each time they have to hit settings, go to the video/graphis section, etc etc... in Microsoft Flight Simulator there is an in-game menu bar that has a miniwindow that directly allows changing settings on the fly, for example I can drag a slider while in the game and have it in real time change from day to night and see the entire cycle... something like this in NightCity would be helpful espeically when in camera mode... and the ability to quickly adjust ray tracing and dlss settings without going to the settings menu would be a big plus...
In terms of bang-for-buck and low-hanging-fruit and applying the 80/20 (Pareto) principle to Cyberpunk 2077 "as-is" in its current state with all the bugs and lack of features, what do you guys think if push came to shove and CDPR had to work down a prioritized list what would you fix/implement first and foremost?
To me, bug fixes are a given and foregone conclusion so I won't even list them, but more specifically in terms of adding (or in some cases adding back promised features that were removed etc) features goes... this is what I have so far:
1) Bring back customizations (even if only for the PC and/or only for the PC initially) such as car, weapons, apartment and character customizations... In a game like Cyberpunk, the character, his tools, the car and his apartment(s) are central core to the game... and although there are some limited character customizations they are by no means what was promised or initially illuded to in the beginning...
2) Implement a real AI for NPC driving, and fix the cop chases, add in car chases, in other words the current non-existent NPC driving AI in which all cars are basically driving down a linear static invisible-"rail" is not good enough. GTA III from two decades ago had better technology than this, heck Midtown Madness (the original) had more realistic AI cop chases! How is it CDPR took 7 million in funds from the Polish government/EU for developing AI in its Cyberpunk game and we get this empty shell of a mess? I'm not asking for Cyberpunk to be another GTA game, but having a baseline minimum of NPC driving AI (even basic "AI") is a bare essential requirement for a game in a genre such as this!
It is totally immersion breaking when I'm walking down the street or crossing the street and constantly get hit and knocked to the ground by NPC cars because they lack the bare minimum "AI" driving to slow down, to swerve or to try to go around me... the fact is 100% of the time they are following a linear scripted 'rail' system and do not even hit the brakes or try to do anything at all... And to make matters worse, I've seen on dozens of occasions in which two oncoming cars making left turns don't have enough clearance to pass (because the rails obviously didn't have enough clearance etc) and they would just sit there for all eternity at the intersection until I looked away and then when I looked back they both disappeared into thin air! Absolutely no open-world game in 2020 should be so aweful like this!
The Cop system is the same way, the main reason the cop system is so lacking is because the game currently doesn't have NPC AI driving...
Seriously for the funds the Poland government gave to CDPR for developing AI in games, I would have expected something like this:
Train Self-Driving Cars Using GTA V
The DeepDrive repurposed GTA V as a self-driving car simulator, and now it's open source.
GTA V + Universe
The Universe integration with Grand Theft Auto V, built and maintained by Craig Quiter's DeepDrive project, is now open-source. To use it, you'll just need a purchased copy of GTA V, and then your Universe agent will be able to start driving a car around the streets of a high-fidelity virtual world.
But at the very least, there is no excuse in 2020 for a supposedly game of the decade open-world to have no NPC driving AI!
3) Bring back the ride-able train system and implement some sort of automated air-taxi system that can autofly the player point to point from anywhere in the map. While quick travel can be convinent, there is no excuse in 2020 to force the user to use loading screens... Bring back the train ride system as originally showcased/pitched and also implement some air-taxi system... An automated air-taxi system would fit right in in the Cyberpunk world of 2077, and being point to point it would both be faster than the train system (since you don't have to walk to "the last mile" to a terminal and it would be more direct pathing than a train rail system) and give the player the oppurtunity to see the city from a height and perspective that afforded to him on foot or even by the lower altitude train rail/system heights... Having both a working train and airtaxi system would reduce the need for Quick travel and the immersion breaking loading screens, as well as it would help highlight and emphasis the much bragged about 'verticality' aspect of NightCity... its one thing to see the tall buildings on foot from the perspective of the ground, but something else altogether to be able to arbitrarily fly from any point on the map to any other point in the city and view the scenery of the flights..
4) Multiple apartments, more building lobbys, skyscraper observationn decks...: giving the player the ability to own multiple apartments throughout the city or at least the ability to move into different apartments as part of upgrading in gamelife is a nobrainer. But in addition to that, please add in some 'observation decks' to some of the taller skyscraper buildings in NightCity so that the player can visit these decks and see NightCity from that high vantage point perspective... Also, most of the buildings are not enter-able in NightCity... I understand even with procedural magic (see games like Space Engine, No Man's Sky, etc) its not feasible to make every room of every floor of every building come to life, but at a bare minimum CDPR should make more of the major buildings in NightCity have a base interior in the form of a first floor lobby... in some instances having a lobby that has working doors on more than one side of the building means the player can use it as a shortcut to get to another street without having to go or traverse the long way... in addition adding basic first floor lobbys to more of the main buildings paves the way for in the future in DLC and other situations to implement other floors of the buildings, after all its the lobby elevators in the main lobby that provides the means for players to access other floors of the building.. this all ties in which having more observationn decks and other potentially interesting applications... for example I'd like to be able to swim in an open outdoor swimming pool with clear glass that hangs from a tall skyscraper and look at beautiful women in the pool as they appear suspended high above in NightCity with the busy city below them... this would give raytracing a deeper purpose...
5) Being able to have a job, work a career path, and earn money (with the player having a bank account in the game and an economy in NightCity), and the 'office/desk' being another quasi-apartment type of abode in which the player can customize, and can switch between (change jobs), and can fast foward time (just like sleeping in bed fast forwards time)... Sleep takes up 1/3 of all our lives, and in Cyberpunk there is an apartment bed in which we sleep and when we do sleep it fast-forwards for approximately eight hours skipping to the morning... Implement something like this for the "work" system... so a player has a corporate job in some tall skyrise somewhere... well if CDPR implemented more building lobbys and lobby elevators (see #4 above) this would make it easier to also implement select floors of a particular skyscraper building to give the player access to these floors in which different companies rent these out as office space... so the user can report to work every morning and arrive at his/her office/desk, the player can customize his own office/desk, and then when he is ready to go to work hit the "work" button and it fast forwards eight hours and becomes five oclock and then he can exit the building and go party or go roam the city or otherwise go home and netflix and chill in his apartment until the next day... rinse and repeat and every two weeks he gets a paycheck and money deposited in his bank account... if he wishes to make more money he can use the computer in his apartment to search and apply for higher paying jobs, he can take college course or online courses to advantage his knowledge and skills to improve his upwards mobility in his career, in life, on the job... or even change careers and get jobs in new industries altogether... Make money mean something in the game, so that if he loses his job he might have to downsize to a lesser apartment and sell some of his cars and toys to make ends meet... This means there should be a rent system, and also the player must eat/drink food to stay alive and these also cost money. On the macroeconomic level implement some form of economy in Nightcity... so say there is a downturn in the economy, then certain companies might be forced to layoff, and that would trickle down and effect the ability of the player to sustain his current standard of living if he got fired from his job in a layoff and/or lost all his money in the crashed stock market etc... Basically add in more emergent gameplay that affects at a high level the interactions between different systems in a scale invariant way such that it retains a broader permanence...
6) Apparently CDPR already broke even shortly after launch and recouped the entire costs... So release an open SDK and welcome the modding community... in fact I would say open source your Red engine under a certain agreeable license and to that extent that you can, open source and/or public domain as much of the Cyperbunk 2077 assets as possible to help aid and assists the community in more advanced and robust bugfix, troubleshooting and modding/enchancements of this game. This wouldn't really affect your total sales so do it for the community good will that you would stand to gain from this.
7) Add a in-game settings mini-overlay to quickly adjust RTX/DLSS/daynight cycles without going to the menus... Take a page from Micrsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and implement a settings overlay in the game itself... A lot of people are playing around with turning Ray-tracing on/off and tweaking DLSS, and each time they have to hit settings, go to the video/graphis section, etc etc... in Microsoft Flight Simulator there is an in-game menu bar that has a miniwindow that directly allows changing settings on the fly, for example I can drag a slider while in the game and have it in real time change from day to night and see the entire cycle... something like this in NightCity would be helpful espeically when in camera mode... and the ability to quickly adjust ray tracing and dlss settings without going to the settings menu would be a big plus...
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