"ARE YOU MODDER? TELL US IT SHOULD BE ON THE NEW REDKIT FOR CYBERPUNK 2077"
Have been wondering for a while now about something.
Throughout my many playthroughs, I am fairly convinced that the state of the game slowly but surely deteriorates during gameplay, up to a point where it spontaneously Crashes To Desktop. When you reload a game save before that happens, the game starts smooth again. Reloading a game save seems to have a counteracting affect on the deterioration process.
What I was wondering about is, as the game seemingly cannot so much recuperate in any, is it not a good idea to let the game reload the last autosave, when it "feels" that it's imminent to CTD?
Can it not be opted in the Options screen to reload the game instead of crashing to desktop?
What do you think contributes to that deterioration? I'm playing on Ps4 pro, SSD and I feel that a lot.
It is my impression that from act 1 to 2 it deteriorates a lot as the city opens up but then I feel it progressively as you said.
Amount of Items in inventory I think it influences, but it is the progression of the save files themselves right? I try to delete all the autosaves and quicksaves often (but I also forget this a lot) and always manually save on an empty slot. Also skip time 24 hours in "safe" environments like Vs apartment...
Do you know other factors that might influence this degradation?
On Ps4 it translates to fps drops and other bugs happening more, not just game crashes.
By and large this is normally a result of the sheer number of scripts that a player has running simultaneously. Things like hunger, active skills, temporary buffs, long-term / repeating quests, gear degradation or skills, etc. are normally handled via these scripts. Early on in things like RPGs, there will be very few of these running. As the player progresses through the game, acquiring new and more complex weapons and armor, accessing new active and passive abilities (some of which will stack or be augmented by other abilities or gear when active), activate new areas with random encounters that are activated with a timer, etc., etc., etc...
...all of these things are added as data to the save state of the player's game. When you load a game, the further and further along you are, the more and more of these scripts will need to be written into the RAM and remain running for the game to load. This then makes those RAM addresses unavailable for other functions, which can and will create slowdown at times, as some of those things will need to be swapped out of RAM and then back in to make sure
everything the game needs is there.
On top of that, all of these processors require CPU cycles, meaning that the load on the CPU can and will increase a bit as players move through a big game. More stuff going on simultaneously = more CPU and RAM being used simultaneously.
A lot of it, if you're seeing a very
noticeable decrease in performance, may be due to playstyle. "Active inventory" is a common culprit for this sort of performance degradation (especially responsiveness in menus and such). If you have a very full inventory, dumping your entire inventory into a stash or simply dropping it on the ground and picking it back up can affect this positively (resetting individual item IDs to much smaller values).
At other times, it's simply conflicts in the code. While it can happen as a form of bug, a much more common way of this happening is players that may attempt to use some form of exploit to, say, infinitely craft or create duplicate items. Even though the exploit may work, if it is unintended game functionality, it often leaves resident script strings that just run endlessly from that point forward. (It was never intended for players to do that sort of thing, and the engine doesn't necessarily know how to deal with it.)
And the last possibility is just plain old bugs. A huge majority of these will likely be the result of very unique glitches that occur when a single playthrough (read: save file) is used over the course of multiple game updates. Every time the core functionality changes, and the game is loaded and re-saved, the higher the probability becomes that the save-state creates conflicting data. It's not uncommon for some old script, one no longer being used by the game, to simply get stuck in the save-state and run endlessly -- or even worse --
duplicated every time the game loads. Hence, you may not see the slowdown if you begin a new game and play up to that point again using the latest version. (This is similar to what happens when a game is updated with mods running, and the older mods create a conflict with the newer game version.)
The end result is, it's hard to say and probably even harder to recreate. Last-gen consoles and lower-end PCs are the most likely to suffer from this, as they may lack the hardware specs to simply "brute force" right through the issues. But I've personally had it happen even on wildly high-end hardware. Most often, if it's really bad (like, unplayable levels of bad), is to kiss that playthrough goodbye, uninstall, reinstall, and start a brand new playthrough. (I've had installations of both Skyrim and Fallout 3 that been stutter-fests that nothing could save...and then the next playthrough is buttery smooth from beginning to end after a restart / reinstallation.)
If I were to guess, I'd say the graphics card getting (too) hot, as maybe its ideal operating temperature is not maintained. But really don't know. The only thing I know is that Cyberpunk is by no means the only game that experiences this. Have played other games that equally gradually deteriorate to a worsened state until it CTD.
This is also a very good point. Be sure that your PC or console has about 4 inches on all sides to breathe freely. (I had a laptop that would stutter and eventually throttle within about an hour of beginning play on it. I kid you not: the solution was bottle caps. Four plastic bottle caps that I used to prop it up so that it had more breathing room for the underside's intake. With that, I got smooth sailing for as long as I wanted to play.)