Building a Foundation, not Witcher 4 (in Space)
Hi Devs and Dev Leaders!
I have recently acquired a copy of The Witcher 3 (as you've said, PR and Marketing takes extraordinary amounts of money and is even then not sufficiently successful to reach long-time gamers like myself), and the game was so good that it made Skyrim bad, and really shown it for the reaching-for-the-middle-ground, minecraft-like, sims-like barebones, unoffensive experience that it was. In fact the Witcher 3 was so good, it is a historic game which will go down in history books (or if it doesn't, it _should_) on par with Zelda as a historic level of achievment in gaming. (Also the writing was some of the best since LOTR, and much better than George RR Martin who is an over-rated depressed hack)
But my comment is about a podcast I heard Sir Marcin Iwinski speak about Cyberpunk 2077 on, on Gamespot (http://www.gamespot.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-dev-it-must-be-fking-great/1100-6435781/)
Here he says that the game "must be f-ing great" and in conjunction with the news that more people are working on Cyberpunk 2077 than have ever worked on Witcher 3, I must ask you devs to not think or expect that you are making the Witcher 4.
Because if you had the foundation of 2 (or 3) previous games, each of which provided an even more refined experience, you could absolutely expect a level of width (rather than depth) that would have come with the Witcher 4 if you chose to do it.
You are now in completely uncharted territory, and need to ensure that you build a strong foundation, rather than a finished product. The game does not even need to be that great, but it needs to be able to support the great game that will be built with the 2nd iteration and 3d iterations (since in some ways, the Witcher 3 and 2 were just updated versions of The Witcher 1)
Rome was not built in a day, and if you jump from step 0 and 1 immediately to step 5, you may find that the final product will be superficially awesome, but fundamentally lacking.
Hey, having said that, is that what happened to Ubisoft? They followed the natural route of progression with Assassin's Creed, but forgot where they came from and how they got there and thought "hey, let's assume that Far Cry an Watch Dogs are at the exact same point as Assassin's Creed and let us just continue on from there" and they gave us crappy and empty derivative games as a result, because they did not do the necessary exploration and colonisation before building something great on top of that foundation, they just sort of stuck a sticker and a pretty picture on a vaccuum and the gamers and the devs too (eventually) realised that their effort was lacklustre.
You do not and should not seek to build the Witcher 4 with Cyberpunk 2077 but the Witcher 1, since that is from where you are starting. Now obviously it can be a lot better than your Witcher 1 was for obvious reasons that the Witcher 1 wasn't very good at the time, with all due respect (It was promising, not AAA or AA even), but all the same - you need to build a foundation first, worry about steps 2 and 3 after step 1 is done. (And when you are drafting every ready and abled male over the age of 18 it makes me think you're structurally making the Witcher 4, not Cyberpunk 1 or 2)
Hi Devs and Dev Leaders!
I have recently acquired a copy of The Witcher 3 (as you've said, PR and Marketing takes extraordinary amounts of money and is even then not sufficiently successful to reach long-time gamers like myself), and the game was so good that it made Skyrim bad, and really shown it for the reaching-for-the-middle-ground, minecraft-like, sims-like barebones, unoffensive experience that it was. In fact the Witcher 3 was so good, it is a historic game which will go down in history books (or if it doesn't, it _should_) on par with Zelda as a historic level of achievment in gaming. (Also the writing was some of the best since LOTR, and much better than George RR Martin who is an over-rated depressed hack)
But my comment is about a podcast I heard Sir Marcin Iwinski speak about Cyberpunk 2077 on, on Gamespot (http://www.gamespot.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-dev-it-must-be-fking-great/1100-6435781/)
Here he says that the game "must be f-ing great" and in conjunction with the news that more people are working on Cyberpunk 2077 than have ever worked on Witcher 3, I must ask you devs to not think or expect that you are making the Witcher 4.
Because if you had the foundation of 2 (or 3) previous games, each of which provided an even more refined experience, you could absolutely expect a level of width (rather than depth) that would have come with the Witcher 4 if you chose to do it.
You are now in completely uncharted territory, and need to ensure that you build a strong foundation, rather than a finished product. The game does not even need to be that great, but it needs to be able to support the great game that will be built with the 2nd iteration and 3d iterations (since in some ways, the Witcher 3 and 2 were just updated versions of The Witcher 1)
Rome was not built in a day, and if you jump from step 0 and 1 immediately to step 5, you may find that the final product will be superficially awesome, but fundamentally lacking.
Hey, having said that, is that what happened to Ubisoft? They followed the natural route of progression with Assassin's Creed, but forgot where they came from and how they got there and thought "hey, let's assume that Far Cry an Watch Dogs are at the exact same point as Assassin's Creed and let us just continue on from there" and they gave us crappy and empty derivative games as a result, because they did not do the necessary exploration and colonisation before building something great on top of that foundation, they just sort of stuck a sticker and a pretty picture on a vaccuum and the gamers and the devs too (eventually) realised that their effort was lacklustre.
You do not and should not seek to build the Witcher 4 with Cyberpunk 2077 but the Witcher 1, since that is from where you are starting. Now obviously it can be a lot better than your Witcher 1 was for obvious reasons that the Witcher 1 wasn't very good at the time, with all due respect (It was promising, not AAA or AA even), but all the same - you need to build a foundation first, worry about steps 2 and 3 after step 1 is done. (And when you are drafting every ready and abled male over the age of 18 it makes me think you're structurally making the Witcher 4, not Cyberpunk 1 or 2)
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It's all about not jumping steps. With a team that built one of the biggest games in the entire genre, CDPR has a powerful resource, but it needs to have the nimble-ness of a small-to-medium sized studio to settle into what works and only then let the hordes of programmers and designers descend on the universe, with clear-cut direction, and what's more important, a "formula" (in the sense of a system or a set of fundamentals) which works.