Dear CDPR! Gameplay matters!

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With Cyberpunk 2077 being delayed yet again and the team working on polishing the game I decided to make this post to remind about and emphasize on the importance of QA and gameplay testing.

The previous big game, The Witcher 3, was very good overall. But its gameplay was desperately lacking that QA attention. It’s been 5 years and many of the skills are still bugged or not working at all. The Blood and Wine DLC is great, but again, the new skills (mutations) are either bugged, not working or duplicating the existing ones from the base game. I know that, because I’ve been modding the game for all those 5 years and fixing many of those bugs that still remain.

It’s known that at CDPR you place the story and the cinematic experience above all else. But for a game it’s not enough. Games are about gameplay. And for a good gameplay having skills with proper and clear descriptions that work as intended and increase the possibilities for the player to interact with the world is mandatory. Sure, the story can be so captivating and the visuals so stunning that at first the player won’t notice the gameplay issues. But as the game progresses problems become apparent and start to detract from the experience.

Here are some examples of why attention to gameplay matters.

Let’s start with Blood and Wine and mutations. The two ultimate mutations are called Second Life and Metamorphosis respectively. The first one revives you when you die and the second one activates a random decoction with no toxicity cost. But both skills already exist in the base game: namely Undying and Side Effects. Little bit different in implementation and sure less flashy in presentation, but they essentially do the same: Undying revives the player and Side Effects activates a random potion (not a decoction, granted, but still the very same mechanic that was already present). What was wrong with those skills that even the developers have forgotten about them? Well, yes, they were certainly not among the most used ones by the players. Because both were unreliable. You could still “randomly” die with Undying (because of the damage calculation rules and some enemies dealing more than one damage type at once, so for the player it looked like the skill randomly didn’t work). And having no control over which potion or decoction is activated makes Side Effects useless – who needs Cat at a sunny day in the middle of the combat? Realizing this makes one’s enthusiasm about the new skills diminish. Because after examining all the other mutations closely more problems become apparent. Deadly Counter and Cat Eyes exist because both counterattacks and crossbows are underwhelming in the base game. Euphoria is bugged and actually gives double the bonus displayed. Furthermore, no other mutation can compete with the passive and massive boost to both attack and sign power it gives! They’re all conditional and active while Euphoria is unconditional and passive - having a big full toxicity bar is not really a condition, because that toxicity means you have boosts from potions and decoctions and you’re getting Euphoria boost on top of them for free. Just take a look at every other mutation and compare investment vs reward and the huge disparity between them and Euphoria will become apparent. How could such an oversight have happened? My guess is the lack of QA and second opinions. Because B&W mutations look like ideas that were implemented without calculations and released without testing. And in the end such an approach did hurt the game, because no matter how good the story was (and it was a very good one!) the gameplay part felt lacking, there were no real choices to make in terms of character development, no new builds and no new tactical moves.

I will finish with the example that in my opinion illustrates the need of calculations and thorough testing the best: Melt Armor skill. The skill was supposed to literally melt the armor of enemies and thus increase the damage dealt to them. It wasn’t working (and still isn’t), but the players were posting on forums how good and effective it was. Why? The answer is simple – numbers. The skill actually did literally nothing. The only enemies who wear recognizable armors (humans) are bugged and don’t have those armor abilities on them. So their armor is zero and even if the skill itself was working properly, its effect wouldn’t matter. The player did see bigger numbers on damages because of two factors. First, the players buy skills after leveling up and leveling up passively increases sign and attack power, so you deal more damage just because of the levelup itself. Second, the skill is associated with Igni sign. And it needs to be slotted to work. And when you slot a skill more often than not you have a corresponding mutagen slotted too and thus gain even more sign power. As a result, casting Igni after leveling up and buying Melt Armor gives noticeably bigger damage numbers. And this is naturally attributed to the skill by the players.

Personally I don’t like progression systems that are based on numbers. And I would prefer Cyberpunk 2077 to go “wide” instead of going “tall”. But whatever path you’ve chosen with it, please, remember that gameplay matters! Attention to skills, their descriptions, visual and audio feedback, their performance and synergies with the other skills and gameplay elements is important in the long run. Stories can be finished in dozens of hours, but the games can be played for hundreds of hours if the gameplay is done properly.
 
Hey,
I have to say I agree with most of what you said.

CP skills/perks or whatever they're called were (teased? or) discussed by journalists who got to play the game - there was some list, and many were just some random passive abilities - like +30% damage or something...

I don't know if the list is even real, complete or to be trusted, but if that's the case, that's a big chance thrown away.

Witcher 3's combat felt kinda simple, non-tactical hack&slash to me. There was no difference in fighting different enemy types. Just spam whatever attacks you like and that's pretty much it.

What was a bit cooler was the ghost from the painting from HoS expansion. Like...you couldn't kill it unless you noticed that it was linked to the paintings. Something like these investigations, preparations and figuring things out could have lifted up the combat as well as general gameplay. Especially when the game is about mutated monster killer travelling through the shades of the world.
 
Witcher 3's combat felt kinda simple, non-tactical hack&slash to me. There was no difference in fighting different enemy types. Just spam whatever attacks you like and that's pretty much it.
I played TW3 at the highest difficulty and i can tell you i HAD to use oils/decoctions/bombs to be able to deal decent damage most of the time, spamming attacks mindlessly would probably have achieved the same result but i bet it would have taken 5x the time.
That being said, combat still was kinda simple but i'm ok with that, remember that the average audience doesn't want a difficult experience like a Souls game or Kingdom Come Deliverance, they just want to play for the story and the occasional "pew pew", making the gameplay too complex would ruin their experience and i think TW3 had just the right balance.
 
I played TW3 at the highest difficulty and i can tell you i HAD to use oils/decoctions/bombs to be able to deal decent damage most of the time
Yeah, but it was because death march (or NG+) just put higher numbers to enemy stats, didn't it? In overall I think that there was linear scaling. Stats of enemy at level L = L * stats_level_1.
At least I would bet on that :)

I definitely get the "pew pew" and chill, though what I meant is that the combat felt the same repetitive hack&slash through the same game. At difficulties under death march, there wasn't really need to prepare oils, crossbow, repair swords or armour. You could just drag&drop from enemies as you went. With little points in Igni solved nearly everything.

What I meant and thought of from the trailers/gameplay was that spells are fight-turners and the equipment matters. But it doesn't so much. In most of the situations, you can just walk straight in, kill and grab everything you can and roll the way out. Like...meh

At least my opinion is that it would be much better to make player poor, useless weakling. Then you would feel the growth and that you actually accomplished something. Not like in the Novigrad quest about dumplings, when the guy promised you the catapult but gave you broken fork. You could find better sword sunk in the river :D And stuff like that...

The combat could have used more moves, to be more resourceful and impactful, maybe a bit slower to let the monsters use their howls and screams to activate some abilities and give a player some time to react to that...

It could have been awesome to e.g. use witcher senses in combat to notice something, use a silver sword to reflect moonlight, prepare traps in the location before a fight, apply potions and oils only before a fight to make it more rewarding if you are correct about a monster type, make stamina to not recharge automatically (but rather based on something?), make the sign usage limited and deciding element, make crossbow to be interesting more than just to generically spam the enemies,...

I guess what I am saying is that it's also about the design itself. You could just chill out while the combat design would be better :)
 
Yeah, but it was because death march (or NG+) just put higher numbers to enemy stats, didn't it? In overall I think that there was linear scaling. Stats of enemy at level L = L * stats_level_1.
At least I would bet on that :)

I definitely get the "pew pew" and chill, though what I meant is that the combat felt the same repetitive hack&slash through the same game. At difficulties under death march, there wasn't really need to prepare oils, crossbow, repair swords or armour. You could just drag&drop from enemies as you went. With little points in Igni solved nearly everything.

What I meant and thought of from the trailers/gameplay was that spells are fight-turners and the equipment matters. But it doesn't so much. In most of the situations, you can just walk straight in, kill and grab everything you can and roll the way out. Like...meh

At least my opinion is that it would be much better to make player poor, useless weakling. Then you would feel the growth and that you actually accomplished something. Not like in the Novigrad quest about dumplings, when the guy promised you the catapult but gave you broken fork. You could find better sword sunk in the river :D And stuff like that...

The combat could have used more moves, to be more resourceful and impactful, maybe a bit slower to let the monsters use their howls and screams to activate some abilities and give a player some time to react to that...

It could have been awesome to e.g. use witcher senses in combat to notice something, use a silver sword to reflect moonlight, prepare traps in the location before a fight, apply potions and oils only before a fight to make it more rewarding if you are correct about a monster type, make stamina to not recharge automatically (but rather based on something?), make the sign usage limited and deciding element, make crossbow to be interesting more than just to generically spam the enemies,...

I guess what I am saying is that it's also about the design itself. You could just chill out while the combat design would be better :)
I get your point, i would have loved more variety too but i also think it's hard to strike the right balance of variety/complexity so most devs go for something in the middle and "dumb it down" compared to the average consumer to reach a broader audience, all i'm saying is the difficulty selection can make up for it, even if by a small margin. You could even try some self-imposed challenges (eg. only use signs to kill enemies, or only use crossbow, or only counter-attack, etc). Sure it won't add that new level of complexity you're referring to, but keep in mind the average user wants a picture saying which button to press to walk forward, big flashy arrows pointing to his next objective, a short cinematic showing him the best approach and an npc helping him to kill stuff while he follow the instructions on screen.
TW2 you could use potions/oils only be4 the fight if i'm not mistaken, and imo it was the most difficult in the saga.
 
Good thing NG+ was mentioned, because it's yet another example of things not being tested.

Rats in the base game were supposed to deal just 1 pt of damage and for that they had infinite armor penetration, so that damage wouldn't be negated by the equipment and player stats. With NG+ levelup abilities they've essentially received a lot of direct damage and became the most fearsome enemy in the game. The exact same thing happened with Djinn throwing wood splinters around - it was supposed to barely scratch the player, but NG+ boost made them deadly. TBH, almost all the bosses in TW3 have fake levels and are manually tuned for their default level, so NG+ abilities break them in one way or the other.

Also NG+ is what reveals the problem with skills being broken and not working: you have a lot of skill points to experiment with, so you start making builds and trying to compare and this is where you notice the issues.

And if we're talking non+ Death March game, it still doesn't require the player to use all the variety of tools. I did complete it several times and also did a challenge run with just starting equipment and being underleveled. If you're playing normally, there is some challenge up to around level 10. But after that the game just snowballs because of the power bonuses. And it doesn't really matter what skills you're choosing - all that matters is passive bonuses and additional powers from links. And even without that, Quen and Igni alone are making a lot of other tools irrelevant. Casting Quen immediately removes all the bleeding/burning/poison effects you have, making corresponding potions and resistances useless. Quen also has an ability to completely block any amount of incoming damage making you virtually invulnerable. And Igni design is fundamentally wrong, because your sign power increases burn chance, duration and damage (and DoT's are enemy's max health percentage!) simultaneously. And it stunlocks. Even without investing a single point in a sign tree, just from the passive bonuses alone, you will be burning enemies left and right very soon. And this problem exists from TW1. It was never addressed.

I'm not writing this to say that TW3 is a bad game. It's a good one. But there were mistakes with the gameplay that absolutely need to be pointed at so CDPR would not repeat them with their next games. Too many praise TW3 as a masterpiece. Which creates an impression of all the systems there being flawless. So the developers might think alright, people did like our gameplay, nothing to change, we'll just do the same. And I personally don't want this to happen.

Cyberpunk can only benefit from a new type of gameplay, calculated, polished, engaging.
 
Congratulations, Cyberpunk 2077 will be heading in the opposite direction now - balanced, +10% here for one move, +5% there for the other, direction.
 
Congratulations, Cyberpunk 2077 will be heading in the opposite direction now - balanced, +10% here for one move, +5% there for the other, direction.

Hmm, whatcha mean? Interesting and balanced aren't mutually exclusive. You can have both. The inverse is true too. Uninteresting and unbalanced aren't mutually exclusive either. You can have both of those too.

In any case, I'm sure everyone would agree having certain things being bugged, others sub-par, others good and others still over-the-top overpowered doesn't lend itself to interesting game play with a high amount of variety. It comes off as extremely reasonable to present concerns about the successor of a very well received game maintaining the status quo of questionable game play, in some regard anyway, as being acceptable.

The good news is, as with all things, there may be a silver lining. I do not believe the Gwent balance team is responsible for tuning the CP game play. Additionally, odds are abilities aren't going to routinely change once they've been designed and implemented. So playing round robin with the overpowered thing of the month need not apply. Let's see how many cryptic, entirely unnecessary burns we can put in one paragraph :). <- Joking/poking fun of course, please don't beat me.
 
I've always said TW3's main problem was the progression system and the math along with it and I'll always be convinced about it.

It's always been my main feedback over the last 2 years but the fact I see tons of +X% in CP77 makes me fear it will have the same exact problem.

(Also, all of this brings to immersion-breaking situations over and over)
 
Well,
the percentual scaling may be a surprisingly good way to go, especially in an open world:
- If you meet NPC with a much higher level then you are, it can still suck at some skill as you do
- you are theoretically guaranteed that player won't under/over damage enemies on about the same level (and won't e.g. one-shot them)
- it makes it worth it to invest the points and yet it keeps the growth controlled/balanced
- separates the concepts of level and equipment (under-levelled enemies can still one-shot you if they have cannon)
- ...
 

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As long as gameplay doesn't lack a punch and a good feedback I'm ok with it. The moment I see I'm hitting manequins or sponges with no reaction you can have all the stats and depth you want...it goes down the drain. Variety with cyber implants and possibilities are what you need in case of "stats" and focusing on a system to create "builds" (I hate this term, I prefer "play styles"). To my understanding the character gets better in those areas the player uses the most, and that's how it should be. The combat in Witcher 3 was all theory and 0 feedback for me. I got bored right away.
 
Congratulations, Cyberpunk 2077 will be heading in the opposite direction now - balanced, +10% here for one move, +5% there for the other, direction.

Yup, more often than not balanced in simple player games is boring, I personally do prefer when everything looks overpowered even when some things are less overpowered that some other things.
 
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