Insider info from CDPR - Development timline (TW2 - CP2077)

[NevaEilhart]

Indeed with the game now in our hands, I can see the 1st person perspective adds quite a lot of immersion to the whole experience (honestly I never had any doubt about this) but also makes this game stand out from the other crowd of well known open world shooter out in the market. So I am quite happy that they make this decision at the end, whatever time it took to reach it the end result justifies it. As you said most of the dev time was probably spent in tech and building expertise on 1st person gameplay prototypes with little time for iterating on the new systems.

I had doubts because I find 1st person games to be too responsive and fast paced to be enjoyed as a slow burning RPG like the Witcher is. That was mostly my concern. Plus the fact they had very poor gameplay showcases in my opinion (badly edited, couldn't focus on one aspect but kept jumping on different elements too quickly in their dive in videos - it was very confusing to watch. Now thinking about it I guess it also shows they were confused about how to market it).

I'm glad I eventually found the same pacing and mechanics as the Witcher in Cyberpunk though. And now with enough support and patience, they'll polish and improve the whole thing. Nothing in this world is either entirely perfect or bad. I just wish, despite all the flaws the game has, the bad buzz wouldn't prevent people from actually finding that there are some really genius moments in this game, especialy considering the supporting cast of characters.

And I also fear this bad buzz will end up back firing in a few years, with less AAA games actually taking risks to launch up new franchises with ambitious projects, but ending up milking the same game over and over with just a bit of new elements here and there. We could have had a Witcher 4 with Ciri and microtransations instead of Cyberpunk. I'd take Cyberpunk over a milked Witcher 4 everyday, no matter what's missing / bugged. Risk, even when ending in failure, should always be rewarded in art industries.

 

[Force58]

Shocking! /end sarcasm

Let's check the boxes ... developers work long 10+ hours per day ... work weekends ... no overtime pay ... cuts to project scope ... high turnover - cut the experienced (expensive) programmers in favor of young (cheap) ambitious talent ... poor project management ... lack of testing ... financial pressure to release prematurely ... releasing software early with known bugs. ... yawn ...

I've been developing software (business applications, not games) for over 20 years, at small start-ups to big multi-national corporations, and this could describe practically every single project I've ever been a part of. There is nothing shocking or unusual about anything that's described here. This is how the sausage is made. The only difference is good companies/people will eventually make it right, bad companies won't - we will see where CDPR ends up ...

If you've been developing software in that kind of environment for that long and it's norm, then you've worked for some really, really bad companies. I'm retired now, but I was a COTR for the government prior to that. We had companies develop software that was to be deployed overseas where they wouldn't have access to it for months on end, sometimes longer. It had to work out of the gate as there was no patching whenever they felt the whim. With the proper management and pre-release testing that can and is done every single day.

I realize these are 2 completely different kinds of software, but the model for gaming development has eroded so much over the years gamers have become accustomed to buying it ahead of time due to hype and then expecting it be crap at launch. It won't stop until we, the consumer, stops buying games ahead of launch to wait and see what state it's in first. I doubt that'll happen as we're programmed in our brains to react to the hype.

The norm now-a-days needs to stop.

Game companies

 

[Starchs]

Part 2