Interactive Scene System

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Of all the mechanics that we have heard about for Cyberpunk 2077, the one that seems most innovative and exciting to me is the "interactive scene system." To really understand it, you have to start by understanding conceptually where "scenes" fit into the game design process. As explained by Patrick Mills in an interview with metro UK: "So, generally the way that it works is that quest design… the way I like to think about quest design is that [quest designers] are in control of the minute-to-minute story for our areas. I have a two-hour chunk of the game and I coordinate with the story team that handles the dialogue writing and helps ensure that the characterization remains consistent across the whole game. They’re also very heavily involved in the main story and sometimes in linking the side quests together. And then I work with level designers and gameplay designers and environment artists to build the areas and make sure that they’re fun. And then I also work with cinematic designers to make sure that the second-to-second activity, specifically in scenes when you’re talking to people, is engaging and interesting and keeps the visual interest as well."

So managing the individual scenes is a key component to how CDPR is designing the narrative of Cyberpunk 2077, and they're definitely evolving this system from how it's been done in the past. Again, Patrick Mills to metro: "One of the things that I think is most different between [Cyberpunk 2077] and Witcher 3… we consider dialogue and scenes and all of that to be gameplay. Because it is, right? You’re making decisions, you’re making choices, you’re interacting with the world. But we want that to be more seamless than it was in Witcher 3, or it is in most games. You walk into a conversation and suddenly the camera is its own camera and you’re making choices. We wanted to be a little bit more fluid and a little bit more seamless."

One of the people in charge of how these scenes work is Lead Cinematic Animator Maciej Pietras. “From my perspective, we’re trying to blend cinematics and gameplay. The way it works is that since we’re creating a first-person perspective open-world RPG we want to keep the player as immersed in the game as possible. We’re using the directive scene system as a way of pulling you into this world and keeping you in the scenes.” Pietras to vg247 "[W]hat we do is tell a story in an open world that is also an RPG. At the end of the day, [it] is still a heavily narrative driven game, and just because of that we just redefine how we approach 'Cinematic-ness'. How we tackled story in The Witcher, of course, is we utilize the camera work; we worked with editing, character composition, with framing and editing very much as a cornerstone of the dialogue and cutscenes in The Witcher. For Cyberpunk what we are doing is using the open world and RPG experience, splashing them together and wrapping them in this interactive scene system overcoat.

So, because of that overcoat, what we think about storytelling and how to create this narrative experience always involves thinking about how the player will experience that from the first-person perspective. One of the ways we think about designing is around the experience of cinematic moments. For example, we are just talking right now, you’re sitting here and let’s say I am the player. So I, as a player, would Point at your bag and ask you why is it grey and you could react to that or not, because you might not be interested, or you may just nod and wonder why we are talking about your bag.

This is kind of how we approach this cinematic storytelling and transforming the experience with it; thinking that this is a living breathing world. The NPC’s set in that world are fully fleshed out characters [and] not just templates, because we approach design like that. It means that you somehow got here. You’re here, you’re doing your job, you’re working, and I approach you and we have a discussion. The outcome is mostly dependent on the player choice. I could pull out the gun and the conversation will go in a very different direction. This example outlines how we think about cinematics and narrative content. So obviously it’s a huge challenge when compared to The Witcher. It’s an open world, one big city that you can explore. There are no loading screens, except for fast travel, and because of that, we have to keep the player as immersed and focus on what’s happening as possible." Pietras to cg magazine

There are examples of how it works in the demo. "In the demo you can see some examples of that, with Royce in the deal, you could give him a chip with the money on it. You can choose to tell him that it has a virus — or not. So at that moment, you’ve either aligned yourself to the cyberpsycho gang or if you don’t say anything at all, you’ll probably get a better standing with the megacorporation. It’s not a black or white choice, it’s more of a grey one — but those choices matter." Pietras to Fandom "It’s not a separate cut scene" reiterated Patrick Mills to metro UK, "when you are in the Maelstrom area and you’re walking away from those guys that’s all still a scene, it’s all still happening as a scene. It’s tightly choreographed with all those people moving around and all of that. And stuff like that is actually really difficult."

It's especially difficult because of the open world nature of Cyberpunk 2077. "OK, if you’re gonna walk to the end of this area here we’re gonna capture that you’re walking there and we’re gonna know to trigger these guys to walk around the corner. And doing that across a big open world… like, if you’re doing that and it’s a linear game it’s much easier to do because you know that the player’s going to be coming from that direction ... Setting it up in an open world game is a lot more work, because you have to anticipate all sorts of things. And yes, obviously it is a demo so it’s very tightly controlled. But you can actually play that demo now, it’s real. Even if you look at Witcher 3 in terms of how the community acts in that, you can see some of the beginnings of what we want to do here. All those characters, you go to a village and it starts to rain and everybody runs and stands underneath a tree or whatever. And at night everybody goes to bed and they all know which bed is theirs. And during the day they go to work. And we want to do the same thing here but on a much larger scale." Mills to metro UK

This of course has a lot of consequences for how the game will play out from minute to minute, since all conversations will have to be thought of as "scenes." Understandably, this probably means that many of the persons we see milling about in Night City wont have deep dialogue trees to explore. "Obviously, when you encounter anyone in the street — not even in the game — most of the people won’t talk to you, no matter how much you bug them. If you bug them a lot, they’ll probably run away scared, or call the police.

In a certain way, we’re aiming to recreate that. It’s a natural common-sense approach. You’ll be able to talk to a certain amount of NPCs and people with which you have interactions are obviously connected to the story itself of the game — as this is the narrative, story-driven [type of] experience that we are proud of making.

Because we control those situations we know that “oh, this guy has to have a certain backstory,” he’s selling weapons but he’s depressed because of X, Y, and Z etc. You may pass him by and know he’s a vendor, but until you start a conversation with him, you might not know that he has something for you to do. Because in this game you’re playing as V, a cyberpunk, and as a mercenary you will get different jobs … I can’t get into spoilers, but like in the demo certain jobs open the door for V to pursue a career as a cyberpunk further." Pietras to Fandom

So yeah, it sounds different than anything I've ever heard of in a cRPG (or really any video game) before. So what do you think about it?
 
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Sild

Ex-moderator
I think they're trying to build something special, and this is but one of the way they chose to go about doing it.

But I also think it's hard, not only for the reasons they mentioned - which were mainly technical - but for another reason that ties in with their choice of perspective.

FPP is perfect for something like this, but it can also backfire if the acting, facial animation and flow of the scene is not done properly. Being "closer" to the action, being one of the interlocutors like the game wants you to be instead of just being in control of what your "pupet" sais and does, WILL make all of those stand out much more than otherwise.

The more they try to suck you in the higher the chance it will backfire. It's just how communication happens at a conscious and subconscious level. We process everything from words to tone, body language, subtle facial gestures... All of it contributes, heck, the information exchanged solely through spoken words is on the lower end of the overall exchange in a face to face conversation.

So, yea, that much harder to do it properly, genuinely, immersively?
 
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This was the best innovation (probably the only real one) shown in the demo. It looks so interactive, all those animations... extremely immersive and something that made me say "ok, FPP is fine, they're forgiven for the lack of TPP". At the same time it increased the turn off when I saw the lack of animations when out of dialogues (picking items/weapons up, interacting with numeric keypad in V's apartment or in the elevator to select the floor).
There's this inconsistency in animations between dialogue and "free-roam" which will be a pity if not improved in the final game. I don't think it's a huge work to implement few animations after a big company like CDPR has made this brand new interactive scene system.

This is an exemple of what I'm talking about:


1 second for each animation when picking items or weapons up, you don't need anything too fancy (such as in RDR2 which I love, but that's a lot of work behind that, probably too much for anyone else).
 
I think this is very interesting and that will really change how people play games and the way people take in games.
 
FPP is perfect for something like this, but it can also backfire if the acting, facial animation and flow of the scene is not done properly. Being "closer" to the action, being one of the interlocutors like the game wants you to be instead of just being in control of what your "pupet" sais and does, WILL make all of those stand out much more than otherwise.
I dunno, it looked pretty good in the demo, even with lesser characters.
At the same time it increased the turn off when I saw the lack of animations when out of dialogues (picking items/weapons up, interacting with numeric keypad in V's apartment or in the elevator to select the floor).
Hopefully they will add animations for pushing buttons, picking up guns, and putting on clothes ... but we shall see. The last one would be the most difficult.
 

Sild

Ex-moderator
I dunno, it looked pretty good in the demo, even with lesser characters.

Aye, but the demo, as they said, was a tightly controlled environment for the purpose of showing stuff off. That said, i would agree that so far it's pretty spot on.
 
putting on clothes ... but we shall see. The last one would be the most difficult.
yeah, for clothes it's impossible, I'm not asking for the moon, like I'm not asking for the shooting to be as good as a real FPS (what was shown looked good enough though, maybe a little more recoil should be added, but it's their first "FPS", we can forgive them) or driving as good as a racing game.

Anyway, fingers crossed. They have the technology and the skills, let's see if they have the will too.
 
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Hey,
I do not really care, but I guess that I prefer TPP for better orientation.

But whatever, I think that as TPP and FPP are camera definitions, they bring limitations to what you can do with the game mechanics. If the game is designed to be FPP, so be it :)
 
Thank you Rawls! I feel like this is one of the biggest highlight of the game that not enough people are talking about. I have been trying some famous first person games lately and none of them do it to this extent (someone can correct me if i am wrong). Closest to this would be deus ex series series where they try to blend animations with free camera control but most of the time Adam is locked into a certain position and the dialogue choices are done in a traditional 3rd person face to face scene.

The animation quality and transition we saw in Cyberpunk demo was really good, specially considering that it's an RPG where it can go multiple ways. Also i am curious about how much freedom players will have during these scenes and how the game world will react to it. Because i am assuming that in some of these interactive scenes where you are not stuck in a spot, you are free to move however you please.

For example, just in the first mission.

- What if V decides to not bring the body of Sandra outside for Trauma Team and just stand inside, will the Trauma Team still reach there in time or does the world stop until we reach the open area.

- What if V doesn't move five steps back and decides to move forward when threatened by Trauma Team?

Maybe i am reading too much into this but i am really curious in knowing how these scenes exactly work.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Also i have to disagree about adding animations for trivial stuffs in the game. There is a good reason that even series like Metro that excels in first person animation doesn't have animations for every action i.e picking loot from enemies that contain weapons, ammo, knives, gas refills. It's because they are an annoyance, specially in games like Cyberpunk where i am assuming we are going to spend a decent amount of time looting enemies.

Even a one second animation of your player constantly ducking to pick up items can become irritating. It's less of whether devs can do it and more of that they avoid it for a good reason. RDR2 for all of it's praises is one of the worst offender just for this reason. CDPR don't really need to be bound by same principles in every aspect of the game just because they used the word immersion to describe few of their design choices.

The reason i am so sceptic about having animation for everything is because RDR2 threw player convenience out of the window for full on realism and i don't want that to be the case here. If they can find a good way of having it without making it an annoyance then we will see.. But i don't see how wearing clothes or opening a sliding door that has dial-pad can be done quickly without it looking completely wrong (assuming that V doesn't wear only single type of clothing and the game has more than one type of door).
 
- What if V decides to not bring the body of Sandra outside for Trauma Team and just stand inside, will the Trauma Team still reach there in time or does the world stop until we reach the open area.

- What if V doesn't move five steps back and decides to move forward when threatened by Trauma Team?
Absolutely these are the types of things that are super interesting when you are able to act within the scene, and not just choose dialogue. What are the consequences?

The reason i am so sceptic about having animation for everything is because RDR2 threw player convenience out of the window for full on realism and i don't want that to be the case here.
Yeah, I know this is a preference thing, but I loved seeing it all in RDR2. Then again, I also normally turn off almost all of the HUD & minimap and refuse to fast travel unless it's narratively appropriate. So I'm very much a realism over convenience kinda player. Nothing wrong with the other way at all, and I wont really be upset if there aren't the additional animations ... I would just prefer they be there.
 
I can't really say right now.

It certainly looks good on paper, but it's probably a nightmare to implement thoroughly throughout the multitude of cut-scenes.

My expectations, at this point, would be a few tightly choreographed scenes scattered around that will offer unexpected choices and outcomes through that type of interactivity. Those might just be enough to call the decision a success and set a healthy precedent for future developments in this direction. Expecting any more would be naive, at this moment, for me.

It's definitely admirable that they strive for more reactivity in their games through things like changing the direction of a conversation by pulling out a gun (or maybe starting one by holstering it?), it's an endeavour i fully support.
 
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I dunno, it looked pretty good in the demo, even with lesser characters.

Hopefully they will add animations for pushing buttons, picking up guns, and putting on clothes ... but we shall see. The last one would be the most difficult.

Agreed on both counts.

Although, I did notice Royce had a slight facial bug during the "up close" conversation (I.E. he has a gun against your head). After saying you "positively reek of Militech," you can see his face snap back to the angry expression and it's a bit unnatural.

Hopefully minor details like that are ironed out. It's fair to say that is probably just a result of the game being early, so I don't want to pick it apart too much.

The "other animations" stuff is actually very important for me... FPP is fine, but if immersion is your focus, you need to go all the way. Thief 2014 did it (despite how garbage that game was) in an extremely smooth way, and that's almost 5 years old now.

It doesn't even have to be super accurate stuff. Just a "smack button with fist" would suffice in many cases, and simply having the character's hand extend towards the gun would be better than it disappearing and re-appearing in your inventory.

Re-usable animations, in other words.
 
The "other animations" stuff is actually very important for me... FPP is fine, but if immersion is your focus, you need to go all the way. Thief 2014 did it (despite how garbage that game was) in an extremely smooth way, and that's almost 5 years old now.

It doesn't even have to be super accurate stuff. Just a "smack button with fist" would suffice in many cases, and simply having the character's hand extend towards the gun would be better than it disappearing and re-appearing in your inventory.

Re-usable animations, in other words.
yep.

If they want to do things right, when selecting a specific code they could use V's finger as a pointer to select numbers (instead of the "pointer" itself) without need of making the process longer, but we'll see. I'm fine with something easy as doom 2018 for elevators if they are lazy. Better than feeling like a floating camera for sure.

Of course if they go for a looter shooter (or fallout 4) approach were you go around collecting all the junk you find every 2 seconds, than I agree that animations would be annoying, but in that case the lack of animations would be just a minor problem for me.
 
I appreciate the effort there. The feature is certainly one of the better ones in the demo.

But one thing that caught my eye was that the "extra options", that I had assumed were there to be discovered, were already visible every time dialog started, and simply required panning the camera a bit (or pressing Y... not sure about that, but Y was the designated key for them) to get them highlighted for activation.

I don't quite see the point there, especially in Royce's case when the gun to be grabbed is in V's face already and Royce was the guy she was talking to already (unlike the guard with the corpo chick... though even there it was visible from the start).

I mean... Wouldn't these moments be more... exhilarating (for the lack of a better word), if you didn't know the options were there beforehand?

And yeah, more obvious harping about skillchecks in dialog....
 
I can't wait to see how this all comes together. I think they are aiming for a pretty lofty goal, and if they hit it the end result will be amazing. I favor a deliberate environment when it comes to interacting with the world in a game so I am all for taking a little bit for animations when performing various actions, and think doing so would continue the level of detail they are describing with the dynamic scenes.
 
I appreciate the effort there. The feature is certainly one of the better ones in the demo.

But one thing that caught my eye was that the "extra options", that I had assumed were there to be discovered, were already visible every time dialog started, and simply required panning the camera a bit (or pressing Y... not sure about that, but Y was the designated key for them) to get them highlighted for activation.

I don't quite see the point there, especially in Royce's case when the gun to be grabbed is in V's face already and Royce was the guy she was talking to already (unlike the guard with the corpo chick... though even there it was visible from the start).

I mean... Wouldn't these moments be more... exhilarating (for the lack of a better word), if you didn't know the options were there beforehand?

And yeah, more obvious harping about skillchecks in dialog....
These are good points, and I'm curious what a solution might be.

In a high intensity encounter, how much time should the player have to quickly examine their surroundings for a contextual option? Too long and it might feel unnatural, too short and there's no point in having the options at all since the player will have virtually no time to access them.

EDIT: Maybe it could vary based on the situation. A more relaxed conversation in someone's apartment could give the player more time than a fast-paced action sequence... but the exact number is still tough... guess that's up to CDPR to figure out.
 
In a high intensity encounter, how much time should the player have to quickly examine their surroundings for a contextual option?

Few seconds (5 to 7 maybe). Found and extra bit? Very good! Didn't find one? It's not a game over, maybe it wasn't even there.

Although... There were no dialog timers in the demo, so it is to be assumed you can assess the situations indefinitely.


I’d propose having (finding) them at all should be based on stats, but I’m not sure what the response to that would be...
 
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Few seconds (5 to 7 maybe). Found and extra bit? Very good! Didn't find one? It's not a game over, maybe it wasn't even there.

Although... There were no dialog timers in the demo, so it is to be assumed you can assess the situations indefinitely.


I’d propose having (finding) them at all should be based on stats, but I’m not sure what the response to that would be...
I'd be fine with stuff being visible based on a Perception skill check of some sort. Could even simulate that a bit in-game - when a dialogue advances to a point where there's something you could see in the environment, maybe it will briefly flash or glint (just to catch the player's eye - after all, we're supposed to role play our character, and you don't want a discrepency between something your character can see but you, the player, can't).

In fact, I really like this idea now... It's an example of RPG systems being used to actually enhance gameplay, rather than (in some people's eyes) restrict it.
 
lack of animations when out of dialogues (picking items/weapons up, interacting with numeric keypad in V's apartment or in the elevator to select the floor).
Those things should never have animation in a 50-100 hour game...RDR2 did it and it just became annoying after 10 hours.
Ok im fine with selecting the floor animation, but picking up items? in an RPG? no way.
This isnt an overlooked aspect, but a design decision which i am totally on board with.
 
Those things should never have animation in a 50-100 hour game...RDR2 did it and it just became annoying after 10 hours. Ok im fine with selecting the floor animation, but picking up items? in an RPG? no way.

I don't think anyone is really expecting RDR2 levels of detail here. And, by the way, I never found that stuff annoying at all, so it's purely a personal preference thing, not a "this doesn't fit an RPG" thing.

Lots of games (RPGs or otherwise) have brief animations where the player reaches their hand out for something, and then the item disappears. Or brief animations for pressing a button or opening door.

The bottom line is, something is better than nothing, and you can do these things in a way that it doesn't impact gameplay to as significant a degree as it does in RDR2.
 
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