Is a Cyberpunk sandbox possible?

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Guest 3847602

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Don't hate GTA, I love it in fact, I'm just bored and mildly annoyed with stupid comparisons with Cyberpunk:
GTA is the series where 95% of the missions are outdoors. In Cyberpunk it's about 10%.
GTA is the series where more than half of the missions feature driving. In Cyberpunk I doubt it's more than 10% and you're a passenger in most of them.
GTA is the series where you're fairly often required to steal cars, run from cops and shoot them. That's not the case with Cyberpunk.
So, GTA having better traffic or police chases is pretty much irrelevant to me when playing Cyberpunk, game that doesn't rely on those systems nearly as much as GTA does.
You have lots of minigames and side activities in GTA, but not in Cyberpunk? Fair enough, it might be because Rockstar team didn't have to divert their attention to things such as customizable protagonist, dialogue choices, skills and attributes, cyberware, designing indoor environments and balancing level design for stealth, alternative routes and body/tech skillchecks...
 
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Of course, we measure the quality of a game by more than just a single metric, and as far as overall entertainment value goes, I personally feel that GTA 5 ranks very low.

I even reinstalled the game just to make sure I wasn't just misremembering how much I disliked it, but nope, it felt like a chore to play, with janky movement and driving controls and a feel to the gameplay that doesn't feel natural in a video game. Granted, there is weight behind character's physical actions, such as engaging in melee, but it looks far better than it feels.

I took a break from GTA 5 after getting annoyed at the airplane training mission. It was just no fun for me. Then much later when they transferred the game FROM steam to their own launcher, I just deleted it off my PC.

I dislike this era of software where once you purchase, it can be changed from the state you liked it after the money is spent. Started with games, but now it is the same for a lot of engineering and business software. 10 years ago in an interview with Autodesk (autocad) they said they wanted to require always on line as a condition for purchase, but they were afraid customers would not tolerate that.

I am still putting hours into this game (Cyberpunk) after finishing it by exploring and stumbling over a few "hidden" gigs once in a while. Seems to still be a lot of crime to fight or the game is generating them, I am not sure. But I will keep playing as long as I can find the blue icons on the map. Then hopefully mods and DLC will give more to do. I just love Night City, I want any reason to spend time there.
 
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There's also little relatable about the characters or the story they engage in, they feel more like caricatures of real characters in a piece of satire than real characters in a serious story in and of themselves, and that's not a good thing. GTA's overreliance on satire also means you'll have a hard time taking anything seriously since there's nothing serious to ground the story in reality. So the game suffers from a jarring dissonance between a very realistically grounded visual presentation and a story presentation that lacks any semblance of realism.
It's a game, not the NYT :)



I don't like Horizon, Spider Man or GoT much, didn't play one of them through the end, although many, many, many+2 people like the games. Hey, I bought the PS4, bc Horizon Even Dawn. But the characters are flat, kind of similar. The typical young Playstation-Hero, looking for her/his meaning in life, no cursing, no drugs, no s*x.
Booorringg af.

But what the hell, tastes are different :shrug:. That don't make them bad games, millions love them. I just didn"t like them.
 
What it shows?
Restaurants, maybe, clubs, shops... That's it. Parks and nature are 95% ugly, seas and ocean polluted, no animals etc. Because town of the future, bla.
I really wonder what could make NC a town, where I want to spend my time.
Any ideas?

You expected a "beautiful" City? In this setting? Okay then... for Cyberpunk genre that park
is as beautiful as it can get. Being this "ugly" humaneating moloch is part of Night City.
So to make Night City rly a city where you can have fun in, the game itself does need a serious
rework, that brings in GTA SA sandboxy things.

They show you this dirty, mean city jungle, where visibly all the promoted stuff happens,
but not for the player and i rly have no clue why CDPR decided to cut all that out. Since i am
sure it was there at some point in 2019.
 
A few genres or approaches to game design help in portraying a sandbox.

It can be online and offline, but online settings can help hugely in boosting player generated content; it's cheaper to set up a core framework and add things to do but always have the player be the biggest event or quest motor for other players. You can see this to some bigger or smaller extend in online sandbox games or RP games where players drive the content to a notable level.

Offline, I'd say something more akin to classic RPGs. Or games like Skyrim, Fallout, etc where you can roam a world but also go along your own route more or less. I feel CP2077 is more linear in the general picture of things than say the recent Elder Scrolls or Fallout games.

That's a sandbox for me: A certain level of freedom and shaping - whether the world and / or character.
 
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