Sardukhar;n10170052 said:
This is something that comes up fairly often, resources expenditure. Limited resources = hard choices, so more resources should be spent on what you want most, right?
But you can't just throw money and people at a game and make it good. Team size is far from a guarantee of quality.
If you have the money and you think you can manage the feature creep, you hire separate teams and specialists.
I know this seems obvious, but it does bear mentioning. We aren't worried that GWENT is cutting into CPunk, are we? Or vice versa?
Now, combining MP and SP in one game is the tricky part and that could well be an issue. But that's a design issue more than a resources issue and although valid, takes it's place alongside worries about vehicles, melee/ranged balance, character Role integration, RP-systems and so forth.
People who don't care about MP find it an unnecessary risk, but the same can be said for people that don't care about Persuasion checks or vehicle integration or character creation.
We will have to see how CDPR deals with these issues and working them all into a great RPG.
Fair points!
It's absolutely possible that CP2077's multiplayer component (if it exists in a more interesting capacity than "here's a deathmatch mode!") is being worked on by a separate team or a group of specialists, and that would probably be the ideal situation.
You're also correct that RP systems and the like present similar challenges... But I think the major difference is that all of those things fall under "one umbrella", so to speak - single player. One main focus. Everybody working on singleplayer is working towards a common goal, even if their tasks differ.
Warning: The following is probably going to be hard to follow. I had a very, very difficult time articulating my thoughts, so hopefully it makes some amount of sense. Plus, it's 10PM and I just finished re-watching the 3+ hr Blade Runner 2049, so I'm tired.
In my ideal "multiplayer mode", you're playing the game as normal, but if you toggle a certain option in your settings, you can invite your friends to come do "radiant" style side content (content that doesn't strictly rely on your created character's strengths/weaknesses - how would you balance that for multiple people?), and you can encounter hostile (or non hostile) enemy players as you explore the city.
In this hypothetical mode, there isn't a single feature (For the most part) that is exclusive to multiplayer. None. No risk of the dev team's resources being wasted on a dedicated "MP mode" like team deathmatch, or capture the flag, or battle royale... Everyone is playing the same single player game, just with other people during "free roam" points.
But there's a lot of risks with this system.
How do you handle differing world states for every player - do you just have the other players pop into the host's world?
How do you handle the host interacting with a story or side quest NPC that isn't "radiant" - Are the players who aren't hosts booted out? If not, do they show up in cutscenes?
Lot of issues, and I don't really have many solutions - but this is the only multiplayer system I can see being developed that doesn't directly pull dev resources from the single player side of things. Anything else and you're still developing separate systems with separate ultimate goals. How significant the resource allocation difference is depends on a number of factors... A small "Social hub" may require very little, for example.