Night City Feels Empty

[Shadowleecher]

Okay, first let me praise the game. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I think its amazing, and looks great.
And my corpo run so far has been reasonable bugless.

And here is the but: But the city feels some times mega empty for a mega city.
Night City looks amazing but sometimes just feels empty.
And to be honest I think that's not a design choice but a hardware constriction choice.
In the more scripted parts of the game its packed, but when you travel from a to b it can feel like New York right now devoid of live, 1 random person walking here one car driving there. Not what I expect from a Mega city.

Not slighting the devs/CDPR but it struck me a when I was driving around, GTAV felt more lived in sometimes then NC does.
What are your experiences and thoughts?

 

[MikeErmantrout]

I agree with u it needs more npcs

 

[doomtrigger]

then play with crowds on high? there were too many ppl walking around so i set it to medium

 

[Shadowleecher]

then play with crowds on high? there were too many ppl walking around so i set it to medium

Its been on high, its not when walking around or when your in a market.
But start driving around, you wont see a lot of cars.
And no cars would be fine but then I expect to see a lot of flying cars.

Its a mega city, is Night City, Its supposed to house billions of people.
And right now it feels like any regular small city out there.
And again, its a hardware problem adding all that to make it look like Mega city from Judge Dred, Blade Runner would cook our pc's so Cyberpunk is just a head of its time is more or less what I'm saying.

Post automatically merged: Dec 10, 2020

I mean looks great but there are billions of people living here.... but all be doing social distancing....

 

[SirGreenDay]

Okay, first let me praise the game. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I think its amazing, and looks great.
And my corpo run so far has been reasonable bugless.

And here is the but: But the city feels some times mega empty for a mega city.
Night City looks amazing but sometimes just feels empty.
And to be honest I think that's not a design choice but a hardware constriction choice.
In the more scripted parts of the game its packed, but when you travel from a to b it can feel like New York right now devoid of live, 1 random person walking here one car driving there. Not what I expect from a Mega city.

Not slighting the devs/CDPR but it struck me a when I was driving around, GTAV felt more lived in sometimes then NC does.
What are your experiences and thoughts?

Yup.

It just lacks something that makes it feel like a REAL city.

 

[lofye__]

Okay, first let me praise the game. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I think its amazing, and looks great.
And my corpo run so far has been reasonable bugless.

And here is the but: But the city feels some times mega empty for a mega city.
Night City looks amazing but sometimes just feels empty.
And to be honest I think that's not a design choice but a hardware constriction choice.
In the more scripted parts of the game its packed, but when you travel from a to b it can feel like New York right now devoid of live, 1 random person walking here one car driving there. Not what I expect from a Mega city.

Not slighting the devs/CDPR but it struck me a when I was driving around, GTAV felt more lived in sometimes then NC does.
What are your experiences and thoughts?

agreed

 

[DataBrain]

Personally, I'd rather see more depth with each individual NPC than just a sheer number of NPCs. I guess that's why a lot of RPGs have a shrunken play space to compensate for this though; Night city is super open.

Having lived in a larger city before though, I'd say it's fairly realistic to have lots of traffic concentrated in the downtown areas, and still be pretty empty in other places (especially depending on the time of day).

Vehicle traffic seems very sparse compared to pedestrians, but I am also sort of glad the vehicle traffic is as sparse as it is because otherwise it would be hell to navigate through with this game's spastic vehicle controls.

 

[Saterius]

That's what I love in Watch Dogs Legion. The amount of characters and cars around the player and their placement is well coded. It feels like there's continuous traffic and people being everywhere.

In NC NPCs sometimes spawn in player view or disappear when they are out of view. It's hard to roleplay a citizen that is part of the world.

 

[pickleysnipes]

Have also noticed this. Doesn't seem like many people live in Night City. Also the ones that do don't really seem to have AI. No angry drivers, no police with object permanence, very, very few lines of dialogue and 0 interaction potential.

I've been having a lot of fun, but I'm at the point now where the sandbox is the meat of it for me (avoiding the last mission because the story was so. damn. short. Like the blink of an eye,) and unfortunately the sandbox aspects are very last-decade weak.

 

[dxm55]

I think it feels empty not because of a lack of NPCs. I have CROWD on high and there is a shit ton of NPCs on my screen in the busy areas of the city.

If feels empty because I know that all these NPCs are just placeholders without any dialogue responses. There are no random NPCs who will add to a side mission or minigame. They're all the same mindless zombies.


The only NPCs that have interactions are part of the storyline. And we know how linear that goes, conversation included.

 

[Gillian_Seed]

Night City is right now a hollow ghost town regardless of how many NPC's there are or are not.

 

[poosh]

View attachment 11074643

Its been on high, its not when walking around or when your in a market.
But start driving around, you wont see a lot of cars.
And no cars would be fine but then I expect to see a lot of flying cars.

Its a mega city, is Night City, Its supposed to house billions of people.
And right now it feels like any regular small city out there.
And again, its a hardware problem adding all that to make it look like Mega city from Judge Dred, Blade Runner would cook our pc's so Cyberpunk is just a head of its time is more or less what I'm saying.

Post automatically merged: Dec 10, 2020

View attachment 11074667
I mean looks great but there are billions of people living here.... but all be doing social distancing....

C'mon, the screenshot says "5:07 AM". Everyone is sleeping

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

But hey, ”1000 NPC’s with handcrafted schedules”.

 

[overhyped2077]

That's why so many people say things aren't bad when you go down the scripted path (main story and some side quests), but once you leave that and explore the city on your own/free roam, you realize that it's severely lacking. It's not that immersive of a city when you start to pay attention to the details. Yes it's fine if you don't care about that sort of thing, but CDPR billed it as being an immersive city and being the next-gen in open world adventure, so people have the right to criticize it when they failed to deliver on it.

 

[volsungaeternam]

One of the strangest things I noted was when driving through the badlands. In the distance you can see car lights by the dozens. But when you come too close they just vanish in front of you. Breaks the immersion quite a bit.

 

[Aris1368]

The open world is just badly designed and it's plainly either because of incompetence, or not enough time.

Hardware don't play any role in density, games like Watch Dogs 2 released 5 years ago manage to both look and play much better with almost a realistic amount of cars and NPCs.

 

[Gillian_Seed]

My experience with NPC's in Night City:

V: .... (*I pressed talk*)
NPC: .......

Other experiences with NPC's in Night City

V: .... (*I pressed talk*)
NPC Waiter in club: Don't you have anything better to do?

V: .... (*I pressed talk*)
NPC: No I'm fine. I'm waiting on a friend.

 

[BigMommaWolf]

I agree with all points in this thread- it needs both more crowds and cars, and more npc development. I just about jumped for joy when a vending machine called me over for a mission to push a dumpster out of the way. I want more of that. I want more randos on the streets interacting with me, even if it's just synthesized robot voices or the same 12 npc voices over and over again like Oblivion. I have such an almost starving sensation to feel the claustrophobia of city life in Night City. I've even practically abandoned my vehicles and taken to walking everywhere I want to go because I just want to bump shoulders with people and hear the street chatter. I want cars to hit me when I use the cross walk because people are stupid and don't always obey traffic laws. I want to hear annoying assholes honking incessantly because traffic is backed up for miles, I want to hear an obaasan throwing her laundry water out on the street in Japantown while a JoyToy cusses her out for getting her shoes wet, and I want to hear a Valentino abuela yelling and throwing la chancla at her deadbeat ganger son.

Make me hate Night City for the chaos. I'm begging you. lol

 

[nafeasonto]

How would you want it more "lively"?

 

[Gillian_Seed]

How would you want it more "lively"?

The first thought that comes to mind in terms of the NPC's is to have the NPC's doing what is being alluded to all over the city. This is for me one of the biggest problems with the game, so much is alluded to but isn't really there and it's not like you have to go searching for the curtain to look behind to see this reality, the illusion is presented on a giant screen that says CURTAIN on it.

- Have NPC's actually committing crimes, not standing around waiting for you to show up and stop them.
- Have NPC's doing drive by shootings or racing or running from the cops through the city etc.
- Let the player sit down at a noodle stand and eat some noodles. Hell just let the player sit down for starters.

CDPR's Night City is dead, give it some life. As it is, it's one step above a virtual reality kiosk tour of a still image.