what is an example of bandit camps in this game? You mean the skulls on the map?
I'm getting the feeling many people played V as a cyberpyscho...
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what is an example of bandit camps in this game? You mean the skulls on the map?
I'm getting the feeling many people played V as a cyberpyscho...
It's an interesting point. I agree that with the advent of games like Skyrim, the imperative of making your game "open world" went through the roof, but I feel like more than anything else, this is a game that can't quite decide what it is. A linear storyline might be tighter, and make might more narrative sense given the supposed "urgency" of V's situation, but I would always want to just be able to go wandering in NC...but at the same time, it's true that the game doesn't quite seem to "fit" with what an open world should be. Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, but I'm looking to DLC expansions to fully flesh out an open world experience.
I have upgraded legendary weapons and gear, 2 attributes at level 20. My map is full of NPCD, side quests and etc that I can do, or I can just ignore them and rush to the endings if I''m disturbed that V doesn't have that much time to live . CDPR have done a great job by letting the player decide what to do.
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Well that is exactly what V is doing, running around killing people left and right, risking his/her life, getting some real quality time
Well that is exactly what V is doing, running around killing people left and right, risking his/her life, getting some real quality time
I guess my take is different, because I only do gigs if I have a reason. Might be money for gear, or curiosity. Or because it fits the idea I have for the charachter
"OPEN WORLD IN SUPPORT OF/WORKING AGAINST THE STORY"
"I came to ask myself, would the game be better without it being open world ?"I am only speaking for myself here; No, absolutely not!
"My point is, why investing so much in work and time in working around implementing an open world, when your game would feel far more tight and have a better pacing as a narrative experience ?"
As far as I know, the only real alternative for an open world is a linear one. Would you enjoy Cyberpunk 2077 a lot more if it were linear? I would not.
"I'm talking about overall design in games in general and the decision to make open worlds in narrative driven games. I can't keep wondering why open worlds designs are so popular despite being almost all the time working against the story mechanics."
Have 1 word what I think the reasoning behind this is.
FREEDOM!
If an open world is only of interest to you if it is "useful", yes i understand your point of view. But for me, just wandering and look how awesome this City is, it's just great (i see that like a artwork and I am just admiring the work done).
And in all honesty i think not all open world is much more useful than being beautiful and going where you want (AC/RDR/Fallout...)
It's my opinion
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How could a city that is supposed to have high levels of crime, not have random crime and places where the criminals hang out? Its also not designed as a needed part of the leveling process. Completely ignorable, in fact they tell you that in the description. They also usually have some sort of story or lore tied to them. Like the girl whose father had Arasaka agents kill her and her boyfriend because he was from Pacifica, and she was being rude to him in texts. Or the valentinos who take down a trauma team unit to get basic medicine for their neighborhoods. Or the skull where a factory tried to continue doing business without paying their mortgage, and NCPD put an open bounty on every one in the area.
In a post apocalyptic criminal city, crime can't just happen when the main story needs it. It has to be built into the open world.
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what exactly would an open world that isn't empty be(by your standards) ? Also, what would be an example of an open world with a point?
Also the game isn't a looter shooter unless you as a player approach it that way. People who agro aren't really there just for you to kill them. And you can more easily get gear from crafting rather than killing.
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Yeah, yeah, I remember that.
They did try to bring some variety, but it's all the same scenario - just a bunch of people waiting to be killed, why should I care for the reason I kill them? I need XP. And the shards/notes are still the laziest way of narration. Like a wall of text in a movie. Many games abuse that.
Look, I don't know what was it that you read between the lines, but I just said I don't like those, they're half-assed missions, most of them are not intertwined or connected to anything. No need to try to prove me something.
The world is not 'post apocalyptic', btw.
There are many games that have a level of interaction of the world that spices up the open world. Bethesda games for example ((excluded fallout 76)) are often games you can lose yourself is. There is a bench. A chair you can sit on it.
Red dead Redemption 2 is a fantastic example of how a thematic open world can work you can do pretty much many activities expected for the theme of the game. From, hunting and fishing to tame horses rob trains banks shops stores. Not only that but exploring pays off as the game is filled with many secret and curiosities to find.
Kenshi an open world survival rpg in another good example of good open world interaction and a living breathing world. You start a playtrough in kenshi and you never known how ti can go because the world is all simulated around you. Is a world that keeps going on on his own and not revolves around you. Yet your actions can be have nice concequences you strike down a faction that holds a city? Probably their ennemies will see that as an opportunity to strike and conquer that city. And the game is filled with little things like that.
GTA from 1 to V?
You have a working police system. YOu can see the ambulance coming if someone get hurt. You can see the firefighter showing up if there is a fire. And on top of that there is a vast selection of activities npc react accordly with the situations happening around them.
Cyberpunk 2077: Oh... there is stuff on the screen.
You can see people having implants that you will never have.
You can see benches chairs that you will never sit on outside some scripted story event.
You can see Vehicles you will never have.
All your side activities consist on PEW PEW or Stealthy hack. And the sidequests you have are so short numbered that the 80% of the game consist on gigs you can find in basically many open world FPS.
Recover the thing.
Clear out the bandit camp.
Destroy this.
Kill taget.
It does not even help the game has a shiny colorued Looter Shooter system for gear that is leveled ((Levels in cyberpunk for pen and paper fans are often seen as Heresy)) and there is no interaction outstide questing at all.
In the end the open world of CYberpunk 2077 while looking fancy is pretty much useless. THere are games that did far more with way less.
And all those story decisions they advertised?... Cyberpunk aside the endings. Is very rail roaded.
The same way that it has police who don't patrol and arrive at a crime by appearing out of thin air?
...and so you would have thought that the same rationale would apply to the police.
On the point of the topic though, it's not an easy thing to make a main story in an open world game important enough to justify it being the main story, but at the same time something that the player could choose to put on the back burner without it going against the narrative. The impending death of your character is the extreme end of this, but many other games have similar issues. Fallouts 1, 3 and 4 all have plots that have a sense of urgency, Fallout 1 actually has a hard time limit.
I never really cared about benches and chairs, Skyrim and oblivions world was generic.
cyberpunk the world is built into the city itself. the bathroom in a club tells you what type of music the people are interested iin. The people in Pacifica talk to each other about their subculture and values. The world tells a story if you are paying attention, just don't expect many random people in a cold hard city to have conversations of any value with a complete stranger.
and cyberpunk isn't built on clearing out bandit camps, thats the way you choose to play it. Every gig has a story, and a setting, and things going on there that make sense on their own. And yeah, gigs or jobs, for a mercenary are going to involve either transporting, killing, obtaining an item or protecting and finding people. Thats the job. These are jobs that people paid a fixer to pay someone on the edge of legal and illegal to do. They aren't random happenings in the city. In an rpg where you play a comedian, expect the content labeled gigs, to involve telling jokes or being funny.
open world doesn't mean life simulator or sandbox. much the same as a polygon doesn't mean square or rectangle.
I can see value in those type of games, but they are designed differently, with different priorities. gtav is primarily a sandbox with guns and crime.
This game is incredibly enhanced by its open world nature, the city is packed with lore, background, people living the lives you read about in other parts of the game. Inter related criminal activities. Quests that allow you to RP what type of mercenary you are, what type of jobs do you refuse, how do you approach an objective. Who do you let go, who do you kill. Who do you blackmail.
You can say choices don't matter, but the major choice of who V is as a person, what they value, what their motivation is, who they trust and what is the main character arc are core parts of any story, and often not something you can change in a videogame rpg. Because of the open world, you can define a large part of what V experiences and why and how they interact with the world.
You can have one V who was born in night city, became an edgerunner specializing in obtaining information or items with minimal killing who sought spirituality in a cold city, became friends with a digital ghost, after a job gone wrong. And gave up their body so the rockerboy ghost could live again, while becoming a digital spirit themselves.
or you can have a V born into a Corpo life who became close friends with a guy from Heywood, who saved their life and gave them everything when the corporation turned on her. Delving deeply into the merc solo life killing anyone who got in their way until Slowly falling in love with an artist in the sex business whose ex was planning to betray you and leave town. Seeing how her ex's naked ambition lead to her destruction in the city of dreams reminded her of her own downfall and losses. Ignoring the terrorist parasite in her head, She became close friends with a nomad who gave her and the woman she loves a way out of the city if broken dreams.
These are totally different stories, shaped by the choices of the players, acted out in an open world, thats where the focus of the choices are, On shaping V, and V's experiences, values, and their character arc.
I think the game would be better if open world were the focus more than the story.
- The main story was...okay.
I didn't feel very invested in it; the only goal I wanted to accomplish was getting Johnny out of V's head safely (for V) and I'm not sure it's even possible. - Cyberpunk began life as a table-top, PnP game, CDPR marketed CP2077 as an RPG (at first, at least), and all of that kind of came together to paint a very Bethesda-esque notion in my head of what CP2077 would be like, with some side helpings of GTA, to boot.
The interviews, trailers, and Night City Wires only served to reinforce what I'd already thought, and described a game I wanted to play quite a bit. - I really, really wanted to play as a Corpo. Or a Streetkid with dreams of worming into the Corpo world.
I wanted to play the character in my head rather than V. I wanted V to be my avatar in Night City, rather than the protagonist in a story over which I actually have very little control.
But the story centers around a very Streetkid-ish way of life, and there is no choosing anything else; this feels kind of like a betrayal of the PnP origins of Cyberpunk. - An RPG pretty much requires an open-world experience; sure, there are exceptions, but when I've played them, I've really butted up against the limits of what the game will allow, and it's quite frustrating.
Because of the freedom. The versatility. The sense of making the game yours.
"I built this fort." "I customized this vehicle." "I conquered this territory." etc...there is something thrilling about going into a world, messing around with it, and creating something out of it.
I never got into Minecraft, but I love, say, Surviving Mars or Cities Skylines, or any of those space games that let you not merely custom-build your spaceship, but actually allow you to walk around inside it after you've constructed it with parts. Those games are so much fun...especially when they let you experience your creation from the same perspective as a person might if it were manifest in meatspace.
Now, take all of that, and morph it into, "I made this character."
And also, "I made this character's home."
"I made this character's life."
Night City, all by itself, is huge. There are so many places to go, things to see, and seemingly things to do.
And, within it, the player could become so many things...but because CP2077 is telling a story, we, the player, are limited in what we're able to to, and artificially so.
I'm constantly finding myself butting up against what I can do versus what I want to do, what the game designers will allow me to do. I want the freedom--the open world--to make V's world my own, and so an open world design makes perfect sense.
Cuz not every game is designed to have a narrative experience, as you're describing it.
And I'd rather have a cyberpunk life simulator than a linear narrative because it's an interactive experience, not a movie.
I wish it wasnt the case, I find that the more open the game, the less detailed
Eh, I like it.
I liked in TW3, too. Even though it had the same problem, what was Geralt even doing sailing those little dingys out to all those underwater chests? It wasn't relevant, at all, and clearly filler. Random monsters spawns make sense, but I don't think Geralt would have canonically taken out every bandit camp across the entire countryside, either.
But, that ability to go off the main path and just wander and pretend like your just another regular Witcher trying to make a living is fantastic for those of us who love to roleplay.
The same is true of Cyberpunk. The amount of side content I think of as canon to my main story playthroughs was very little. But, once I've done the main missions all the side content is there so I can pretend to just be another faceless merc in the big city. I can even make my own stories and use the various gangster spawns as the villain something you couldn't do in TW3 since monster and bandit camps never respawned.
Honestly, as much as those two side activaties didn't add anything to story, I felt like something was missing from ME3. There was no since of size, no sense of this massive galaxy to explore. It ended up feeling like a big space shopping trip, you go down the list of allies, get them to join up, and move on. It lost that sense of grand galactic scale that drew me into ME1 to begin with.
It's your choice how to approach them. Are you an NCPD subcon? Are you just scavenging? Are you a crazed cyberpsycho looking to just murder people? It's entirely up to you.
That is where the freedom to roleplay comes in. You don't have to do *any* of that stuff. All the FIxer gigs and all the NCPD calls is just "stuff that's happening in the city" and its your ability to roleplay and use your imagination that makes them makes them a part of your story or not.
I liked in TW3, too. Even though it had the same problem, what was Geralt even doing sailing those little dingys out to all those underwater chests? It wasn't relevant, at all, and clearly filler. Random monsters spawns make sense, but I don't think Geralt would have canonically taken out every bandit camp across the entire countryside, either.
But, that ability to go off the main path and just wander and pretend like your just another regular Witcher trying to make a living is fantastic for those of us who love to roleplay.
The same is true of Cyberpunk. The amount of side content I think of as canon to my main story playthroughs was very little. But, once I've done the main missions all the side content is there so I can pretend to just be another faceless merc in the big city. I can even make my own stories and use the various gangster spawns as the villain something you couldn't do in TW3 since monster and bandit camps never respawned.
True, but both ME1 and ME2 had a whole exploration side quest. ME2 was pretty dumb but it was still neat scanning all those planets, pretending to be just another surveyor. And ME1 had the full on land on the planet and drive around thing going on.
Honestly, as much as those two side activaties didn't add anything to story, I felt like something was missing from ME3. There was no since of size, no sense of this massive galaxy to explore. It ended up feeling like a big space shopping trip, you go down the list of allies, get them to join up, and move on. It lost that sense of grand galactic scale that drew me into ME1 to begin with.
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No, man. What? The NCPD calls just show up from your Kiroshi optics, its like having a police scanner in your car.
It's your choice how to approach them. Are you an NCPD subcon? Are you just scavenging? Are you a crazed cyberpsycho looking to just murder people? It's entirely up to you.
That is where the freedom to roleplay comes in. You don't have to do *any* of that stuff. All the FIxer gigs and all the NCPD calls is just "stuff that's happening in the city" and its your ability to roleplay and use your imagination that makes them makes them a part of your story or not.
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Being able to jump and climb anything in TW3 felt great, but I prefer TW2's approach, that game felt like it had no filler at all. Monster combat in TW2 also felt better for some reason.
Uhhh...so? What does that have to do with what I said at all?
That's not role-playing. Lots of games let you make choices; role-playing is something else entirely.
You're talking about side-missions, where the goal is to complete a simple task of eliminating some enemies. There is no character interaction, there is no dialogue, there is only combat.
Your choices have no effect on the larger game when you do these missions.
Quite frankly, your responses have nothing at all to do with what I was talking about, not in the least. Your definition of "role-playing" and mine are not the same, and even if I adopted your definition, that only means I'd have to find another term to describe the problems I see.
So let's not argue over nomenclature, okay? It's not gonna help move the conversation forward.
And you also don't play a role.
All you're describing is choosing tactics.
A lot of people throwing in their bits of thought into this and I didn't read all of them, but I agree with the first post and few replies. I feel that this game's story is a rush towards survival, personal conflicting goal that conflicts with having to do Gigs and such. There never came a comment from the main (well-developed) character that we're playing as (Pointing toward V being a well-written character, not a blank slate to roleplay as) that we're wasting our time with gigs, but it sure felt like that. Why are we rushing for a cure, dying in a 'few weeks', when I feel I spent way beyond that amount on gigs and just cruising around.
The story, even if well written, was out of touch with that 'open-world' aspect and I think I get it... It's not so easy, but everyone keeps trying to do 'open-world' because GTA got good at it. Here... It doesn't make much sense and by that I could say that aspect kind of failed.
It could've been solved if all of these key people towards our solution were greedy and we needed to earn that quick cash. It worked on my first playthrough to an extent when I IMMEDIATELY deviated from the main story (before the heist and rush for a solution), where I was limited in my space, but I wasn't dying... Just earning cash for myself, getting geared for more gigs. Then the heist happens, THEN in the Afterlife I get asked that 1,5K or 15K creds (can't remember) and it burns a little hole in the pocket. I did my gigs before my death timer, so it made sense to me and at the same time it made sense to earn back creds to maintain gear and resources.
This feels like either shouldn't have gone with the death clock or Should have added money roadblocks to push us doing sidegigs for dirty cash even if we're on the death timer.
The story, even if well written, was out of touch with that 'open-world' aspect and I think I get it... It's not so easy, but everyone keeps trying to do 'open-world' because GTA got good at it. Here... It doesn't make much sense and by that I could say that aspect kind of failed.
It could've been solved if all of these key people towards our solution were greedy and we needed to earn that quick cash. It worked on my first playthrough to an extent when I IMMEDIATELY deviated from the main story (before the heist and rush for a solution), where I was limited in my space, but I wasn't dying... Just earning cash for myself, getting geared for more gigs. Then the heist happens, THEN in the Afterlife I get asked that 1,5K or 15K creds (can't remember) and it burns a little hole in the pocket. I did my gigs before my death timer, so it made sense to me and at the same time it made sense to earn back creds to maintain gear and resources.
This feels like either shouldn't have gone with the death clock or Should have added money roadblocks to push us doing sidegigs for dirty cash even if we're on the death timer.