Potential Bloat: Is this game going to be too big

[kofeiiniturpa]

"Overt" (for the lack of a better word) amount of content isn't a problem when gameplay and systems are also designed to take that into account.

What kinda worries me, is that the progression system gets stale before the game is half way through. And with that the whole gameplay gets a hit for the worse. One of the markings of a good open world RPG is that it makes the player "want to" keep playing to get better; and to get better so that he can tackle that one thing (enemy, puzzle, dungeon, mission, what ever...) that bested him. I'm not really seeing that being the case here; from what we know of the things that are involved. I might be wrong, but....

 

[Cargan2016]

I sank about 600 hours into New Vegas and about another 600 in the Witcher series. If CDPR creates something with similar level of greatness, I will be happy.

looking at 250 hours per play thru if do every quest approximately but with the number of choices and high impact choices have per each quest easily have 4-6 play thru before have major repeat stuff

 

[Tynarious]

Personally, I didn't mind all of the undiscovered locations in TW3, the more content to me the better. I will say however, I wish a majority of those locations were more meaningful missions, but I understand the difficulty of that on principal.

I also didn't feel that TW3 was too long, on the contrary I wish it were longer. I actually actively avoided completing the core game until the DLC was released, I then fully completed the DLC stories and only after that did I return to the core story. And I loved every...bloody...second of it!

So if Cyberpunk is anything on the scale of content as TW3 just in the core game (not to mention the free DLC!) I will be a happy camper.

 

[Adamantium_X]

I don't mind "bloating" as long as it's interesting and meaningful content.

So as long as you don't pull a "Dragon Age: Inquisition" with a shitload of generic forgettable quests, we are fine.

But what I do mind is when a main story has a serious sense of urgency in an open world game which you are supposed to explore and take it all in:
Witcher 3 - find and save Ciri
Fallout 4 - find and save your son

If you want to get immersed, and you take the story seriously with the urgency the story requires, then you don't bother with meaningless fetchquests, and other people's bullshit because your child's life is on the line.
Tunnel vision and a fastest way to get to them only makes sense.

If on the other side you decide to take it easy with the main story and ignore it when convenient, and do every sidequest, explore every nook and cranny, then the main story losses it's immersion and impact.
Ciri is in danger and Wild Hunt is after her - meanwhile Geralt is trying to become a boxing champion of Skellige, gwent master, wandering down to Toussaint (if you do this before the main quest) just for the sake of it.

So I don't mind an occasional main story quest that feels urgent, and has consequences if you are not fast enough (Kingdom Come: Deliverance - curing a poisoned village, finding Reeky before the gang does, etc, Mass Effect 2 - saving the crew if you go trough Omega-4 early), but I don't like a constant sense of urgency throughout the entire game.

 

[Metropolice]

Too big? I don't think so.

Can never be too big - if space is used in meaningful fashion and "recycled". What do I mean with recycled? Well you start somewhere and have different areas. Make it so that you do not just progress through areas in linear fashion and then forget about them, but rehash or reuse the areas in quests or even alter some areas you might've passed by before.

In other words, the problem rarely is (too much) space if you use it well. That, of course, is easier said than done.

 

[MauricioMM]

I'm actually "worried" that the size of the game world could be no match for the writers. That is, that there might be not as much content (quests and environment/incidental stories) as I'd like for the size of the world. But that's fine, I'd rather have a 50-hour game made with mostly memorable moments over a 100-hour one composed of mostly filler activities.

More The Witcher 3 and less Dragon Age: Inquisition, please. I love both games, but I'd say of the two TW3 was superior in this regard... Although, curiously enough and despite that, I spent around 100 hours more in TW3 over DA:I. Perhaps the dramatically smaller amount of bloat in TW3 compared to DA:I's made me want to stay more there?

 

[Bloodartist]

I am more worried of the game being too small.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

I am more worried of the game being too small.

Would you elaborate?

 

[Mybrokenenglish]

Assassins Creed Odyssey was a lot of fun but the Cultist system made the story drag out far longer than it needed to plus the open world was given far too many points of interest that it became disorientating. RDR2 was smaller in content size but the attention to detail, obsession with realism and open world went too far and felt like a chore and was not enjoyable at all.

Totally disagree with underlined sentences.

Regarding the game being too big, I look at TW3 and expect more or less the same. What they do need to adress, are those question marks all over the map that added little to no fun to the game. It was interesting to read those small notes, but they seriously were too many. I would've traded all of them for 5 side quests.

Post automatically merged: Jul 26, 2020

i always felt too few people had a big enough reaction to the fact that TW2 is two whole ass video games. it just is.

I still think that, while TW3 is a better game as a whole, TW2 offered a way more balanced gaming experience and fitted more to the story CDPR wanted to portray (main quest and the minor side quests in TW3 are totally 2 independent paths, almost 2 independent games)

 

[Restlessdingo32]

Regarding the game being too big, I look at TW3 and expect more or less the same. What they do need to adress, are those question marks all over the map that added little to no fun to the game. It was interesting to read those small notes, but they seriously were too many. I would've traded all of them for 5 side quests.

Hmm, the worst offender with TW3 was how it was "open world" but had a relatively empty world. If you went roaming out in the wilderness you might find a pseudo-random group of... something... but it was largely tied to the area. There were parallels with the question marks. Yes, the magical treasure chest out in the middle of the forest. There is a big Earth Elemental guarding it but nothing else in the general area. Both of these aspects prevented the world from feeling alive. Even though it was open, strictly speaking.

Compare this to something like KCD. If you roamed out into a random forest you would find animals just kind of doing their thing. Random bandits or fights between bandits and guards, bandits and cumens, etc. Groups of merchants getting tore up for embarking on their journey at the wrong time. The world felt a bit more alive. Even though it was likely behaving similar to TW3, albeit with more prevalent random spawns, it certainly created the illusion of... life.

Of course, KCD was/is plagued by the horrible concept of back and forth fetch quests. It had it's share of interesting activities. It also had a lot of quests where it's like, go to Rattay, now back to Sassau, now back to Rattay, rinse/repeat half a dozen times. I've never been a fan of artifially inflating the... temporal element of the narrative or quest design this way. The quest only felt long and involved because you were galloping on your horse for 30 minutes. Well, an hour because you played it on hardcore mode and got lost for 30 minutes . I've never asked myself the question, "Where the fuck am I?", so many times in my life....

 

[Nicademusx]

Didnt read through most of the comments, maybe some already mentioned.

It's a natural progression of technology!
Next generation systems and future upgrades!

More defined images require more information thus requiring more space.
Old processing units get phased out by the inability to handle the workload. Forcing a necessary system upgrade.

That being said, most of us remember the early fallout games that constantly crashed because the games exceeded system capacity. This coming generation of consoles seems to have increased load times.

I love being alive right now, it's like living in the future!

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

Hmm, the worst offender with TW3 was how it was "open world" but had a relatively empty world.

Agreed. Pretty, but fairly empty.

I think a lot of that also had to do with how the core gameplay felt so heavily detached from that kind of random roaming (due to the focus on very specific "storytelling"). It felt... pointless unless one just wanted to see the sights.

 

[Mybrokenenglish]

Hmm, the worst offender with TW3 was how it was "open world" but had a relatively empty world. If you went roaming out in the wilderness you might find a pseudo-random group of... something... but it was largely tied to the area. There were parallels with the question marks. Yes, the magical treasure chest out in the middle of the forest. There is a big Earth Elemental guarding it but nothing else in the general area. Both of these aspects prevented the world from feeling alive. Even though it was open, strictly speaking.

Agreed on this, haven't played KCD yet so...

I think a lot of that also had to do with how the core gameplay felt so heavily detached from that kind of random roaming (due to the focus on very specific "storytelling"). It felt... pointless unless one just wanted to see the sights.

Yes, this is what I meant when saying main quest and side quests/open-world are independent each other in TW3.

 

[Poison19]

From what i heard and saw, world is pretty dead on current version of the game, some journalists mention that every location is prepared for a some quest, so if you haven't this quest, this location will be empty, maybe with some generic NPC/world stuff. Of course, this doesn't apply to activities marked on the map.

 

[Codecypher]

From the little leak we had in the past in Playstation Store the game will be at the very least 100 GB if not more. So yeah you should kinda expect that.

The world is smaller than Witcher 3 however given the different life paths and player freedom of approach you might very well end up with a bigger game than Witcher 3 due to the density in choice and different experiences. Witcher experience was more spread out across the map while Night City is much more incredibly dense and vertical both up and down.

 

[Maelcom404]

My biggest concert is actually that the world may be big enough but after the "woaw" effect you'd realize most things are cardboard figure you can't interact with and most people are just stray bullets targets.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

My biggest concert is actually that the world may be big enough but after the "woaw" effect you'd realize most things are cardboard figure you can't interact with and most people are just stray bullets targets.

That’s what I’ve been fearing for years. It’s always been a pitfall of big open worlds to lack meaningful interactivity.
Also one of the reasons I hoped the game would be based on hubs.

 

[Guest 4211861]

I hope it's a really thicc game (am I using that word correctly?) because there won't be major games coming out for a while afterwards I think.

 

[Kaspar.Hauser]

For me I expect a game faithful to the lore of Cyberpunk Red and Cyberpunk 2020 in main missions.

If the main missions can show new players about cyberpunk lore and make the fans of cyberpunk 2020 happy, I'm on with it.

But the side quests I presume that it'll really explore more of this world while making reference or based on cyberpunk culture elements in general (judge dredd, blade runner, Robocop, Terminator, Alita Battle Angel - the manga, not the movie).

Being CDPR, and considering what Pawel said about the team working on hand tailored quests, I don't think the game will be bloated at all, even if it had a 100 hours of main missions.

PS.: About the journalists that said: "W3 main missions are too long": They're wrong! Witcher 3 main missions are very complete, without loose ends!

 

[fridgeband]

I worry about the file size. I like the fact that the game seems like it's going to be HUGE in terms of the world size and the amount of content inside. I'm just worried about the file size, like if my hard drive can even take that much space, and I don't really know 100% for sure the amount of space the game will need. I'm also worried about when it comes time to download the game. I hope there is the option to predownload parts of the offline backup installers a day or two or three in advance so that I don't have to download for several hours when the game is already released. Another thing I'm worried about is when the DLC for Cyberpunk finally comes out. Can my hard drive take the full game + all DLC content? I am very very worried about that. But we will see I suppose I will try to do my best somehow.

I really truly hope CDProjektRed will optimize Cyberpunk2077 well enough that this wont be too huge of a problem for most people.