CDPR Needs more Transparency! - Where did shown content go?
--That is, if they want to gain consumer trust back.
Hard and difficult honesty is the only path back to that.
The more I look at old gameplay footage vs what came out the more I wonder where that gameplay trajectory went, and what state the game must have been in to not have that gameplay developed further. Did they pull an Anthem, where the gameplay demo was all they had ready to show at that time, and the rest of the game was in pieces?
As an example, the character creation used to be Male/Female. Since then they made it more fluid to be more widely inclusive. They also had a different hacking menu/minigame and more mod abilities. Did they spend all that time redoing different aspects of the game?
Also, while probably not the most kosher example, immersive nudity was even in the game on day 1, as advertised! This last example specifically was obviously initially intended in the release since it's in the character customization and there's even a censor toggle in the settings menu if you didn't care for it. (For many players it makes the game more immersive! Who showers in their underwear!? Is the city gritty or sterile? I don't mind too much either way, but make up your mind before you advertise towards gritty realism. It's false advertisement otherwise, and why many people are rightfully upset. It's also a frustratingly stupid look to spend time not fixing bugs to take out at game release an optional feature that's already in the game.) The main question is, why was it patched out?
The biggest reason I see for that example is to sterilize the game against its original creative vision just to make it more marketable worldwide. (If so, that's a decision I adamantly disagree with.)
Without decisive answers from CDPR themselves, a likely and depressing answer many are left with is the assumption that all of this was the decision of some CDPR corpo who thought they'd make more money on the decision to leave all of this out at launch.
Is that true? Why did they show (and even advertise) aspects of the game that just seemingly ended up in a programmers waste basket? We'd only know if CDPR was more transparent.
