Cyberpunk 2077 has many strengths from being more action focused from combat to driving, having vast city to explore, having more things to find out regarding future technology.
But here's a few lessons from Witcher 3 that I started noticing after playing through Cyberpunk 2077 first and just recently started playing Witcher 3.
I'll try to edit this long text to cut out some parts that feel like ramblings so keep that in mind when commenting.
Game Introduction
In Cyberpunk 2077 we're too fast introduced into the game by this fast paced opening intro when first time opening up the game. We're not shown the Witcher 3 style opening with this slow paced animated video with beautiful hand drawn pictures. I think there could have been some introduction about the city and what is going on before you step into the boots of V. Perhaps some introduction about how the city is currently run, how it has managed to get in such state, having some doomsday prophets talking about companies being Gods.
I think Cyberpunk 2077 could still keep the TV format but maybe make the introduction a little less fast paced and being more about glorifying the look of the city from distance, showing people doing daily activities and drinking in cafeteria, making the introduction more inviting to the newer player and showing this fake version of the city witch is pretending to be crime free and having a ton of opportunities, shortly showing couple of protesters in the streets before video cuts out to somewhere else and so on. Just a different pacing.
I think the intro is still decent but it shouldn't be out first footage shown about the city. I think if you cut that thing into smaller pieces and made it more like an advertisement for example the Drama Team recruiting video where they fly their AV over some window and blast their way in. Anyway this is just my opinion.
The dream sequence
In Witcher 3 you're first thrown into this dream where you believe it's all happening until stuff goes south and you're terrified and frozen and finally wake up. I think we could have seen something similar of V dreaming about living in a large mansion, sipping coffee and looking outside, until multiple Cyberpsychos rushed through his front gate and started gunning down the house, where V wakes up having bullet put in his brain.
This could have happened for example after the first mission with Jackie (after already failed once before and being betrayed, guns pointed at V) )where V gets to sleep first time in the bed. Having this dream partially because of what Jackie kept saying during the ride home about "This is a city of dreams, Legends are born here!" I think it could be a proper place to have this vision.
This would give kind of inner monologue with what V is about, how he's just another dreamer like many in the city. Or any other way make this more apparent in the story telling that V is a big dreamer. Having more dialogues with Jackie about what they would do with the money or so on.
Introduction cinematic for lifepaths
In Witcher 3 you get this introductionary video where Gerald is observing the environment and trying to determine where his lover has travelled. It shows in a cool manner that Witchers are trackers and they're able to very accurately draw conclusions from evidence what has happened in the past.
I think it would have been more proper to have a short introduction footage foreach lifepath. Showing how you were raised up and how you eventually ended up in such situation, how you thought climbing the ladder of corporation/street or just chilling out as Nomad would make your life better, give some explanation why you end up making the next decisions of entering the city and leaving the gang, or telling how "it started just as a normal day" in Corpo path. Some kind of introduction before the start.
Witcher Sense
I think it's pretty fair to say that Witcher sense works more fluidly than the Braindance in Cyberpunk 2077, you can use it more frequently and it blends with the other gameplay. Sure it kinda limits you only to observe where you're currently standing, where in Cyberpunk 2077 many braindances if not all aren't shown about the locations that you're currently standing on. Sure, you already got the special eyes which allow you to read information about the world around you, so it's nothing really too bad.
I think in general there could've been more seamless transition with BD's of crime scenes and the actual reality in certain situations, where you would enter into a crime scene and seamlessly go watch what happened during it and then enter into real life and perhaps find something that was left behind. Perhaps in next Cyberpunk 2077 sequel this BD sense would be made more seamless with the actual real world and giving us more detective style quests. Hacking into cameras and using their old footage to check what happened in crime scene, rather than going through lengthy sequences of putting a helmet on and then entering into this matrix like sequence.
Maybe in the "Cyberpunk 2088" there could be an upgrade to the BD system that the tech companies were able to squeeze this tech into the artificial eyes that you get to install in next title.
Make you the expert
I think there's something entertaining about having to play as this sort of superhuman who's very acknowledged with how the world operates and is able to give interesting narrative. V however seems often very clueless, asking quest givers "why am I doing this" rather than saying "I see, you really leave me no options", just making you look very inferior to the other people who seem to have better grasp how things are done. Sure this might all be intended but it's not really entertaining to experience as a player.
I think it's fine as it is but maybe in next title have the next "V" or whoever is taking his/her place is going to be more of a professional, who is shown all the tricks of the trade, then having these dream sequences from his past where he wasn't so skilled to act like a tutorial to the game.
Also when you're in BD you often hear Judy narrate how things happened, you don't often even react to these like "oh yeah and then this happened I see", you're more quietly observing what other people are discovering. I mean it's cool to have interaction with other people and having this aspect of not being the best on all fields... but still games are kinda escape from reality and having to play as superhuman is more entertaining power trip than being just a part of large crew.
I think there could've been more effort put into making you being very observant one to draw conclusions, not just in some dialogues based on stats, but it's just my opinion, I'd be willing to bet some people would've hated that aspect.
The quest givers
This is one of the major gripes I have noticed. In Cyberpunk 2077 you're kinda just introduced to these people (in a call you have to answer) who give you quests by the phone almost like an accident. You never get to see them on person without checking them up and they just casually drop new quests for you without any impact after reaching certain milestones.
In Witcher you got 0 quests given to you automatically and you have to check out boards and listen in conversations and talk to people in order to have quests. This is probably why so many people think also why the city feels so lifeless, when you don't have these smaller 1 person quests from a single NPC's.
There's few things that could be changed:
- Make every contractor have a forced arranged meeting before you get any quests from them
- Make majority of quests to require to talk to actual person because of how many of quests are in the gray area of legal and you're too afraid to talk openly about it on phone because of fears NCPD listening on the calls
- Have a lot more individual NPC's who have their own small tasks, maybe some grandma lost her wallet in some hotel and you're asked if you could kindly return that in exchange for some information, maybe having some drunk guy at the bar telling how he was robbed by local gang, and you get a prompt to get a certain item back, a lot more of these smaller quests as much as possible
Gwent
It's pretty obvious that Gwent is very polished game that even became an independent game outside of Witcher. In contrast to Cyberpunk there's nothing really like that, the closest there is, is the small hacking minigame that requires you to match 3-5 numbers.
Simply put, the hacking minigame needs a lot more work put into it. It's currently far too simplistic and gets old very quickly.
I think you could make it that the code changes automatically lets say every 20 seconds, so that it'd be up to the players speed to crack the code in time. When the difficulty gets increased the timer goes from 20 seconds all the way to 10 seconds or even 5.
or/and
Instead of having 3 different tiers of rewards, just give out a single line, lets say 7 numbers, where solving the first 3 would get you rank 1 reward, solving 5 would give you rank 2 reward and solving all 7 numbers would give you complete reward. This would make it simpler for players to understand the goals rather than look around 3 different objectives. On top of this you could add bonus objectives like going over certain coordinates in the hacking table.
or/and
You could further improve this minigame by having a sort of competition between other hacker or AI, playing the game like competitive Tetris where after solving lets say 5 number code, the numbers would permanently disappear and become empty spaces and you are given a new code. When opponent solves their code, maybe some of your numbers could become blocked.
Introducing some tools to change the numbers of not having to lets say have the right number "22" for sequence "11 22 33 44 55", making it only to require "11 33 44 55" and so on.
So many things could be added to make this hacking more interesting. More noncombat oriented hacks that would make the friendly enemy hacker who's trying to protect the network act slower, having a "cyberdeck" like in Pokemon where a "professor oak" allows you to redraw more cyberhacks and dish out your remainding ones.
I think what we currently have is a very lackluster and is a damn shame it has so little effort put in it. We could have all sorts of paralysis/poison effects, giving bonuses for numbers 55 to give double score and so on. So many opportunities to make this really interesting minigame.
Combat
In Cyberpunk there's very few instances where you really struggle against certain enemy types, mainly the 2 legged heavy combat robots, where everything else pretty much dies from a normal gunfire.
In Witcher what I've notices it that you're really required to use certain tactics like putting a trap on moonwraith or shooting at the griffin to force it to land. In Cyberpunk you just generally shoot at things.
I think you could introduce a lot more mechanics and shields in future with specialized combat robots wearing sword and shield, where you'd be forced to use a stun granade for example to cut their defenses. In fist fighting you could take some examples from classics like Mike Tysons Punch Out and make it so that the fighting is more focused around striking at critical moment rather than just slamming attack.
The World
In Witcher you're meeting up with NPC's who are in need of your help to take care of tasks, helping to kill dogs for example, where you're joining in forces. In Cyberpunk you got the introductionary sequence with Jackie but after that you're mostly just soloing the world alone, very rarely meeting an NPC to talk to.
Partially because the world is so open and vast and you're given a little bit too much freedom to explore, you don't really get a feeling that the world is THAT interractive, even if Witcher had exact same level of interaction, but because of the pacing and how you're given a quest to visit around local area, you get more of a feel to talk to others.
So maybe in future sequel the experience could evolve more round smaller cities, especially at the beginning, going around the country side and solving problem with lets say water crisis, finding out it's some evil corporation seeking to benefit from your misery and putting an end to it, before moving to a bigger city.
Night City could as well be part of that sequel, acting as the capitol, where the story wouldn't really revolve around, and it'd be acting more as a hub where you could gain valuable items and establish friendships. I get that these are two different games and this game is trying to emulate the GTA formula, but I think it's not working as smoothly because of the open world and RPG elements mixing up poorly in such large open world.
There's a good reason why so many people are cheering up for the game and saying the first 6 hours of the game are pure 10/10 material, because you're kinda locked in the smaller area and you're not put to explode the vastness of the city, and you're being introduced a lot of people to talk to, but after that it kinda changes and doesn't stay as strong element anymore.
I guess it's still somewhat maintained by how the leveling system kinda prevents you from visiting other areas that are more stronger, but there's no clear indication for the player that THIS IS NOT WHERE YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO GO, THEY ARE TOO HIGH LEVEL, VISIT LATER, other than quests showing up that the difficulty is way too high, or that area completely lacks in quests.
I think this game feels a lot more like Fallout than GTA or Witcher in this aspect, where you're kinda thrown into this wild world and you don't really have a strong narrative other than the main quest line to follow, where a lot of areas are kinda restricted by your level and would get easily demolished by opponents by even attempting it.
So I guess I don't have any solutions to this, it kinda is what it is. You have vast city that has different zones, different level opponents to beat, but they don't actually introduce any new mechanics to the game, so there's nothing really to wait there after leveling up.
So I think the difficulty of higher tier opponents really should scale up, not in soaking up damage, but having a more harder to approach camps, having more established safe zones, quick-hacks that paralyze you and requiring you to prioritize certain targets. Introducing more enemy types in harder difficulties like modified dogs with artificial limbs that charge at you quickly, suicide bombing mini drones that are only easy to take down with a shotgun blast or EMP. Hacking terminals that control said drones and so on, enemies with laser sights through walls. Enemies using same tactics against you and so on. You could even have highest level nethacking enemies who cast "suicide" on you and if successful. So many opportunities to make it more challenging without actually changing too much.
Also everyone is aware that quickhacking is just way too strong at the moment with no real weaknesses. It'd be great to introduce certain types of enemies with maybe special helmets that are un-hackable, leaving at least portion of harder enemies alive to face you even if you manage to take majority of them out.
You recently introduced fix to invisibility modification that allows players to become invisible for 15 seconds with 60 seconds cooldown I believe, so similar tech could be used some advanced ninja's. I think there's a lot of opportunities to transform this combat more away from "guns go boom" or just quick hacking everyone to death in 5 seconds.
I think there's a lot of opportunities to make this game --- just insanely great and something to remind yourself 20-30 years later about, like old Mario from a NES era. Merging multiple genres into one is a big and complex project.
-
There's definitely some strengths this game has even on a launch day against the latest builds of Witcher 3, tutorial is just excellent and it doesn't take you too long to understand what you're supposed to do. In Witcher 3 you got like 20 different popups whenever you open up the menu and it quickly becomes overbearing for a starter.
The BD sequencing and switching through multiple channels is interesting and visually pleasing. It's just kinda hard sometimes to understand what you're supposed to do without having played through the game first.
But here's a few lessons from Witcher 3 that I started noticing after playing through Cyberpunk 2077 first and just recently started playing Witcher 3.
I'll try to edit this long text to cut out some parts that feel like ramblings so keep that in mind when commenting.
Game Introduction
In Cyberpunk 2077 we're too fast introduced into the game by this fast paced opening intro when first time opening up the game. We're not shown the Witcher 3 style opening with this slow paced animated video with beautiful hand drawn pictures. I think there could have been some introduction about the city and what is going on before you step into the boots of V. Perhaps some introduction about how the city is currently run, how it has managed to get in such state, having some doomsday prophets talking about companies being Gods.
I think Cyberpunk 2077 could still keep the TV format but maybe make the introduction a little less fast paced and being more about glorifying the look of the city from distance, showing people doing daily activities and drinking in cafeteria, making the introduction more inviting to the newer player and showing this fake version of the city witch is pretending to be crime free and having a ton of opportunities, shortly showing couple of protesters in the streets before video cuts out to somewhere else and so on. Just a different pacing.
I think the intro is still decent but it shouldn't be out first footage shown about the city. I think if you cut that thing into smaller pieces and made it more like an advertisement for example the Drama Team recruiting video where they fly their AV over some window and blast their way in. Anyway this is just my opinion.
The dream sequence
In Witcher 3 you're first thrown into this dream where you believe it's all happening until stuff goes south and you're terrified and frozen and finally wake up. I think we could have seen something similar of V dreaming about living in a large mansion, sipping coffee and looking outside, until multiple Cyberpsychos rushed through his front gate and started gunning down the house, where V wakes up having bullet put in his brain.
This could have happened for example after the first mission with Jackie (after already failed once before and being betrayed, guns pointed at V) )where V gets to sleep first time in the bed. Having this dream partially because of what Jackie kept saying during the ride home about "This is a city of dreams, Legends are born here!" I think it could be a proper place to have this vision.
This would give kind of inner monologue with what V is about, how he's just another dreamer like many in the city. Or any other way make this more apparent in the story telling that V is a big dreamer. Having more dialogues with Jackie about what they would do with the money or so on.
Introduction cinematic for lifepaths
In Witcher 3 you get this introductionary video where Gerald is observing the environment and trying to determine where his lover has travelled. It shows in a cool manner that Witchers are trackers and they're able to very accurately draw conclusions from evidence what has happened in the past.
I think it would have been more proper to have a short introduction footage foreach lifepath. Showing how you were raised up and how you eventually ended up in such situation, how you thought climbing the ladder of corporation/street or just chilling out as Nomad would make your life better, give some explanation why you end up making the next decisions of entering the city and leaving the gang, or telling how "it started just as a normal day" in Corpo path. Some kind of introduction before the start.
Witcher Sense
I think it's pretty fair to say that Witcher sense works more fluidly than the Braindance in Cyberpunk 2077, you can use it more frequently and it blends with the other gameplay. Sure it kinda limits you only to observe where you're currently standing, where in Cyberpunk 2077 many braindances if not all aren't shown about the locations that you're currently standing on. Sure, you already got the special eyes which allow you to read information about the world around you, so it's nothing really too bad.
I think in general there could've been more seamless transition with BD's of crime scenes and the actual reality in certain situations, where you would enter into a crime scene and seamlessly go watch what happened during it and then enter into real life and perhaps find something that was left behind. Perhaps in next Cyberpunk 2077 sequel this BD sense would be made more seamless with the actual real world and giving us more detective style quests. Hacking into cameras and using their old footage to check what happened in crime scene, rather than going through lengthy sequences of putting a helmet on and then entering into this matrix like sequence.
Maybe in the "Cyberpunk 2088" there could be an upgrade to the BD system that the tech companies were able to squeeze this tech into the artificial eyes that you get to install in next title.
Make you the expert
I think there's something entertaining about having to play as this sort of superhuman who's very acknowledged with how the world operates and is able to give interesting narrative. V however seems often very clueless, asking quest givers "why am I doing this" rather than saying "I see, you really leave me no options", just making you look very inferior to the other people who seem to have better grasp how things are done. Sure this might all be intended but it's not really entertaining to experience as a player.
I think it's fine as it is but maybe in next title have the next "V" or whoever is taking his/her place is going to be more of a professional, who is shown all the tricks of the trade, then having these dream sequences from his past where he wasn't so skilled to act like a tutorial to the game.
Also when you're in BD you often hear Judy narrate how things happened, you don't often even react to these like "oh yeah and then this happened I see", you're more quietly observing what other people are discovering. I mean it's cool to have interaction with other people and having this aspect of not being the best on all fields... but still games are kinda escape from reality and having to play as superhuman is more entertaining power trip than being just a part of large crew.
I think there could've been more effort put into making you being very observant one to draw conclusions, not just in some dialogues based on stats, but it's just my opinion, I'd be willing to bet some people would've hated that aspect.
The quest givers
This is one of the major gripes I have noticed. In Cyberpunk 2077 you're kinda just introduced to these people (in a call you have to answer) who give you quests by the phone almost like an accident. You never get to see them on person without checking them up and they just casually drop new quests for you without any impact after reaching certain milestones.
In Witcher you got 0 quests given to you automatically and you have to check out boards and listen in conversations and talk to people in order to have quests. This is probably why so many people think also why the city feels so lifeless, when you don't have these smaller 1 person quests from a single NPC's.
There's few things that could be changed:
- Make every contractor have a forced arranged meeting before you get any quests from them
- Make majority of quests to require to talk to actual person because of how many of quests are in the gray area of legal and you're too afraid to talk openly about it on phone because of fears NCPD listening on the calls
- Have a lot more individual NPC's who have their own small tasks, maybe some grandma lost her wallet in some hotel and you're asked if you could kindly return that in exchange for some information, maybe having some drunk guy at the bar telling how he was robbed by local gang, and you get a prompt to get a certain item back, a lot more of these smaller quests as much as possible
Gwent
It's pretty obvious that Gwent is very polished game that even became an independent game outside of Witcher. In contrast to Cyberpunk there's nothing really like that, the closest there is, is the small hacking minigame that requires you to match 3-5 numbers.
Simply put, the hacking minigame needs a lot more work put into it. It's currently far too simplistic and gets old very quickly.
I think you could make it that the code changes automatically lets say every 20 seconds, so that it'd be up to the players speed to crack the code in time. When the difficulty gets increased the timer goes from 20 seconds all the way to 10 seconds or even 5.
or/and
Instead of having 3 different tiers of rewards, just give out a single line, lets say 7 numbers, where solving the first 3 would get you rank 1 reward, solving 5 would give you rank 2 reward and solving all 7 numbers would give you complete reward. This would make it simpler for players to understand the goals rather than look around 3 different objectives. On top of this you could add bonus objectives like going over certain coordinates in the hacking table.
or/and
You could further improve this minigame by having a sort of competition between other hacker or AI, playing the game like competitive Tetris where after solving lets say 5 number code, the numbers would permanently disappear and become empty spaces and you are given a new code. When opponent solves their code, maybe some of your numbers could become blocked.
Introducing some tools to change the numbers of not having to lets say have the right number "22" for sequence "11 22 33 44 55", making it only to require "11 33 44 55" and so on.
So many things could be added to make this hacking more interesting. More noncombat oriented hacks that would make the friendly enemy hacker who's trying to protect the network act slower, having a "cyberdeck" like in Pokemon where a "professor oak" allows you to redraw more cyberhacks and dish out your remainding ones.
I think what we currently have is a very lackluster and is a damn shame it has so little effort put in it. We could have all sorts of paralysis/poison effects, giving bonuses for numbers 55 to give double score and so on. So many opportunities to make this really interesting minigame.
Combat
In Cyberpunk there's very few instances where you really struggle against certain enemy types, mainly the 2 legged heavy combat robots, where everything else pretty much dies from a normal gunfire.
In Witcher what I've notices it that you're really required to use certain tactics like putting a trap on moonwraith or shooting at the griffin to force it to land. In Cyberpunk you just generally shoot at things.
I think you could introduce a lot more mechanics and shields in future with specialized combat robots wearing sword and shield, where you'd be forced to use a stun granade for example to cut their defenses. In fist fighting you could take some examples from classics like Mike Tysons Punch Out and make it so that the fighting is more focused around striking at critical moment rather than just slamming attack.
The World
In Witcher you're meeting up with NPC's who are in need of your help to take care of tasks, helping to kill dogs for example, where you're joining in forces. In Cyberpunk you got the introductionary sequence with Jackie but after that you're mostly just soloing the world alone, very rarely meeting an NPC to talk to.
Partially because the world is so open and vast and you're given a little bit too much freedom to explore, you don't really get a feeling that the world is THAT interractive, even if Witcher had exact same level of interaction, but because of the pacing and how you're given a quest to visit around local area, you get more of a feel to talk to others.
So maybe in future sequel the experience could evolve more round smaller cities, especially at the beginning, going around the country side and solving problem with lets say water crisis, finding out it's some evil corporation seeking to benefit from your misery and putting an end to it, before moving to a bigger city.
Night City could as well be part of that sequel, acting as the capitol, where the story wouldn't really revolve around, and it'd be acting more as a hub where you could gain valuable items and establish friendships. I get that these are two different games and this game is trying to emulate the GTA formula, but I think it's not working as smoothly because of the open world and RPG elements mixing up poorly in such large open world.
There's a good reason why so many people are cheering up for the game and saying the first 6 hours of the game are pure 10/10 material, because you're kinda locked in the smaller area and you're not put to explode the vastness of the city, and you're being introduced a lot of people to talk to, but after that it kinda changes and doesn't stay as strong element anymore.
I guess it's still somewhat maintained by how the leveling system kinda prevents you from visiting other areas that are more stronger, but there's no clear indication for the player that THIS IS NOT WHERE YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO GO, THEY ARE TOO HIGH LEVEL, VISIT LATER, other than quests showing up that the difficulty is way too high, or that area completely lacks in quests.
I think this game feels a lot more like Fallout than GTA or Witcher in this aspect, where you're kinda thrown into this wild world and you don't really have a strong narrative other than the main quest line to follow, where a lot of areas are kinda restricted by your level and would get easily demolished by opponents by even attempting it.
So I guess I don't have any solutions to this, it kinda is what it is. You have vast city that has different zones, different level opponents to beat, but they don't actually introduce any new mechanics to the game, so there's nothing really to wait there after leveling up.
So I think the difficulty of higher tier opponents really should scale up, not in soaking up damage, but having a more harder to approach camps, having more established safe zones, quick-hacks that paralyze you and requiring you to prioritize certain targets. Introducing more enemy types in harder difficulties like modified dogs with artificial limbs that charge at you quickly, suicide bombing mini drones that are only easy to take down with a shotgun blast or EMP. Hacking terminals that control said drones and so on, enemies with laser sights through walls. Enemies using same tactics against you and so on. You could even have highest level nethacking enemies who cast "suicide" on you and if successful. So many opportunities to make it more challenging without actually changing too much.
Also everyone is aware that quickhacking is just way too strong at the moment with no real weaknesses. It'd be great to introduce certain types of enemies with maybe special helmets that are un-hackable, leaving at least portion of harder enemies alive to face you even if you manage to take majority of them out.
You recently introduced fix to invisibility modification that allows players to become invisible for 15 seconds with 60 seconds cooldown I believe, so similar tech could be used some advanced ninja's. I think there's a lot of opportunities to transform this combat more away from "guns go boom" or just quick hacking everyone to death in 5 seconds.
I think there's a lot of opportunities to make this game --- just insanely great and something to remind yourself 20-30 years later about, like old Mario from a NES era. Merging multiple genres into one is a big and complex project.
-
There's definitely some strengths this game has even on a launch day against the latest builds of Witcher 3, tutorial is just excellent and it doesn't take you too long to understand what you're supposed to do. In Witcher 3 you got like 20 different popups whenever you open up the menu and it quickly becomes overbearing for a starter.
The BD sequencing and switching through multiple channels is interesting and visually pleasing. It's just kinda hard sometimes to understand what you're supposed to do without having played through the game first.
Last edited: