Uggh. So this is improved? [NPC Clones]

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Funny thing is: the clones have become MUCH worse for me with patch 1.23, even though this issue was on the patch notes list lol. And before v1.23 I rarely had clones walking around. They did occur in an area of around 20 - 30 meter distance to each other sometimes, which didn't bother me. Now they're constantly walking right next to each other and that looks ridiculous.

Running on PC with RT Psycho and max crowd density. Seems like another big downgrade for PC players. Wish I could revert back to v1.06 or before, if Steam would allow it...
 
While I'm sure it can probably be improved more over time, it's hardly something I'd spend large amounts of time on at the moment -- especially if there are still optimizations being done to the overall graphical engine. It's a polish-level concern.

It is a bit distracting, though. On PC with crowds set to max, it tends to happen more frequently, but because of the sheer number of people in crowds, it's also less noticeable. When it does create a situation where I have 4-5 identical NPCs within my field of view, though, that, in turn, can be even more distracting. :LOL:
 
Man, sounds to me not only was the content of the game not finished, the entire engine wasn't finished at the time of release.
The engine was very finished. And very robust. It's absolutely gorgeous on PC.

But that doesn't mean that it was optimized as well as it could be. Engines don't simply work like: "Just set it like this -- and then everything is flawless!" In order to get the game running universally well on high-end hardware, mid-range hardware, and low-end hardware, various elements can be configured and reconfigured (like draw distances, level-of-detail elements, maximum number of NPCs that will be created at one time, the order in which things are loaded, etc.) that can create significant improvements or problems on various systems. (And no, it's not possible to test this in a way that will account for all of the hardware combinations possible for tens of millions of different users.)

Hence, while some people may see noticeable improvement when an optimization is made...others may get worse performance...or graphical glitching...or bugs and crashing. And the great balancing act continues apace.
 
The engine was very finished. And very robust.
According to whom?

I seem to recall some fixes in the patch notes for 1.2 indicating that the engine was anything but "very robust." As for "finished," I would be extremely surprised if the engine met the internal definition of done, given how much last-gen was struggling with the game, and how long it took to return to the PS store.

Also, "gorgeous" doesn't have a clear correlation with whether or not a game engine is either finished or robust. I think we both know that, so not sure why it is even in the same sentence.

But that doesn't mean that it was optimized as well as it could be.
Now we're just getting into hair-splitting and semantics. Call it "unoptimized" or "unfinished" to suit your taste--there isn't a formal definition either way.
The important thing is that ALL platforms were and are experiencing bugs ranging from inconvenient to critical.
 
Honestly to some extent I agree that people seem a little hypersensitive to things that "break immersion" around this game. The other day I came across a comment elsewhere that the fact the line where the rain stopped on the ground didn't match the rain itself "broke my immersion".

I mean, OK, then wait for the holodeck to be developed in 2225 or so.

(OP, your complaint is rather more understandable than the rain shadow one.)

In all fairness, CDPR did want to make CP77 super immersive, so its fair to point out what wrecks that immersion. Some things are petty yes, but others are not, such as no NPC's ride around on bikes, or pretty much all the stalls are non-interactable ect.
 
In all fairness, CDPR did want to make CP77 super immersive, so its fair to point out what wrecks that immersion. Some things are petty yes, but others are not, such as no NPC's ride around on bikes, or pretty much all the stalls are non-interactable ect.
But also in fairness you are playing a game that effectively recreates a small life size city. So a degree of realism would be helpful. It's still a computer game.

There are things that are obviously unacceptable like the behaviour of NPC cars. It's pretty much the one thing EVERYONE, love the game or loathe it, brings up.

But at the opposite extreme you have rain shadow silliness or "why can't I open every single door".
 
There are a few people who are out of all proportion disgusted that the water isn't responsive to shooting, smacking, etc.

I mean, yeah, it's 2021, you're right, that's dumb, but it's also a small, small thing.

Of all the immersion breakers in 2077 (Civilian AI, bikini tops with better armor than actual armored vests, making Railguns out of discarded cans, car races you can't lose, a Combat Zone that you don't have to do combat in, a million inhalers just lying around that heal you back to full from nearly dead in a setting where people pay thousands to armed ambulance crews) things like poorly responsive water and NPCs that look the same are not really a big deal.

Even if all of those other issues were fixed, still not a big deal.

Oh and cloning has been a thing since 2020, actually! Cloned organs and limbs available commercially since 2009 iirc, and full human cloning since about 2020. No, I don't think that's why.

Thing is though, small details make a big difference. One small detail missing isn't an issue, but when there are lots, it all adds up.

No water collision
No interaction with the majority of shops and stalls
No barbers or ways to adjust V's appearance
No mini games
No NPC's ride around on bikes
Duplicating pedestrian NPC's, sometimes up to 3 in a row
NPC's driving is beyond stupid and aren't willing/able to navigate obstacles
Pedestrian NPC's aren't willing to fight back (lore-wise, that's stupid since pretty much everyone has a gun .. supposedly)
NPC's do very little other than walk about (see RDR2 for NPC routines)
I believe NPC's were supposed to have a day/night cycle?
Police don't drive around in cars or bikes or anything
MAXTAC do not show up in their flying vehicles to be badass like at the very start of the game :(
What should be random events are marked on the map, this must makes these look like set pieces. (easy fix, remove them from the map unless the player is near by)
Very few weapons in the game, which seems odd for the setting
Everything that you mentioned
ect ect

Any of those on their own is not that big of a deal, but added all together its noticeable, and that's never a good thing. Nobody is silly enough to forget that they are playing a game, we all know that it isn't actually real, but that doesn't mean that a game should get a free pass just because its actually a video game.

The game was supposed to be immersive and immersion was something that CDPR wanted to focus on, that's why people pick up on it a lot.

For example in the Mass Effect series, there's not much that can be done outside of missions and side missions, and that series doesn't have many of what is listed, however, Bioware never said they wanted to make an immersive world/city, it was all about the characters, their arc's and main story.

If a dev says they are wanting to focus on a certain aspect of a game, then people will notice it since its been pointed out.
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But also in fairness you are playing a game that effectively recreates a small life size city. So a degree of realism would be helpful. It's still a computer game.

There are things that are obviously unacceptable like the behaviour of NPC cars. It's pretty much the one thing EVERYONE, love the game or loathe it, brings up.

But at the opposite extreme you have rain shadow silliness or "why can't I open every single door".

What you say is true, but the entire city is not fully rendered all the time, but the bubble around the play that is rendered, just isn't all that good anyway.

You'll always find someone wanting something completely unobtainable within a game, such as what you mentioned about doors and what not. However it doesn't help when the dev says things like;

"Your never going to be in a situation where you're like "I need to get in there, I need to get in there" and then you go and you're like "urg I can't get in there" because the city is so big its overwhelmingly huge" - Patrick K Mills

I think the game has potential, it always did, but I think their marketing, what they said in interviews, and how early they announced the game all went against them in the end and skewed peoples perception of what the game was going to be and how it would play.

There's a ton of things they can do to make NC feel more alive, but its the question of "will they do it?".
 
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Thing is though, small details make a big difference. One small detail missing isn't an issue, but when there are lots, it all adds up.

No water collision
No interaction with the majority of shops and stalls
No barbers or ways to adjust V's appearance
No mini games
No NPC's ride around on bikes
Duplicating pedestrian NPC's, sometimes up to 3 in a row
NPC's driving is beyond stupid and aren't willing/able to navigate obstacles
Pedestrian NPC's aren't willing to fight back (lore-wise, that's stupid since pretty much everyone has a gun .. supposedly)
NPC's do very little other than walk about (see RDR2 for NPC routines)
I believe NPC's were supposed to have a day/night cycle?
Police don't drive around in cars or bikes or anything
MAXTAC do not show up in their flying vehicles to be badass like at the very start of the game :(
What should be random events are marked on the map, this must makes these look like set pieces. (easy fix, remove them from the map unless the player is near by)
Very few weapons in the game, which seems odd for the setting
Everything that you mentioned
ect ect

Any of those on their own is not that big of a deal, but added all together its noticeable, and that's never a good thing. Nobody is silly enough to forget that they are playing a game, we all know that it isn't actually real, but that doesn't mean that a game should get a free pass just because its actually a video game.

The game was supposed to be immersive and immersion was something that CDPR wanted to focus on, that's why people pick up on it a lot.

For example in the Mass Effect series, there's not much that can be done outside of missions and side missions, and that series doesn't have many of what is listed, however, Bioware never said they wanted to make an immersive world/city, it was all about the characters, their arc's and main story.

If a dev says they are wanting to focus on a certain aspect of a game, then people will notice it since its been pointed out.
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What you say is true, but the entire city is not fully rendered all the time, but the bubble around the play that is rendered, just isn't all that good anyway.

You'll always find someone wanting something completely unobtainable within a game, such as what you mentioned about doors and what not. However it doesn't help when the dev says things like;

"Your never going to be in a situation where you're like "I need to get in there, I need to get in there" and then you go and you're like "urg I can't get in there" because the city is so big its overwhelmingly huge" - Patrick K Mills

I think the game has potential, it always did, but I think their marketing, what they said in interviews, and how early they announced the game all went against them in the end and skewed peoples perception of what the game was going to be and how it would play.

There's a ton of things they can do to make NC feel more alive, but its the question of "will they do it?".
So I guess the thing for me was that I came into the game not having seen the marketing and having ignored all videos. I just read reviews, waited for patch 1.2 and, narratively, it plain blew my mind.

I think it's pretty clear that, probably inadvertently (in that you don't expect people to hang off literally every word and those words then got spun even further by online chatter and clickbait news), they overfed a hype machine that led people, to a greater or lesser extent, to expect cyberpunk: the more real life than real life simulator. And now they're paying for it when they could have been more tight-lipped.

Which is a real shame, to be honest, because what the game does well it does spectacularly well. But if people walk into it expecting the world, the planets and the universe delivered via their computer screen, then, yes, anything less, even in the slightest details, will be a problem.
 
I think the game has potential, it always did, but I think their marketing, what they said in interviews, and how early they announced the game all went against them in the end and skewed peoples perception of what the game was going to be and how it would play.

There's a ton of things they can do to make NC feel more alive, but its the question of "will they do it?".

I think we all thought this game had been in development for 8 years. Had we known it was only a little over four years we would have been like "no, put it back in the oven, no way is this finished'.
 
So I guess the thing for me was that I came into the game not having seen the marketing and having ignored all videos. I just read reviews, waited for patch 1.2 and, narratively, it plain blew my mind.

I think it's pretty clear that, probably inadvertently (in that you don't expect people to hang off literally every word and those words then got spun even further by online chatter and clickbait news), they overfed a hype machine that led people, to a greater or lesser extent, to expect cyberpunk: the more real life than real life simulator. And now they're paying for it when they could have been more tight-lipped.

Which is a real shame, to be honest, because what the game does well it does spectacularly well. But if people walk into it expecting the world, the planets and the universe delivered via their computer screen, then, yes, anything less, even in the slightest details, will be a problem.

You did yourself a solid for ignoring all marketing and press info, and I'd say that goes a long way towards you liking the game too.

For me, I held off from the majority of the press info bar the Night City Wire videos as these were official CPDR videos which showcased the game. And even from the modest information that I did see, I wasn't too impressed with the game or even much of the story. I wish I could have liked it as much as some people to do, but I just found it lacking in many areas and I was frankly shocked by it, especially because of who was making the game and that we were in 2020 (at release).

Perhaps I've been spoilt by games like RDR2, but even then, that's an older game which seems more technically superior and works on the older consoles.

Don't get me wrong, people can love CP77 as much as they want, but its also sad that a lot of people really don't like it. I'd love CDPR to pull a NMS sort of revival, but I've got a feeling that they wont .. :( But please CDPR, prove me wrong!
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I think we all thought this game had been in development for 8 years. Had we known it was only a little over four years we would have been like "no, put it back in the oven, no way is this finished'.

I believe that the game actually had a major shift party way though it's development, and I think it was roughly around the time that KR was signed onto the project. :/
 
You did yourself a solid for ignoring all marketing and press info, and I'd say that goes a long way towards you liking the game too.

For me, I held off from the majority of the press info bar the Night City Wire videos as these were official CPDR videos which showcased the game. And even from the modest information that I did see, I wasn't too impressed with the game or even much of the story. I wish I could have liked it as much as some people to do, but I just found it lacking in many areas and I was frankly shocked by it, especially because of who was making the game and that we were in 2020 (at release).

Perhaps I've been spoilt by games like RDR2, but even then, that's an older game which seems more technically superior and works on the older consoles.

Don't get me wrong, people can love CP77 as much as they want, but its also sad that a lot of people really don't like it. I'd love CDPR to pull a NMS sort of revival, but I've got a feeling that they wont .. :( But please CDPR, prove me wrong!
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I believe that the game actually had a major shift party way though it's development, and I think it was roughly around the time that KR was signed onto the project. :/
Cyberpunk hit me as hard as a seriously good book or movie. But my play style is to explore, to read the lore, to take it slow and wander, to uncover the secrets buried throughout the game world. It is, narratively and atmospherically, a game that thinks pretty deep things, that they wrapped in a wrapper of something else entirely.

So when I heard about the gangs, gunplay, etc, I plain wasn't interested. I have no interest in GTA and its themes and wouldn't want to play anything similar. What I got was a game where you can learn to meditate, where you face repeated questions about the nature of the soul, and issues of the manipulation of thought and reality.

It's almost like there are two completely different game styles in there, one of which had broader commercial appeal. And I think it's the latter that is being met with such criticism.
 
You did yourself a solid for ignoring all marketing and press info, and I'd say that goes a long way towards you liking the game too.

For me, I held off from the majority of the press info bar the Night City Wire videos as these were official CPDR videos which showcased the game. And even from the modest information that I did see, I wasn't too impressed with the game or even much of the story. I wish I could have liked it as much as some people to do, but I just found it lacking in many areas and I was frankly shocked by it, especially because of who was making the game and that we were in 2020 (at release).

Perhaps I've been spoilt by games like RDR2, but even then, that's an older game which seems more technically superior and works on the older consoles.

Don't get me wrong, people can love CP77 as much as they want, but its also sad that a lot of people really don't like it. I'd love CDPR to pull a NMS sort of revival, but I've got a feeling that they wont .. :( But please CDPR, prove me wrong!
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I believe that the game actually had a major shift party way though it's development, and I think it was roughly around the time that KR was signed onto the project. :/
Well, Pawel Sasko confirmed that Keanu Reeves had not such a big impact on the game as some people speculate , from 26:00:
 
According to whom?
According many, myslef included, that received perfectly playable framerates and stable performance right from the beginning. I had a fair few problems I needed to sort through at the beginning, but engine issues were not one of them. Even before I upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10 to fix the crashing issue that developed for me after the first patch, I never had any major issues with draw-in, textures loading very late, shadows vanishing, FPS drops, etc. The only time I ever encountered any major problem that was optimization-related was in the taxi garage with all the steam and stuff.

It's complex engine, though. Mileage will vary depending on your system, hardware, etc. (And no, I don't have a top-of-the-line rig built in 2020 for $8000. I'm using the same system I built in 2015 to play TW3. i7-4790K, 16 GB RAM, and a GTX 980 ti. Was able to play from day one at between 45-56 FPS at full Ultra, 1080p.)

I seem to recall some fixes in the patch notes for 1.2 indicating that the engine was anything but "very robust." As for "finished," I would be extremely surprised if the engine met the internal definition of done, given how much last-gen was struggling with the game, and how long it took to return to the PS store.
That's the same engine that was used up to 1.2. The engine didn't change. It was better optimized to offer more universally smooth performance, especially as work was done for consoles.

Also, "gorgeous" doesn't have a clear correlation with whether or not a game engine is either finished or robust. I think we both know that, so not sure why it is even in the same sentence.
A graphics engine is meant to render and draw the game in a way that looks good. I'd like to compare side-by-side shots of the macro and micro detail between Night City and any other open-world game on the market. Yup, some of it is going to be subjective, but there's not a game I've ever played that offers this level of fine detail and variety of detail that's also handled seamlessly. That's what I'm referring to by robust. It's not a reference to gameplay mechanics, it's a reference to the graphical engine.


Now we're just getting into hair-splitting and semantics. Call it "unoptimized" or "unfinished" to suit your taste--there isn't a formal definition either way.
The important thing is that ALL platforms were and are experiencing bugs ranging from inconvenient to critical.
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Hence, if a graphical engine produces great image quality and solid performance on one set of hardware, but it produces image glitching or instability on a different set of hardware, then the issue is not that the the engine is not robust and versatile and powerful, it's that it needs to be optimized for the hardware it's having trouble with.

That's exactly the work that's going on now. It's exactly the thing that happens with any other studio that runs into performance problems with their titles. It's exactly what has always happened when a studio tries to develop their own engine, make significant changes to an existing engine, and push the envelope of what can be done visually. It will continue to happen this way unless all hardware is restricted to only a set number of options, only one engine is available for game design, and all studios build only within those parameters. (No thanks, for my part. I'm a proponent of experimentation and innovation. If things are handled that way, it's guaranteed not to work out fantastically every time. I'm happy to wait while issues are sorted out.)
 
Top priority for CDPR has been returning on the PSN store. that means optimizing for a machine with plain HDD and 8 slow cores.

For some bizzarre reason, however, also the PC version suffered. I remember with V.104 I had fewer issues like meshes and LOD pop-ups, texture mip-maps switching too close to the cameras, and -yes- even more clones than before. Not to mention that, despite that, I've never seen any sizeable improvement in framerate or GPU utilization.
 
The game was supposed to be immersive and immersion was something that CDPR wanted to focus on, that's why people pick up on it a lot.

For example in the Mass Effect series, there's not much that can be done outside of missions and side missions, and that series doesn't have many of what is listed, however, Bioware never said they wanted to make an immersive world/city, it was all about the characters, their arc's and main story.

If a dev says they are wanting to focus on a certain aspect of a game, then people will notice it since its been pointed out.

While I do agree with the general sentiment behind the post, I do believe you're misrepresenting what immersion means to many.

Immersion is very subjective, I personally found immersion in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (very little to no interaction with the environment) in droves, like nothing else before or after it until Cyberpunk 2077.

It's the atmosphere and the cohesiveness portrayed in its creativity and art style which includes visual, narrative, sound, gameplay, perspective and everything else that thoroughly portrays the design decisions behind the game world/universe.

But it also means that this painstakingly created atmosphere that in turn emits the feeling of immersion can be broken by the lack of detail in certain aspects that may or may not be easy to overlook for some people hence the thread in question.

Bottom line is, we are playing a video game, there's a certain suspension of disbelief required to fully enjoy what's presented to us, but it's not an excuse for the shortcomings, just like the shortcomings don't take away the good and the great it already achieves.
 
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Cyberpunk and Stalker have more in common than you may think.


Both games had huge ambitions. To this day I remember how in the original Stalker there was supposed to be a thousand (1 000) individual stalkers, freely roaming through the Zone, sharing stories of other virtual stalkers and their misadventures. One of the Stalker developers said that sometimes you would encounter bandits, and if you had a firefight and killed them, later you might hear from some stalker you talked to that he found the bodies of those bandits some time ago. And you could maybe talk to another stalker and he would say that he heard some fire exchange in the distance. It was supposed to be all connected. The infamous "A-Life"
And lets us not forget about drivable cars that never made it to any of the stalker games if I recall correctly. Only Lost Alpha, a stand-alone mod to the original Stalker, implemented cars with some good results.


When I think about what Cyberpunk was supposed to be and what we ended up with, I always go back to Stalker and its promise. I don't want Cyberpunk and CDPR to share similar fate to Stalker and GSC. The company has dissolved, we got Tarkov and Metro and who knows where else the ex-stalker devs laned in. We can see a similar process with CDPR, although the company is still operational. You can hear here and there how ex-witcher devs create new studio or work on a new project under someone else.


In my case the bottom line is, I don't want 3 iteratively progressive games that never live up to the original promise. Especially that Stalker at least had some dedicated modders that eventually gave us Lost Alpha, and I doubt that RED engine will be modable enough for someone to fix the game for CDPR.
 
Cyberpunk and Stalker have more in common than you may think.


Both games had huge ambitions. To this day I remember how in the original Stalker there was supposed to be a thousand (1 000) individual stalkers, freely roaming through the Zone, sharing stories of other virtual stalkers and their misadventures. One of the Stalker developers said that sometimes you would encounter bandits, and if you had a firefight and killed them, later you might hear from some stalker you talked to that he found the bodies of those bandits some time ago. And you could maybe talk to another stalker and he would say that he heard some fire exchange in the distance. It was supposed to be all connected. The infamous "A-Life"
And lets us not forget about drivable cars that never made it to any of the stalker games if I recall correctly. Only Lost Alpha, a stand-alone mod to the original Stalker, implemented cars with some good results.


When I think about what Cyberpunk was supposed to be and what we ended up with, I always go back to Stalker and its promise. I don't want Cyberpunk and CDPR to share similar fate to Stalker and GSC. The company has dissolved, we got Tarkov and Metro and who knows where else the ex-stalker devs laned in. We can see a similar process with CDPR, although the company is still operational. You can hear here and there how ex-witcher devs create new studio or work on a new project under someone else.


In my case the bottom line is, I don't want 3 iteratively progressive games that never live up to the original promise. Especially that Stalker at least had some dedicated modders that eventually gave us Lost Alpha, and I doubt that RED engine will be modable enough for someone to fix the game for CDPR.

Oh I know, that was a deliberate comparison.

And S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is still one of my favorite franchises, really looking forward to the sequel because Metro's melodrama didn't do anything for me even if I enjoyed the gameplay and atmosphere.

And I fully agree, but I also see no problem with trying to shoot for the stars and miss than not try at all and be confined by the norms.

And to circle back to the thread in question, they are just like GSC still working on the game and have no plans to give up even if some of the patches come with their ups and downs.

As for the NPC clones, I've started a new game and not only do I see a lot more NPC's around at all times (even in the intro sequence while Jackie was driving) I haven't seen any clones that stood out.

I have to admit I was not particularly looking for them either, too busy enjoying the atmosphere :).
 
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