Was CP too ambitious?

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This purpose of this thread is not about whether CP lived up to what it set out to be or not, or what they said or didn't. But more from a technical point of view. I watched this video earlier, which covers a lot of issues with the whole thing, from start to finish:


However Im currently playing some Assassins creed Valhalla, which made me think about it, and even though CP is a FPS. I couldn't help wondering if it was simply to ambitious a project for CDPR?

Because I think most people will agree, that NPC AI is not good, neither is the Traffic AI, Police not so much, even a lot of the effects are not very complete as also pointed out in the video.

But as I was playing AC: Valhalla I couldn't help notice that here you have your ship that you can sail down the rivers etc. You can pretty much mark any place of the map and tell it to sail there automatically and the AI will go there, raise and lower sail as needed. But also you can do the exact same thing with your horse. As most people know that have played any of the newer AC, you can do a lot of crazy stuff in it, especially in Valhalla it seems that they have added a lot of stuff to it.

You obviously don't have as many NPCs gathered in one place as in the CP, but still enough to make the places feel alive and them getting out of your way or them dodging out of your way if you are about to hit them with your horse and then yell stuff at you. And the list goes on, there are a lot of things going on here, that it would take a long time to name them all.

So when I compare them it still makes me wonder, how come CP seem to be so far behind in pretty much all aspects or features, except for the quests.

Lets assume that they had to change the story along the way, even if that were the case, that shouldn't really impact the general traffic AI or NPC AI, police might be a bit harder to program, but still its add an absolutely minimum at the moment. In AC, the NPCs have no issue climbing stairs, ladders or walking around these huge castles.

And even though cyberpunk is a FPS, a lot of games, including AC, sometimes goes into FP when you shoot your bow for instance, which doesn't really seem to change a lot about how the game plays, it just automatically switches between these as you switch weapons. My point being that even though CP is a FPS, a lot of the things are identical compared to if it had been in 3rd person. Exactly as the camera switches to 3rd person when you ride on the bike or car, its not like the whole game changes.

Even in the TW3, if I recall correctly, places like Novigrad had quite a lot of NPCs as well, and NPC reacting somewhat similar as they do in AC if you hit them with your horse and lots of small cool AI features, which again have nothing to do with it being FP.

Also CP is better graphics, but that shouldn't really impact how well the AI is, it might hurt performance graphically, but then again there are options to turn that down as well.

To me, it just seems like it is two completely different teams that have made CP and TW3, because a lot of the experience from TW3 should be possible to transfer to CP, such as the NPC AI, and obviously improve it. But I think CP NPC AI is far worse than in TW3, I at least don't recall having any major issues with them.

So do you think that CP was to ambitious? And if so why? Why do you think there is such a huge difference between the NPC AI in CP compared to TW3? And again, all those things which are not linked to it being a FP game?
 
First of all, a detail that I find important. When you're going to create something, for me it's always good to be a little too ambitious. If you start from the principle that you will limit yourself only to what you know how to do best, without trying to innovate (taking the risk of making mistakes of course), this is not a good approach.

Then maybe CDPR was more impacted than other studios by this damn pandemic... I think depending on where the studio is located in the world, it can really make a difference. In Europe alone, some countries were much stricter from the start and therefore companies in that country suffered the effects of the pandemic faster and for longer.

And if you compare Assassin Creed license (I haven't play Valhalla, I wait for a low price... I like those games, but not for €60+).
So for me, Valhalla is an "upgraded" version of Odyssey, itself was an "upgraded" version of Origins. In my opinion, it's way more easy to start from a previous game than start from nothing. And speaking about horses, when like me, you came from RDR2 and after that you play Odyssey, you could wonder how it's possible to have worse horses than that... For me, they could hardly to be worst (at the point that I had never used them once in the whole game, better to just run) :(
 
Not too ambitious. they just announced a release date too early imo. I blame marketing and management. Imo the game needed more time in the oven (probably at least one more year) but once CDPR announced a release date, especially after all of the "when it's ready" talk, people expected it to be finished. When they kept moving the release date up, I figured that CP might launch in a buggy, unoptimized state.

The problem was marketing didn't want to lose last gen consoles. The game couldn't be optimized in time. People say it they should have released it just for next gen and pc. I disagree. They should have held off announcing a release date and worked on the game until it was actually ready for all platforms, or had a later release date for last gen. I play on ps4 myself. Been playing since launch, in fact. At this point the game feels MUCH better than it did at launch, and I have little doubt that with further updates/patches/dlc Cyberpunk will eventually be the game it should have been on last gen.

Another problem is the current game dev "culture". By that I mean a lot of devs get away with releasing an unfinished game nowadays. Basically a beta until the community is used as play-testers for a few months and patches come in. CDPR wasn't supposed to be that type of dev. The community believed in them and the marketing and management were simply being dishonest.

Unregulated capitalism has corrupted many businesses this way. I'm not an "anti-capitalist" but I think greed, combined with the fact that so many companies have been getting away with this crap for years without repercussions, will lead even the "better" companies - like CDPR - to betray their fanbase for money. A crapton of money... or so they thought.

The sad thing is the people at the top were too blinded by avarice to see that a rushed release only hurt them even more in the end, financially. And another sad fact is the ENTIRE MESSAGE of Cyberpunk (sticking it to the corpos in a dystopian future where greed reigns supreme) gets lost because of CDPR's handling of the release.

I'm still hopeful that the game will turn around, believe it or not. I actually very much enjoy Cyberpunk for it's very strong core elements (Story, characters, dialogue). And imo the combat mechanics are actually a big step up from the Witcher. In Witcher 3 you didn't have access to all your skills. You had to set the ones you wanted to use in an active tree. Then the game became spamming swift attacks, as the way Geralt would spin at random eliminated the ability to time counters or fight in a smart way. Anyway, I digress. My point Cyberpunk is great at it's core and in some ways even better than the Witcher.

It's just.... they need to keep fixing the performance issues and keep adding elements to the game that should have already been there. There's a lot of work to do if they want to regain our trust and pull-off a No Man's Sky "phoenix rising from the ashes".
 
I don't think it was too ambitious, I think there was a disconnect between the upper echelon and techs. They more or less confirmed that. The hype for this game was on point with the expectation, but it just wasn't there yet. We're seeing as time passes the promises that we're meant to be. It'll get there.

Another piece could be that the studio needed revenue and so they pushed it earlier for that.
 

Guest 3847602

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Probably. They obviously tried to do many things at once that fell out of their area of expertise: futuristic setting, driving, shooting, customizable protagonist, 1st person perspective, more advanced RPG mechanics, etc... How successful they were is up for debate.
As for NPCs in TW3, I disagree. Most of them stay in place, those who do walk will bump into you like they don't see you if you position Geralt in their path. There are some places where a group of NPC can glitch and walk in circles. In some other places their legs are 0.5m underground.
What gives the people the illusion of TW3 having better NPC AI is the game prohibiting you from causing chaos, so this almost never comes into the spotlight.
 
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Madae

Forum veteran
I think most of the problem came from introducing Keanu Reeves to the project, and maybe some misguided loyalty to his character and giving him a bigger part in the game than was initially planned, which started a domino effect of changing the game to accommodate his character and story. Just on the surface, you can tell there is a conflict over who is the actual main character of the game, V or Johnny, and which story we're actually supposed to care about, though that tends to lean more towards V since you have more connection to them from the gameplay, but still, it confuses the direction of the game and where it was meant to go by having Johnny play such a big part in it. Even the endings have favorable outcomes for Johnny, and we're given the option to kill our own character, which is very weird as far as storytelling goes.

That he came so late in development with the announcement being so close to launch, and the things we thought we were getting at first (choice of origin more readily affecting gameplay, and the missing gameplay from that choice) really just points to Johnny as the problem, imo. As for the game being too ambitious, I don't think so. It's not all that much different from what else is out there. It was just a conflict of interest.
 
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I think most of the problem came from introducing Keanu Reeves to the project, and maybe some misguided loyalty to his character and giving him a bigger part in the game than was initially planned, which started a domino effect of changing the game to accommodate his character and story. Just on the surface, you can tell there is a conflict over who is the actual main character of the game, V or Johnny, and which story we're actually supposed to care about, though that tends to lean more towards V since you have more connection to them from the gameplay, but still, it confuses the direction of the game and where it was meant to go by having Johnny play such a big part in it. Even the endings have favorable outcomes for Johnny, and we're given the option to kill our own character, which is very weird as far as storytelling goes.

That he came so late in development with the announcement being so close to launch, and the things we thought we were getting at first (choice of origin more readily affecting gameplay, and the missing gameplay from that choice) really just points to Johnny as the problem, imo. As for the game being too ambitious, I don't think so. It's not all that much different from what else is out there. It was just a conflict of interest.
Pawel Sasko, one of the lead quests designers, mentioned already in his streams that they DIDN'T change the game/story because of Keanu. More dialogues: yes, and probably they have added his appearance to more side quests, but the open-world quests have been managed by another team anyway. Until the summer of 2018 they even haven't known if Keanu will accept this role.
 
Pawel Sasko, one of the lead quests designers, mentioned already in his streams that they DIDN'T change the game/story because of Keanu. More dialogues: yes, and probably they have added his appearance to more side quests, but the open-world quests have been managed by another team anyway. Until the summer of 2018 they even haven't known if Keanu will accept this role.
I'm saying this without really knowing and without infos, but I imagine that if we had not "Johnny-Keanu", we would still have had an another "johnny-unknow" in the head. I'm pretty sure that even without him, the story would have been the same (or almost), with the endings we know :)
No, it's not Keanu's fault that V still dies at the end !
 
Sorry, but comparing AI in TW and CP is like comparing bananas to tomatoes.

I wouldn't even watch a video where I see a broken disc case because I'm bored with people, who try to do everything to get some attention. Critique is good, but it still has to be done with some respect.

Was the game too ambitious? Probably, but in the meanwhile, they have more experience with those kinds of games, so I'm pretty sure they will do better in the future.
 
I think most of the problem came from introducing Keanu Reeves to the project, and maybe some misguided loyalty to his character and giving him a bigger part in the game than was initially planned, which started a domino effect of changing the game to accommodate his character and story.

CDPR has said this is nonsense and that it was the plot with Johnny Silverhand that attracted Keanu. There's not been a single bit of evidence that they did anything other than add him to sidequests to make commentary. The idea there was a different story other than the chip also seems bizarre. The entire game is set up around it and always has been.

It's a weird accusation too. I don't know where it came from either. Do people really think that they threw out some mythical better script?
 

Guest 3847602

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It's a weird accusation too. I don't know where it came from either. Do people really think that they threw out some mythical better script?
Briefly off-topic, but yes. There is a bizarre theory floating around, claiming that the original intention was for the game to be some sort of rags-to-riches journey with Jackie, but then Keanu came in and said: "Screw it!" and CDPR decided to rewrite the script (sometime in 2018) to appease him. Because more Keanu on screen = more $$$.
There's nothing in game's files to support this theory (while there's plenty of examples of abandoned or altered story content within TW3's files), but who cares about evidence...
 
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I wouldn't even watch a video where I see a broken disc case because I'm bored with people, who try to do everything to get some attention. Critique is good, but it still has to be done with some respect.
Also off-topic, sorry :(
So Yes, I haven't even watched the video actually, a thumbnail like this smells like click-bait from afar.
And honestly, I much prefer watching a video of a game that I don't like, made by someone who loves the game. That's way more interesting, for me at least :)
 
Briefly off-topic, but yes. There is a bizarre theory floating around, claiming that the original intention was for the game to be some sort of rags-to-riches journey with Jackie, but then Keanu came in and said: "Screw it!" and CDPR decided to rewrite the script (sometime in 2018) to appease him. Because more Keanu on screen = more $$$.
There's nothing in game's files to support this theory (while there's plenty of examples of abandoned or altered story content within TW3's files), but who cares about evidence...

Crazy. Mind you, I really do like the Watson section of the game and would have enjoyed Jackie as a permanent companion. But the game seems pretty clear he was a sacrificial lamb meant to make you feel bad and the game is all built around you dying/Johnny Silverhand. They were barely able to get the game running as is, I can't imagine they would be able to change it half as drastically as the theory suggests.
 
Personally I think you were supposed to play the "six months cut scene" as the "first act". Why do I say that, well when I play as I Nomad, in the "cut scene" you are plainly seen delivering goods to Padre, and getting paid for it. However when you actually start the game you have never met him before as he introduces himself.

In my opinion V and Jackie were supposed to do all the "Fixer Gigs" first leading up to the Heist, which would have been the next act, with Johnny and all the Main Missions.

Look at the evidence, you supposedly have been doing "gigs" in Night City for 6 months yet the only Fixer who has heard of you is Wakako! All the others contact you after your spectacular failure with the heist. It doesn't' hang together and felt wrong from the first time I played it. The chip is killing you. You have to find an answer, why are you messing around with ordinary gigs!! In several of the Main Missions you are told "don't keep me waiting", Hanako memorably says it when meeting her at Embers yet doing that will end the game. Aside from the main story there are 92 side quests, and 86 gigs you are trying to do while dying, makes no sense and lead me to feeling "rushed" on my first playthrough.

The six months was cut and the gigs were added to the main storyline so Johnny could be added to the game earlier. That is my opinion and I can see little evidence to the contrary.
 
It was too ambitious to try and release it on old gen consoles. One year later CDPR could have released it as next gen and pc only, and saved their good name.

I understand the marketing reasons behind that, but i still believe they chosed money over integrity.
 
Personally I think you were supposed to play the "six months cut scene" as the "first act". Why do I say that, well when I play as I Nomad, in the "cut scene" you are plainly seen delivering goods to Padre, and getting paid for it. However when you actually start the game you have never met him before as he introduces himself.

In my opinion V and Jackie were supposed to do all the "Fixer Gigs" first leading up to the Heist, which would have been the next act, with Johnny and all the Main Missions.

Look at the evidence, you supposedly have been doing "gigs" in Night City for 6 months yet the only Fixer who has heard of you is Wakako! All the others contact you after your spectacular failure with the heist. It doesn't' hang together and felt wrong from the first time I played it.
"Maybe" that the 6 months were planned to be playable, but maybe were "cut" because TW3 main's quest was considered as "too long" (I think it was mentioned). So since these 6 months aren't "too important" to the main story, they've been cut. It could also be a reasonable explanation for me at least :)

And for the "urgency", for me there is always (mostly) in all games some sort of "urgency" in the main quest (TW3 is a good example for me). So it's not related to the fact that Keanu-Johnny was be added after :)

But it's just my opinion and certainly not a truth ;)
 
"Maybe" that the 6 months were planned to be playable, but maybe were "cut" because TW3 main's quest was considered as "too long" (I think it was mentioned). So since these 6 months aren't "too important" to the main story, they've been cut. It could also be a reasonable explanation for me at least :)

And for the "urgency", for me there is always (mostly) in all games some sort of "urgency" in the main quest (TW3 is a good example for me). So it's not related to the fact that Keanu-Johnny was be added after :)

But it's just my opinion and certainly not a truth ;)

While I wish it were true that the Six Months were playable, the fact is that they weren't able to get much of the main game 100% working. If I were to be a conspiracy theorist, I'd believe a lot of the game wasn't made up because they had to cut a huge chunk of the game because it was clear they were never going to make their deadline even with a year long delay.

Which is, "yes, too ambitious."

I think its equally likely, though, that the Six Month Montage is actually more an example of CDPR misjudging their audience. We already have the Tutorial mission: the Scavenger Organ Harvester rescue. That introduces us to stealth, fighting, hacking, and shooting. I don't think there were ever meant to be any more missions before that.

However, CDPR misjudged their audience that really wanted more of THAT sort of thing. Jackie, you, and getting to know people rather than just jumping ahead to the main plot.

Weirdly, I think it's more they gave too much OR too little. If the game had literally started with no Life Paths or the montage, people would probably have less of a problem but they gave us a taste that made us want it.
 
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