Can you think of games that offer plenty of combat, but which don't force you into combat a lot? Can you name some non-combat challenges you would like to see? It's hard to come up with missions that can be satisfyingly resolved in multiple ways.
Tabletop D&D can be a cerebral experience, but single-player D&D computer games tend to come down to combat after combat.
Are there similar games that you find more satisfying? Cerebral is hard to do in single-player games that offer action combat. I mean, they can tell us a cerebral story, but that's not the same as thinking for yourself.
Can you think of any similar computer games that feel satisfying in this regard? I think that in a computer game, such planning can tend to devolve into a repetitive mechanical process. If you want to get plans for a building, for instance, the game has to give you clues about how it will let you do that. This tends to devolve into following the arrows.
That one is tricky. I agree that it's easy to escape the police. On the other hand, it feels very easy to accidentally get a warrant and the penalty for everything is death, so the cops could become a real drag if they were more effective.
Well, I mean, you seem to be open to a debate, but the thing is I think you're trowing the ball to somebody else entirely's roof, that being "other games", "other developers". And if other games aren't doing it right, and if others aren't pushing the boundaries, then why are we asking CDPR to do it.
Well, we've been doing a ton of brainstorming in this community for years, and I know we're not game devs and I know we can go crazy with expectations, and we can be not very realistic at times.
The thing is, just because game making has come a long way, we seem to assume that you can put all the best elements of a thing in a blender and make it work. We think that diamonds in the rough such as Bloodlines and New Vegas could be done with today's tech, perspective, hindsight and insight and they will just work. And now you can add a bit of GTA, and you can look at Divinity Original Sin and how they're doing RPGs, and the Witcher 3 gives you hope...
Whatever I answer will come down to personal preference and how dated it is. If I say Deus Ex you may say something about choosing your ending at the end of the game, clunky gameplay and anecdotal reactivity. If I say it about DE:HR you'll say something about there being two clear cut paths: guns blazing and stealth, and mandatory boss battles in the regular version. If I say something about GTA, you'll say something about its mission approach not being really sandbox. If I say something about New Vegas and its factions, same thing...
And I'll understand that and agree to a point. But the thing is that, if we want to call games art, we need to stop conforming to this state of things.
PnP RPG makers know this: if you want to make an RPG set in this setting, you need to make mechanics that reflect that. Why is it so difficult for videogame devs to understand that all the artistic merit we should care about in a videogame is that of its mechanics? Acting, cinematography, emotions, writing, music, art assets... all are artistic elements with their own merits from the perspective of their craftsmanship. But all of those are done better in their respective fields, being literature, cinema, music and visual arts.
If you're making Cyberpunk into a videogame, and you and everyone has assumed that the story and setting can be awesome regardless of how derivative they are (and they are and they're awesome in part precisely for how derivative they are, because what we want is the pure distillation of the genre)... then what you have to justify artistically is your commitment to game mechanics that reflect that.
Preproduction should have been more than running in circles with concept art, concept trailers and 45 minute CGI trailers of pretended demos that only used ingame assets but were pre-recorded as recent leaks suggest. They should have been about prototypes of mechanics:
Start making small scenarios, programme interactions and AI: reactions, pathfinding, ways in which they react... programme collision, programme driving AI, programme the NPCs responses... And please, how uncreative is it that you have to use fantasy game shorthands for weapon and item ratings like "epic" and "legendary" and I don't even have different ammo types.
You can't just start building a house from the roof down and that's what happened with this game.
my way around because when I try to move normally, my game stutters so bad that it sometimes crashes. I believe the cause of this may be related to the streaming of game assets by the console so yeah.
