Worried about CDPR going into full corpo mode

[Surma.]

So for me, at the time, it was more because there was no choice, rather than the studios/Devs were more serious/decents. But maybe I'm wrong

Games were far simpler back then to code as well.

Not having to worry about 3D made easier to code AI, even for fake 3D like Doom, monsters travel and use only the 2D space to make movement and planning.
You also didn't have units pulling out gadgets or swapping guns, animations were simpler and there was 2-3 recorded voices for each unit.

Pretty much summarized in otherwise shitty video in first minute of watching (the rest is quite garbage tier material):

When you have to do with constant array of variables influencing units, player positioning, 3D space to move, some kind of inner logic to switch strategies, with animation engine running in the background and trying to make everything smooth, it's no accident that once a while you see one of these getting stuck from unknown variable entering to the picture through error.

I mean computer code in itself is prone to errors in physical properties. Most of course are filtered out by another layer of logic, but eventually something weird is going to happen eventually with the amount of calculation happening in screen.

When computers calculate binaries 0001 + 0001 million zillion times, sometimes you come out with 0011 instead of 0010, because the computing unit are so tiny that electrons start to occasionally glitch into other side of equation (called quantum tunneling if I'm not mistaken). The more calculations you do, more natural errors you're prone to get, especially in highly intensive 8 nm GPU processors.

I'd bet even in NES era if you just run the emulation of lets say Ninja Gaiden for 100 000 hours in some advanced AI that was able to test all the possible inputs and outcomes of every corner, we would find some new ways to win the game in lets say under 2 minutes. If you check how ingenious some of these speed runners are, they're able to find multiple exploits in 2D games where for example in Castlevania Aria of Sorrow (GBA) you could finish the game in 15 minutes which should be impossible even for a God to do it in legit way.

And it's the same with even polished ultra highly tested games like Zelda Breath of the Wild where in manner of few days, people were starting to clear the game within just few hours and it took less than a week to narrow the clear time below 1 hour, and now the record is something below 30 minutes. I'm quite sure Nintendo didn't even expect anyone clear the tutorial area in that time even while speed running.

Considering how large the games have become, it would take the size of 5-10 times larger to release games in absolute polished flawless condition, where everything is extremely well tested.

Unfortunately we happen to live in capitalist system where spending insanely more resources to make experience worth for the 5% who have to suffer through worst of the bugs or are going to be the ones to abuse exploits. And I would rather have competition of ideas rather than every company trying to reach some sort of flawless status.

 

[Bartinga2077]

I'm not against growth per se. But as I said in the first post, creativity shouldn't be just the means to this end.
There are game developers who make great games and stay creative: Santa Monica Studios or Supergiant Games – although some of you might say, Hades isn't Triple AAA (if you define AAA by graphics too much).

Tend to believe CP77 bustles with creativity, the ideas for the gig's topics, and the transition of all cars and NPCs from 3D to 2D and back to name a few. Only it's creativity can best be seen from the game's internals, which its customers cannot see. Because people cannot see it, they tend to say that the game knows little to no creativity.

To myself, the game's sheer high amount of content tells it all about its innovative creativity stored deep within. Made out of experiences and lessons of previous projects, and thus progress and growth.

 

[Trylander]

You're not the only one feeling this.

Even the most hardcore fans of CDPR have to admit their communication with both community and investors has been very quiet.


Then again, it's people in gaming communities who told them to do exactly that: "Stop apologizing, stay quiet, and get to work", obviously they don't want to create some craze over the investors calls where news outlets will report "CD Projekt has announced one third of their staff is now working on Witcher 4 and are about to tease Cyberpunk 2077 expansion and multiplayer in E3", you would get a lot of bad negative press by these angry critics in YouTube if perception is still that game is not yet finished and they are just going to abandon these missing features. And of course a lot of companies are trying to stay silent before E3, where you're going to get hyped no matter what is shown.

I can only wish we would hear a lot of positive spin in E3 about what's to come and what's at least shown to be fixed in the game in their test servers, how would the game be changed for the better, what fan feedback have they started to work on implementing, like car customization and barbers, gang favor, etc.

I mean they've demoed the game on far worse state years before release, so it wouldn't be that hard to show few new features that they're planning to implement in 6 months.

The lack of transparency is on one hand helping since there's a ton of toxicity toward the game, especially festered by the YouTube gaming community, and on one hand it's really irritating to not hear anything for half a year.

To be honest, I like it that they are silent. For a multiude of reasons. But in general I wish all publisher would go with the No Mans Sky aproach. Ofc I don't mean the way how they shiped the game but how they just cut of the middle men (Press/Media) and just release stuff when they're done with it. They don't promise anything anymore, they look at feedback, evaluate what is possible to do and get to work without a word until they are done with it. Sean Murray tweets maybe some cryptic stuff a week prior to an update release but thats it. And just look how far they have without the Hypetrain. Sure I get it why it makes sense to promote a game an steam up the hype train, but men just do it if your have done the work and not years prior to it.

So all in all I'm glad they're silent now and hope steer this Aircraft Carrier into the right direction this year without any stupid announcements and attemps to hype anyone up. If your work is good, word will spread by it self. Because hype only builds expectations and you can never please everyone. It's better to let players find out by themselfs.

 

[BabalKabak]

If I remember, this was clearly the case, when our consoles/pc had no or a "very" bad internet connection. Obviously, no digital version of a game either. It was impossible to consider any fix/patch after a game was released.
So for me, at the time, it was more because there was no choice, rather than the studios/Devs were more serious/decents. But maybe I'm wrong

Well, it sounds weird to me that, given that the budget is growing, and the less technical constraints there are in creative industries, the overall quality of these games goes down or even, but rarely up.

Yes there've been difficulties at that time : the early 3D games looked funny as compared to nowadays games, but it had to be pushed forward so we end up playing (in real time) literally what we saw on the pre-rendered video cutscenes decades ago.

Internet play was a feature pushed forward advertised as a revolution (and it was slowy and tedious at start), but that's how we make the industry evolving, and today there are great multiplayer games that couldn't exist without this initiative.

However... I don't think that either the digital release, or the intent of bug fixing after release... none were the initial motivation for having internet in our consoles 20 years ago. It's more of a consequence of internet's existence into gaming + the evolution of the business, that people started to take profit from that. As for digital products, well it's more of a natural evolution as it came as a logic way of saving money and material, + infinite amount of products. Which means more sales.

Games were far simpler back then to code as well.

Not having to worry about 3D made easier to code AI, even for fake 2D like Doom, monsters just the layout basically to travel in 2D.
You also didn't have units pulling out gadgets or swapping guns, animations were simpler and there was 2-3 recorded voices for each unit.

Sorry to disagree on this, I believe (based on documentaries & interviews) that the technical difficulty of making games has been a constant throughout the years. You could imagine these old games as puzzles at an intellectual, creative, and technical level. It took real geniuses to lay such brilliant code back then, to make everything working fine with so little place to fit them into the tape/cartridge. I'm sure that compared to nowadays, we've just displaced the problem onto another type of problem.

Because in comparison, it's a reality that some games among the greatest of these past years, are just built upon rather simple mechanics. And I'm sure that a compromise have been set between "What do the devs want to do VS what they can actually do." Because if they were seeing too big, imagine if they would technically extend/upgrade their game at every direction, the game would've become either in a non-ending development state, or a bugged game.

And it's the same with even polished ultra highly tested games like Zelda Breath of the Wild where in manner of few days, people were starting to clear the game within just few hours.

Considering how large the games have become, it would take the size of 5-10 times larger to release games in absolute polished flawless condition, where everything is extremely well tested.

There are specific conditions needed to either use an exploit, or reproduce it.

There's always been software tricks & exploits, old games included. Whether or not the players want to "use" the exploits is up to them, and must not be taken in account for any statistics regarding the game itself, unless it's obvious that the bug is game breaking, and/or open to everyone to reproduce it without requiring any speedrunner skill at all (which is in some way, game-breaking).

I make the difference between two categories of bugs : the ones the player don't have any clue about unless they stumble upon it, and have the skill to reproduce it at their profit (= exploitable, reproductible bugs used in speedruns) ; and the other type of bugs that are game-breaking in the bad way (crashes, save corruption, soft lock, blatant hole in the code, etc.). I was talking about that kind of bugs.

I don't know about to how long should take a videogame to be ready, what effort should the devs put into a single project ? I see it more like an open question. If the problem relies on "bigger games = more bugs", then why not going back to simpler mechanics, simpler methods ? If the problem concerns the budget that requires such big games to be developed at their full potential, well, it depends on the project, and who's gonna pay throughout the development state. Or maybe the game companies should look at other ways of earning their money to continue developing their game. And they have been such systems like Kickstarters, Preorders, Early Access, etc. but too many companies are misusing this medium, or cheating with the backers ; this makes a bad picture that affects all the industry. And I'm not talking about investors because I fundamentally have a problem with this economical system.

So either one or another, I prefer that a dev base their work upon what they know they can do, at first ; then they can (re-) gain the gamer's trust, having a name in the industry and MAYBE at that moment they could try more risky projects...

Unfortunately we happen to live in capitalist system where spending insanely more resources to make experience worth for the 5% who have to suffer through worst of the bugs. And I would rather have competition of ideas rather than every company trying to reach some sort of flawless status.

Yes, agreed ! I'm not sure how it comes that some companies try hard to compete with the champions, at the expense of their own reputation... But if they realized that what makes a great game has nothing to do with graphic performance or size of the map...

it needs a true dedication to the art for whatever console or system you're working on, and knowing where to go from the first draft of the project.

 

[LeKill3rFou]

Well, it sounds weird to me that, given that the budget is growing, and the less technical constraints there are in creative industries, the overall quality of these games goes down or even, but rarely up.

Yes there've been difficulties at that time : the early 3D games looked funny as compared to nowadays games, but it had to be pushed forward so we end up playing (in real time) literally what we saw on the pre-rendered video cutscenes decades ago.

Internet play was a feature pushed forward advertised as a revolution (and it was slowy and tedious at start), but that's how we make the industry evolving, and today there are great multiplayer games that couldn't exist without this initiative.

However... I don't think that either the digital release, or the intent of bug fixing after release... none were the initial motivation for having internet in our consoles 20 years ago. It's more of a consequence of internet's existence into gaming + the evolution of the business, that people started to take profit from that. As for digital products, well it's more of a natural evolution as it came as a logic way of saving money and material, + infinite amount of products. Which means more sales.

What I mean is that back then, when a game came out, it really had to be "theoretically" flawless, because there was no way to fix them afterwards (no right to error under penalty of definitive failure).
For me, it also limited the fact of testing new things in games, for the same reasons, impossible to change them afterwards.

I'm not saying that is an excuse for the state of games today. But that before the studios and Devs were certainly no more honest than they are today. They had just no other possibilities (failed release > definitely Failed).

 

[Ayinde_Palmer]

Well, that was still true I believe a few decades ago ? But now the economy along with the business strategy has changed as it seems.

Today's successful marketing plan is based upon the promise of a great art piece / journey / something-something "beyond expectations". And it's working very, very well unfortunately. Create and grow the Demand instead of working on the quality of a respectful Supply.

Note that I'm aware that the most successful gaming companies didn't make their profit out of just "good and passionate games", there always been a big mediatic fight around the consoles/hardware, and note that few of the hardware products were either disappointing or plain fraud, they were delivered, functioning, enjoyable for what they were ; and so were the game. Most of videogames were ready to play on RELEASE, no DAY 1-2-3 patches at that time, you get what you pay for and it was the norm. Does someone remembers that we could try the game beforehand, and that was called a DEMO ? How many companies does that now, are they too afraid of disappointing the gamers ? (I know about the "alternative" to demos but for obvious reasons I won't mention it).

We can see how the trick isn't even disguised anymore. Lots of successful campaigns that rely on the promise of something great and that desperately needs the customer to keep on giving money for. You name it : Early Access frauds, Game as services, Hype-rich projects that turn into crapwares / vaporwares, Kickstarters frauds, Sequels that are plain copy-paste of the last game, an so on... It appears that fewer of these companies even attempt at deliver a decent product anymore. And as I said, they don't hide it either, it's the same strategy for 10+ years. Selling hopes & dreams.

I'm not throwing a boulder on every company / indie dev that work their product based on these methods. Some of them are fine, some of them are being honest and transparent about the development process. But fewer each year...

I agree about what you're saying : we should keep our wallets CLOSED until something's out. Advertisement has been a magic show for too long now. Let's get back to the fundamentals. Decent games made by decent people.

the real deal is that game creation has changed drastically since those days. the size of the project on nes Megaman vs AAA game is phenomal. Also, while games used to be more heavily tested and designed to be bug free, the tradeoff was less ambitious games, and more QA time. Live development is actually more than worth it in terms of software evolution. Some studios are really bad with those tools, but overall its been a large benefit to gaming, and probably consumers.

you look at Street Fighter 2 which required you to buy like 10 different game cartridges for bugfixes, feature expansions, characters, balance etc, vs Street Fighter V with constant fixes, balance, characters.

Also, the real deal, in 1988 new games cost 40 bucks, in 2021 games cost 60 bucks. That is an incredibly low increase, well below inflation, where 40$ back then is worth 90$ now. The cost of console/pc game development has drastically increased in contrast. Not to mention the cost in man hours, which is probably actually more important.

so yeah, my point is, we can get caught in the negativity, and the nostalgia, but the fact is players overall are getting more games, better variety, that last longer, with higher quality, for less money than they used to.

Post automatically merged: Jun 2, 2021

Well, it sounds weird to me that, given that the budget is growing, and the less technical constraints there are in creative industries, the overall quality of these games goes down or even, but rarely up.

Yes there've been difficulties at that time : the early 3D games looked funny as compared to nowadays games, but it had to be pushed forward so we end up playing (in real time) literally what we saw on the pre-rendered video cutscenes decades ago.

Internet play was a feature pushed forward advertised as a revolution (and it was slowy and tedious at start), but that's how we make the industry evolving, and today there are great multiplayer games that couldn't exist without this initiative.

However... I don't think that either the digital release, or the intent of bug fixing after release... none were the initial motivation for having internet in our consoles 20 years ago. It's more of a consequence of internet's existence into gaming + the evolution of the business, that people started to take profit from that. As for digital products, well it's more of a natural evolution as it came as a logic way of saving money and material, + infinite amount of products. Which means more sales.


Sorry to disagree on this, I believe (based on documentaries & interviews) that the technical difficulty of making games has been a constant throughout the years. You could imagine these old games as puzzles at an intellectual, creative, and technical level. It took real geniuses to lay such brilliant code back then, to make everything working fine with so little place to fit them into the tape/cartridge. I'm sure that compared to nowadays, we've just displaced the problem onto another type of problem.

Because in comparison, it's a reality that some games among the greatest of these past years, are just built upon rather simple mechanics. And I'm sure that a compromise have been set between "What do the devs want to do VS what they can actually do." Because if they were seeing too big, imagine if they would technically extend/upgrade their game at every direction, the game would've become either in a non-ending development state, or a bugged game.



There are specific conditions needed to either use an exploit, or reproduce it.

There's always been software tricks & exploits, old games included. Whether or not the players want to "use" the exploits is up to them, and must not be taken in account for any statistics regarding the game itself, unless it's obvious that the bug is game breaking, and/or open to everyone to reproduce it without requiring any speedrunner skill at all (which is in some way, game-breaking).

I make the difference between two categories of bugs : the ones the player don't have any clue about unless they stumble upon it, and have the skill to reproduce it at their profit (= exploitable, reproductible bugs used in speedruns) ; and the other type of bugs that are game-breaking in the bad way (crashes, save corruption, soft lock, blatant hole in the code, etc.). I was talking about that kind of bugs.

I don't know about to how long should take a videogame to be ready, what effort should the devs put into a single project ? I see it more like an open question. If the problem relies on "bigger games = more bugs", then why not going back to simpler mechanics, simpler methods ? If the problem concerns the budget that requires such big games to be developed at their full potential, well, it depends on the project, and who's gonna pay throughout the development state. Or maybe the game companies should look at other ways of earning their money to continue developing their game. And they have been such systems like Kickstarters, Preorders, Early Access, etc. but too many companies are misusing this medium, or cheating with the backers ; this makes a bad picture that affects all the industry. And I'm not talking about investors because I fundamentally have a problem with this economical system.

So either one or another, I prefer that a dev base their work upon what they know they can do, at first ; then they can (re-) gain the gamer's trust, having a name in the industry and MAYBE at that moment they could try more risky projects...


Yes, agreed ! I'm not sure how it comes that some companies try hard to compete with the champions, at the expense of their own reputation... But if they realized that what makes a great game has nothing to do with graphic performance or size of the map...

it needs a true dedication to the art for whatever console or system you're working on, and knowing where to go from the first draft of the project.

it literally takes more man hours to develop games now than it used to. The "genius" of old developers is questionable, there were tons of knockoff games, and code has always been reusable, such that while programing in a more basic language was more esoteric, once they made the tools it was rather easy to work from there.

super Mario was made by seven developers over the course of two years.

witcher 3 was made by 150-250 developers over over 3.5 years

its not really debateable that games take more man hours to develop now

 

[reaper1]

so yeah, my point is, we can get caught in the negativity, and the nostalgia, but the fact is players overall are getting more games, better variety, that last longer, with higher quality, for less money than they used to.

Definitely would agree. It's always wise to be careful when looking through the old rose tinted specs. It is also true that there were many games from the days before the ability to patch games that had some minor or serious bugs and flaws. Final Fantasy 6 (3 as the US version was known as at the time) had a serious, albeit rare and unlikely that the player would trigger, bug that could cause a memory overflow causing at best the save file to become seriously corrupted, but still partially playable and at worst would corrupt all three save files on the cartridge, requiring a fresh start. The second run of cartridges contained ROM version 1.1, with the bug fixed, but it still exists in version 1 of the rom. Furthermore, the evade stat didn't work, instead the magic evade stat was used for both physical and magic attack calculations. That was never fixed on the SNES versions of the game.

 

[BabalKabak]

Thank you guys for adding a broader point of view to this. Sorry about that. I should've done this, but it takes me an considerable amount of time just to arrange my ideas then translate correctly. Oh btw I didn't mean to send a "nostalgia bomb" here.

There were, and still are, many examples and counter examples of good design VS bad design ; I agree with most of what you're saying, you're right.

super Mario was made by seven developers over the course of two years.

witcher 3 was made by 150-250 developers over over 3.5 years

its not really debateable that games take more man hours to develop now

I don't know, to me a good game can be whatever, it depends on the initial goal.

My definition of a good game is the very sense of what makes a game a "game". One which sets its priorities in the gameplay, and (fair) rules (how to win ? to lose ? does it feels fair to me ?). Everything else is extra, or up to personal subjectivity. Whether or not a game took five minute of five years to be done developing, I mean it's up to how high the bar the developers did set on themselves.

Yes I know that Cyberpunk77 is "slightly more significant" to design than making per se, Pong. It takes more planning, more resources, etc. But given that CDPR probably delivered their best shot (many says that CP77 surpass TW3 in every way), I must make clear that I'm not attacking them personally. In fact, CDPR aren't the only one to suffer from long-term kickass AAA projects that end up seem barely afloat if we see the ending result (in a subjective perspective... because financially they are well). There is something wrong with this industry, with the way AAA's tend to be sold on looks, marketing, performance, experience, feelings of whatever, and less on the basics. On the very definition of a game. Given that these companies have the biggest resources to make game, the AAA's should become the golden example of a perfect game ?

So what could we (they) do to make AAA's better ? Lower the bar next time ? Everyone should pay a monthly forfait perhaps ? Or accept that a videogame shall never meet a finished state, it must grow forever ? Are we still buying games or what, what are they trying to sell

 

[Spockprime]

Those sorts of promises might mean something to me if they'd specifically list what it is that they're promising. As it is now, the "promises" that they've given mean about as much as the word "better" in an advertisement.

 

[LeKill3rFou]

My definition of a good game is the very sense of what makes a game a "game". One which sets its priorities in the gameplay, and (fair) rules (how to win ? to lose ? does it feels fair to me ?). Everything else is extra, or up to personal subjectivity. Whether or not a game took five minute of five years to be done developing, I mean it's up to how high the bar the developers did set on themselves.

Mine, It could seem too simple...
But for me, a "good" game, it's a game that I enjoy playing for more than a few hours. If I turn off the console, go to sleep and the next day I plan to replay it, it's all good
(But hey, I guess everyone has their own vision)

 

[NorseGraphics]

Games were far simpler back then to code as well.

Not having to worry about 3D made easier to code AI, even for fake 3D like Doom, monsters travel and use only the 2D space to make movement and planning.
You also didn't have units pulling out gadgets or swapping guns, animations were simpler and there was 2-3 recorded voices for each unit.

Pretty much summarized in otherwise shitty video in first minute of watching (the rest is quite garbage tier material):

When you have to do with constant array of variables influencing units, player positioning, 3D space to move, some kind of inner logic to switch strategies, with animation engine running in the background and trying to make everything smooth, it's no accident that once a while you see one of these getting stuck from unknown variable entering to the picture through error.

I mean computer code in itself is prone to errors in physical properties. Most of course are filtered out by another layer of logic, but eventually something weird is going to happen eventually with the amount of calculation happening in screen.

When computers calculate binaries 0001 + 0001 million zillion times, sometimes you come out with 0011 instead of 0010, because the computing unit are so tiny that electrons start to occasionally glitch into other side of equation (called quantum tunneling if I'm not mistaken). The more calculations you do, more natural errors you're prone to get, especially in highly intensive 8 nm GPU processors.

I'd bet even in NES era if you just run the emulation of lets say Ninja Gaiden for 100 000 hours in some advanced AI that was able to test all the possible inputs and outcomes of every corner, we would find some new ways to win the game in lets say under 2 minutes. If you check how ingenious some of these speed runners are, they're able to find multiple exploits in 2D games where for example in Castlevania Aria of Sorrow (GBA) you could finish the game in 15 minutes which should be impossible even for a God to do it in legit way.

And it's the same with even polished ultra highly tested games like Zelda Breath of the Wild where in manner of few days, people were starting to clear the game within just few hours and it took less than a week to narrow the clear time below 1 hour, and now the record is something below 30 minutes. I'm quite sure Nintendo didn't even expect anyone clear the tutorial area in that time even while speed running.

Considering how large the games have become, it would take the size of 5-10 times larger to release games in absolute polished flawless condition, where everything is extremely well tested.

Unfortunately we happen to live in capitalist system where spending insanely more resources to make experience worth for the 5% who have to suffer through worst of the bugs or are going to be the ones to abuse exploits. And I would rather have competition of ideas rather than every company trying to reach some sort of flawless status.

You can never reach perfection, only approach it. And at the end, it's how much effort they can justify throwing money and time into a project, before it costs more than it returns.

Post automatically merged: Jun 3, 2021

Thank you guys for adding a broader point of view to this. Sorry about that. I should've done this, but it takes me an considerable amount of time just to arrange my ideas then translate correctly. Oh btw I didn't mean to send a "nostalgia bomb" here.

There were, and still are, many examples and counter examples of good design VS bad design ; I agree with most of what you're saying, you're right.



I don't know, to me a good game can be whatever, it depends on the initial goal.

My definition of a good game is the very sense of what makes a game a "game". One which sets its priorities in the gameplay, and (fair) rules (how to win ? to lose ? does it feels fair to me ?). Everything else is extra, or up to personal subjectivity. Whether or not a game took five minute of five years to be done developing, I mean it's up to how high the bar the developers did set on themselves.

Yes I know that Cyberpunk77 is "slightly more significant" to design than making per se, Pong. It takes more planning, more resources, etc. But given that CDPR probably delivered their best shot (many says that CP77 surpass TW3 in every way), I must make clear that I'm not attacking them personally. In fact, CDPR aren't the only one to suffer from long-term kickass AAA projects that end up seem barely afloat if we see the ending result (in a subjective perspective... because financially they are well). There is something wrong with this industry, with the way AAA's tend to be sold on looks, marketing, performance, experience, feelings of whatever, and less on the basics. On the very definition of a game. Given that these companies have the biggest resources to make game, the AAA's should become the golden example of a perfect game ?

So what could we (they) do to make AAA's better ? Lower the bar next time ? Everyone should pay a monthly forfait perhaps ? Or accept that a videogame shall never meet a finished state, it must grow forever ? Are we still buying games or what, what are they trying to sell

How about decoupling the AAA-titling of games from publishers/developers? So many of them has misused the AAA-system, that it's more of a joke these days. Same with the pg/rating-system. They define their own nebulous goals, and shift the post after launch to make it seem they've 'always been right'. The latest ridiculous attempt was EA's way trying to evade the MTX-label on games containing exactly micro-transactions due to scrutiny by various governments.

This 'meme' can also be heard in CP2077 through radio-broadcasts were the cyber-tech agency was decommissioned to let companies rate their own cyberware-products.