Video Games: Mystery Box Character Creation

[Jace, Extat]

"See, the beauty of this idea is you can imagine V to look like anything you want."- CDPR spokesman who looks suspiciously like J.J. Abrams.

[Caligula_K3]

I don't have much of a stake in this, since I enjoy both 3rd person and 1st person RPGs (with a slight preference for 3rd person), and since I won't have a PC that can run Cyberpunk for five years. But if the main character is voice acted, instead of the silent 1st person protagonist of games like Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3/New Vegas, and Outer Worlds, then it does seem like a strange choice; those cutscenes and the player character's dialogue are going to feel very static, I'd think.

[Fez]

Sorry to be such a harbinger of bad news. But at least I wasn't alone in not knowing this was the case, and also that I'm alone in being super disappointed by it.

V is fully voiced so that's something at least. But apparently CDPR wanted you to be able to move and look around during dialog, even just walk away, so they needed to keep you in the gameplay mode of first person for all that. Also, I don't know if this true, but I did see some speculation that there may still be a handful of true cutscenes, which would be third person; but that almost everything that we'd think of as cutscenes in a game like The Witcher 3, such as all the conversations, would be in gameplay mode.

And you will see your character in mirrors, inventory menus, and when driving a motorcycle.

It all just really sucks. Even an option like Skyrim's janky 3rd person camera would've be something.

[Jace, Extat]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

Sorry to be such a harbinger of bad news. But at least I wasn't alone in not knowing this was the case, and also that I'm alone in being super disappointed by it.

V is fully voiced so that's something at least. But apparently CDPR wanted you to be able to move and look around during dialog, even just walk away, so they needed to keep you in the gameplay mode of first person for all that. Also, I don't know if this true, but I did see some speculation that there may still be a handful of true cutscenes, which would be third person; but that almost everything that we'd think of as cutscenes in a game like The Witcher 3, such as all the conversations, would be in gameplay mode.

And you will see your character in mirrors, inventory menus, and when driving a motorcycle.

It all just really sucks. Even an option like Skyrim's janky 3rd person camera would've be something.

I really don't mean to sound like an internet person, because I go out of my way to avoid getting hype for shit. But this has greatly saddened me. I spent Sunday putting together a shopping list just for this Ray Tracing business. My current machine is now two years old, and I wanted to run Cyberpunk in its max glory, but I ain't spending $1,000 bucks on new graphics cards if I don't even get to see my fucking character. I'm getting the game of course, but the single reason I can think of not to display the player character is because its a pain in the ass to make all of those different shaped models. And like seriously, what's the point of that highly touted character creator if I'm playing a camera?

[The Drunkard]

I forgot the protagonist was named V and thought you were all talking euphemistically about the pubic hair customisation for a while.

3 hours ago, Fez said:

Sorry to be such a harbinger of bad news. But at least I wasn't alone in not knowing this was the case, and also that I'm alone in being super disappointed by it.

V is fully voiced so that's something at least. But apparently CDPR wanted you to be able to move and look around during dialog, even just walk away, so they needed to keep you in the gameplay mode of first person for all that. Also, I don't know if this true, but I did see some speculation that there may still be a handful of true cutscenes, which would be third person; but that almost everything that we'd think of as cutscenes in a game like The Witcher 3, such as all the conversations, would be in gameplay mode.

And you will see your character in mirrors, inventory menus, and when driving a motorcycle.

It all just really sucks. Even an option like Skyrim's janky 3rd person camera would've be something.

I am reserving judgement for the moment. I never noticed the lack of cutscenes in games like New Vegas (until just now, thinking about it) and I thought that was completely fine in terms of presentation.

[Ran]

@Jace, Basilissa

See earlier discussion on GeForce Now, re: whether to upgrade or not. Worth testing out the free tier and seeing how it works where you are.

As to Cyberpunk 2077 and cutscenes, it seemed clear to me that a lot of the scenes we were being shown were first person cut scenes, but they do genuinely seem to also have some third person cut scenes that are more scripted. We'll see.

To go back on something else from the previous thread

  

On 7/1/2020 at 1:31 AM, The Anti-Targ said:

Interesting the Dr Disrespect perma ban from Twitch happens just days after MS announces they are killing off Mixer. And I think we still don't know the exact reason he was banned.

There's this confluence of things going on that could plausibly be the explanation for his being perma banned -- the public accusations against a host of streamers and game devs, Mixer closing, Twitch having announced they were going to clean things up, Tencent announcing they were throwing their hat into the ring with a rival streaming service called Trovo -- and it's not at all clear what the situation is with Dr. Disrespect. It's said that his contract with Twitch was on the order of $10 million, which was negotiated when Mixer was throwing huge contracts out to poach big names in the industry like Ninja and Shroud. Suddenly those guys are free agents, are probably hearing pitches from Youtube and Twitch, and the question of whether Twitch needs to match Doc's contract or not could be an issue. Or Doc was talking to Trovo about moving and Twitch got wind of it. I've seen a lawyer who does vlogs about gaming looking at all the information to date and he suspects it's some kind of contract dispute going on, because the level of complete silence regarding what's happening.

 

On 7/1/2020 at 1:31 AM, The Anti-Targ said:

I never watched his stuff and I have no idea what he is like (aside from reading that some time ago he made fun of the Chinese accent, and when he was accused of being racists he denied it was racist). But even if he is a racist, misogynist arsehole Twitch should be transparent about their perma ban actions. All Twitch said was there was a terms of service or something violation. 

It's all made weirder that in the last minutes of his final stream, he was clearly hit by bad news on his phone. Had to be his being informed, either directly by Twitch or through representatives of his that Twitch was pulling the plug that day. He's since tweeted that he has not been told the "specific reason" for his ban, but this is typical of Twitch -- they would have told him which guideline was violated but not what the specific violation was. So presumably he knows what the issue is but Twitch is not giving specifics, presumably because of policy and presumably because they don't want to give his lawyers (he's repped by CAA) a chance to push back on their interpretation.

You would have thought that he would have tried to negotiate some stuff in the contract around how banning should be done or explained to him if it happened, of course. We'll see

And still radio silence on what's going on, even still. Nothing has leaked. It's very strange.

I haven't watched Dr. Disrespect in awhile, since I'm not a fan of CoD, which is what he was mostly playing these days. It's been a bit bothering that Doc has lately been sounding like a right-wing loon on political matters, including claiming to have been reading conspiracy theorist David Icke's book on that final stream, but the fact that Dr. Disrespect is a persona, a character being played, makes it hard to make out what's going on there.  Is it Colbert Report style satire? Is it real opinion? I've no idea. (I do think if it's an attempt at just pushing the persona in a satirical direction, it's not well-judged; very different audiences...)

I'll say this for Guy Beahm (aka Dr. Disrespect), he's the only streamer I know who treats streaming as theater. It's very unique, and no one seems to be able to replicate it successfully. His approach has a lot of similarity to pro wrestling, a lot of "kayfabe", which is why this crossover with the Undertaker was so on point:

 

[Ramsay B.]

Just finished TLoU2.

Spoiler

I played the original for the first time a few months back, and mentioned on here that at the end it took me like 30 seconds to react and actually kill the doctors and save Ellie. I thought it was silly to murder all the people looking for a cure and not at all surprised Joel paid for it. So I didn’t mind the decision they made to kill Joel but the story obviously suffers from not having their relationship a major focal point.

They seemed to try and do way too much with the sequel. I didn’t mind playing as Abby and she wasn’t a bad character, but a lot of her story was just tedious. Doing things like finding a toy shark and shooting the bullseyes with Owen got tiresome. Then having you control her in a fight against Ellie was plain annoying. Weird decision.

I also felt like there was no momentum because the story kept getting broken up by flashbacks or switching characters. Wish they simplified it a lot more. I don’t know.

The gameplay was great though. Also appreciated ‘It Was a Good Day’ and ‘Young Men Dead’ being played at different points. Loved Ellie’s rendition of ‘Take On Me’ too. 

 

 

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

@Jace, Basilissa

See earlier discussion on GeForce Now, re: whether to upgrade or not. Worth testing out the free tier and seeing how it works where you are.

As to Cyberpunk 2077 and cutscenes, it seemed clear to me that a lot of the scenes we were being shown were first person cut scenes, but they do genuinely seem to also have some third person cut scenes that are more scripted. We'll see.

To go back on something else from the previous thread

My 1060 should be able to handle CP77 pretty fine at 1080p without any problems. I have been considering an upgrade, especially since the impending announcement of the 30x series means that the 20x series should see some serious price drops soon, but I'm not going to be buying a new monitor to run games at 4K, so there seems little point at the moment (I stream games to my TV a fair bit, so I'd also need to buy a 4K TV, which feels like overkill at this point).

The cut scene thing seems mostly fine. Apart from Fallout 4, where it really didn't work that well, all of the Bethesda games are in first-person for conversations. A common criticism of The Witcher 3 was that you spent an absolutely insane amount of time in conversation cutscenes not able to do anything other than pick dialogue choices, so allowing you to walk around the room during conversations and look at things is a reasonable idea. In fact, CP77 seems to be taking a lot of design choices from Half-Life 2, with the strict first-person viewpoint, not breaking immersion for traditional reasons and keeping you in the character's head at all times. It feels like a genuine shift away from The Witcher 3, probably down to the fundamental difference between playing someone else's character (Geralt/Ciri) and playing your own creation.

I'm still wondering if they're going to have Ciri show up in Cyberpunk 2077. It might be a bit too self-referential, but having set up that crossover in The Witcher 3 it feels like they should really close it.

[Inkdaub]

I hate first person and gave up on Cyberpunk a long time ago. 

Little useless information for everyone.

 

[Toth]

By pure chance I just now stumbled across the Trackmania Nations remake as a giveaway in the Epic Store. A bit weird because it's not listed in the free games tab or otherwise marketed as a free game.

Edit: Ah, nevermind, it's a free to play title.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, Inkdaub said:

I hate first person and gave up on Cyberpunk a long time ago. 

Little useless information for everyone.

 

At least you can feel supported. I'm the same was v disappoint to learn it's FPS. I was so in, and then suddenly totally out.

 

5 hours ago, Ran said:

@Jace, Basilissa

See earlier discussion on GeForce Now, re: whether to upgrade or not. Worth testing out the free tier and seeing how it works where you are.

As to Cyberpunk 2077 and cutscenes, it seemed clear to me that a lot of the scenes we were being shown were first person cut scenes, but they do genuinely seem to also have some third person cut scenes that are more scripted. We'll see.

To go back on something else from the previous thread

  

There's this confluence of things going on that could plausibly be the explanation for his being perma banned -- the public accusations against a host of streamers and game devs, Mixer closing, Twitch having announced they were going to clean things up, Tencent announcing they were throwing their hat into the ring with a rival streaming service called Trovo -- and it's not at all clear what the situation is with Dr. Disrespect. It's said that his contract with Twitch was on the order of $10 million, which was negotiated when Mixer was throwing huge contracts out to poach big names in the industry like Ninja and Shroud. Suddenly those guys are free agents, are probably hearing pitches from Youtube and Twitch, and the question of whether Twitch needs to match Doc's contract or not could be an issue. Or Doc was talking to Trovo about moving and Twitch got wind of it. I've seen a lawyer who does vlogs about gaming looking at all the information to date and he suspects it's some kind of contract dispute going on, because the level of complete silence regarding what's happening.

 

It's all made weirder that in the last minutes of his final stream, he was clearly hit by bad news on his phone. Had to be his being informed, either directly by Twitch or through representatives of his that Twitch was pulling the plug that day. He's since tweeted that he has not been told the "specific reason" for his ban, but this is typical of Twitch -- they would have told him which guideline was violated but not what the specific violation was. So presumably he knows what the issue is but Twitch is not giving specifics, presumably because of policy and presumably because they don't want to give his lawyers (he's repped by CAA) a chance to push back on their interpretation.

You would have thought that he would have tried to negotiate some stuff in the contract around how banning should be done or explained to him if it happened, of course. We'll see

And still radio silence on what's going on, even still. Nothing has leaked. It's very strange.

I haven't watched Dr. Disrespect in awhile, since I'm not a fan of CoD, which is what he was mostly playing these days. It's been a bit bothering that Doc has lately been sounding like a right-wing loon on political matters, including claiming to have been reading conspiracy theorist David Icke's book on that final stream, but the fact that Dr. Disrespect is a persona, a character being played, makes it hard to make out what's going on there.  Is it Colbert Report style satire? Is it real opinion? I've no idea. (I do think if it's an attempt at just pushing the persona in a satirical direction, it's not well-judged; very different audiences...)

I'll say this for Guy Beahm (aka Dr. Disrespect), he's the only streamer I know who treats streaming as theater. It's very unique, and no one seems to be able to replicate it successfully. His approach has a lot of similarity to pro wrestling, a lot of "kayfabe", which is why this crossover with the Undertaker was so on point:

 

Interesting thoughts. I feel inclined to think its somehow a contractual thing, and not racist/sexist or even crazy right wing conspiracy theory stuff.

I think if a streamer is going to act all conspiracy nut they would do the right wing version. Because it's easier for left-wing viewers to detach and believe it all as an act, than for right-wing viewers to do the same with left-wing nut-jobbery. But when you start playing at being a nutcase you do start bumping up against some prejudices that could get you banned from streaming services even if it's just an act, And if he has legit gone down the rabbit hole then he's even more likely to cross a line. But I still think it's more likely to be a contract thing, based on nothing but I feel like if Twitch was going to drop the hammer for bad on-screen behaviour they would have been more specific than just "breach of ToS." Also Dr Disrespect appears to be being fairly restrained in his social media communications. If he was feeling aggrieved over being shut down for his speech I would have thought he might be more aggressive. Arghh! but if he did that he would probably be poison for every other streaming service. So maybe he's being restrained because he wants to be picked up by YT or the tencent thingy. Ugh I'm talking myself in circles.

I imagine it is lawyers at 10 paces and Twitch will have to fully come clean on their reasons, which means some more information should come out.

But on Tencent. I wonder where Epic is going to go with Fortnite and Rocket League. Tim Sweeney claims he's not beholden to them, because he still has the majority ownership. But I wonder.

[Fez]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

The cut scene thing seems mostly fine. Apart from Fallout 4, where it really didn't work that well, all of the Bethesda games are in first-person for conversations. A common criticism of The Witcher 3 was that you spent an absolutely insane amount of time in conversation cutscenes not able to do anything other than pick dialogue choices, so allowing you to walk around the room during conversations and look at things is a reasonable idea. In fact, CP77 seems to be taking a lot of design choices from Half-Life 2, with the strict first-person viewpoint, not breaking immersion for traditional reasons and keeping you in the character's head at all times. It feels like a genuine shift away from The Witcher 3, probably down to the fundamental difference between playing someone else's character (Geralt/Ciri) and playing your own creation.

And I didn't like it in the Bethesda games either. I played as much as possible of Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas in that janky third-person mode they had. And I really like The Witcher 3/Mass Effect/Dragon Age style of conversation cutscenes. Perform for me you digital actors! I don't care about exploring the room or whatever while dialog is happening.

I want lengthy conversations where I don't do anything except absorb the information being given, and maybe even feel an emotion if the writing is really good. And I want to see my digital avatar's reaction to that information happen up on the screen; none of this headcanon nonsense.

[Jace, Extat]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

And I didn't like it in the Bethesda games either. I played as much as possible of Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas in that janky third-person mode they had. And I really like The Witcher 3/Mass Effect/Dragon Age style of conversation cutscenes. Perform for me you digital actors! I don't care about exploring the room or whatever while dialog is happening.

I want lengthy conversations where I don't do anything except absorb the information being given, and maybe even feel an emotion if the writing is really good. And I want to see my digital avatar's reaction to that information happen up on the screen; none of this headcanon nonsense.

I'm fine with first person gameplay. I simply cannot wrap my mind around all this customization and RPG talk for a character who will appear during vehicle sequences and in janky mirrors. Why build your own character at all? I'd say it's like if the Halo games had no multiplayer and a much more robust armor customization system except that's not true. You see Master Chief all the time in cutscenes.

[Poobah]

Yeah I really agree with Jace here, seems incredibly pointless to go into such depth of customising your character to be able to be whatever you want them to be, and then not actually see them interacting with other people in the world when that occurs.

[Fez]

21 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I'm fine with first person gameplay. I simply cannot wrap my mind around all this customization and RPG talk for a character who will appear during vehicle sequences and in janky mirrors. Why build your own character at all? I'd say it's like if the Halo games had no multiplayer and a much more robust armor customization system except that's not true. You see Master Chief all the time in cutscenes.

I would assume that they were going to build the character creator anyway as a way of creating all the minor NPCs in the game. Adding a player-friendly UI to it probably isn't that big a lift, and people love their character creators. It's a good low-effort selling point, especially with the number of people who don't realize how rarely they'll actually see the characters

But I entirely agree with your point. And yeah, I'm okay on the gameplay being first person. In the Bethesda games I almost always did combat first person; I'd switch to third person when walking around towns though.

[Werthead]

Fallout TV show in development with the Westworld showrunners.

Quote

It's a good low-effort selling point

Relatively little in video game development is a low-effort selling point. For Fallout 4 the settlement building thing was a spin-off from the tools they used to build the game in the first place, but creating a player-usable variant that could be used with a controller took something like a year of solid effort from a dedicated small team, even though the code was already all in the game.

For CP77, if they already had all the conversations in 3rd person ready to rock a year ago, they must have all been done, and yanking them out leaves an absolute ton of development time and money on the table (interesting to see if the game ships with the code still in there and if modders can reinstate it).

I have a suspicion that something in the game as they developed it made the 3rd person camera less and less tenable, even for cutscenes, and fixing it would have added more time to development than they are comfortable spending at this late stage. We know that ditching the 3rd person camera allowed them to create much more restrictive level geometry than you can manage in a 3rd person game (since there's nowhere to put the camera), so I wonder if they discovered they had a large number of conversations happening in small rooms and restricted locations that caused the camera to glitch out. Apparently they're doing the RDR2 thing of letting you talk to every single person in the game, which likely had an impact on that as well.

[Rhom]

9 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

I hate first person and gave up on Cyberpunk a long time ago. 

Little useless information for everyone.

 

 

7 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

At least you can feel supported. I'm the same was v disappoint to learn it's FPS. I was so in, and then suddenly totally out.

I'm with you guys.

There are DOZENS of us!!!

[Whiskeyjack]

28 minutes ago, Rhom said:

 

I'm with you guys.

There are DOZENS of us!!!

Same here.

So uh....that makes at least 4!

[Ran]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

My 1060 should be able to handle CP77 pretty fine at 1080p without any problems.

Well, yes, but I want the ray tracing. Looks gorgeous.a

FPS vs. third person, I tend to find first person decidedly more immersive than third person. Third person is nice for games with melee combat, which obviously Cyberpunk 2077 has, but it's less good for impactful ranged combat which I suspect most people will tend to go with in most occasions (will be interesting to see who goes for 'street samurai' style character who just uses a bad-ass tech katana and cyber blades, and how viable pure melee is). 

 

 

 

[Ran]

Speaking of FPS, a new battle royale from Ubisoft called Hyper Scape is in beta, with a bunch of streamers playing it on Twitch ATM. Movement is very Apex Legends in terms of speed, but throws in elements from Overwatch (to pick an obvious example). Jesse Scoble, who was the lead writer of Guardians of Order's A Game of Thrones RPG (and who I'm friendly with), is the head writer. Not too much has been revealed about the characters and the setting yet, but presumably nearer to the public launch in July, I guess.

ETA: Part of the idea of the game is that combatants are in a virtual city... and Ubisoft seems to have taken that to heart, because they're apparently recycling building models from the Assassin's Creed series (specifically, it seems Notre-Dame is virtually 1:1 the same as in Unity.)