Cyberpunk 2077 [split from video games]

[sifth]

32 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Cyberpunk 2077: What Caused the Video Game's Disastrous Rollout

"Fans and journalists were wowed by Cyberpunk 2077’s ambition and scale. What they didn’t know was that the demo was almost entirely fake. CD Projekt hadn’t yet finalized and coded the underlying gameplay systems, which is why so many features, such as car ambushes, were missing from the final product. Developers said they felt like the demo was a waste of months that should have gone toward making the game".

I think this is what angers me the most in this whole mess. They straight up lied to us. That 2018 50 minute demo is why I preordered this game, back in 2018 and they gutted the hell out of it for the final product and straight up lied to us when it came to a lot of the features.

[Werthead]

14 minutes ago, sifth said:

"Fans and journalists were wowed by Cyberpunk 2077’s ambition and scale. What they didn’t know was that the demo was almost entirely fake. CD Projekt hadn’t yet finalized and coded the underlying gameplay systems, which is why so many features, such as car ambushes, were missing from the final product. Developers said they felt like the demo was a waste of months that should have gone toward making the game".

I think this is what angers me the most in this whole mess. They straight up lied to us. That 2018 50 minute demo is why I preordered this game, back in 2018 and they gutted the hell out of it for the final product and straight up lied to us when it came to a lot of the features.

I think Schreier is misrepresenting the 2018 demo a little bit.

It's was actually playable, and a lot of people played the demo at E3 in 2018. It wasn't an non-interactive video. It appears to have been the vertical slice of the game, a pretty standard internal dev tool where they take all the game's systems and combine them for the first time to show what the final product will look like and get all the dev team on board for what they're trying to do. It's not uncommon for vertical slices to be used as external demos and it's actually better for time, so you're not making a vertical slice and then a separate gameplay demo, so saying it was a "waste of time" to make it is an exaggeration. You need vertical slices internally so people actually know WTF they're actually making and not lose sight of the overall vision.

It's clear the 2018 demo has some elements missing from the final game because they were too ambitious (situational kills in an open world environment were, at the time, felt to be rather unrealistic in an open-world game) as well as the fairly standard UI changes you'd expect, but it's not the case the 2018 demo is completely different to the final game. That mission in the actual game and in the demo are surprisingly close to one another, rather more than most vertical slices are to the finished game.

[Ran]

11 minutes ago, sifth said:

That 2018 50 minute demo is why I preordered this game, back in 2018 and they gutted the hell out of it

"Gutted" seems strong for their removing wall-running, brief 3rd person cutscenes in your apartment, and some UI differences. Because that's pretty much all the difference between the demo in 2018 and the game today.

I too doubt the whole "pre-programmed" claim about the demo's fight scenes. They are too similar to the actual game. The only really substantial difference that I can see is the hacking UI which gives an illusion of much more complexity, but basically means you have to navigate some "nodes" and then you're doing pretty much the exact same hacking that you do in the game.

 

[sifth]

15 minutes ago, Ran said:

"Gutted" seems strong for their removing wall-running, brief 3rd person cutscenes in your apartment, and some UI differences. Because that's pretty much all the difference between the demo in 2018 and the game today.

I too doubt the whole "pre-programmed" claim about the demo's fight scenes. They are too similar to the actual game. The only really substantial difference that I can see is the hacking UI which gives an illusion of much more complexity, but basically means you have to navigate some "nodes" and then you're doing pretty much the exact same hacking that you do in the game.

 

Yea, what about every choice mattering? They make a huge deal of that in the 2018 demo. They use the Maelstrom mission as if it's an example about how every choice will lead to a different outcome in the game in that demo. Branching storytelling is in a lot of story driven games, like Detroit, The Witcher 3, Mass Effect and so on, so it's to be expected in a choice driven game.  Well turns out in the final game, that's literally the only mission, where that's possible. Just another one of their many lies. This was sold as a next gen open world game, yet I find that RDR2, had more next gen features than this game. I mean if this is your first open world game, I get why you like it so much man, I really do. For me though, I've played dozens of these type of games and this just isn't anything special, IMO

[Ran]

10 minutes ago, sifth said:

Yea, what about every choice mattering? They make a huge deal of that in the 2018 demo. They use the Maelstrom mission as if it's an example about how every choice will lead to a different outcome in the game in that demo. Branching storytelling is in a lot of story driven games, like Detroit, The Witcher 3, Mass Effect and so on, so it's to be expected in a choice driven game. 

I don't know what to tell you, but it branches more and choices matter more than you're admitting.

10 minutes ago, sifth said:

 

Well turns out in the final game, that's literally the only mission, where that's possible.

Most missions allow you the choice of how to approach them, and you can decide to kill or leave people alive in situations that have some sort of impact on the story you're presented.

Like, in my 2nd through, I did a gig for the Padre involving killing someone that had pissed him off. Then I ended up attending a certain funeral, and realized that the Valentino members I had had a chat with in a previous run-through weren't there... and that's because they were led by the guy I had recently taken out. (A fact that people were talking about, for that matter, at the funeral and another location later in the game, though they didn't know I and Padre were behind it, which was good as it would have been awkward.) Gangs do eventually recognize you and start reacting to you as friendly or a threat, it just doesn't sign post it with "So-and-so will remember that" ala Tell Tale; the 6th Street Gang will party with you to start with... until someone recognizes you at the end of their shooting competition as someone who's killed a bunch of them. Things you do in the game lead to changes in the environment (e.g. I cleared out a gang from a rave club, a few days later the club has been cleaned of the bodies and blood and people are dancing there at night). 

There's 4 distinct endings to this game, whereas RDR2 has 3. Witcher 3 has 3 as well. _And_ there are variants within them, depending on choices you made regarding your relationships and the main jobs and side jobs you chose to do or not to do. People live or die based on your decisions. 

10 minutes ago, sifth said:

This was sold as a next gen open world game

Pretty sure they talked about aiming at current gen with a next gen update for consoles, and that they were using cutting-edge tech (which, you know, high-speed asset streaming to make loading screens practically a thing of the past, and gorgeous ray tracing, are things they achieved).

When people talk "next gen", I think of the hardware and what is possible. Seamless streaming so that level-loading is nearly a thing of the past (which CP2077 has), high resolution graphics (ditto), ray tracing (ditto), HDR (ditto), and complex physics. Like, maybe the physics is the place where it could do a lot better in making use of high-end power? 

 

[sifth]

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

I don't know what to tell you, but it branches more and choices matter more than you're admitting.

I was referring to branching story lines that effect the games main story, not side quests. Having more than one ending, is like the easiest thing in the world in a video game, so that's not the issue. For example Fallout New Vegas came out nearly a decade ago and has 4 different endings. With the exception of the Maelstrom mission and to a lesser extent The Voodoo Boys mission, every main story mission is basically not effected by any of your choices.

I wanted this game to be a different experience for me, if I was a Corpo, than if I played it as a Nomad. Me and my best friend even joked how he was going to play the game as a corporate sellout, while I was playing as a Mad Max Nomad. We even started comparing notes and after not too long, we both realized that we were more or less having the exact same experience. That alone is my biggest disappointment when it comes to this game.

[Werthead]

With CP77 you have a totally different starting mission depending on background and three completely different missions to end the game. You also get varying missions and mission outcomes depending on your actions through the game, major NPCs being alive or not, your reputation with different factions changing depending on your actions in missions and outside of them.

I think everyone agrees that the "different background" thing ended up being way less important that they made out - everyone was expecting Dragon Age: Origins levels of variability at least, which to be honest weren't that great either (which is why no-one's bothered doing them since), but at least felt more consequential through the story - but it does have an impact on the game. It's also highly unusual: DA:O and CP77 are the only two games that immediately come to mind where the start of the game can change so much. Virtually every other RPG of note has a set opening no matter what type of character you've created and you have to just go with it.

A lot of the criticisms I've seen of not being able to change the game's story feel a bit off. The last game that you could change on such a fundamental level was Deus Ex, released 21 years ago. No game released since then has even come close (even Deus Ex's own sequels have lowballed that level of malleability), certainly not The Witcher 1-3 which I think is the reasonable comparison to make. CP77 gives you multiple, wildly differing end-states based on your decisions and actions, and rather more than most CRPGs and certainly vastly more than any open-world action game.

Another criticism I have seen which I think is valid is that CP77 makes it a bit pointless to create your own character. V is almost as much a set-in-stone character as Geralt, and your dialogue choices feel more limited than they could be. You can't really make V an amoral, evil arsehole because that clashes too much with the story, whilst you can in most BioWare and Bethesda games (even if they handle it in a rather shallow manner, they at least address it and allow you the option).

[Ran]

So, not having played Deus Ex, I checked the wiki and ... are the changes really "that" big in its endings? There's three endings that were all basically turned into all being partially canonical, with the end result being that they "didn't matter" when sequels came out.  Obviously, without a sequel, they do seem really big.

I don't really know what people expected. The kind of game people are imagining which CP2077 failed to meet in terms of "choices mattering" don't really seem to exist in any sort of narrative-driven, open world RPG I can find. You cannot have total chaos. What you need is a sandbox where there is no narrative and players impose them on themselves, i.e. Mount and Blade Warband, where you can annex pieces of kingdoms or help a claimant take over the throne, strategy games like the Paradox games, and so on.

It's true that there are limits to where you can take V. I mean, yes, you can make him an amoral monster by going around murdering children and fighting off NCPD, but the game doesn't "pay attention" to that. Presumably, it would do that by having fixers refuse to work with you and basically the game ending because you've gone from merc to criminal. That'd be a "choices matter" thing, but... eh, the game ends and people would complain about not being allowed to do what they wanted despite making choices that would preclude them achieving their aims.

Like I said in the past, what CDPR could have done is just time-gate things. Clock ticking, only limited number of missions you can do, hence you can only unlock one possible ending branch in a play through, hence increasing " replayability" and the illusion of choice. But I can fully understand why, rather than doing that, CDPR basically allows people to do 99% of the available content in any playthrough, unlocking all possible endings if they'd like.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

So, not having played Deus Ex, I checked the wiki and ... are the changes really "that" big in its endings? There's three endings that were all basically turned into all being partially canonical, with the end result being that they "didn't matter" when sequels came out.  Obviously, without a sequel, they do seem really big.

Deus Ex 1, not Human Revolution (which has 3 endings which literally unfold from a button push 5 seconds before game ends). Deus Ex 1 has a level of continuous granularity in how it responds to your decisions which I don't think any game has matched before or since. I think the total number of possible end-states is not necessarily vast but how the game accumulates all your decisions until you get there is on another level of detail. Of course, the creators have said that was partially only possible because the game was so primitive in terms of graphics and animation that adding responses to each of your decisions was trivially easy, which it would not be with a modern game.

Human Revolution and Mankind Divided are prequels to Deus Ex (Mankind Divided indeed lowballs the ending to Human Revolution, quite badly). The actual sequel, Invisible War, was moved so far into the future that it didn't really need to refer to the ending of the original game very much, and is so poor that most fans and even some of the franchise creators seem to pretend it didn't really happen.

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I don't really know what people expected. The kind of game people are imagining which CP2077 failed to meet in terms of "choices mattering" don't really seem to exist in any sort of narrative-driven, open world RPG I can find. You cannot have total chaos. What you need is a sandbox where there is no narrative and players impose them on themselves, i.e. Mount and Blade Warband, where you can annex pieces of kingdoms or help a claimant take over the throne, strategy games like the Paradox games, and so on.

Yup, or online games like EVE Online or Elite: Dangerous. Of course, those games get shat on frequently for not having a single-player, narrative storyline when that's kind of the point (the number of people screaming about Elite: Dangerous not having a story for six years straight when it's the fourth game in a series which has never had "a story" even in its earlier, SP-only games is beyond wearisome).

The Bethesda games also give you a lot more freedom, but at the cost of having fairly primitive main stories with absolutely nothing like the character or story reactivity of CP77, apart from New Vegas (published but not made by Bethesda), which may exceed it, to the point of cheerfully letting you murder every quest-giver in the game, which is accompanied by the game thunderously listing every single quest you've just made inaccessible so you can reload if you decide that was a bad idea.

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It's true that there are limits to where you can take V. I mean, yes, you can make him an amoral monster by going around murdering children and fighting off NCPD, but the game doesn't "pay attention" to that. Presumably, it would do that by having fixers refuse to work with you and basically the game ending because you've gone from merc to criminal. That'd be a "choices matter" thing, but... eh, the game ends and people would complain about not being allowed to do what they wanted despite making choices that would preclude them achieving their aims.

The fixers thing actually would make sense. The game leans into that a couple of times with the mission where you rescue "the package" (a guy) from the back of a car and letting him go rather than taking him to the criminal client. However, the fixer calls you and says that's fine because the client didn't tell them the package was a person and that violated the contract and V did the right thing. Much more interesting would be there being missions with moral issues and you can piss off and alienate the fixer and lose all their contracts by doing "the right thing."

As it stands, the fixers are all pretty straight-up people (despite being apparent criminals or borderline so) who side with you every time you take the moral high ground which is weird.

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Like I said in the past, what CDPR could have done is just time-gate things. Clock ticking, only limited number of missions you can do, hence you can only unlock one possible ending branch in a play through, hence increasing " replayability" and the illusion of choice. But I can fully understand why, rather than doing that, CDPR basically allows people to do 99% of the available content in any playthrough, unlocking all possible endings if they'd like.

Yeah, that's a huge no-no in a modern AAA game. Ticking clock, gating content out of reach etc is stuff you can do in small-tier CRPGs on Kickstarter or something, you can't do it in the blockbuster space, you'll get crucified for it.

[RumHam]

5 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Yeah, that's a huge no-no in a modern AAA game. Ticking clock, gating content out of reach etc is stuff you can do in small-tier CRPGs on Kickstarter or something, you can't do it in the blockbuster space, you'll get crucified for it.

That's something I loved about the original Dead Rising. The ticking clock really added something to what would have otherwise probably been a generic zombie game. You could do everything but there was little room for error. 

[Fez]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

A lot of the criticisms I've seen of not being able to change the game's story feel a bit off. The last game that you could change on such a fundamental level was Deus Ex, released 21 years ago. No game released since then has even come close (even Deus Ex's own sequels have lowballed that level of malleability), certainly not The Witcher 1-3 which I think is the reasonable comparison to make.

In general I agree with all your points, and the original Deus Ex was remarkable. But I don't think its fair to say no games have come close to what it achieved in terms of player choice and altering the story.

Disco Elysium, Divinity Original Sin 1 & 2, Morrowind, Fallout New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, and Pillars of Eternity 2 all offer a similar scope in terms of shaping your main character and how they interact with the plot.

Obsidian Entertainment in general usually gets pretty close to the mark, though its other games I don't think are quite as much there. 

 

[Poobah]

Even the Mass Effects (though they botched the ending) did a good job with offering you meaningful decision points with actual follow-through. Those of us who played them all remember the major stuff where your choices lead to people dying (or not) or saving or dooming the krogan and so on but even small stuff like how npcs respond and remember if you were an asshole to them and how it does tend to feel different to be playing Paragon-Shep vs Asshole-Shep.

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Deus Ex 1,

Right. I was referring to that. Per the fan wiki on its endings:

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There are three possible endings to Deus Ex. Which one in particular plays out depends on the actions taken by JC Denton (the player character) in the final location of the game, Area 51. The sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, establishes that all of the possible endings are at least partially canonical.

The actual content of the endings sound decidedly very different, but it seems they all come down to decisions at the end of the game, and the sequel basically merges them together to make them functionally the same thing.

1 hour ago, Fez said:

Disco Elysium, Divinity Original Sin 1 & 2, Morrowind, Fallout New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, and Pillars of Eternity 2 all offer a similar scope in terms of shaping your main character and how they interact with the plot.

Interestingly, I looked up Disco Elysium as it was a recent much-praised RPG... and people noted it basically has just one ending, with variations based on choices along the way. As I understand it, though, it does seem to allow you a lot of scope to define how your character deals with and interacts with people. 

Alpha Protocol did keep coming up as a game people really thought worked well in terms of character and story development. Sounds interesting, a spy thriller game...

[Kalbear]

I would say Dishonored has some very different behaviors based on your actions throughout the game. not just the high-low chaos thing, but whether some characters are actually alive, what choices you have to make later - quite a few things. 

Ultimately I see where the 'your choices don't matter' comes in. The main plot of the game and most of the major subplots do not change noticeably depending on what you do. There are romance options and certain happy/sad paths, but the big events aren't that big a deal.

However, a whole lot of the game does indeed change depending on your choices. Mission choices, who your friends are, certain gear and items and companions, romances and relationships, side missions and whatnot - there's a lot of branching. But it's all kind of small and doesn't make a massive difference in how the game ends up going. 

[Kalbear]

Also, holy crap is the nomad start shit compared to the corpo. Like, insanely bad. The corpo beginning gives you a hugely better connection with Jackie, a much better view of what the hell you're doing changing your life and your ways, a much better hate-on for Arasaka, and a cooler view of the city too. It's a shame - if you dont' start corpo the game is already starting off bland.

[Martell Spy]

4 hours ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

Also, holy crap is the nomad start shit compared to the corpo. Like, insanely bad. The corpo beginning gives you a hugely better connection with Jackie, a much better view of what the hell you're doing changing your life and your ways, a much better hate-on for Arasaka, and a cooler view of the city too. It's a shame - if you dont' start corpo the game is already starting off bland.

Haven't done the corpo run yet, but it would seem like you'd have a better connection with Jackie being a fellow Street Kid.

[Ran]

28 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Haven't done the corpo run yet, but it would seem like you'd have a better connection with Jackie being a fellow Street Kid.

Culture-wise, yes, but in both the Nomad and Street Kid starts, you just meet Jackie for the first time. When you meet Jackie in the Corpo life path, OTOH, it's explicit you are already old acquaintances and have had some sort of shared experiences. You almost certainly know him professionally, from having hired him to work on your behalf on a few Arasaka counter-intel projects, and there's room to believe you may even know him outside of that (in my "head canon", you bumped into him as a snot-nosed Charter Hill preppy when he was still with the Valentinos and somehow ended up becoming friendly, and when you climbed the ranks at Arasaka and needed a gangoon choom to do some dirty work, you turned to him)

I really don't understand why they made the choice of having those two life paths not know Jackie in the background. Or at least why the Street Kid didn't have that, especially since in that one you're a regular at El Coyote Cojo (you start there!), know Pepe and Mama Welles from there, know Padre... something feels a little off about that one, to be honest. I don't think there's a bunch of cut content in the sense that they never intended the montage to actually be played out, but I do wonder if they basically cut recording some of the alternate dialog with characters they had initially planned to more strongly delineate the lifepaths.

[Werthead]

12 hours ago, Ran said:

Alpha Protocol did keep coming up as a game people really thought worked well in terms of character and story development. Sounds interesting, a spy thriller game...

Yeah, Alpha Protocol was outstanding but released in an almost unplayable state. Sega commissioned the game under one management team and it was completed on another who actively hated it, so they released the alpha build and didn't ask for any bugfixes from Obsidian. It's only a series of later patches that make the game stable enough to run reliably (there's also now some fan patches and mods which make it pretty bug-free), so it got crucified on release. It's had a massive reappraisal since then and is now widely regarded as one of the best CRPGs of the last decade, albeit by a small audience. Also, it's not quite as cold and cynical as some other Obsidian titles.

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Also, holy crap is the nomad start shit compared to the corpo. Like, insanely bad. The corpo beginning gives you a hugely better connection with Jackie, a much better view of what the hell you're doing changing your life and your ways, a much better hate-on for Arasaka, and a cooler view of the city too. It's a shame - if you dont' start corpo the game is already starting off bland.

I get the impression that Street Kid is the default assumption for V's identity and the game makes most sense with that option. Nomad does help you bond a bit with Panam and her tribe and makes choosing the Nomad ending make more sense, but otherwise it doesn't really come up as much as you'd expect. I'm not sure Corpo makes vastly more sense either, but justifies the "make a deal with Arasaka" ending a bit more.

[Fez]

13 hours ago, Ran said:

Interestingly, I looked up Disco Elysium as it was a recent much-praised RPG... and people noted it basically has just one ending, with variations based on choices along the way. As I understand it, though, it does seem to allow you a lot of scope to define how your character deals with and interacts with people. 

Alpha Protocol did keep coming up as a game people really thought worked well in terms of character and story development. Sounds interesting, a spy thriller game...

Disco Elysium is the quintessential "it's about the journey, not the destination" game; which means three things:

1. Although the events of the ending don't vary that much, how you reach them in the first place can change dramatically.

2. The actual main plot is basically an excuse to get to know the characters of the game and deal with their problems. How you interact with them and how/if you complete their quests has a huge amount of variation.

3. The biggest draw of the game are the conversations, not the actions. And so even though the actions at the end don't change that much, the conversations about them change quite a lot.

 

Alpha Protocol is a lot like Cyberpunk, in that the game's ambitions exceeded its developers' capacity to implement them (there was also some behind the scenes fuckery). But if you can get past the bugs and the jank, there's some greaet stuff there.

 

4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I get the impression that Street Kid is the default assumption for V's identity and the game makes most sense with that option. Nomad does help you bond a bit with Panam and her tribe and makes choosing the Nomad ending make more sense, but otherwise it doesn't really come up as much as you'd expect. I'm not sure Corpo makes vastly more sense either, but justifies the "make a deal with Arasaka" ending a bit more.

Street Kid has felt way much natural than Corpo; any time it comes up. I thought the Nomad ending worked really well for Street Kid though. It's V breaking free from their old life and going on a journey to something completely new. I could almost see it being less impactful with Nomad in fact, since there its V just going back to what they already knew after their adventure to Night City didn't work out.

[Ran]

17 minutes ago, Werthead said:

It's had a massive reappraisal since then and is now widely regarded as one of the best CRPGs of the last decade, albeit by a small audience.

And, sadly, it's not available for sale digitally anywhere because of music rights issues, apparently. Seems Sega took it off online stores a couple of years ago and doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get it back out there. Will keep an eye out for it, it sounds pretty interesting.