Cyberpunk 2077 [split from video games]

[Werthead]

Ah, apparently the first major story expansion will not arrive until 2023, or over two years after the game came out. That feels like pretty poor going.

[karaddin]

Just now, Werthead said:

Ah, apparently the first major story expansion will not arrive until 2023, or over two years after the game came out. That feels like pretty poor going.

Was about to post that news as well. I think a long turn around is understandable given all the work on getting it up to what should have been release state, but I'm definitely disappointed. Hopefully we get some smaller DLC and NG+ to keep us going in the mean time. Definitely a major failure of project management though

[Ran]

Also from the investor report, they're aiming for 2023 for the expansion. I am a little worried by the fact that of late only one expansion is ever referred to. Did they decide to go all out and put both planned DLC into one mega-DLC? Or are they just holding the cards close to their chests?

 

[IlyaP]

6 hours ago, Ran said:

Also from the investor report, they're aiming for 2023 for the expansion. I am a little worried by the fact that of late only one expansion is ever referred to. Did they decide to go all out and put both planned DLC into one mega-DLC? Or are they just holding the cards close to their chests?

 

2023?! 

I am the sads.

[IlyaP]

9 hours ago, Ran said:

Also from the investor report, they're aiming for 2023 for the expansion. I am a little worried by the fact that of late only one expansion is ever referred to. Did they decide to go all out and put both planned DLC into one mega-DLC? Or are they just holding the cards close to their chests?

 

Could...could you and @karaddin make some DLCs for us in the meantime? I'll pay you in 'strayan dollaridoos and high fives!  

[karaddin]

Just now, IlyaP said:

Could...could you and @karaddin make some DLCs for us in the meantime? I'll pay you in 'strayan dollaridoos and high fives!  

Fortunately the Aussie exchange rate to Swedish krona normally isn't too bad! I'd make a terrible writer though lol

[IlyaP]

I just want more Cyberpunk 2077! Please ma'am, I'd like some more!  

[Ran]

There were concerns based on a graph released yesterday, and follow-on reports from hyperventilating press, that many of the teams that had worked on CP2077 had been shifted to the new Witcher game. But someone spotted that today, the graph that went out has been corrected, and indeed as of late February more people were working on expanding the game than at any point in the last year and change.

[IlyaP]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

There were concerns based on a graph released yesterday, and follow-on reports from hyperventilating press, that many of the teams that had worked on CP2077 had been shifted to the new Witcher game. But someone spotted that today, the graph that went out has been corrected, and indeed as of late February more people were working on expanding the game than at any point in the last year and change.

@Ran Do you know what they're working on? As in: is it code optimisation? Content upgrades? Item balancing? Rendering pipelines? Something else? 

I don't work in game development, so I'm curious to learn/understand how it works to have so many people working on a project and yet still have such a distant date for content upgrades. Unless the idea is that the 1.6, 1.7, etc., patches would all feature small content updates the way the 1.5 patch did upon release? 

[karaddin]

I think it's reasonable to interpret the yellow section of the bar as those working on improvements - it species the next gen patch, but that's out and the patch work would all be related, so that's the team working on patch enhancements. The light blue team is working on the expansion which looks about 4-5x larger than the remaining staff dedicated to the patches.

The unclear part would be whether small DLC that will come with future patches would be worked on by the expansion team or the patch team.

On an unrelated note, I got frustrated in Elden Ring yesterday and jumped back into night city and finally finished the last couple of missing achievements - gun slinger and rough landing. I used a sandevistan to get the former, but even with 20 body and the iconic berserker it was a real pain to get rough landing.

[Kalnestk Oblast]

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

@Ran Do you know what they're working on? As in: is it code optimisation? Content upgrades? Item balancing? Rendering pipelines? Something else? 

I don't work in game development, so I'm curious to learn/understand how it works to have so many people working on a project and yet still have such a distant date for content upgrades. Unless the idea is that the 1.6, 1.7, etc., patches would all feature small content updates the way the 1.5 patch did upon release? 

So this is a big topic. The answer depends a lot on what is being worked on and how far they are in cycles, but in general:

- engine work is likely done or mostly done. There may be some features worked on for specific behaviors (think things like wall running or a tank sequence) but most things will be done. There may be smaller features being worked on as well, but they'll likely be close to complete or alpha quality at this point.

- lots of content and revs to quests, artwork, areas. Most areas will be functional but there will be placeholder art, graphics, sounds. Some parts of the map won't be there. Most quest lines can be done barely but may have some flow gaps. Weapons and clothing will be in various states of being added.

- game balance and tweaks to make gameplay fun are going quite a bit at this point.

- adding any mocap and speaking is probably mostly complete. They'll likely do more sessions later as things get finalized.

- lots and lots of bug fixes and optimizations and whatnot

- testing is mostly internal testing teams on dev builds, not full external teams yet

[IlyaP]

On 4/16/2022 at 3:58 PM, Kalibuster said:

- lots of content and revs to quests, artwork, areas. Most areas will be functional but there will be placeholder art, graphics, sounds. Some parts of the map won't be there. Most quest lines can be done barely but may have some flow gaps. Weapons and clothing will be in various states of being added.

Do you know if this includes unfinished content? For example - modders have found the code for and subsequently integrated a working metro system and in-car gun control, which were apparently in various states of development in the game's code but never finished.

[Kalnestk Oblast]

43 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Do you know if this includes unfinished content? For example - modders have found the code for and subsequently integrated a working metro system and in-car gun control, which were apparently in various states of development in the game's code but never finished.

It could, that's possible. Games have a lot of unfinished content that was also deliberately cut however. It could be that they tried the metro thing and they simply didn't like it. The content (and code for it) stays in because after a certain point removing anything is disruptive to making a game work, often in hilariously stupid ways.

So yeah, some things like that could be coming - but it doesn't mean all of them, heck any of them, are going to.

Also, think of it this way - will this feature move units or make it a better game? I guarantee there are a TON of things people have pitched, worked on concepts and demoed even that got cut because they weren't as valuable as something else or added too much complexity to something else. Wall running is a great example of that. 

[IlyaP]

5 minutes ago, Kalibuster said:

Wall running is a great example of that. 

Wall running was considered for CP77? Really? This I did not know.

[Kalnestk Oblast]

2 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Wall running was considered for CP77? Really? This I did not know.

It wasn't just considered- it was in one of the demos. But they cut it and later said that it basically meant you couldn't have walls you could dynamically interact with or have architecture behaviors AND do wall running - essentially you need a lot of flat boring walls to wallrun - so they cut it.

There's a mod that brought it back, but that's a good example of something that they cut not because it wasn't technically feasible but because it made the game worse, at least to them. 

[IlyaP]

26 minutes ago, Kalibuster said:

There's a mod that brought it back, but that's a good example of something that they cut not because it wasn't technically feasible but because it made the game worse, at least to them.

Have you tried this mod? Have the modders found a way to make it work in a way that doesn't break anything?

[karaddin]

5 hours ago, Kalibuster said:

The content (and code for it) stays in because after a certain point removing anything is disruptive to making a game work, often in hilariously stupid ways.

This made me vaguely remember a video about one of the most random bugs that somehow resulted in a player or NPC winding up massively above the map and killing something that wasn't meant to be killable, argh I wish I could remember the details.

ETA: Maybe it wasn't a video, this Twitter thread was explaining it though - it was from The Outer Worlds

Ilya - you may find this one interesting for an example of how weird code interactions can produce very hard to decode interactions

Edited April 19, 2022 by karaddin

[IlyaP]

2 hours ago, karaddin said:

This made me vaguely remember a video about one of the most random bugs that somehow resulted in a player or NPC winding up massively above the map and killing something that wasn't meant to be killable, argh I wish I could remember the details.

ETA: Maybe it wasn't a video, this Twitter thread was explaining it though - it was from The Outer Worlds

Ilya - you may find this one interesting for an example of how weird code interactions can produce very hard to decode interactions

This entire post is just...so much more amazing than anything I get paid to do for a living. Man, reality is so disappointing. (Australia, why must your publishing industry be so hard to get into?!)

Reading the above Twitter thread, @karaddin, and I snorted some of my drink as I was reading this:

"My personal fav was "what if a companion is standing *right* where a cow spawns in during a random event and they're launched into space. Was genuinely bummed when that theory didn't pan out (12/18)"

And then I realised: OMG IT'S THE FAMOUS LADDER BUG!!!

I heard so much about that, I wasn't ever sure if it was real or just an internet myth! 

[IlyaP]

CDPR have released a small statement around timelines and DLCs: https://www.ign.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-expansion-cd-projekt-clears-up-team-size-confusion

[karaddin]

Between this and Elden Ring being the last two games I've really gotten into I keep thinking how spoiled gamers are now in terms of the quality of music that goes into games. CP2077 has a bunch of main theme tracks that I personally think are phenomenal and perfectly capture the moods of the scenes they feature in, then a ridiculous amount of additional tracks created for in game radio play, in club scenes and so on. Most of this is of a sufficient quality that they could just be regular music releases and a lot were done by genuinely popular musicians under in game aliases.

Elden Ring has a bunch of full orchestra boss themes which are gorgeous and again excellently composed to do some heavy lifting on boss characterization given the limited explicit story telling ER does.

What's amazing me here is just essentially the nesting of works which are art themselves within a larger piece of art. I know this has existed in cinema for a long time, but I've been gaming since a C64 in the mid 80s and its incredible how far its come.