Cyberpunk 2078

[Ran]

I feel like announcing there's a project is fine, but you definitely need to keep a lid on providing information until you're very near release. Getting pressured by fans and media to release the CP2077 demo reel caused a lot of the backlash because everyone ignored the big honking "Work in Progress" on it and decided that everything they saw was both brilliant and locked in for the final release.

[Kalbear]

I think that there is no reasonable way that they would be able to keep it secret for any length of time, and honestly as a dev it sucks to not be able to talk about any of the cool shit you're doing for years. 

I do agree they should not be planning on doing demo or sizzle reels, and I'm hoping that a sequel will be significantly cheaper because so much of their tech will be fine for this gen so it should be out 'soonish'. But I also think they'll be able to have some time on it. 

 

[Ran]

Main thing, re: tech is that I think they've said they're switching to UE from here on out. I wonder if that means rebuilding Night City and all that from scratch or if they can import much of it over...

 

[Gorn]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

I do worry they are making the exact same mistake as before: announcing and hyping the shit out of stuff years and years before release. They really need to learn from the companies who don't announce things until 6 months before release.

I think they needed some hype to boost their stock value, which in turn gives them the funds they need for development. They don't exactly have EA/Activision/Sony/Microsoft kind of money in reserve, nor do they have steady yearly releases to provide them with a regular cash flow.

[Werthead]

40 minutes ago, Gorn said:

I think they needed some hype to boost their stock value, which in turn gives them the funds they need for development. They don't exactly have EA/Activision/Sony/Microsoft kind of money in reserve, nor do they have steady yearly releases to provide them with a regular cash flow.

CDPR's profits are outrageously insane. Apparently their income in 2020 and 2021 was better than any year prior because of the sheer number of people playing The Witcher 3 for the first time (propelled by the pandemic and the Netflix show), and Cyberpunk 2077 took less than 36 hours to become profitable. No, they're not EA/Activision etc, but they punch incredibly high above their weight for their size.

Quote

Main thing, re: tech is that I think they've said they're switching to UE from here on out. I wonder if that means rebuilding Night City and all that from scratch or if they can import much of it over...

Well, they don't build things in the engine. They build things in other tools (Blender, 3D Max etc) and import them into the engine, so importing 3D assets into another engine should be relatively straightforward. But they would have to re-code them etc, which is quite complex and time consuming.

Rockstar recently ported the 20-year-old GTA3 trilogy from RenderWare into Unreal Engine 5, which is a hell of an accomplishment (although the models were primitive and easy to work with).

[Ran]

10 minutes ago, Werthead said:

But they would have to re-code them etc, which is quite complex and time consuming.

Right. That's what I meant, the reworking of that side of things. 

[Kalbear]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Main thing, re: tech is that I think they've said they're switching to UE from here on out. I wonder if that means rebuilding Night City and all that from scratch or if they can import much of it over...

 

I would be a bit surprised if they did that for the CP2077 sequel. It's certainly possible, and I know UE has a lot of things that make importing assets and fitting things in a LOT nicer, but it's also a lot of work to do - and presumably they've already got their workflow around their existing engine and assets. 

Now, if they've already been working on getting that set up and have that ready to go then that makes more sense, but I didn't think that's where they were with it. 

[karaddin]

As much as all the people, vehicles etc are good, the biggest thing to me is retaining the city itself (assuming the sequel is set in Night City). They must have put a ton of work into designing the urban landscape and the buildings themselves and you wouldn't want to throw that out and start from scratch. Surely those sorts of objects could at least be imported in a reasonable fashion?

[Kalbear]

51 minutes ago, karaddin said:

As much as all the people, vehicles etc are good, the biggest thing to me is retaining the city itself (assuming the sequel is set in Night City). They must have put a ton of work into designing the urban landscape and the buildings themselves and you wouldn't want to throw that out and start from scratch. Surely those sorts of objects could at least be imported in a reasonable fashion?

To answer that goes down a real rabbit hole. The answer is likely "probably, but not easily". Making assets always requires coordination with the thing you're making assets for, and every engine has quirks and weirdness that designers end up figuring out workarounds for. Those workarounds are the real key problem for easily transferring. Holes in meshes, in collision detection, lighting and texture map weirdness, occlusion and clipping, animations, deformations, material simulations (like hair and cloth), explosion maps...all of these require weird tweaks and other things and none are fun. 

Now, UE5 is going to have a lot of super great tools to figure things out but it isn't trivial to do it. Add to that the xomplexity of putting in ue5 all the mechanics, ui, animations, gameplay and triggers and figuring out if bugs are because of bad assets or bad engine or both and you see what problems it can have.

This is also one of the reasons I laugh whenever someone talks about nfts having textures or skins going from game to game - unless you're talking something like among us hats to hollow knight hats that is an incredibly complex thing to do.

[karaddin]

Oh yeah, the NFT transfer between games thing was transparently laughable to me haha. I guess my question was less "is it easy" but rather "acknowledging its still a lot of work, is that going to be easier than starting from scratch in the new engine?"

I guess even if they start from scratch, the actual architecture of the city etc is still something they can go back to even if making new assets for it. On that note, I just had this interesting video pop up in my recommendations about the architecture of the 4 apartments they added in 1.5, found the comments about how they made it clear the Glen apartment had structural supports retrofitted onto it was a really cool detail. On the whole they really did their work of making the city itself tell so much of the story.

 

Also in the comments on the video that could be easily missed is some of the credits for who actually did the structural designs:

Quote

Massimiliano Bottega
1 day ago (edited)
Hey, I'm Max, the guy that created the V's apartment in the motel. The rest of the apartments were created by my extremely dedicated and skilled colleagues at Treehouse Ninjas, a studio in Budapest that assisted CDPR in creating nearly a hundred locations in Night City. We had pretty much total freedom on what to do with the spaces they assigned us for the apartments, so we feel al to of ownership to them  Working on this title was a blast, and we really appreciate your in-depth review. Like everyone else at CDPR, we put our hearts and blood in this project, so it's really nice to hear some good words about what we did  Cheers!

 

Edited October 5, 2022 by karaddin

[Werthead]

Impressive. Someone tracked down almost every location from Edgerunners in Cyberpunk 2077.

I wonder if the animators used the 3D model of Night City to base their work on? Or even just used it directly?

[Werthead]

Three episodes in on Edgerunners and it's pretty solid so far.

Also fired up CP77 for the first time since January 21 to check out the small amounts of extra content they've added to the game. Got another 7-8 hours out of it, which is good, and now strongly considering a replay as a corpo.

My main issue here is that in those 7-8 hours I experienced more bugs than in the 95 hours of my original playthrough, despite this being a fresh install. Not sure if the old save is the problem and it'll go more smoothly with a fresh save.

Edited October 5, 2022 by Werthead

[Ran]

14 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Not sure if the old save is the problem and it'll go more smoothly with a fresh save.

I recall even with earlier patches that bugs persisted in your saves and you had to start fresh to get things sorted.

[Werthead]

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

I recall even with earlier patches that bugs persisted in your saves and you had to start fresh to get things sorted.

Oh FFS. In most cases that doesn't even make sense (and one mission I never finished first time because it glitched is now instantly completable).

[Ran]

14 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Oh FFS. In most cases that doesn't even make sense (and one mission I never finished first time because it glitched is now instantly completable).

In my first play through, a mission I never got to do because it bugged (the one with rescuing a netrunner from in the midst of a Tyger Claws enclave) never sorted out after they patched it. Had to wait for my second play through to get to it.

[karaddin]

Ah Bugbear. One of the many gigs that have become very streamlined from my repetitions lol. I try to vary my approach on at least some of the gigs and I'm still finding new things every time, but for some of them it's so fast and easy I tend to blast through with the way I know.

Spoiler

Go up the fire escape stairs at one end of the building, not sure if it's necessary but I always double jump across from the stairs to the pedestrian footbridge. Go up to the roof and silently take down the Tyger to your left, then look down from the roof and silently take out the Tyger on her balcony then drop down. Grab the coolant from the bathroom, the loot in the room, inject her with the coolant and disconnect her. Carry her back out onto the balcony and drop off the edge into the garbage right next to her rescue car, although save first just in case the fall lands wrong and kills her.

Gig can be done in a couple of minutes like this lol. And then her rescue car will knock over some pedestrians leaving which is worse than my driving.

[Ran]

7 hours ago, karaddin said:

Gig can be done in a couple of minutes like this lol. And then her rescue car will knock over some pedestrians leaving which is worse than my driving.

The first time it bugged, I used a tech sniper to kill everyone in the building I was locked out of in hopes that the baddies being dead would open the door. Alas, no.

I definitely did some sneaky thing when I properly played the mission, but you definitely worked it out into something very effecient! I never thought of dropping her down, for example. Carrying her was so slow...

[karaddin]

There's also some other gigs that can be done very quickly but I insist on killing everyone at the scene so never take advantage of it. Like a certain father/son duo in one of Regina's gigs

Quote

Instead of entering where the map guides you, you can walk across the road and open a door (forget if it's body or tech check) and double jump up a broken stair case straight to where they are, you don't even see Maelstrom if you do this and leave the same way, but I've got to make a statement about that business so they all die.

 

[Kalbear]

That is, imo, one of the weaker parts of the game - pretty much every gang is just complete trash and horrible, and most are not very interesting. There is very little nuance or attempt at any kind of empathy with any of them. It does mean I do very similar things to @karaddin - all scavs die, maelstrom gets the violent ways out, etc - and I guess that is good on some level so you don't feel too bad about them and have a constant stream of enemies. Still, doesn't make me feel like I have many good choices. 

[karaddin]

I'm fine with a couple being like that, but I could have used one or two more that are "good" gangs. The Valentinos are treated by the narrative like they are, but there's some dissonance with the gigs involving them not showing them as being much better. There's a hint of it in the Gustavo Orta quest, but just not enough of it.

Maybe they're all always going to look bad when you're always interacting with them in the context of them being antagonists but that's where having them as the client rather than the antagonist could have really helped. And I do wish there was a reputation system with them as well. Have the Tyger bosses we interact with actually reach out through Wakako and give us a couple of jobs. Have us help the Valentinos out. Let me join the Mox and protect working girls. 

I clearly love this game, so I don't think the lack of these things makes it bad - just that the inclusion of them would make it even better.

But always, in every iteration, fuck the Scavs. They're getting killed every time I ever see them in any play through, but their evil is explicit in the actual main story missions rather than just what you get from the gigs. Their entire existence is built around slaughtering people for parts. Scavs and Nomad Scavs, aka the wraiths, are the only ones I always kill though - apart from things like that gig I mentioned before I take a more variable approach to Maelstrom etc. It depends on what they're doing.