Gargaune
Magister
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2020
- Messages
- 3,137
I didn't italicise "some" as a diss, just to indicate that not all prospective buyers had those expectations in terms of content. What I was covering in that paragraph was exclusively in relation to gameplay complaints, features and mechanics. My suspicion is that CDPR misjudged the scope and cut down on some of the extra features they'd planned.Ok, let assume it's *us* consumers that had the wrong expectations. There are however many large and small details that points to CDPR not even being able to deliver a game which is on the same level,technically wise, as the others game on the market. One example is the retarded traffic AI. How about water? It's just a flat polygon covered by a static shader. Throw something and it will clip without even a sprite simulating the ripples. What was the last time we saw such static water? Even in Morrowind with a DX8 card the water was animated. While the poor game mechanics can be a direct consequence of bad design decisions, there's no excuse to how 'primitive' the game feels. Even if they rebooted the story and mechanics twice, what were the programmers doing meanwhile? Why car AI and phisics are shit? It's not as if going from 3rd person to 1st person or rewriting the story to give a bigger role to mr. Reeves required a complete rewrite of the game physics!The problem is that some consumers seem to have expected more from the open world content, and while that's mostly their own fault, CDPR did make some promotional statements in the past that might've fueled such aspirations, stuff like faction systems and "activities" and LARPing opportunities. Take that old line about Night City having "a thousand NPCs with daily routines in a full day/night cycle" - CDPR might have some plausible deniability in that (a) there may be 1000 NPC models and (b) the city has a full day/night cycle with a variation routine (e.g. crowd and traffic density), but it's not surprising that people might've interpreted that as Bethesda Game™ NPCs with their own homes and jobs etc. In the end, I suspect there's plenty CDPR wanted to do through development, but they dropped all of it as they fell farther behind and struggled to just deliver The Witcher 3-with-Raytraced-Guns.
On the tech side, you're dealing with a similar situation most likely. The developers pursued that original, grand vision for Night City, pushing harder and harder on graphical detail and cell streaming to achieve that seamless city from the design docs, and ended up struggling to keep the game running on older hardware. So they pushed other detail elements to the side, such as traffic physics or water simulations, and went all hands on deck trying to duct tape Cyberpunk to a PS4. Take AI, for instance, it's something that's usually CPU-bound, but CBP's already riding your processor hard even without any sophisticated AI behaviours.
It all comes down to mismanagaing the project plan, CDPR aimed very high but, for whatever reasons, ran out time and processing power to execute so at some point in development they dropped everything else and scrambled to deliver on just the "core experience" of the game, those elements that the bulk of the playerbase will most interact with. I guess it's why there are no water effects, but the dildo weapon vibrates...
And anyway, I'm not excusing it, just trying to break down what went wrong.