CD Projekt's CYBERPUNK 2077 Release Thread - The Next Gen Update

[gurugeorge]

Life imitates art. (Metaverse's Somnium ounds very much like Mikoshi, etc., also a bit Ex Machina)

“Literally, if I die—and I have this data collected—people can come or my kids, they can come in, and they can have a conversation with my avatar, with my movements, with my voice,” CEO Artur Sychov told Vice. “You will meet the person. And you would maybe for the first 10 minutes while talking to that person, you would not know that it’s actually AI. That’s the goal.” - from RT article on Gab

 

[Kjaska]

It's probably influenced by Black MIrror s02e01 "Be Right Back" instead of Mikoshi.

 

[gurugeorge]

It's probably influenced by Black MIrror s02e01 "Be Right Back" instead of Mikoshi.

Charlie Brooker (developer of the series) is an old gamer who used to write for one of the UK pc gaming mags (actually a great reviewer and very witty writer at the time), so I should imagine he was quite au fait with all the s-f/gaming tropes (particularly cyberpunk stuff) from the 80s and 90s and derived a lot of the BM themes from that prior knowledge.

A lot of these themes have been floating around basically since Douglas Hofstadter wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, which was a tremendously influential book in the late 70s/early 80s (it was a regular topic of highfalutin' dinner table conversations in those days). That book introduced most of these common themes (particularly related to the possibility of "uploading" consciousness) for the first time in one neat bundle to a big audience.

I should think it's a common pool of ideas amongst big tech people since those days - anyone who was the least bit intellectually curious, into s-f and nerd areas in general, would have known Hofstadter, would have read Neuromancer, etc.

 

[Cat Dude]

I'm impressed wrpg snobs here are still giving this game a chance

 

[tritosine2k]

(...)

(...)

Feel free to hit up Sweeney on twitter about how he shouldn't develop UE6 for streaming,
Carmack about how RAGE looks bad for something made for PS360 (and how come missed some chance for revision because of some gamechanger Moonshot kool aid )
and while you're at it tell all zoomer kids to prepare and shell out for triple digit wattage hardware if they want 60 fps.
"Dis gon b gud."

Maybe but this has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

Spectacularly you bought up expense of development vs. megatexture and ilk (scans).

 

[OSK]

I'm impressed wrpg snobs here are still giving this game a chance

Just the Polacks trying to make their zloty.

 

[Gerrard]

The stock will bounce back, as it did back when the game was originally delayed in the spring. Its sales are a more concrete indication of its success or failure, and 13+ million units, even on just the PC, is by no means a number that indicates a failed game.

The stock did not drop because the game was delayed in spring. That was a market crash.

Nah it will recover.

Any minute now.

 

[Fedora Master]

I'm impressed wrpg snobs here are still giving this game a chance

Codex never stops touching the poop in hopes of finding a piece of corn.

 

[lukaszek]

gave new toys a go.

gorilla arms finally help with STR checks
mono wire no longer is weird hybrid of COOL/brawl. Now Its DEX/blades. It recharges at acceptable rate while not swinging. Its better dmg than katana while offering some range. Although I dont have truly end game save to compare.
Whats interesting is that they are threated as tech weapons(could be true before). To maximize their potential you might want to go TECH for that reason. While being fully charged tech weapon it doesnt penetrate walls though. In general which feats work and which dont requite some testing. Anyway if tech armor bypassing applies to it its quite devastating Id say.

My main focus was throwing knives though. They are godly. Went high tech since upgraded iconics have better dmg and throwing knives are all about that single alpha strike. You will sneak rush whole armies while constantly throwing headshots. Feats for it are all over the place, like crafted item dmg boost from tech, blades +100% dmg to enemies on full health etc. Oh yeah, they get headshot multiplier too. And melee dmg boost from STR. Aiming with them is weird gets something to get used to. Sadly its nothing like soldier of fortune 2, you cant use them to kill enemy hiding behind the barell sine their trajectory is more of a straight line. Im fairly certain some auto targetting is in place even when disabling it. Perhaps its part of melee targetting so its doing some magic behind the scenes.

If you wonder - knife or mono wire for stealth - in my tests wire did 5k dmg while throwing knife headshot was 15k+ and at that time I could execute it from much greater range. You can have both though. 3 knives in basic slots and if you run out of - switch to wire. Also useful for bosses since you cant block with knife if you can throw it.

 

[Preben]

The stock will bounce back, as it did back when the game was originally delayed in the spring. Its sales are a more concrete indication of its success or failure, and 13+ million units, even on just the PC, is by no means a number that indicates a failed game.

The stock did not drop because the game was delayed in spring. That was a market crash.

Nah it will recover.

Any minute now.

I'm still laughing at gamblers who bought CDPR stock days before CP2077 premiere.

 

[Obsequious Approbation]

I didn't feel like waiting till 2023 for the next expansion, so I figured I'd start a second playthrough and go through some of the side content slowly. Started as a Nomad, ran over the sheriff and the guards with my car. Even though I hadn't even met Jackie at this point, he randomly spawned in my car and began spraying the locals. For some reason, the guards didn't open fire and just walked around yelling as I crashed into them one by one. Thought I'd found a pretty cool exploit when I picked up the rare loot they dropped, only to realize I must be level 30 to use any of them.

So looks like I'm going to need some mods. Any must-have mods you've been using, Codex? Something to rebalance this glorious mess maybe?

 

[Kjaska]

I didn't feel like waiting till 2023 for the next expansion, so I figured I'd start a second playthrough and go through some of the side content slowly. Started as a Nomad, ran over the sheriff and the guards with my car. Even though I hadn't even met Jackie at this point, he randomly spawned in my car and began spraying the locals. For some reason, the guards didn't open fire and just walked around yelling as I crashed into them one by one. Thought I'd found a pretty cool exploit when I picked up the rare loot they dropped, only to realize I must be level 30 to use any of them.

So looks like I'm going to need some mods. Any must-have mods you've been using, Codex? Something to rebalance this glorious mess maybe?

No Intro Videos

 

[RobotSquirrel]

The stock will bounce back, as it did back when the game was originally delayed in the spring. Its sales are a more concrete indication of its success or failure, and 13+ million units, even on just the PC, is by no means a number that indicates a failed game.

The stock did not drop because the game was delayed in spring. That was a market crash.

Nah it will recover.

Any minute now.

Buy The Dip. They're looking ripe for a takeover.

 

[Bad Sector]

Feel free to hit up Sweeney on twitter about how he shouldn't develop UE6 for streaming,
Carmack about how RAGE looks bad for something made for PS360 (and how come missed some chance for revision because of some gamechanger Moonshot kool aid )
and while you're at it tell all zoomer kids to prepare and shell out for triple digit wattage hardware if they want 60 fps.
"Dis gon b gud."
Spectacularly you bought up expense of development vs. megatexture and ilk (scans).

Dude, honestly, learn to read, i never mentioned that RAGE looks bad (if anything i consider it one of the best looking games of its time) nor made any of the other claims you seem to think i did. I also never mentioned expense of development (in the discussion around UE5 in this thread at least) at all.

Hell, i don't even think baking light, etc, info into some generic geometry or texture format (like RAGE did) is a bad idea in general (if anything i was looking into that myself recently), what i wrote is that i doubt UE6 would go towards that direction because the entire industry seems to be going towards a different direction entirely.

 

[tritosine2k]

...

... .

"Learm to read" yeah right...

"But also, I think we can take a wider view of what games could be in the future," Sweeney adds. "Now we have this idea of installing a game, which means downloading every byte of the game from the Internet and putting it on your machine. You know, those boundaries can change over time. Perhaps only part of the game can actually be on your particular machine at any one time."

He points to the nascent rise of cloud gaming, where the idea is that the entire game lives in the server, thereby invalidating concerns about data size and footprint. "We're just going to have to watch the way the games evolve over time, and they may be more flexible in the future than they are now. Every previous console generation was limited by the expectation that some people don't have Internet, and have to be able to play the game off of a physical disc, right? If that expectation fades away, I think you have entirely new possibilities."

They were always moving for higher detail to please the close up detail crowd ( you know the one throwing fits bc. RAGE) . Keep being verbose and obscuring though.

 

[Bad Sector]

That Sweeney bit (which is from this article) is as unspecific as it could be but even that isn't about baking lighting to megatextures (or nanite vertices or whatever), it is about streaming data from a server for games that are too big to fit in a console's storage (i mention consoles because he was referring to console generations previously), something that is made more clear from a bit you didn't copy/paste:

Fortnite's mainstream success in spite of being entirely dependent on a decent Internet connection has only confirmed for Sweeney that this will be the future of video games. "I think that more and more games will go in that direction in the future, and that even games that we look at as singleplayer might in the future have so much content and variety that parts of the experience are streamed in dynamically in the background as you're playing, and you won't even notice."

(emphasis mine)

This has nothing to do with megatextures or even rendering and if anything they can already add it in UE5's new world partition system to download partition data per cell as you approach the cells form a distance. But this isn't anything revolutionary, in fact i wouldn't be surprised if some MMOs already did something like that for years now.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Yeah, CDPR should have just scanned the actual Night City instead of modelling it by hand. Would have saved them millions.

Couldn't they have built set models of Night City and scanned those?
Wouldn't it even be cheaper?

 

[Outlander]

I didn't feel like waiting till 2023 for the next expansion, so I figured I'd start a second playthrough and go through some of the side content slowly. Started as a Nomad, ran over the sheriff and the guards with my car. Even though I hadn't even met Jackie at this point, he randomly spawned in my car and began spraying the locals. For some reason, the guards didn't open fire and just walked around yelling as I crashed into them one by one. Thought I'd found a pretty cool exploit when I picked up the rare loot they dropped, only to realize I must be level 30 to use any of them.

So looks like I'm going to need some mods. Any must-have mods you've been using, Codex? Something to rebalance this glorious mess maybe?

But why the fuck are you wasting precious time with this broken, piece of shit game?

 

[Obsequious Approbation]

I didn't feel like waiting till 2023 for the next expansion, so I figured I'd start a second playthrough and go through some of the side content slowly. Started as a Nomad, ran over the sheriff and the guards with my car. Even though I hadn't even met Jackie at this point, he randomly spawned in my car and began spraying the locals. For some reason, the guards didn't open fire and just walked around yelling as I crashed into them one by one. Thought I'd found a pretty cool exploit when I picked up the rare loot they dropped, only to realize I must be level 30 to use any of them.

So looks like I'm going to need some mods. Any must-have mods you've been using, Codex? Something to rebalance this glorious mess maybe?

But why the fuck are you wasting precious time with this broken, piece of shit game?

I'm a sucker for the setting, the music, the aesthetics. I liked flying around in slow motion frying people's brains from afar. And I was hoping the updates had fixed the most glaring issues by now.

 

[tritosine2k]

That Sweeney bit (which is from this article) is as unspecific as it could be but even that isn't about baking lighting to megatextures (or nanite vertices or whatever), it is about streaming data from a server for games that are too big to fit in a console's storage (i mention consoles because he was referring to console generations previously), something that is made more clear from a bit you didn't copy/paste:

Fortnite's mainstream success in spite of being entirely dependent on a decent Internet connection has only confirmed for Sweeney that this will be the future of video games. "I think that more and more games will go in that direction in the future, and that even games that we look at as singleplayer might in the future have so much content and variety that parts of the experience are streamed in dynamically in the background as you're playing, and you won't even notice."

(emphasis mine)

This has nothing to do with megatextures or even rendering and if anything they can already add it in UE5's new world partition system to download partition data per cell as you approach the cells form a distance. But this isn't anything revolutionary, in fact i wouldn't be surprised if some MMOs already did something like that for years now.

Burden of proof is on you and let me guess you can't show mesmerizing realtime lighting stuff extending to hundreds of meters and kilometers without running into cascades and cutting off abruptly. And nvidia is cooking numbers.

Yeah, CDPR should have just scanned the actual Night City instead of modelling it by hand. Would have saved them millions.

Couldn't they have built set models of Night City and scanned those?
Wouldn't it even be cheaper?

Could be worth it, if they can store it reliably and it'd be perfectly converged for time of day and account for distance and occlusion better. But now it's a bigger deal to sell some realtime Moonshot kool-aid and you're supposed to believe how they can light up a city and such in realtime.

how about you fuck off with your authority power trip

 

[Obsequious Approbation]

I didn't feel like waiting till 2023 for the next expansion, so I figured I'd start a second playthrough and go through some of the side content slowly. Started as a Nomad, ran over the sheriff and the guards with my car. Even though I hadn't even met Jackie at this point, he randomly spawned in my car and began spraying the locals. For some reason, the guards didn't open fire and just walked around yelling as I crashed into them one by one. Thought I'd found a pretty cool exploit when I picked up the rare loot they dropped, only to realize I must be level 30 to use any of them.

Managed to reproduce it for posterity. Also, the driving mechanics have improved considerably as you can see.

 

[Kjaska]

looks fucking fun

 

[Gerrard]

The stock will bounce back, as it did back when the game was originally delayed in the spring. Its sales are a more concrete indication of its success or failure, and 13+ million units, even on just the PC, is by no means a number that indicates a failed game.

The stock did not drop because the game was delayed in spring. That was a market crash.

Nah it will recover.

Any minute now.

I'm still laughing at gamblers who bought CDPR stock days before CP2077 premiere.

I'm laughing at people who bought it at ~170 expecting that it will surely bounce back up when they release the Witcher 3 nextgen update.

 

[Bad Sector]

Couldn't they have built set models of Night City and scanned those?
Wouldn't it even be cheaper?

Unlikely for the whole city, AFAIK the best scanners available commercially (at least those you can actually buy) can give around 0.25mm of detail (some can scan in more detail but that is to reduce the noise in the output which is still limited at that resolution). Even if we assume that the largest buildings are at most 100 meter tall (the shortest height for something to be called a skyscraper according to Wikipedia) and a scale down 1:100 (i.e. one meter), that would only give you at most ~2.5cm in-game detail or around 38% of the detail you'd get in regular 256x256 textures as used in Quake 3. Also even that 0.25cm detail in reality would need to be sculpted somehow and mistakes simply are way more costly in physical form than in digital form where you can undo, etc.

3D scanning can be very useful for small objects and for capturing materials with better accuracy than what photographs can give you.

But it also isn't "for free" either, consider what the people working on Vanishing of Ethan Carter went through - and while some tools have improved, they haven't improved to the point where you can just scan and drop an item into an engine with minimal work.

Burden of proof is on you and let me guess you can't show mesmerizing realtime lighting stuff extending to hundreds of meters and kilometers without running into cascades and cutting off abruptly.

Burden of proof for what (and why it'd be on me?)? Also realtime lighting extending to kilometers is something that even classic deferred shading can do since world scale is irrelevant for it as it is all done in screen space.

 

[tritosine2k]

Couldn't they have built set models of Night City and scanned those?
Wouldn't it even be cheaper?

Burden of proof for what (and why it'd be on me?)? Also realtime lighting extending to kilometers is something that even classic deferred shading can do since world scale is irrelevant for it as it is all done in screen space.

all done in screen space

How many samples per pixel to match photogrammetry or texture space shading at >200meter? That just happens to be available on demand? And why would that ever work on consumer cards?

In other SAD news someone is still mad about not getting his GRAND car game (like this glamorous dynamic lighting stuff even allows that ) :

stay mad Gerrard