i wonder if the current traffic "ai" is just a placeholder or if real traffic ai was never planned from the beginning and this is what cdpr thought they could get away with. i'm no game director or programmer but if you are making an open world game based in a city with tons of cars driving around in it, isn't one of the first things you have to think about how to give the traffic some sort of reactivity so that the whole simulation aspect doesn't fall flat on it's face the moment you step outside into the open world? it's just completly immersion breaking that you can park in the middle of the road and the cars behind you are not even trying to drive past you.
Sometimes it feels like CBP's open world was designed like an expensive, elaborate backdrop for a focused, linear plot, and I still want to do a second playthrough some day where I zerg-rush the main quest to see how that works out. But I don't actually believe that's what the devs intended. I know I sound like a broken record by now, but I genuinely think a lot of the game's problems with structure and gameplay flow stem from CDPR's Witcher 3 world design making a poor fit for the dense, urban environment of Night City, it was a mistake to rely so much on it.
One part of that which ties in to what you're saying here is that it's one thing to have negative space comprised of forests and hills, wilderness basically, and it's another for it to consist of on-rails traffic, locked buildings and effectively non-interactive NPCs. It might look similar in the abstract, if you're tabulating clicks on an Excel sheet, but the player's expectations and perceptions are completely different.
the whole thing made me realize how cdpr have lots of people who are talented in creating pretty stuff on screen but they have no gameplay people working there who know what they are doing.
Yep. CDPR have masterful art direction, no doubt about it, but they have yet to gain a proper grasp on the artistry of gameplay.
