Is CD projekt the company everyone can still trust?

[Chippy]

I suppose CDProjekt deserve a full review from me to describe why W3 infuriated me. I rage quit 5 times, and am still plodding along, but there's so much to talk about that the review would be as boring as the filler in the game.

In a nutshell, they should have:

• Whittled down all the filler content, devoted the resources and voice talent to characters we care about. Only thing the game has going for it is the story.
  
• Allowed you to level up to the point where you could follow all paths, and then made the enemies as hard as they liked.

• Made specific enemy weaknesses (as per W1 e.g. overpowered Beast being weak vs Aard + stun). And reflected this in signs, alchemy, swords & bombs.

• Accepted that the combat was shit and frustrating, so don't frustrate the player further with 1-shot mechanics inherited from W2. E.g. Randomly placed kegs of 1-shotting scale-to-your-level/HP gunpowder, Geralt jumping from a boulder and dying, and the +500% attack power, +800%HP red skull enemies.
• Created a rules system that makes sense. Everything (swords, signs, alchemy & bombs, items) just seems to be +percent. I also read from a mod description that Geralt gets +2% on all damage per level - so it kinda invalidates the paths.
• Done away with weapon + armor scaling. WTF.
• Implemented a crafting system that people might have bothered with if there wasn't store-based weapon & armor scaling scaling.
  
• Done away with the random loot system that people might have bothered with if you couldn't just craft everything. The same items you can buy in stores.
• Went back to hand placed loot.
• Simple QOL stuff: hide decoctions I wont ever use, allow use of items in quick slots on the inventory screen, allow a third weapon slot (for other weapon types) so I'm not damaging my swords on low level enemies.
  
• Invalidated loot, XP, enemies, quests. See below.

I could go on. But to try and summarize: they have managed to invalidate all of the things that make an 'RPG' an RPG. Levelling (only 12 tabs for skills in the vanilla game I think?), worthless loot system, no reason to kill enemies (loot/XP), open world game invalidated by scaled to your level quests & XP, and invalidated crafting and economy.

So yeah; I suppose this game just wasn't meant for me. But then I should have appreciated that after W2. And off another company go - down the route of implementing systems, and chasing targets.

Edit: The mutagen system is good. I haven't got to Blood and Wine yet. I expect you can change the mutagen colours (I've got about 600 blue, and 4 red). This is an interesting mechanic because it allows you to 'level' beyond the level cap. So yet another +percent to your character as per the skills/talents & items. But it's interesting.

 

[Xelocix]

What reason would anybody have to trust these hacks? All of the smoothbrains who jumped on the preorder hype-train for 2077 got what they deserved.

How can you look at this image and seriously be surprised that the game is a broken dumpster-fire? If you feel betrayed by CDPR for pushing out an unfinished falsely advertised product then you clearly didn't pay close attention to the company itself.

It's an international women's day photo you dumbass.

Ok, and what's your point retard? They all worked on 2077. Was that meant to disprove something or...?

 

[Serious_Business]

 

[DalekFlay]

Only thing the game has going for it is the story.

Hate to tell you this but Witcher 3 is Codex's 15th best RPG of all time now, solely because it has a good story and cool world. When I have made comments in the past about how it's basically an Ubisoft open world checklist game people always tell me I'm crazy, but then the reason they offer for why it's so much better always boils down to story and world design. This shouldn't come as a surprise on a site that has Planescape as the best RPG of all time I suppose, but if even the boomer fags on here love Witcher 3 to death it tells you why half of AAA games today, including Cyberpunk, are open world checklist games that attempt a good story.

 

[TemplarGR]

A good story inside a believable (aka open in order to give illusion of real place) world is the most succesful AAA recipe simply put because most people play through games only once, and thus a good heavy story can make the most impact. It is in the interest of most developers to make games that are aimed at being played only once, since then the players are gonna be starved for more games and DLC, lol. Most people don't have much time to play anyway, so the story is the most important thing they are gonna extract from a game anyway, the feels, the escapism.

This is not bad design per se, or "decline", it is just how it is. There is nothing wrong with storyfag CRPGs. We just hate them because not many non-storyfag CRPGs are made anymore, and those who do are mostly indy trash on unity.

 

[Trotsky]

I never understood the CDPR hype to begin with.

I bought the entire Witcher series on a big, big discount years after release and couldn't finish either game as none of them were actually good. I'd say the first Witcher had good and interesting systems in place but overall too much jank and lack of fluidity to really be good.

The Witcher was a promising first RPG from a new developer that made attempts at creating interesting real-time combat, a character progression system, C&C, and exploration, even though it had limited success in each aspect.

The Witcher II was an attempt at emulating Bioware with the Witcher IP.

The Witcher III was an attempt at emulating Bethesda Softworks with the Witcher IP.

Cyberpunk 2077 was an attempt at emulating Grand Theft Auto with the IP of a previously-obscure tabletop RPG.

CDPR hasn't even been trying to create a good RPG after the release of the original Witcher in 2007; they've only been chasing the best-selling trends in gaming (admittedly with considerable commercial success).

More like CD Project Red took a risk on an unknown book series giving it the platform it needed to become massively successful making The Witcher trilogy one of the best trilogies of all time with each game being better than the last.

Cyberpunk is similar and just the beginning of something new. Hubris is also a part of human nature & CD Project Red got high on their own supply or in this case hype much like Tony Montana from Scarface who always had his flaws.

 

[Chippy]

DalekFlay TemplarGR I'm enjoying the story and can't fault it. But in terms of time, it can't be played like Assassins Creed or Skyrim. It's monotonous to loot. Even an open world space sim like X3 was more interesting to move around in.

There's just no incentive except autsim to collect them all on the places of interest. It was fun moving around in AC, Skyrim had dragons and random encounters, and X3 had you managing your own fleet, company, sperate missions, etc. W3 has: drowners and wolves. An if you kill anything else, it might fuckup a quest.

AFAIK they also fucked up the loot in the sense that when you get to the guarded treasure it's no different from what you find in a random house. Then they confuse the player further because you don't know if the loot is scaled to your level, or literally how many treasure chests there are, and whether you only get recipes and crafting diagrams form certain treasure chests.

So early on in the game, I was getting enhanced and then superior alchemy recipes because I levelled a lot, and didn't bother running around at low levels to get the basic alchemy recipes. I eventually just bought the basic ones.

Also: I love crafting. Fuqqing love it. But the only thing I crafted was the witcher gear. Why did they bother with all that other shit? It might have been fun, if better versions of the same stuff wasn't available later in the game from stores. Swords anyway.

It seems every decision they made with the mechanics was invalidated by another one.

 

[cruelio]

Not a single person finished Kingmaker for at least three months after its release because it was so full of game breaking bugs. The one redditter who finished it in month three or four did so with a hex editor. Other recent releases, Expedition: Viking and KotC2, were similarly unfinishable on release. Everyone who bought those games on release or preordered expecting not a perfect or even bug free game, just a game they could finish, was screwed, as they were actually paying to work as alpha testers. And yet the cucks on this forum will defend these unethical companies to the grave.

For some reason this cucked supplication isn’t extended to Cyberpunk, which is a game that has problems but that you can play from start to end, unlike the above Codex darlings on release. Instead, we are subjected to speculation on if we can “trust” them. Pretty weird! I wonder what could explain this discrepancy, why some games have desperate sycophants but Cyberpunk is treated like the worst thing to ever happen. What was that? Must have been the wind.

 

[DalekFlay]

This is not bad design per se, or "decline", it is just how it is. There is nothing wrong with storyfag CRPGs. We just hate them because not many non-storyfag CRPGs are made anymore, and those who do are mostly indy trash on unity.

You can make a non-linear game with a strong story focus without it being a checklist game. New Vegas being an obvious example, along with old school stuff like Fallout and Arcanum. Lots of story and world building via dialog and such, with cool factions to play off of as well. Not every game of that type is as mechanics focused as Baldur's Gate or Kingmaker.

I'm enjoying the story and can't fault it. But in terms of time, it can't be played like Assassins Creed or Skyrim.

Skyrim and New Vegas type games share some similarities with open world checklist games, but there are crucial differences. Random exploration has more reward, you discover quests by exploring towns and talking to random people, every quest has some kind of story and context attached to it, factions make your actions feel more purposeful and you're not usually buried under an avalanche of random loot. In The Witcher 3 you have that feeling of doing nothing but going from marker to marker, checking boxes on a list and seeing what random crap you picked up along the way. New Vegas style games don't feel like that anywhere near as much, because of the greater context and discoverability behind those actions. Granted Bethesda has made some steps toward this kind of design with some radiant quests and crafting upgrades you can find already made in the field randomly, but both these things can be entirely ignored easily. We'll see if they take the next dreaded step with Starfield.

Anyway, I find it hard sometimes to explain the difference between something like New Vegas and something like Cyberpunk, but hopefully I did better than usual there.

 

[Chippy]

Not a single person finished Kingmaker for at least three months after its release because it was so full of game breaking bugs. The one redditter who finished it in month three or four did so with a hex editor. Other recent releases, Expedition: Viking and KotC2, were similarly unfinishable on release. Everyone who bought those games on release or preordered expecting not a perfect or even bug free game, just a game they could finish, was screwed, as they were actually paying to work as alpha testers. And yet the cucks on this forum will defend these unethical companies to the grave.

For some reason this cucked supplication isn’t extended to Cyberpunk, which is a game that has problems but that you can play from start to end, unlike the above Codex darlings on release. Instead, we are subjected to speculation on if we can “trust” them. Pretty weird! I wonder what could explain this discrepancy, why some games have desperate sycophants but Cyberpunk is treated like the worst thing to ever happen. What was that? Must have been the wind.

People can tell when a game has been made with intrinsic motivation and when a game has been made with the same kind of motivation but spoiled a lot by box ticking.

I think in the first case everyone knew Kingmaker was a made by devs with their hearts in the right places. W3 was as well, but they started going downhill with W2. I'll never forgiven them for QTEs. I know they took them out, but to this day, every time I select the Yrden sign I hear:
"HIT IT WITH THE YRDEN!" from the Kayran battle. The point being that CDProjekt made some retarded decisions with these games. Lots of them. That add up for some people.

Edit: and they can't all be patched.

 

[Zer0wing]

Ok, and what's your point retard? They all worked on 2077. Was that meant to disprove something or...?

Do I really have to explain this? It's a low quality "Cherchez la femme" bait that paints women as cause for CP2077 failure that shifts the focus from real fuckups, higher management, their friends, marcin iwinski and adam badowski themselves.

 

[Melcar]

 

[Xelocix]

Ok, and what's your point retard? They all worked on 2077. Was that meant to disprove something or...?

Do I really have to explain this? It's a low quality "Cherchez la femme" bait that paints women as cause for CP2077 failure that shifts the focus from real fuckups, higher management, their friends, marcin iwinski and adam badowski themselves.

It's not bait if it's real. CDPR (as well as Bioware and dozens of other big-budget game studios) have been hiring talentless incompetent women to fulfill their diversity status-quo for years now, and it always results in hilariously broken stupid unpolished messes being pushed out. "Higher management" is responsible for this shit, and if you can't see this increasingly prominent pattern by now then you don't actually pay attention to how companies have been structuring themselves for the past 5-8 years and what their agendas are.

 

[Tacgnol]

Not a single person finished Kingmaker for at least three months after its release because it was so full of game breaking bugs. The one redditter who finished it in month three or four did so with a hex editor.

Whilst Kingmaker was definitely buggy as fuck at release, I finished it with very few issues in December 2018. Which would be "month three" as you put it.

The most annoying thing back then was the loading times (especially without shortcuts to get back to the world map from the kingdom), which, whilst still awful now, were even worse at release.

 

[Chippy]

CDprojekt taken over by women?. I don't know whether to feel or depressed. On the one hand, it kinda makes sense now that they made retartred decisions like Geralt getting 1-shot by explosive barrels, and jumping a little bit from big rocks. Because men are interested in things, and women are interested in people (Jordan Peterson).

On the other hand - there are a large proportion of women in Poland that are interested in games...and if they were all SKWs, the story wouldn't be so good.

I dunno. Maybe when I finish W3 I'll be in a better position to comment. The only problem is, this game never ends. I've been going at it for about 3 hours a day, for 6 weeks now. And I'm skipping all the riddler ?????s

 

[prengle]

lol there is no such thing as a corporation that you can trust

 

[DalekFlay]

lol there is no such thing as a corporation that you can trust

You can trust them... to do what corporations were designed to do and put financial return above any other concern.

 

[damagedbrains]

This is the only site I visit that consistently puts the gaming conversation in the sphere of actual developers - the people. I don't understand why the gaming world idolizes publishers and "development studios". Its the people who made it.

Its like saying you like 21st Century Fox's Fight Club and hence you are looking forward to their reboot of Desperate Housewives. Really, people who call themselves gamers are the lowest common denominator of human progress.

PS. That being said, even the pole who made witcher 3 aint good enough, let alone cdpr.

 

[Archwizard Hank]

Trust no one. Not even yourselves!

 

[gurugeorge]

This is the only site I visit that consistently puts the gaming conversation in the sphere of actual developers - the people. I don't understand why the gaming world idolizes publishers and "development studios". Its the people who made it.

Its like saying you like 21st Century Fox's Fight Club and hence you are looking forward to their reboot of Desperate Housewives. Really, people who call themselves gamers are the lowest common denominator of human progress.

PS. That being said, even the pole who made witcher 3 aint good enough, let alone cdpr.

It's the ship of Theseus again. The CDPR we have now is not the plucky CDPR that made the first 2 Witcher games and set up GOG to the delight of older gamers everywhere. There's obviously more soy and estrogen involved now.

But at the same time, companies have their own traditions and ethos that carries across changes of personnel. It changes too, but more slowly than personnel changes, because you have a "fold-over" effect of people who've been in the company longer training younger personnel.

That struck me particularly wrt CP77 thusly: ok, so we know they had a design for something more RPG-ish than what we've got, because that's what all the hype and marketing was showing up to the middle of 2018. We can be pretty sure that they bit off more than they could chew, in that having to accommodate Keanu meant they had to almost create another game (action adventure) and set aside the game they'd been working on (RPG). So they had the problem that while they'd have had enough time to finish the RPG from mid 2018 tiill now, and they'd have had enough time to finish a Keanu action-adventure if that's all they'd been working on all along, they didn't have enough time to finish both by the end of this year.

But what did they do? In order to kludge it all together, they fell back on some TW3 tropes. But this is a company from which many of the most experienced TW3 developers had already left around 2017 (if we are to trust some of those timelines from Reddit, etc.). It's a different company in terms of personnel. Yet regardless of the different personnel, the knowledge of how to make a TW3-lite was still part of the company's DNA at that point, still a homeopathic residue of the previous iteration of the company.

 

[lycanwarrior]

Not a single person finished Kingmaker for at least three months after its release because it was so full of game breaking bugs. The one redditter who finished it in month three or four did so with a hex editor. Other recent releases, Expedition: Viking and KotC2, were similarly unfinishable on release. Everyone who bought those games on release or preordered expecting not a perfect or even bug free game, just a game they could finish, was screwed, as they were actually paying to work as alpha testers. And yet the cucks on this forum will defend these unethical companies to the grave.

For some reason this cucked supplication isn’t extended to Cyberpunk, which is a game that has problems but that you can play from start to end, unlike the above Codex darlings on release. Instead, we are subjected to speculation on if we can “trust” them. Pretty weird! I wonder what could explain this discrepancy, why some games have desperate sycophants but Cyberpunk is treated like the worst thing to ever happen. What was that? Must have been the wind.

i'm guessing it has more to do with CDPR knowingly lying about the performance of CP2077 on base consoles. Not to mention intentionally withholding review copies of console versions in order not to scare away that sweet, sweet preorder freight train.

That is the major difference.

 

[KK1001]

There's a major difference between an early access title being a broken, unfinished mess (kinda the point), and the most anticipated game of maybe the past 8 years not running on last gen consoles and the developer being purposefully deceptive.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

I've said it before. I'm too tired and old to repeat it here. I'll just paraphrase. Game companies do not care about you. If they're publically traded. They just want share prices to go up. The #GamersTM are a neccesarry evil that are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the borderline Socialist utopia that is stock trading. As long as the money changes hands, they don't actually care if they make money on the product or not because the real money and the real product is the stocks.

CDPR are public last I checked. I've talked with several of their ex devs. They think you're all retarded for letting them get away with what they did for Cyberpunk and believing the sob story about crunch they pulled to get more pay.

 

[TheBreadcrumb]

I don't trust them as far as I can throw them, but GOG is the only online platform I can buy games DRM free as far as I know. Download the installer plus other files, goodies and save them on an external hard drive. I suppose you could do something similar with Steam but you need a crack for those. And as for Origin and EPIC Games store, I have no idea. Never used their services, never will.

 

[Andhaira]

DON'T BE EVIL!!!!!!