I've been watching my girlfriend play it on PC and it's been generally fine
There is controversy around this idea. The game is certainly buggy and many similar open world games have also been buggy on release. However, a lot of the problems in Cyberpunk 2077 don't appear to be bugs. They appear to be active design decisions that were made as a shortcut on promised features. Here is a Twitter thread with some examples of design decisions that might appear as bugs to an untrained eye.[1]
It seems like CDPR knew they had an unfinished game and couldn't deliver it close to its release date. Management decided to do whatever had to be done to release a game in time for Christmas. This "open world games are always buggy on release" narrative plus some shady behavior surrounding how they handled reviews[2] allowed them to get largely great reviews and a huge influx of cash. Hopefully that provides enough capital to justify a long term commitment to finishing this game because it is doesn't appear to be a few bug fixes or performance improvements away from being the game that was promised.
[1] - https://twitter.com/jumpovertheage/status/133892916630199091...
[2] - https://screenrant.com/cyberpunk-2077-ps4-xbox-one-review-sc...
I don’t really mind the examples in the Twitter thread, but I do mind that you really cannot interact with the world in any meaningful way.
None other than skyrim is one of the best examples of this.
But yeah your description is pretty good.
For me it was great on the beginning, the mood and the graphics are pretty good. Some missions are great as well. But now I’m not really sure if I will even finish it. It doesn’t really feel meaningful.
Also even though there are some explicit sex scenes (but so few I’m not sure why they are there), it is really not edgy at all. It’s like a corporation designed the game which is everything cyberpunk is not supposed to be.
There are a ton of great ideas in there, but then someone realized it would take too long so they half assed everything.
Totally agree. Take for example character backgrounds. They are meaningless. You have a custom 5 min introduction for that background and then you are playing the same game as everybody with the addition of just a few dialogs.
They could have just focused on one background and make the side quests more relevant to that background.
And that's exactly why I loved it haha, but I do understand the grievance with it
With this game it's probably a generational thing on more than one level: not only do most people tend to grow out of side quest competitionism at some point, I suspect that older parts of the audience are also drawn into this particular main story stronger than their younger peers. It's just so perfectly 1990ies vibe that you almost forget that people did not in fact have mind machine interfaces and fancy prosthetic limbs when they sent their first email on AOL. The game represents exactly how people born around 1977 remember the movies of their youth (entirely unlike how you'd perceive them if you'd see them today).
Really npc's are stupid in skyrim, gta, cyberpunk whatever. And it doesn't matter. When you look at Watch Dogs, its getting very repettetive anyway; You look at a few and discover that you actually don't care about it anyway.
I play cyberpunk right now for the story they build and they build, so far, a very good story.
They can keep the npcs as they are honestly; Finetune perhaps but meh
PS. I'm also enjoying the game a lot, but soft locks and brokenness is starting to take it's toll.
In earlier GTAs like San Andreas there is an explicit difference between "traffic in the distance" and "traffic close by" - the former will be removed if out of sight, doesn't have full-fidelity 3D models, apparently doesn't have physics applied to them, ... Once they get close enough, they get more complete and sticky. (GTA V quite possibly does the same, I just know less about the details there and its a lot less obvious)
Regarding your second point, I'm not sure if you've seen how it's handled in CP? Basically all roads in the distance have a string of car/headlight sprites (yes, 2D) moving on them. Makes the world look amazingly populated and alive.
However the density of the sprite cars is much higher than the actual cars (depending on your settings). So when driving on a long road you always seem to be chasing a large group of cars that you can never reach. There seems to be no connection between actual cars spawning in and the sprite based crowd illusion.
And if you use a scope with good zoom to observe the sprite cars, it looks very funny. Basically you have very obvious Doom faux-3D sprites in an otherwise stunning environment.
That said, why do we have to remain purely positive for an expensive AAA game that promised so much and sold at a high price tag? Why should they be excused?
The police seemly doesn't have an AI, people actually believed they didn't.
But a player happened to see a police car with cops inside (extremely rare to see that), and saved his game near, and ran several tests.
He found out if you piss off the cops, using a car (on foot they just exit the car and never climb back on), and then you hit their car with yours (shooting them doesn't work, they just go away following a pre-programmed path), they start chasing your GTA-style.
So this means they DID code the cop cars to chase the player car, but a sequence of bugs make the only way to see this content to be go out of your way to do it (you need to see cops in a car spontaneously while you are inside a car too, then run over a pedrestrian, then hit the cop car with your car).
Self driving cars are a billion dollar industry, and yet you expect a game dev studio to come up with a realistic AI for drivers?
It's a game. People know that it's not real. Sure, it's fun to discover the tricks that the devs had to pull off to make it work. But man, don't blame a game dev studio that they haven't come up with an algorithm for self driving cars.
edit: Also hitting a pedestrian isn't a huge deal in a videogame.
Other than the game is very enjoyable on a PC, with some really enjoyable NPC action, interesting side quests and a great main story line. Also a great value compared to buying a movie or going to the cinema for a similar price - so far sunk 50h into the game.
For example take a look at this video[1], specifically the part in which the user shoots at AI driven cars. The AI in GTA 5 responds in a much more realistic fashion. This has a huge impact on immersion and creating a lifelike world. GTA 5 came out 7 years ago. There is no technical reason for Cyberpunk's AI being this bad. CDPR simply didn't want to invest the time in making it better.
(Sidenote: When the guy started beating up pedestrians I just couldn't continue watching that video. Maybe I'm getting old.)
for those of us that just heard about nitter in some other thread here today.
The game was announced 8 years ago and the last gen consoles were the main target. What do you mean it didn't belong there in the first place. The game came out now because it was delayed, otherwise it would have been out when we ONLY had the consoles where it "didn't really belong in the first place".
I am running it on a high end PC, maybe the bugs manifest more often on a lower spec PC?
RDR2 manages to offer a level of fidelity, detail on a larger scale and runs on these systems just fine. I don't think it's unreasonable for consumers to expect a game in development for so long to live up to at least the level of that game.
Cyberpunk has vastly more variation in NPCs, models in general, textures, light sources, and so on. In my playthrough, the largest crowd present in RDR2 was maybe 10 people on screen at the same time. Twenty at best. In my mind, the level of ambition doesn't compare, unless you were to limit your Cyberpunk experience to the Badlands.
I like rockstars approach much better: very limited hype, limited numbers of trailer/videos, no crazy promise, &c. Release on a limited amount of platforms first and take your time to port it to others so that everyone gets a polished version (or at least as good as it gets given the hardware). Cyberpunk looks like your typical "over promise, under deliver" approach.
If I could request one single upgrade though, putting user input fully onto a thread that isn't also responsible for rendering would be great.
What would be the point of putting user input on its own thread, though? Do you letting the UI run at 60 if the 3D graphics are janky? Otherwise there's no point collecting input faster if the game isn't going to draw it until next frame.
Shooting things with a console controller becomes much easier. With a high power single shot weapon, you can sweep over your target and pull the trigger at the right moment. Works great for games that accurately record your input timing regardless of whether there's a frame drawn at the right moment or not. But once you learn this technique, playing games that require a frame to process input becomes very painful.
edit: Sure, it doesn't specifically need to be implemented as a thread if the controller events come with a timestamp, but my sibling comment indicates that in CP2077 the input event between frames might actually be lost.
Also bear in mind that this is the PS4 version that’s being pulled. Maybe that’s where your confusion came from. The proper PS5 edition is not released yet. The PS5 runs this PS4 version somehow fine... But that’s definitely not how it’s supposed to work in the first place.
So you hear complaint from people with PS4 Pro and people with standard PS4 that swear they only have few issues but playable performances, which makes no sense unless the game is dependent on some less visible spec, like the performances of the media it has been saved to, which circles back to the original point, consoles are no longer this stable, uniform hardware that's hard to master but easy to support, and the requirement to target every hardware combination is anachronistic