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Comment by LeoNatan25 | Hacker News Reader

I launched the game on PS5 with 1.5, and during the first few minutes of the Streetkid storyline, saw several characters T posing. This is a year and a half after original release, for a game that has several major delays as it is before release.

This kind of jank wasn’t acceptable in the 90s and 2000s, let alone in 2020-2022.

It’s amazing how incompetent this team has become.

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Let's be more empathetic to the developers than call them "incompetent". It might be that they are burnt out from years if crunch, investor expectations and harassment from fans.

Incompetent is defined by Merriam-Webster as „lacking the qualities needed for effective action“ and „unable to function properly“. Incompetent is the correct word, all things considered. Protecting the feelings of the people involved by mincing words is not going to help them very much in the end.

Citing technical definitions of a term used to critique individual humans is unhelpful and splitting hairs.

Even if I entertain your nitpicking, the former definition (lacking qualities) is still unfair.

But we don't know that the developers are lacking those qualities? It's certainly possible that the only problem at CDPR and the only problem with the development of Cyberpunk 2077 is that the programmers and artists are bad (or "lacking the qualities needed for effective action"). But it's certainly also possible that the artists, developers and maybe even low-level managers are perfectly capable workers but placed in circumstances where even the most competent workers would produce a sub-par product, no?

This isn't about mincing word, this is about correctly attributing blame.

Notice I didn't only blame the developers. I said "team". Management is part of that team. But where there is smoke, there usually is fire, and probably some of the blame of this technical failure of a game lies with developers also.

9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. If anything there was severely incompetent management.

nobody needs your merriam webster definition. you never even spent a day as a developer in this company and somehow you think you have the credibility to back a comment on their competence?

Your emotional comment is inappropriate. You seem to think that calling a team incompetent is the same as calling individuals incompetent, which it isn't.

On the official patch reveal stream random cars were still blowing up...

https://clips.twitch.tv/FancyTenuousLatteBloodTrail-QuTfEAEz...

I think there was also a ragdoll that spazzed out against some props after a takedown during the pre-recorded next-gen preview video that was shown at the beginning.

EDIT: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1298832987?t=00h21m33s

Remembered correctly

It seems that the devs are experiencing some serious stability issues with their physics engine (which is likely homebrewed), and is causing most of the bugs the players are complaining about (the next problematic being character AI and animation). Which I understand, since I also spent some time implementing my own physics engine and encountered the sorts of bugs similar to these... (though I still expect veteran engine devs to do a lot better than me!)

It's like everyone's forgotten entirely about the (wonderful) madness of Havok which characterises basically every Bethesda and Source Engine 2 game... The sound of agressive slapping and thumping as a corpse or four hundred cheese wheels get caught in the ground is music to my ears, bringing me back to the halcyon days of my youth when times were simpler and video games were...... Still a humongous crunch culture and populated with vocally angry impatient dorks for fans, but physics glitches were apparently just part of a game's charm back then?

We took what we could get. Back then, the sound of 4000 cheese wheels rubbing ominously against other surfaces was one of the most glorious experiences available. Just the fact that it resembled any functionality at all was impressive to us.

You're right, physics simulation are still the most jankiest part of a game engine and for good reason. And these buggy parts are what brings humor to many games like the one's you've mentioned.

Still, I never expected ragdolls to be THAT buggy in Cyberpunk. I thought ragdolls were mostly a solved problem, they're still funny to look at but aren't that glitchy anymore. You can probably eliminate most of the stability issues of ragdoll systems (which have lots of constraints between rigid bodies) by damping the hell out of them (along with adding some realistic joint constraints). But I really don't understand what Cyberpunk's engine is doing, the 1% of cases when things align well it looks very realistic, but most of the time it glitches out weirdly (unrealistic poses) in ways I don't expect. Looking at the way how characters can get stuck to objects it seems like there are some serious issues with contact resolution...

all games that try to have real physics have these glitches. you can’t not have them and also have good frame rates.

Yes, but the best studios minimize these glitches to a minimum. Compare this game with GTA5 or RDR2. Rockstar uses its own proprietary engine that works together with the animation engine. When taking into consideration how much interaction there is with game world in GTA5 and RDR2, the glitches are fewer and farther between. Rockstar is the gold standard of technical game development these days.

They may have been the gold standard, but not anymore since the GTA remaster release last year... that was so bad they had to apologise for releasing it.

The Definitive editions were developed by a mobile game studio (Grove Street Games) rather than in-house by Rockstar. Rockstar still published them though, so they do bear some responsibility for the quality issues.

I’m playing through Dark Souls at the moment - superb game, but Havok shenanigans abound. Good times.

I think people were too busy being amazed to nitpick the jank. My own experience with “realistic” physics in games at that point was limited to Elastomania and Worms, so Source was mind-blowing. I remember spending more time in the CS:Source beta throwing grenades at piles of junk than playing the actual game.

I thought this one was funny — an NPC exits a car, all the doors fall off, and then the car explodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs1MKLXV_jA.

"You Were Only Supposed To Blow The Bloody Doors Off"

In the 90s and 2000s console makers still did strict quality assurance for all games on their platform, mostly as a consequence of the video game crash of 1983, which was in large part caused by bad games. Something as buggy as Cyberpunk 2077 wouldn't have been allowed. Since then those checks have relaxed considerably, basically to a level of "if it runs, you can ship it".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Gamers have proven that they will happily buy broken games so they can get away with it.

A game's function is to be entertaining, so if the customer is entertained then the product can't really be said to be broken.

I don't necessarily think they only had higher QA standards back then. Back then you delivered the game on a physical medium, i.e. CD/DVD-ROM and could not expect the customer to be 24/7 online. If you did mess up your Golden Master or did not catch game breaking bugs, this could severely damage your revenue during your main sales window.

Maybe in 2077 T posing is just a fad like dabbing has been in recent years.

If it gets people to shoot video landscape instead of portrait I'm all for it.

I'm so glad I got it for PC and not for my PS5! I had one bug in a complete play-through - where I had to reload to trigger a quest - otherwise the game worked as intended from release day.

I had a few that looked silly, like a floating cigarette I encountered within the first minute of playing or a car clipping into the ground or various T-posing models. But they weren't so game-changingly bad that they ruined anything for me

To me, such immersion breaking bugs are the worst, especially in an RPG that is supposed to immerse you in a world.

apparently more budget, more advanced technology and team members a game has, crappier it gets.

90s games were simpler due to lot of restrictions, but most main stream titles were quite polished.

this company sure made several mistakes on the hiring process and team management, I just can't imagine how something like this went to production.

> apparently more budget, more advanced technology and team members a game has, crappier it gets.

That's just not fair. Expectations have changed, technology has changed and team sizes have grown to accomodate the desires of the audience. With this extra scope comes extra risk which has been poorly managed.

> but most main stream titles were quite polished.

This is your nostalgia talking, and there's a huge amount of survivorship bias at play here. There were plenty of games from the 80s and 90s period that were anything from crap to just straight up unplayable, and they were just left in that state.

I agree there is a lot of survivorship bias, but it seems like every triple AAA game that releases is an unfun buggy mess. It feels like they like passion and have become too corporate. Like they focused on what features the game has to have instead of being a fun game. And by having so many features of course you have more area for bugs.

Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.

> but it seems like every triple AAA game that releases is an unfun buggy mess.

Horizon forbidden west released late last week and is a AAA title that has been well received, is polished and great fun. There are still many AAA titles released that aren't unfun buggy messes.

> Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.

That doesnt mean all AAA games are bad.

> That doesnt mean all AAA games are bad.

They might not suck, but they are so often bland and unoriginal. Like they owe it to their 100 million dollar investors not to rock the boat too hard.

> They might not suck, but they are so often bland and unoriginal.

There's plenty of original and not-bland AAA games releasing regularly. Teams take risks, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't.

> Like they owe it to their 100 million dollar investors not to rock the boat too hard.

This is just shitposting, frankly, and is the sort of comment I'd expect ot see on reddit, not here. Cyberpunk is many things, but unoriginal and bland is not it. It definitely _tries_, and there's not really anything else like it (Deus ex is maybe the closest thing). That doesn't mean it's fun, and that doesn't mean that all AAA games are unoriginal bland and unfun either.

The end result of Cyberpunk is that the world is bland. The city is empty and lifeless, the AI that is there, is really brain-dead. We are not in the PS1 era of open world games, where pioneers in the genre were happy to just have a few people and cars on the street. In 2020, this is some of the worst open-world implementation in recent AAA game development.

> Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.

It's all about expectations. 99% of what makes vampire survivors fun is that it's a $2 indie game. If the same exact game was released by a AAA studio for $30-$60, everyone would say it's shit, has terrible graphics, doesn't have enough content, etc. It would completely change your perception of the game.

In that vein, I played through cyberpunk and had a lot of fun. I didn't rage quit the first time I encountered a physics bug. I allowed myself to have fun, which is something a lot of gamers can't seem to do anymore.

Not just survivorship bias imo. You had to ship a stable game because you couldn't patch it later. And the scope of games was much smaller, in complexity and game length, so it was easier to QA. End result is that on average games were much more stable than modern games are at 1.0.

> And the scope of games was much smaller, in complexity and game length, so it was easier to QA

Agreed on this point.

> End result is that on average games were much more stable than modern games are at 1.0.

Have you got an actual source for this? I think you're missing a large amount of pure crapware that was released. I have memories of playing the Sierra adventure games being incredibly unreliable for example. Ports for DOS were unbeatable without cheating because they were so sloppily done[0]. E.T. [1] which has been associated with the fall of major games companies and is widely known as the worst game in history, or Bubsy 3d which is literally meme material. 95% of boxed games that were released were complete and utter crapware.

[0] https://kotaku.com/that-time-a-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtle-g... [1] https://www.npr.org/2017/05/31/530235165/total-failure-the-w...

> Expectations have changed, technology has changed

This I agree, nowadays people start with a lot already done, no need to write a custom audio codec, or image compression trick or whatever, not only there is plenty of code ready for doing so, but there are plenty of computational resources to use on runtime.

Back then you would see advances first in the games and later on being documented, now they are released as papers, you hope that it will be implemented on some engine somewhere, and games using these techniques will be at least 5 years away from the paper release.

In the past graphics APIs like OpenGL and old Directx leaked a lot of structural information, so almost every big game release was followed by a driver update where the GPU vendors fixed any bugs in the games that where visible on their GPUs. They still do that for widely used engines. Write your own engine that throws around binary buffers in Vulkan or modern DirectX? Tough luck, no one will spend months trying to reverse engineer a fix for every bug you wrote.

Wasn't really an option in the 90s (and mostly 2000s) as games shipped on physical media. No patches, no updates.

There were patches in the 90s, and certainly in 2000s. Perhaps not on consoles, but certainly on PC. What I meant was certain notorious PC RPG games, which became cult classic despite their bugginess (Gothic, Elder Scrolls, etc.)

As far as I can tell, there's really just one bug underlying most of the issues, and its that there is so much content in the game, that it messes up trying to load and unload objects. And a lot of it is failed attempts to adapt it for consoles.

>saw several characters T posing

For those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-pose

A bug that makes penises stick out of female character pants on the customisation screen is quintessential 2020.

This? Since CP there were a few releases of other big titles that got worse scores than CP

What is "T posing"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-pose

NPC sometimes take T pose and stand still https://duckduckgo.com/?q=t+pose+cyberpunk&iax=images&ia=ima...

Ok so it means they botched the animation of some characters?

The animations are fine but the game fails to load them. As it fails other assets too, for example you might see your main character in a cutscene with her tits out because the clothes didn't load. [1]

At launch the game had you T-pose without pants while riding a motorcycle...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/sx031p/start...

Game engines typically spawn character model entities with this pose by default. Which means if you see this then the NPC's scripted loop hasn't even been initiated at this point. This can be a bug obviously but it could also be due to performance since a lot of game engine pipelines are async and some of these tasks might not have been completed in time.

It's not exactly an easy problem to solve (simulating crowds in a huge city without any organic view distance portals) but I guess they could have also saved themselves a lot of pain by not targeting legacy systems or maybe make less ambitious claims about their game.

I think this is a problem that is specific to the animation system, not necessarily the entire scripting system, as the characters are still following their scripts and driving/shooting; it’s just that their animation is broken.

It's been ages since I've left gamedev, but generally characters and creatures are animated by constructing an actual skeletal structure inside their body (usually called a mesh). Points on the mesh are then mapped with various weights to the bones in the skeleton. When a bone moves, points on the body are moved along with it depending on the weighting. You can think of it like attaching muscles to bones, which determines how the "flesh" moves when bones move/rotate.

What you animate then is not the "flesh", but the skeleton. You tell the hand to move to a certain position, and then a constrained optimization problem is solved to extend the arm and hand while keeping the joint limits in mind.

The most convenient default shape to set up the skeletal structure of a humanoid is the T-pose, so this is usually the shape humanoids take in games before any animation logic is applied to them. If you see a T-pose in a game, odds are that the animation system crapped out. The animation system may have crashed but the error was swallowed to keep the game chugging along.

A human standing in a pose that looks like a T. So standing up straight, arms stretched out to both sides.

I'm not entirely certain but I believe the T-pose is the "default" position for characters before their animations start.

So it's just really sloppy game dev work. As if the game suddenly only has lego characters that don't have animations anymore.

T-pose is the default/neutral stance for character rig/skeleton iirc, makes it easier for modelers etc to work on the asset as they don't have things hidden by the model.

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