>For anyone interested: Ignore the negative reviews.
As I replied elsewhere, it is strange to see another echo chamber in action. The sales number seems to be doing fine. And reviews were extremely polarised.
As I replied elsewhere, it is strange to see another echo chamber in action. The sales number seems to be doing fine. And reviews were extremely polarised.
The team did definitively over-extend themselves and failed to deliver a perfect? product but I don't see why this is being shunned here. They pushed the limits where it comes to Open World games and GTA has to up their game a LOT in the next release.
I'm sorry, but as a software dev with some hobby experience in game development, I disagree with this.
* hacking: tons of other games have a hacking component, either as a hack this computer, or break this lock, or make an enemy turret be friendly, or control this enemy. Fallout has hacking, Batman Arkham series has hacking (and enemy control), PoE has enemy take over skills etc
* cyberware gear: there is no difference between a "cyber deck" and a "helmet of might". Also, I think Deus-Ex has cyberware gear...
* scanning: Arkham games have a beautiful implementation of the concept. Horizon Zero Dawn has scanning.
* brain dances: this is simply playing a pre "recorded" 3d scene with some elements removed based on the "mode" selected. This is not a very hard thing to do, from a software development perspective, but requires lots of content. And guess what, there are like 4 brain dances in the game: the tutorial, the find the chip mission, the find the voodoo lady mission and the side mission with the cow dude.
And this is a recurring thing with Cyberpunk 2077, lack of content. I wish they'd spent less on getting Keanu Reaves to "star" and more on adding more clothing options or side missions, or give the beggars more lines. It would have been really cool to stay a while and listen to a beggar about that time their tank got blown up and they had to trek back from behind enemy lines...
Here is the thing, you can both like the game and critique the technical aspects.
This seems especially so in CDPR's case: they aren't using Unreal or any other off-the-shelf engine, they developed their own engine bespoke for The Witcher. Cyberpunk 2077 was the first game to use that engine for something that wasn't The Witcher series. A lot of their technical hurdles seem almost entirely related: it doesn't seem like it should be a huge surprise that a game engine originally built for a setting where the fastest traveling vehicle is a horse starts to fall down with performance problems when you introduce cars and sky cars and planes.
(Some small credit where credit is due: Rockstar at least started with GTA and then moved to RDR. Cars to horses seems to make more sense as a transition for a game engine than the other way around.)
Absolutely there are probably technical things CDPR could have done to avoid some of the problems they've had, but it was way more of a "programming challenge" than "why didn't they just copy and paste the hacking component from Fallout [Bethesda/Microsoft] and scanning from Arkham Asylum [Rocksteady/Warner Brothers] and call it a day?" (They couldn't, there's no way to access those components from other companies. There's no "Unity store" for that sort of stuff. There's not even a "Unity" here: all three of those franchises have extremely different bespoke game engines that never leave the doors of their development companies or publishers.)
It's a wonderful world/backdrop/setting. I like the story. There's 50x as much cutscenes and consequence-free dialog choices as there needs to be. I occasionally had fun with the missions. But overall it was a big basket of good ideas that they dropped on the floor.