Comment by ghosty141 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghosty141 | Hacker News Reader

I love cyberpunk as a genre/style/aesthetic but there are almost no open world videogames that actually nail it.

For me the cyberpunk aesthetic basically requires bustling small streets with tons of detail (shops, trash, crowds). That's where most games that try to use an open world fail in my opinion. We just don't have the technology yet to create these dense detail rich scenes without a lot of work on the developers/artists side as well as keeping it performant so it can run on mainstream gaming PCs.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a prime example of that in my opinion. Most parts of the city look like it's Covid again and people must stay at home. Some parts of the map come remotely close but the illusion breaks once you inspect your surroundings.

I like Cloudpunk (https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/) a fair bit but even that suffers from the walkways and buildings feeling slightly empty. At least the pixel art style helps it from falling in the uncanney valley that cyberpunk constantly dips in.

I think Cyberpunk has a good basis but as you say, it's heavy weight; they did increase or tweak crowd density in an update I think, but also it's a PC game so it can be modded and improved as hardware gets better. The challenge - and you already see it on lower crowd density numbers - is getting enough unique and different characters. Cyberpunk seems to have a number (dozens?) of NPC characters making up the crowds, but it gets repetitive and you frequently see identical ones.

Procedurally generated characters would already improve that, and some games do have it but they tend to pick from a fixed set of animation and behaviour stereotypes still. More of those stereotypes make it better (think GTA), but it's still fixed.

I don't think going all in on procedural generation or even AI would fix it though; especially AI has a tendency to go for a mean / average character quickly. And in video games, you still want predictability.

That said, maybe a different visual style (lower fidelity or 2d) would work.

> they did increase or tweak crowd density in an update I think

I assume something like that to be the case, as I played the game last year and "empty streets like covid" definitely don't describe my experience. But apart from stuff like the NCPD-marked encounters spread around the city, you probably do not want to look too closely at the random npcs, as it does get repetitive fast. But they do give an image of a lively city, at least, as you walk through. But imo it had enough of random encounters, side quests etc around the city to give you reasons to explore and immerse into it outside the main story (which I did not hate anyway, but can def imagine playing the game without it).

> and "empty streets like covid" definitely don't describe my experience

I think I gotta explain myself a little better here.

If you play the story it doesn't feel like that too much, but if you just walk through the city you often encounter quite empty roads and walkways. See here for example: https://youtu.be/0J55aRPrgOM?t=1285

Like mentioned above, you sadly can't properly fix it by just upping the population density since there are far too few models and you constantly notice the duplicate characters.

An example of what kind of crowd density and aesthetic I think is necessary for big populated cities can be seen in Altered Carbon: https://youtu.be/aDrj-_dB09k?t=22.

Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to dunk on the game, it's all just my personal opinion of what I want from a game with thats trying to nail the cyberpunk aesthetic.

Well, that's in the US (sort of), most people use the cars /s

No, you are right. I see what you mean now, it does not have the population density that corresponds to a superpopulated megacity.

There is a mod that makes it much higher (apparently activating a setting that gdpr had introduced but hidden)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgsRpxZU-0M

But even then, apart from the absolute amount of people, there is imo an issue with how people are distributed as they increase. People irl are not distributed uniformly and walk alone, they cluster (walk together, hang out in groups etc). Even with increased density with a mod, model repetitions aside, it puts them in a way that feels imo fake/weird. And in a game you have the time to notice these details.

Is there any open world game in any genre that manages the "bustling city" effect well? I didn't play Cyberpunk 2077 but Witcher 3 never quite got there either. It seems like 'detail' is a fractal/exponential problem that scales poorly in many respects.

I think Witcher 3 is the closest we have right now. Novigrad is a fantastic city and I loved to immerse myself in the game, I even played it without the minimap because it makes you think about your environment much more (NPCs even gave clues where you had to go for a mission in their speech!).

But yea I generally feel the same, that there are no open world games that manage to accurately portray a city (including residents and traffic).

I think the better route than trying to chase realism is using a stylized version of a city. Mirrors Edge does this particularly well imo. "The Ascent" is probaby the best detailed cyberpunk "world" right now (I haven't played it). From what I've seen that game has insane amounts of detail and they make it work by not trying to immitate real life and giving players access to a city but having custom built areas that mimic some aspects of a real place.

I'd love to read more about the whole virtual city topic etc. I feel like it's under-discussed.

The Ascent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_(video_game)

Definitely the best cyberpunk world right now. It looks absolutely stunning. Id love a Witcher 3 style game in that world.

Neon Giant have an FPS game called No Law, which is to be released later this year, which is based in a Cyberpunk-style world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD6kFXZlX00

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