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TychoCelchuuu
PIGEONRegistered User regular
PIGEONRegistered User regular
NEW THREAD: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/248212/cyberpunk-2077-huge-2-0-patch-is-out-dlc-the-26th-good-reviews-so-far/p1?new=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIcTM8WXFjk
Cyberpunk 2077 is a first-person RPG by CD Project RED, developers of the Witcher series. It is based on the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG created by Mike Pondsmith, who was a consultant for the video game.
All your favorite streamers are in the game, like Keanu Reeves and Johnny Mnemonic.
You play as V, and your overaching goal is to steal a computer program that contains the key to immortality. You can drive a car around, something the AI is less adept at. Your dick size is customizable.
The developers have apologized for the buggy state the game was released in. They blamed QA, which is like blaming the servers for bringing out food that the chefs couldn't finish cooking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIcTM8WXFjkCyberpunk 2077 is a first-person RPG by CD Project RED, developers of the Witcher series. It is based on the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG created by Mike Pondsmith, who was a consultant for the video game.
All your favorite streamers are in the game, like Keanu Reeves and Johnny Mnemonic.
You play as V, and your overaching goal is to steal a computer program that contains the key to immortality. You can drive a car around, something the AI is less adept at. Your dick size is customizable.
The developers have apologized for the buggy state the game was released in. They blamed QA, which is like blaming the servers for bringing out food that the chefs couldn't finish cooking.
TychoCelchuuu on
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In essence, yes, but also, no.
"self control" is an easy thing to say, but games are built and designed around their current systems, so simply refraining from using something is not the same as design that implements a different system. And there is absolutely something to be said for being forced into doing something you are not necessarily comfortable with rather than dismissing it after a few goes and thinking "nah" then getting rid of it without consequences, which you would normally do if the option is available without really thinking about it. Being forced into doing something causes you to have to actually put time into it, to actually have an accurate assessment on it because you've kept on using what you've got.
And then you can often get more value out of a game because of that. For example, you could try a different build that you find more fun because you have played this other build for so long and have a comparison point, replay the entire game with this new fun build, and get even more bang for your money. Experimenting with builds from the start rather than swapping to them halfway is a completely different form of fun. You experience all the content with the new build, starting from scratch up to full power. It can be like playing an entirely new game.
you could also discover something unexpected about this ability you initially dismissed, that turns out to be hella fun, and you wouldn't have realised because you just swapped back with a snap of your fingers. You just got some fun out of that too.
It's one of those cases where less can actually equal more.
My opinion is kinda mixed on this. On one hand, I'm all for options, especially accessibility options. On the other, I can see a case for a game being designed a specific way with the intention of pushing a player outside of their comfort zone, with that being the point of it, and if you don't enjoy that, the game wasn't intended to be played by you.
The thing is both sides have a point. They're both right. There is no perfect answer.
If I implemented a game I would probably allow for options, but if my game was one where I wanted people to be pushed out of their comfort zone, I probably would make some options fixed once you've started a playthrough. you want to play on easy, that's fine. But you don't get to swap down to easy halfway and back without some kind of consequence. This still makes people unhappy (a good point made in counter to this is that being forced to restart a multiple hour playthrough just to change the difficulty is sucky for people without a lot of time on their hands), but there's no perfect solution here. You try to balance things as best you can in that sense, but ultimately at some point in a design you just have to come to terms with that.
The other 2 ARPG's I was talking about have dozens of good builds, all of which work with all content. So a game with choices but only a single good build sounds like a game I wouldn't want to play anyway, because the entire skilltree would be a noob trap except for the good one you mentioned.
And yes, by itself locking down respeccing doesn't make more viable builds. Good content that doesn't just scale off to infinity is probably the biggest thing which allows this. But people have found interesting mechanics in both those games, in some instances in ways the devs didn't even intend to work, because respeccing would be painful.
A lot of that is stuff that maybe could be addressed (but probably won't) given time, so who knows. I'm in no rush to replay the game. I actually managed to play Cyberpunk mostly how I wanted, I only barely touched hacking towards the end with some side quests requiring it. The game dumped different orange rarity cyberdecks all over me but kinda discouraged me from going and trying most of them out (especially when I encountered a late game bug that made hacking completely unusable anyways lol...)
I like watching a build grow. Respecs are usually for fixing small errors, like a few skill choices that don't really work like I thought they would work.
Ideally what I want is for a game to have respecs but for them to be limited by cost, with that cost being balanced so that it doesn't feel impossible to get (which is the same as not having one) but isn't too easy.
Cyberpunk is not at the right place in terms of respecs.
(spoiler'd for both spoilers and mildly NSFW)
--Mark Twain
If it's a self control thing I guess I can respect that but then it's just an eternal battle of who's preferences we should prefer. I think I would favor the way that's more options for everyone since adding the option doesn't mean you have to use it. It feels like arguing that Pokemon should have to be played Nuzlocke style for everyone when you can just as easily opt into that level of difficulty while leaving the option there for others. Or saying that you have to care about your speedrun time to enjoy a game. It's much easier to arbitrarily make a game harder without developer assistance than the other direction.
And yeah it won't stop me from winning or playing more, but it isn't elegant or consequential, it just misses modern sensabilities.
Completely aside from any other question, I think respecs should always be around in RPGs because devs constantly fuck up their systems. I can't think of many RPGs where all the skills worked as described, let alone intended, and that's in games that didn't come flying out half-baked like Cyberpunk. Players shouldn't need to rely on community testing to understand what the shit in the game actually does, it should just tell you.
Personally I advocate for as much information as possible, so after it says "increases x by 10%" there should be a details button that brings up the formula it's calculated in and any notes, letting you know whether it's additive or multiplicative or whether there are caps or what the order of operations between different systems affecting the same thing are, but since no one is ever going to provide that skills should at least do something reasonably close to what they say they do, and failing that players shouldn't have to hurdle some gigantic barrier to respec to the build they thought they were getting.
But really I just think some perks should be consolidated.
. . .having said that, the Commitment video CDPR put out was a load of hogwash.
There's two possible reasons I can think of that a developer might not do this.
The first is that a lot of players enjoy working things out for themselves and don't really want to be deluged in numbers. They just want to intuit the game. Being drowned in maths can put them off. They have to think about those customers too.
The second, and the more important one, is that this is a shit ton of work and they usually just straight up don't have time to add this in. It has to be correct after all. They can't typo these tooltips. Someone has to check them every time a formula is changed behind the scenes. That can quickly lead to total chaos and end up just being too much work. Usually tooltips are done in a single pass with some small corrections and then they move onto other work. They leave them a little general so they have the option to adjust things as they are balancing in the weeks up to release.
Note that I am on the side of GIVE ME ALL THE NUMBERS I CAN TAKE IT so I'm not arguing against it. I'm just saying, there's reasons.
Of course a third reason can also be "our ui design is shit and/or we didn't even think of it" which I'm sure happens as often as not.
I put a replay (or rather getting back into playing) D:OS2 to jump on Kingmaker because I had already put a chunky amount of time into D:OS2 before, and wanted a chunky amount of time into something I hadn't seen before. I'm also finding I like the systems in PK (and to a simpler degree POE2) a lot better than DOS2 which is kinda just "Beat on enemies until they fall - but strategically." I also forgot about Baldurs Gate 3 which I'm trying not to play despite paying full price for it. Feels like another Fort Joy in EA situation from Larian that I want to save for full release (will probably pick it up a month before release).
. . .none of which has anything to do with CP77 other than showcasing the breadth of RPG's out there at the moment.
Reminds me of my issue's with DA:O; Melee weapons were rife with notes on bonuses but at no point did I get enough of the math to actually be able to figure out what damage *actually looked like*; I understand that the hammer has armor penetration value, but how much does armor absorb and how much armor do my enemies have on average? this says I get an extra 10% missile resistance but how much is that? What is the base speed of my weapon so I can tell how much a +4 influences?
Like, if you're going to throw math at me give me enough to resolve the equation.
Every skill in every single game that involves a stat change should always display the fixed or percentage change, full stop. There are faaaar too many games with skills that do nothing noticeable when you take them or will obviously be worth crap if you knew the value of the change, and just using word descriptions is virtually always a waste of the player's time and efforts.
Basically, the best thing to do would be to not have the basically insignificant incremental stuff, and only have stat changes that have significant improvements, or actually change gameplay somewhat.
Excellent work from Crowbat as always. There's a whole lot of over promising that I was unaware of. The thing about the NPCs having routines and lives and then smash cut to the NPCs simply walking in circles forever... Oof.
Yeah, it was a lot.
Again, I know who I'm putting on the chopping block for this one. It's that douche who wrote a "counter" to all of the claims currently circulating about the game, just kind of further cementing my impressions that he's primarily responsible for launching a game that's the epitome of an upside-down pyramid where the entire thing was precariously balanced by the graphics (the pointy top part) instead of the games base.
So now the poor employees have the arduous task of flipping a fucking pyramid.
It's like every person in Watch Dogs has their own detailed custom history. Sure, totally, they don't just take a bunch of details from a random list and leave it at that.
Or in Sim City (the bad one), the people have their own homes and jobs that they go back and forth to. Unless you follow them, when they go straight to the nearest unfilled job no matter what they did yesterday, then drive to the nearest unoccupied home afterwards.
And that's fine because the amount of stuff you'd need to add to make that work is ridiculous, and wouldn't really add much of value. Just don't make the claim in the first place.
Like just street upon street of stores that if you drove there? Go fuck yourself.
Except it's Night City so as long as you don't actively murder anyone while doing so you can just pull up on the sidewalk because the cops are too busy pretending to do rather than actually doing their job.
I'm pretty sure both my Vs would be crippled by parking tickets even if they'd managed to sell the goods.
That's cool and all that you don't believe it.
I don't believe it either.
But they flatly said it.
At that's kinda not okay, that companies get to do this.
Their marketing department should be in an institution somewhere because what they got some real crazy vibes going on.
For me, it's kind of like Disney World / Land. That place feels magical and clean and fully realized, until you go "backstage" and see that its all duct tape and bubblegum holding the illusion together. Goofy with his mascot head off, furiously dragging on a cigarette while cindarella calls him an asshole sure was a thing high school me saw when my marching band got to perform in the parades.
I have no problem with how the NPCs and AI drive and behave in the world, and if I don't engage with it too closely it feels pretty well realized. Just don't try to follow people home or sit in one spot for 6 hours or whatever. Going backstage shows just how basic and/or fragile a lot of this actually is.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I avoided an absolute shit ton of the overhyped advertising for this game because I wanted to go in fresh.
I also had a pretty big argument a few months ago where I said the game would be buggy to fuck and got shot down about it, so I'm not even disappointed there too.
But coming back and looking at what they said later on? What they said is not ok! I don't care myself that this stuff isn't there, and I never really expected them to put it in. But plenty of people did because they told them to expect it.
I can believe that someone came up with the idea, and thought it was viable enough to decide that yes, they were going to have that and mention it to marketing. Then it was bought to the people who actually had to make it happen, and they just laughed until it turned to crying and gave them an estimate on how much CPU time would be needed to make that happen, and they backed off.
Like the Mantis Blade wall thing. I can believe that they had it at least in the semi-implemented stage, then realised how much it broke the level designs they were making, or that they couldn't make it fun. Things get cut from games all the time, we just mostly don't find out about it.
The problem all goes back to marketing your game when the game is still being made, and the solution is to not market anything in your game until it's locked down. Good luck getting that to happen. Heck, it still happens with movie trailers, where they show scenes that end up being cut from the actual movie.
Given that triple A games spend a huge amount of money on marketing, I assume there's a measurable payoff for it, so asking them to dial that back won't get results.
I'd honestly be fine with games not even being announced until they're all ready to go (Origami King went from announcement to launch in like a month), but I don't see it becoming the norm.
WoW's interface is still pretty awesome as far as ability to customize it is concerned
I used to follow people around in Cities Skylines once I had a city built up and I was bored. It was actually pretty cool. Instead of ruining the illusion, it gave me an appreciation of my own cities as I watched my tiny residents go to school, go to college, grow up and get a job, enjoy a stroll to the park, etc. The only problem was the difficulty in keeping track of someone permanently because the game didn’t launch with NSA tools or anything.
I followed an NPC around in Cyberpunk because I knew they were supposed to have simulated lives, not knowing it would end up in them walking around in a loop, and was somewhat disappointed and went back to the good parts of the game.
I see your points and I respect them but this game is a very, very exaggerated example. It is the sheer level of lie going on that is a problem here.
Yes all marketing can be bad. Usually though, they're not this blatant about it. This was completely disconnected from reality. That is the difference.
Like, this is at the level where it feels like a parody.
I decided I would just wait until it gets the Realm Reborn treatment in a year or two with patches and expansions that actually finish the game then give it another shot.
But its one of those things where there is no point in beating a dead horse. By now we all know what the game is and either you find it worth your time or don't.
There's also virtually no CHOOH2/gas stations for all these cars. I think I saw one in the entire city. Maybe two.
still yeah, where are those? Underground?
Duke Nukem 3D turned 3D Realms into perfectionists who made Duke Nukem Forever like a dozen times then canned it and started over each time because things were moving away from them.
Half-Life almost led to Valve doing the same thing for 2, but they avoided it at least until Episode 2 came out.
About the only time I've seen this being remotely true would be Radiata Stories, wherein virtually every NPC was unique and they all were given specific daily routines.
Also you could fight basically anyone in the game by kicking them twice.