this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Cyberpunk 2077
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Nice, push it. I still haven't played it. Is the fixed up game pretty worth it? I don't want no spoilers. How open world is everything?
The game is so good. But I might be biased because I enjoyed the game since day 1. How open world is everything? For me there's a lot to explore, some corners tells a story of what happened there even though you can't see any shards that you can read what happened, you can see some traces of what went through and that for me is what made the city alive. (People pointed out that the city is dead because NPCs don't have daily routines/cycles and they are dumb) Maybe I am just easy to please. Anyways, some doors are locked for obvious performance reasons.
The issue is mainly that they (and the city overall) don't really react in a way that has been established by open world city games since like... GTA3?
NPCs didn't have a range of reactions to aggression or being bumped, they wouldn't start fights, some of the seated ones wouldn't even run away when gunfire goes off nearby they'd just stay seated and scream. The police system was obviously hellishly bad with cops just teleporting in to fight you, no chase/escape gameplay, no real anything.
The sandbox basically fails to deliver standard features of the open world city sandbox that have existed in every open world city game for 15 years.
The story content is good, and plays really well. The issue is that the world and interacting with it functionally feels like a diorama that you're not supposed to touch. Like a background in a movie where the walls will fall over if you touch them.
Compare to how the world interacts with the player in GTA5 or RDR2 and it's massively underwhelming, which is what people were expecting in terms of quality and polish. It's a real shame because the game is gorgeous and tonnes of effort clearly went into its world and story. I personally have some other issues with it, like the "punk" aspect not really being present because half the studio are far-right PiS voters but it's a Polish studio so I expected that. Trigger really demonstrated how this franchise should look when you handle it from the properly left-wing "punk" angle that the cyberpunk genre is supposed to have, fully committing with no both-sides or confusion about it.
Yep, I get all of that. Encountered some of that specially the police but it didnt really bothered me much since I also hated police chase since GTA 3. I had fun with the NPC reactions specially day 1 patches because I will scare them then chase them and switch to photomode to capture the moment like a maniac. Lol The set-up pieces on corners of Night city, like diorama as you said is what I appreciated. Maybe it's just me but I really liked it.
I think there's so much more you can do with the setting and the sandbox though. The basics of a city sandbox involve the police, fire and ambulance response to problems in the city.
There should be private fire crews, and they should compete with each other. Fires that break out should have multiple private fire companies come out to them and compete for putting out the fire. This should turn into a disaster obviously because they just shoot the shit out of each other.
Ambulance teams should obviously be Trauma Team. The scene where you hand over the woman from the bathtub to Trauma Team should have been the way they work ALWAYS. They should be scary heavily geared medics that don't fuck around about killing you to save some corpo you've injured, they should show up before the police in cases of corpos because Trauma Team are more efficient than the cops, and not over-stretched.
The cops should have a real chase system, and show significantly more signs of being overstretched in the city.
Areas of the world should react realistically to player inputs, rather than feeling like a diorama they should feel like living spaces.
If these had been nailed properly along with modtools the modscene for the game could have been better than Skyrim. Especially with all the locked doors everywhere for modders to add content with.
On the non-technical side of things. I find CDPR's cyberpunk to be a little confused. Sometimes it doesn't remember that this world is hell and it goes to "coool futureeeee", effectively having the aesthetic trappings of the genre but trying to pretend that the world is good and likeable. Trigger's show on the other hand is never confused about the world, it's a living hell that nobody should ever admire or think is cool and it never strays from that. This isn't really very surprising given that everyone working at Trigger is a communist though lmao. You can see the difference between half of CDPR being right wing who actually admire this future libertarian hell city vs Trigger's studio full of commies.