after seeing what happened to Cyberpunk... I hope KSP 2 takes their time

[Guest]

18 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

The community of KSP fans hardly perceives KSP 2 as an analogue of an AAA game, although it will cost the same 60 bucks. I don't see any fundamental difference in creating a game, now it is also made by about 30 people or even less.

Nobody said AAA, and fan perception mean very little in KSP2 development, but there's a huge difference.

When Harvester started developing KSP he was not a game designer, he didn't have a 30 people team, he had no idea of what the game would become just a patch or two down the road and definitely didn't have 8 years of collected playtesting, player data, community and code to build a sequel upon.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the difference between the development of KSP and KSP2, prior to 2017 squad had no publisher, had to do everything in-house and had way less resources compared to what PD can provide.

39 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

In the videos, for the most part, we are shown the faces of the developers, but I don't remember the gameplay at all. But nobody is outraged! And the question of how serious the creators are making the game is all speculation.

The game was supposed to be revealed 6 months before release and have a 6 months plan to drop all the relevant informations, now they have more than a year to fill with the same content they planned to reveal in 6 months (more than a year ago).

When you dilute 6 months of content over 2 and a half year I think some waiting is supposed to happen, nothing to be outraged about, the game got delayed and so did the reveal and marketing plan, I don't know if you heard of Cyberpunk, but I heard that it didn't go well for them hyping the game too much and too early.

[Alexoff]

3 hours ago, Master39 said:

Nobody said AAA

Yep, just price like CP2077

3 hours ago, Master39 said:

When Harvester started developing KSP he was not a game designer, he didn't have a 30 people team

But he coped with the task perfectly, the game developed before our eyes and by the end of 2013 it became very similar to what we have today.

3 hours ago, Master39 said:

and had way less resources compared to what PD can provide.

Well, the publisher may have a lot of money, but how do you know exactly how much they give the developers? Speculation?

3 hours ago, Master39 said:

The game was supposed to be revealed 6 months before release and have a 6 months plan to drop all the relevant informations

Or maybe corpo from the publisher decided to release a trailer and promise the game in 2020, since he or she needed to account for the purchase of the rights to the KSP in 2017.

3 hours ago, Master39 said:

now they have more than a year to fill with the same content they planned to reveal in 6 months

For example, make faces for kerbals in December 2020?

3 hours ago, Master39 said:

When you dilute 6 months of content over 2 and a half year I think some waiting is supposed to happen, nothing to be outraged about

I didn't understand your logic at all - they decided to stretch the development of the game several times and there is no problem in that? When cyberpunk was postponed for several months, there was a train of memes, fans simply treat cyberpunk like a dream, and KSP 2 as an indie project that is forgiven a lot.

[Lisias]

6 hours ago, Master39 said:

When Harvester started developing KSP he was not a game designer, he didn't have a 30 people team, he had no idea of what the game would become just a patch or two down the road and definitely didn't have 8 years of collected playtesting, player data, community and code to build a sequel upon.

"Nobody told me it was impossible, so I did it!" - Felipe "HarvesteR" Falanghe Jean Cocteau.

 

2 hours ago, Alexoff said:

I didn't understand your logic at all - they decided to stretch the development of the game several times and there is no problem in that? When cyberpunk was postponed for several months, there was a train of memes, fans simply treat cyberpunk like a dream, and KSP 2 as an indie project that is forgiven a lot.

Ja genau. You answered yourself.

Indie developers can walk away from stunts that are plain unforgivable on big players. The bigger you are, more demanded you get.

It's simple like that, really...

[razark]

5 hours ago, Alexoff said:

I didn't understand your logic at all - they decided to stretch the development of the game several times and there is no problem in that?

I don't understand your logic.  Why would anyone have a problem that a game is delayed?

[Guest]

8 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Yep, just price like CP2077

I finished Cyberpunk in 78 hours, granted, I left behind a lot of things for my next run, and I already know that I'll do other runs in the future, but I'll never reach the 2000+ hours I have on Kerbal (1300 on Steam, but I usually play from a copied folder to avoid automatic updates, 2000 is a very conservative number). If KSP2 lives up to my lowest expectation (a mere KSP1 remake with some added systems) it's totally worth the full price of a game.

I also think that devs underselling their games it's a big problem in the indie scene, games like Kerbal (1), Factorio or Oxygen not Included should not be priced under 40€ (regional pricing excluded).

 

8 hours ago, Alexoff said:

But he coped with the task perfectly, the game developed before our eyes and by the end of 2013 it became very similar to what we have today.

He surely did a good job for the conditions he  had, but nothing even remotely similar to what a real team of professional game designer can accomplish.

 

8 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Well, the publisher may have a lot of money, but how do you know exactly how much they give the developers? Speculation?

Any amount is bigger than zero, that is what Squad got when they didn't have a publisher, but Resources != money.

Even just the fact that the publisher manage the PR and distribution problem frees up a lot of those hypothetical 30 people to be actual developers instead of management staff.

 

8 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Or maybe corpo from the publisher decided to release a trailer and promise the game in 2020, since he or she needed to account for the purchase of the rights to the KSP in 2017.

  And they invented the whole Star.Theory fiasco and PR nightmare just to cover it up, the idea of the century, it sure didn't backfire!

 

8 hours ago, Alexoff said:

For example, make faces for kerbals in December 2020?

Yep, that video wasn't information rich, especially since Nate dropped the big reveals of the video (like the colony shots or the cockpits) here on the forum, but, since you're complaining about the lack of information, let me ask you a question, did you listen this podcast inteview?  Because I doubt that those video will cover anything more, except maybe, showing some new footage.

You have to understand that we're a bit spoiled with the amount of information we have in this forum section, outside this forum, on other platforms like reddit, they basically know nothing about the game and even something like the Kerbal reactions, a thing that we knew about for months now, it's completely new.

 

8 hours ago, Alexoff said:

I didn't understand your logic at all - they decided to stretch the development of the game several times and there is no problem in that?

The reason for the delay are limited:

1. They encountered an unforeseen problem and got more time to fix it, good, it means that we won't have that problem to deal with at release.
2. They got more budget/time (the two terms while not completely interchangeable are at least strongly liked in this context) to work on the game and decided to expand its scope including things that they would have otherwise cut from the release. Good, it means we get a bigger and better game.
3. They're evil overlords and decided to lie about the game even existing and started to develop it after the trailer, making up the whole Star.Theory thing for drama and bribing those who visited the studio to falsely report what they saw (people like Scott Manley, Snark, Shadowzone and Linuxgurugamer).

I don't know what you think, but option n. 3 doesn't seem realistic at all for me.

 

8 hours ago, Alexoff said:

When cyberpunk was postponed for several months, there was a train of memes, fans simply treat cyberpunk like a dream,

Everybody overreacted in every possible direction at once with Cyberpunk, before and after release. It was the perfect example of the "toxic gamer" stereotype, definitely not a good example to follow.

Edited December 27, 2020 by Master39

[Lisias]

5 hours ago, Master39 said:

I also think that devs underselling their games it's a big problem in the indie scene, games like Kerbal (1), Factorio or Oxygen not Included should not be priced under 40€ (regional pricing excluded).

Not to mention the infinite series of discounts and "free weekends". They are so numerous that they are predicable. I can buy the whole KSP series by near half the price of just the main game right now on GOG and Steam.

KSP 1.11 was released on Dec 17, and on Dec 22 (persisting until now) the price for the full combo (KSP + DLCs) is at 48.14 BRL (from the normal cost of 132.79 BRL). So, why bothering buying the game at full price at release launch, if I can wait one week or less to buy the whole series at 64% discount?

The people doing this are not stupid, they do it to maximise the earnings on the short run. But, on the long run, I think this ends up being counter-productive. The attachment to a game is proportional to the perception of value the user has about the game.

 

8 hours ago, Master39 said:

The reason for the delay are limited:

1. They encountered an unforeseen problem and got more time to fix it, good, it means that we won't have that problem to deal with at release.
2. They got more budget/time (the two terms while not completely interchangeable are at least strongly liked in this context) to work on the game and decided to expand its scope including things that they would have otherwise cut from the release. Good, it means we get a bigger and better game.
3. They're evil overlords and decided to lie about the game even existing and started to develop it after the trailer, making up the whole Star.Theory thing for drama and bribing those who visited the studio to falsely report what they saw (people like Scott Manley, Snark, Shadowzone and Linuxgurugamer).

I think there's a 4th option:

• They got initially less then ideally advised by people with som knowledge but not exactly expertise on the task at hand, and started the project reproducing (differently) the same mistakes KSP1 did in the past - and then someone realised they had draw themselves to a corner.

Star.Theory was not sacked just because. Something very serious (CDPR style, besides far from that order of magnitude) should had happened - all that drama is way overkill for a mere "the game need to get delayed because we underestimated the efforts".

 

8 hours ago, Master39 said:

Everybody overreacted in every possible direction at once with Cyberpunk, before and after release. It was the perfect example of the "toxic gamer" stereotype, definitely not a good example to follow.

"Me too" syndrome.

It's way interesting to know that some people that asked for a refund are now complaining about losing access to the game!!!!

[Alexoff]

8 hours ago, Master39 said:

He surely did a good job for the conditions he  had, but nothing even remotely similar to what a real team of professional game designer can accomplish.

And where does the information come from that now the game is being developed by a company of professionals, and not yesterday's employees of the indie studio? In general, there is no direct relationship between funding and the quality of the game; in rich studios, employees often engage in harassment or just idleness, and in indie they work from morning to night for an idea and a cup of thanks.

8 hours ago, Master39 said:

And they invented the whole Star.Theory fiasco and PR nightmare just to cover it up, the idea of the century, it sure didn't backfire

Why not? We learned the details about the studio interception as a result of insider information, the publisher and studio staff refrained from commenting, apparently there was something to hide.

9 hours ago, Master39 said:

They're evil overlords and decided to lie about the game even existing and started to develop it after the trailer, making up the whole Star.Theory thing for drama and bribing those who visited the studio to falsely report what they saw (people like Scott Manley, Snark, Shadowzone and Linuxgurugamer).

Driven to the point of absurdity to prove that the game was delayed to make it big? Did any of the KSP players play the demo or alpha version? Or did one of the players inspect the game code? Did the studio change happen because the product turned out to be an extremely raw product of unsatisfactory quality with spaghetti code?

9 hours ago, Master39 said:

You have to understand that we're a bit spoiled with the amount of information we have in this forum section, outside this forum, on other platforms like reddit, they basically know nothing about the game and even something like the Kerbal reactions, a thing that we knew about for months now, it's completely new.

Why then upload almost empty videos? New animations are added to KSP 1 by squad, but they do not make a ten-minute show from this. Well, I will also note that I do not really believe in the stories of what will happen, I am a little spoiled by the modernity, where usually the creators either do not say anything, or immediately show and tell.

9 hours ago, Master39 said:

Everybody overreacted in every possible direction at once with Cyberpunk, before and after release. It was the perfect example of the "toxic gamer" stereotype, definitely not a good example to follow.

Well, I wrote that most KSP fans are absurdly kind and will forgive any problem of KSP 2, such is the anti-toxicity. I'm afraid that because of this we will get a game with technical problems, as we will always find a reason to justify.

[Okhin]

It's not a binary choice between Glitchy or Delayed. Because there will be bugs, essentially because it's software. And software have bugs.

Also, you can have a game delayed for ten years, and still have it plagued with bugs on some platform (re: CyberPunk 2077). That happens because a game development oin this scale means a lots of change in the social environment around it, which already happened a lot for KSP 2.

Also, throwing more human-hours at a problem does not means you'll fix it. You sometimes have to live with it (or need to rewrite 70% of all the code you wrote, hopping for not creating more bugs). There's two process the industry is supposed to use for that. One is management, and everything that's linked to the well being of your teams and employees (not slaves, not machines, complex human beings). And it's so under valued that there's some management method that did emerge from the panic room and emergencies mitigation that has been now applied everywhere (namely, the Agile methodology, which is great for crisis management, but bad for non-crisis management when you need actual project leading). It seems that today, in a lot of software company, including the gaming industry, you develop in a perpetual state of emergency, fixing bugs, pacthing stuff, losing sight of what your project is supposed to be.

The other process is Quality Assurance. ie: The code does respect some standard, some specific items. The issue here is to define what those items are. It is a work that I've seen disappearing more and more, and being replaced by coding standards and guidelines (they're not only that), test coverage (neither that).

Basically, the social context in which the software are supposed to be written and emerge, have been replaced by fancy program and software. They existed to allow for an interface between project manager (now chief of products ?) and other division of the companies, one being marketing, the other being funding. Those two wants to know when will the game is going to be ready. The first because they want to be able to have a perfect marketing campaign, the others because they want to maximize they're return on investment. And as soon as you setup a deadline, you're meaning soon. You can move it around a bit, or even a lot, but people except the game soon. Like in a foreseeable future where they can imagine themselves playing the game. And so, you'll know have to pick which glitch you're going to work on firszt. And since you're only working in an emergency mode because a lot of people lost track of what they were doing, you don't even know if those bugs are critical or not. That's probably what happened to CP2077.

Now, indie game, generally relies a bit less on Marketing and funding. Especially with all the Early access, open beta and other things that Steam, GOG and others allows. You don't really have a release date on those games anymore. They exists as a Work in Progress, and use the feedback from a small community to keep tracks of where's the project going. However, it's not an ideal way (because spending month on memleaks hunting is important, but gives little to no satisfaction to beta-testers for instance, while changing a texture compression might gives a lot of positive feedback while being technically no work).

So, you can't choose between glitch and release date.

I will say that I'd be better with a "When it's ready" release date, with some dev diaries from time to time, than a release date. But most of all, I want no crunch. Developers being paid a fair price, artists too. QA doing their jobs, a project lead who have a vision of where they are and where they need to go.

And I'll take that over No Glitch or a release date. Everytime.

You'll have glitch yes. But you'll have better software, and human beings working on those projects in a better shape. But yes, I know. I'm dreaming. It's never going to happen.

[Lisias]

6 hours ago, Alexoff said:

And where does the information come from that now the game is being developed by a company of professionals, and not yesterday's employees of the indie studio?

Do you really think that 8 years working on the field don't turn a indie, garage developer into a professional?

At this time, they are professionals. Perhaps not top notch [(but who knows the future?)], probably a few would be on the mediocre classification (if much, frankly....). But they are not the same guys they were when they started all this anymore.

You know, people gather experience as they work on a field. And there're really few better ways to gather a hell of an experience than doing mistakes (and Kraken knows Squad gathered a full load of experience all these years!! ).

Edited December 28, 2020 by Lisias
some rephrasing...

[Guest]

13 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

9 hours ago, Master39 said:

And they invented the whole Star.Theory fiasco and PR nightmare just to cover it up, the idea of the century, it sure didn't backfire

Why not?

If this is your position I think there's no point in continuing this conversation.

[dave1904]

To be fair cyberpunks issues go far beyond gliches. Even if it worked perfectly people would be hating on it. Fun games get away with bugs. Cyberpunk is a boring game. The world looks nice on a 3080 but GTAVs world feels better on a PS3. If it were only glitches I wouldnt care but some of cyberpunks issues are fundamental game design issues that cannot be simply patched. I would rather KSP2 be released buggy but fixable than ksp2 being released with no issues but having bad game design. 

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, dave1904 said:

Cyberpunk is a boring game.

It depends in what you're searching in a game, if you expected GTA yes, it's a boring game, in the same way KSP is a boring No Man's Sky.

Edited December 27, 2020 by Master39

[dave1904]

Just now, Master39 said:

It depends in what you're searching in a game, if you expected GTA yes, it's a boring game, I'm the same way KSP is a boring No Man's Sky.

I was referring to the open world feeling alive or not. GTAVs story is not great and I probably prefer cyberpunks. 

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, dave1904 said:

I was referring to the open world feeling alive or not. GTAVs story is not great and I probably prefer cyberpunks. 

GTA as a franchise is mostly entirely based on emergent gameplay caused by interacting with NPCs and the police, the city is your playground and cheats to spawn veichles play a bigger part in the experience than the story itself, that's totally intentional and noone beats Rockstar at that, especially not a team ten time smaller that wasn't even trying to do it.

Cyberpunk it's completely another game, surely it has problem, it was obviously rushed to release and there's a lot of potential for interactable experiences around the city that the devs completely missed, but the main gameplay loop doesn't even remotely come close to having the player interact with the city like you do in GTA.

Night City is not a sandbox playground like Los Santos, it's the setting of a story just like the maps of Skyrim, The Witcher, Fallout and other similar games.

Yes, when I first visited Wakako's arcade I tried to interact with the arcade machines, and it's sad that they don't work, but that's far from saying that the city feels dead, if anything NC is the most credible city I've ever seen in a videogame up to date.

[dave1904]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

GTA as a franchise is mostly entirely based on emergent gameplay caused by interacting with NPCs and the police, the city is your playground and cheats to spawn veichles play a bigger part in the experience than the story itself, that's totally intentional and noone beats Rockstar at that, especially not a team ten time smaller that wasn't even trying to do it.

Cyberpunk it's completely another game, surely it has problem, it was obviously rushed to release and there's a lot of potential for interactable experiences around the city that the devs completely missed, but the main gameplay loop doesn't even remotely come close to having the player interact with the city like you do in GTA.

Night City is not a sandbox playground like Los Santos, it's the setting of a story just like the maps of Skyrim, The Witcher, Fallout and other similar games.

Yes, when I first visited Wakako's arcade I tried to interact with the arcade machines, and it's sad that they don't work, but that's far from saying that the city feels dead, if anything NC is the most credible city I've ever seen in a videogame up to date.

What makes the city the most credible city you have ever seen? Both games are incredibly similar. Both are openworld and GTA is as much as a sandbox game as cyberpunk. I wouldn't even call GTA a sandbox. One game just has a world and NPCs that interacts with the player and one game doesn't. Its that simple.  I do not care if they are a smaller developer team. They could afford to have one of the largest marketing campaigns I have ever seen in gaming so they are not some indie dev struggling to get food on the table. 

[Okhin]

My main issue with NC, is that it's empty. There's some place where there is some people, but after 83hours in, it feels empty. I know the demographic did drop like hell in the settings, like they lost 30% of the population lately. But still, the streets looks like the one in any city with Covid and shelter-in-place. There's no rush hour, there's no district animation at night, there's no crowd.

But the city is beautiful. There's a lot of details in it, the spaghetti design makes you enjoy actually walking the city.  A bit like riding a horse in the lands with The Witcher 3 (let's all agree this game is a ride in the forest on your pony simulator). It is beautiful. And it feels dead. But then, CyberPunk 2077 is a ghost story so, being dead, haunted by the ghost of past revolt in a dead city is kind of coherent I guess.

But I suspect that the environment code is only slightly adapted from the Witcher 3. And it works fine with a medieval city, and not as good with a Urban sprawl supposedly overcrowded with people.

And I do not think they rushed the release. I would argue that the game has been overworked on details, with too many team change to the point no-one inside CDPR had a global vision of the game. Which does not happens when you lack time, it only happens when you have too much of it (and well, the game has been delayed almost ten years).

[Guest]

1 hour ago, dave1904 said:

What makes the city the most credible city you have ever seen? Both games are incredibly similar.

Los Santos is just like Whiterun, it's not a City, it's the scaled down videogame idea of one, Night City just feels right, maybe it's not a 1:1 scale but sure it's way more credible than the map of any GTA.
The map is just better, both technologically (GTA V is an old game and it shows) and artistically.

 

1 hour ago, dave1904 said:

One game just has a world and NPCs that interacts with the player and one game doesn't. Its that simple. 

One game relies on random NPC interactions for the most part of its content the other doesn't, remove the NPCs and minigames from GTA and nothing worth playing remains.

 

1 hour ago, dave1904 said:

I do not care if they are a smaller developer team.

It's not about caring or not caring, it's about setting realistic expectations, GTA is not one. Rockstar is specialized in random NPC interactions, driving on the sidewalk with a combine it's the whole point of the game when playing GTA and while you can roleplay a cyberpsycho in CP2077 that's definitively not the point of the game nor the intended way to play it. 

Having GTA as a goal for city interaction it's just like setting Arma or Counter Strike as a minimum requirement for the shooting or using Forza for the driving. 

 

1 hour ago, Okhin said:

I know the demographic did drop like hell in the settings,

That's it, at normal density (which is the highest setting) the city has the more or less the right amount of crowd around. 

 

1 hour ago, Okhin said:

And I do not think they rushed the release. I would argue that the game has been overworked on details, with too many team change to the point no-one inside CDPR had a global vision of the game. Which does not happens when you lack time, it only happens when you have too much of it (and well, the game has been delayed almost ten years).

They dropped the teaser trailer 8 years ago (didn't see it at the time, I started following the game a week or two before release), but started working on it full force only after the last DLC of TW3 (2016).

More than anything the game seems to be unfinished on many aspects, with even some inside placeholders (like the police system) that remained in the release because they didn't even have the time to remove it entirely.

[Okhin]

Just now, Master39 said:

That's it, at normal density (which is the highest setting) the city has the more or less the right amount of crowd around. 

I don't think I can change that on console.

Just now, Master39 said:

They dropped the teaser trailer 8 years ago (didn't see it at the time, I started following the game a week or two before release), but started working on it full force only after the last DLC of TW3 (2016).

Nope. They bnought the licence back in 2008, dropped the trailer in 2012, mostly to attract developers. They even had some dev diaries back then. Then, at some point, stopped the dev on the game to prioritize The Witcher 3, when they merged the initial team into the Witcher one. Then, after TW3 got out, the started working on it again with a dedicated team. I mean, I heard about The Witcher because I was following all thing CyberPunk in the beginning :p

So this is almost ten years in the making (between the time they bought the licence to the release). They made choices (prioritize TW over CP), merge team, separated them again later when creating a new studio, etc. This is why I don't get why they rushed it toward the end, but that's probably too much pressure from Marketing and from the potential players. Or why they did crunch their team (while they were bragging about the no-crunch policy for the release of TW3, especially when RockStar did crunch their team to make the horses of Red Dead Redemption 2 looks nicer).

I understand that you do not need the same amount of people to write a game engine, do the graphics and create the narrative. But technically, since CP and TW uses the same engine, the work on TW3 can be partly counted as working on CP however, I'm guessing that the reason they stopped the development of CP to prioritize TW, is because they shared the same engine and didn't want to do the work twice. And the comercial risk is lower on a third instalment of a franchise than on a brand new complex universe. It kind of makes sense.

[dave1904]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

One game relies on random NPC interactions for the most part of its content the other doesn't, remove the NPCs and minigames from GTA and nothing worth playing remains.

 

For the most part of its content? Nobody considers NPCs to be part of GTAs content. I think you miss my point. I am not talking about random events. I am talking about how all NPCs in the world interact with each other and the player. Nobody plays GTAs minigames. They are fun for a while but after 1 or 2 hours they get boring. I had hundreds of hours in GTA online before it turned into garbage but we never played minigames. Most of the time we were killing eachother, playing missions and making money to buy cosmetic items, cars and houses. You cannot tune your car in cyberpunk, cannot cut your hair and you cannot get a tattoo. You would think they are highly desirable things in a game in the cyberpunk genre especially since its an RPG. 

 

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

's not about caring or not caring, it's about setting realistic expectations, GTA is not one. Rockstar is specialized in random NPC interactions, driving on the sidewalk with a combine it's the whole point of the game when playing GTA and while you can roleplay a cyberpsycho in CP2077 that's definitively not the point of the game nor the intended way to play it. 

Having GTA as a goal for city interaction it's just like setting Arma or Counter Strike as a minimum requirement for the shooting or using Forza for the driving. 

I agree that GTA is not the goal for city interaction. That doesn't mean there should be no interaction at all. Call of Duty can offer players things Arma doesn't. I will probably complete the story in cyberpunk but other than the story it has nothing. You basically do the same things over and over again and its not even fun because the animations are the same and there is nothing new to see. I did not expect anything from cyberpunk. I did not even follow it. It doesn't matter if 1 guy makes the game or 1000. A boring game is a boring game. KSP was made by a few amateurs. They still managed to make a fun game. KSP would feel dead without kerbals. They add that certain something. That 1 small detail added so much to this game. One might even go as far as saying KSP would have never been successful without those little green men. 

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Los Santos is just like Whiterun, it's not a City, it's the scaled down videogame idea of one, Night City just feels right, maybe it's not a 1:1 scale but sure it's way more credible than the map of any GTA.
The map is just better, both technologically (GTA V is an old game and it shows) and artistically.

Los santos and night city are similar in size. Besides that map size has never made or broke a game. Yeah GTA is an old game but apparently is doesn't show since its far better than Cyberpunk in many ways. 

Edit: I would also like to add that cyberpunk had a larger buget than GTA so them being a smaller studio goes out the window. 

Edited December 28, 2020 by dave1904

[Guest]

9 hours ago, Okhin said:

Nope. They bnought the licence back in 2008, dropped the trailer in 2012, mostly to attract developers. They even had some dev diaries back then. Then, at some point, stopped the dev on the game to prioritize The Witcher 3, when they merged the initial team into the Witcher one. Then, after TW3 got out, the started working on it again with a dedicated team. I mean, I heard about The Witcher because I was following all thing CyberPunk in the beginning :p

So this is almost ten years in the making (between the time they bought the licence to the release). They made choices (prioritize TW over CP), merge team, separated them again later when creating a new studio, etc. This is why I don't get why they rushed it toward the end, but that's probably too much pressure from Marketing and from the potential players. Or why they did crunch their team (while they were bragging about the no-crunch policy for the release of TW3, especially when RockStar did crunch their team to make the horses of Red Dead Redemption 2 looks nicer).

I understand that you do not need the same amount of people to write a game engine, do the graphics and create the narrative. But technically, since CP and TW uses the same engine, the work on TW3 can be partly counted as working on CP however, I'm guessing that the reason they stopped the development of CP to prioritize TW, is because they shared the same engine and didn't want to do the work twice. And the comercial risk is lower on a third instalment of a franchise than on a brand new complex universe. It kind of makes sense.

More or less right, add to this the fact that the company was way smaller before TW3 and their size exploded with it and especially during Cyberpunk development and you have the perfect recipe for the management disaster that happened.

For a new established game studio, with only 3 games and 1 commercial success under their belt, that never made a sci-fi openworld before sure CDPR got a lot of things right at the first shot and even most of what they got wrong was either because they rushed and couldn't optimize things (and yes they did, even without using personal opinions on gameplay the last delays and controversies on the crunch speaks volumes) or because they implemented some desperate measures to increment console performances (pedestrian spawn/despawn too close to the player, low crowds and so on).

Sure it was a failure if the expectation was a all-round RPG that could compete with GTA in free roaming, with FPSs on the shooting and with combat games on the Melee, with the complexitity of a 2D GDR (that only had text to show, so storywriters had no limits) but dubbed.

 

7 hours ago, dave1904 said:

I had hundreds of hours in GTA online

That's another, completely different, beast altogether, the comparison between GTA and Cyberpunk already makes little sense and is stretched, let alone if you bring in multiplayer.

 

7 hours ago, dave1904 said:

I did not expect anything from cyberpunk. I did not even follow it.

Comparing it with GTA, a completely different game, sets what are your expectations.

Even at the highest of the hype for Cyberpunk, before launch when everybody thought it was going to be the game of the century, there was already people saying that who was expecting a GTA in the future was in for huge disappointment.

7 hours ago, dave1904 said:

I will probably complete the story in cyberpunk but other than the story it has nothing. You basically do the same things over and over again and its not even fun because the animations are the same and there is nothing new to see.

Nothing like GTA online, sure, if that's what you were searching for I get your point, but here is what I got from the game:

I've done the first run as a male Nomad focusing on Technical as the main attribute followed by Intelligence, dropped Body and kept Reflexes and Cool at a decent level. I focused on the crafting skill tree and on tech firearms (the ones who shoot through walls) and grenades (ending my run with the arm-mounted projectile launcher). I used both hacking and stealth as tool but without investing too much in their skill trees (and even then I sow huge potential for a focused build) at the end of the run I had a full equip of crafted weapons and clothes better than anything I could loot. This run lasted 78 hours while leaving behind a lot of activities and stories and while failing a couple of big secondary quest trees, of all that time less than 5 hours were dedicated to "messing around" in the city, two of which in the hilarious attempt of going with a motorbike on the monorail train (which almost didn't completely fail).

Now I'm doing another run, female streetkid, focus on Body and Reflexes, I'll invest most of the point in the blades skill tree, I'll buy cyberware to increase jump and speed and close the run with the legendary Mantis Blades. It already feels like a completely different game and I had to replay the tutorial because in my last run I never touched melee.

The city? It's a good backdrop when going from mission to mission and a fantastic place were to parkour to find hidden places (yep, that's totally why I'm doing a athletics-based build), it's a pity that's not more interactive but given that I discovered the "police problem" 20-30 hours in and from Reddit telling me there was one I don't feel like I can complain about the lack of something I never expected to use.

I won't say you're playing it wrong, because it's not true, but sure you obviously expected a completely different game. I had the same experience with another CDPR game, people continued to compare The Witcher 3 to Skyrim, describing it precisely as "like Skyrim but better" and that set all the wrong expectations rigging me to the disappointment I then experienced when I tried the game (to this day I still haven't played TW3 past the first few missions).

 

7 hours ago, dave1904 said:

KSP was made by a few amateurs. They still managed to make a fun game. KSP would feel dead without kerbals. They add that certain something. That 1 small detail added so much to this game. One might even go as far as saying KSP would have never been successful without those little green men. 

But if you go into Kerbal "blind", thinking "I had fun for hours in NMS and Kerbal is just like NMS but harder" you'll find Kerbal disappointing and boring.

 

7 hours ago, dave1904 said:

Los santos and night city are similar in size.

Only on paper, and NC is an order of magnitude more complex.

 

7 hours ago, dave1904 said:

Yeah GTA is an old game but apparently is doesn't show since its far better than Cyberpunk in many ways. 

Yep, GTA is definitely better at being  a GTA clone than Cyberpunk is, just like NMS is a better NMS than Kerbal but maybe that's not the point of either games.

 

7 hours ago, dave1904 said:

Edit: I would also like to add that cyberpunk had a larger buget than GTA so them being a smaller studio goes out the window. 

Pretty sure that Rockstar having 20 years of experience with the GTA formula and being a giant of the industry for most of that time while CDPR quadrupling in size during Cyberpunk development did play a huge role in the mess that resulted.

Edited December 28, 2020 by Master39

[Okhin]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

More or less right, add to this the fact that the company was way smaller before TW3 and their size exploded with it and especially during Cyberpunk development and you have the perfect recipe for the management disaster that happened.

For a new established game studio, with only 3 games and 1 commercial success under their belt, that never made a sci-fi openworld before sure CDPR got a lot of things right at the first shot and even most of what they got wrong was either because they rushed and couldn't optimize things (and yes they did, even without using personal opinions on gameplay the last delays and controversies on the crunch speaks volumes) or because they implemented some desperate measures to increment console performances (pedestrian spawn/despawn too close to the player, low crowds and so on).

Sure it was a failure if the expectation was a all-round RPG that could compete with GTA in free roaming, with FPSs on the shooting and with combat games on the Melee, with the complexitity of a 2D GDR (that only had text to show, so storywriters had no limits) but dubbed.

Well, I'm not sure CP2077 is a failure. It probably is one if you intend to meet the expectation of some old pen and paper RPG cyberpunk posthumans beast like me, but then, we need to proceed to a genre critics of cyberpunk, which is not the place here.

I really enjoyed going through the game, even if the difficulty is a bit on the easy side of it (especially if you grind the game before going to the last mission, everything is easy to do, but then, I became a walking electronic noise machine whose enemies just falls of quick hack, while I shoot missile at them through my arm and manage to separate body and heads with a blade with my other). I liked NC, even if I would rather had more plots focused on the gangs and less contracts stuff for instance. There's flaws to it, but I can work with it, while I never managed to pass through GTA4 (question of pacing mainly). I also had insane fun with Saint Rows the Third, which is not even a RPG at this point.

If CP2077 is a failure, it is a failure of management culture, and marketing driven decision making. Which is something that's plaguing the whole software industry, and especially the video games making one. There need to be some change there. For once, union to protect workers in those companies, which would reduce crunching. But also, we - as customers - need to accept that we don't need a release date. Because those release dates come at a cost always. It is the cost of developers sanity, which translates in glitchy games.

It's not as if there was no video games out there. We can wait years. We should learn to do it. We should not ask for release date and functionnality and accept what we have when we have. After all, no one's asking a release date on a record to Beyonce or Lady Gaga, they release their tunes when they think it's ready to be released. And they make money.

The issue is not one videogame being glitchy. It is structural, it is omnipresent, and even Star Theory might falls to it.

[Okhin]

I want to add something related to KSP2 though, I am optimistic about it, because there' at least one person who have a vision of what KSP2 should be, and it's Nate Simpson. I think the guy knows where the game should go, and that is a big deal. Because it helps to prioritize things and make choice of what should go in the game and what can't make it. It helps focusing artist  and developers attention on specific part of the game. It helps when QA needs to triage the bugs. And that is why I think KSP2 will be an interesting and fun to play game, because there is a vision, it's been detailed, and shown. And the dev team talks about it too in their dev blogs.

So, that's a plus for Star Theory I guess

[mcwaffles2003]

15 hours ago, Master39 said:

Yes, when I first visited Wakako's arcade I tried to interact with the arcade machines, and it's sad that they don't work, but that's far from saying that the city feels dead, if anything NC is the most credible city I've ever seen in a videogame up to date.

Honestly, to me this puts the games world in an uncanny valley of sorts. GTA V has a million buildings and almost none are accessible, yet that fact doesn't feel unnatural in its setting, whereas in cyberpunk the fact that I cant purchase food from the million food vendors does feel unnatural to its setting. GTA V is advertised as a digital playground full of ridiculous escapism where as cyberpunk is advertised as an insanely immersive and dystopian world with rich personal interaction, yet when I

Spoiler

talk to pam after the tank ride the dialogue  is essentially over and she just sits there with the same dialogue options and no new interaction.

 that kinda hurts the immersion and fulfillment of artificial interpersonal relationship.

[vv3k70r]

On 12/26/2020 at 9:42 PM, Master39 said:

Nobody said AAA, and fan perception mean very little in KSP2 development, but there's a huge difference.

AAA phy - who cares about graphic if we are looking at navbal?

On 12/26/2020 at 9:42 PM, Master39 said:

And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the difference between the development of KSP and KSP2, prior to 2017 squad had no publisher, had to do everything in-house and had way less resources compared to what PD can provide.

Result is good - so this is a wayt to make it. See how many hours of gameplay it brings.

19 hours ago, Okhin said:

It's not a binary choice between Glitchy or Delayed.

We gonna get both:)

On 12/27/2020 at 1:25 AM, Alexoff said:

Yep, just price like CP2077

Who cares? It is a price for a single dinner.

19 hours ago, Okhin said:

It seems that today, in a lot of software company, including the gaming industry, you develop in a perpetual state of emergency, fixing bugs, pacthing stuff, losing sight of what your project is supposed to be.

Because of low quality menagment. But they do not get any better for this money. Real money are in real bussines. Game industri is something around drugs & tobaco.

[dave1904]

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

Pretty sure that Rockstar having 20 years of experience with the GTA formula and being a giant of the industry for most of that time while CDPR quadrupling in size during Cyberpunk development did play a huge role in the mess that resulted.

You like the game and I don't. It's that simple but I don't get why you keep defending the studio flaw. Cyberpunk doesn't know what it wants to be. I think the leadership is at fault.