8 ms·

The multiple path concept is evidence of CDPR biting more than they could chew. They spread themselves too thin, the game is less than the sum of its parts beca

by simias 6y ago

The multiple path concept is evidence of CDPR biting more than they could chew. They spread themselves too thin, the game is less than the sum of its parts because half-finished subsystems weigh down what can be a very solid game when it focuses on its fundamentals. OP says "Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5". I think some higher ups at CDPR wanted for it to be that at the start, and they only corrected course very late into development when they realized that they'd never meet the deadline. If they had cut off the driving completely for instance, and instead focusing on having things like taxis and public transportation, you'd get a much more immersive RPG setting and you wouldn't have the immersion breaking, performance tanking, AI-stupidity-demonstrating driving and car chase sequences. Then once the game is successful you can extend and improve it with expansions and sequels, building on top of a solid base. Instead they managed to miss the deadline twice in a row despite making their devs crunch and despite all that they released a completely broken, unfinished game.

bird_monster 6y ago
I believe I saw on Reddit a post that attempted to map all the dialogue/in game decision options, and found that 98% of choices ended up not mattering. Only 2% of player-choice decided which ending (of the 5) you got. edit To rephrase, I don't even think it's about the endings at all. Most of the choices in the game do not actual change the trajectory of your character. Most of the decisions put you on the same track. Kill steve, don't kill steve, even if it seems like it mattered to some part of the story, it actually did not.
- folkrav 6y ago
  I'd be curious to see this for other games for comparison. The number seems high, but when I start really thinking about it, I can't think of many games where multiple endings relied on much more than a handful of key decisions.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  It's not all about the endings though. Mass Effect famously only had 2 endings (which everyone raged about), but the plot itself is interesting to see the different branches in the story on their own.
  - oarabbus_ 6y ago
    Not comparable, your choices actually "matter" as you play the game, until the end where it's revealed nothing you did mattered. In this game the lack of choices mattering is apparent from the beginning. Most gamers may not care but for a certain type of gamer, this is a game ruiner. For example with ME3 again, I had fun the entire way through the game, assuming my prior games' choices mattered. And there actually were different dialogue options, references to past choices, etc. The ending was awful, and I will never replay that game ever. But if my choices didn't matter even while playing, before the ending... well that's just an awful game to a person like me. I would never play a minute of a story-based, choice-based game where I know the choices don't matter.
  - bird_monster 6y ago
    It's not about ending, but the branching story isn't actually branching at all. You make a decision and, regardless of what you chose, end up in the same place. The amount of decisions that actually stick, or actually change your progression through the game, are very low. "Do x or y" where both X and Y cannot be undone and seem like heavy decisions, ultimately do not change the outcome of any future story items. Side with Ben or side with Jill, doesn't matter, they both treat you the same afterwards and it never mattered at all which you picked.
    - mercer 6y ago
      Even with just one ending, a game can do branching well for all the sub-story endings that most games have. Hell, even The Witcher 3 did this incredibly well. Spoiler incoming for those who haven't played it yet. "The Bloody Baron" quest not only has three endings, IIRC, but one of your choices can lead to entire village dying. And I'm pretty sure there's a few other variables that can end up having some effect at later points in the story. Granted, it's probably the most-cited example of great Witcher 3 quests, second perhaps only to the romancing options (again, 3 possible outcomes), but I've already come across a few more main and sub-quests where reloading and trying a different option was meaningful. As part of the journey, they might not affect the ending, but in an RPG style game with quests, it's just as much about the journey.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  Assuming all choices are between two options, you could make this claim about any game with (five endings and...) more than three choices for the player to make. if one of the choices has three options, two choices will do the job of selecting between 5 endings. What's the point of the map, if all you're concerned about is which ending you get? If there are 40 choices with an average of 3 options each, it's still obvious before you buy or even hear anything about the game that it won't have 12,157,665,459,056,928,801 endings.
  - namrog84 6y ago
    You fell into a local maxima or made an assumption that got you tunneled visioned. You can definitely have N number of choices contribute to 2 or more endings and still have every choice matter. You can have 100 choices with 3 options, and have all of the make an impact on the ending and still only have 2-3 endings. Or any number of endings between 2 and n (in your case the 12*10^m. Have each choice do a +1, 0, or -1 to some internal metrics. You could call this a good or evil system, but it could be a ton of different things. They could be doing +1,0,-1 to corpo, streetkid, and nomad rankings. Some choices might do +1 to streetkid and nomad, and 0 to corpo, you could have any number of combinations. Or you could have 1 choice do +10 to corpo. Then at the end, whichever had the highest score would be your ending. Or you could do if highest was 10-30 points, you'd get 1 ending, but if your highest was 40+ youd get super ending. Like if you were mostly corpo, but still a bit others, maybe you become middle management in final cinematic at corpo X, but if you were like ALL IN on corpo choices, maybe you'd become new president of some corpo Y. That way every choice matters, and you can still have a few different endings. And the 'vanilla basic ending' being where you are choices were mostly neutral, or what they guessed majority of playerbase would choose. But what OP was saying, is that 98% of questions have 0 impact on anything. Which makes them not impactful and not matter at all, and that often is boring.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      The system you describe does not have the property that every choice makes a difference to the ending. Most of them still don't. An internal counter going up, without changing the ending you get, is not making a difference to the ending.
kmonsen 6y ago
I posted this somewhere else, the game has a ton of interesting concepts but they ran out of time a long time ago and half assed everything. Cut the content in third and make it 3x deeper and it would have been a great game (bugs and all). Well perhaps not on last generation consoles, I have not tried it there.
nexuist 6y ago
> If they had cut off the driving completely for instance This is one of my biggest gripes with the game. You literally have self driving cars built into the lore (and the story - Delamain) AND flying cars (Trauma Team, police officers), why the hell does anyone care about owning a car or driving it? We have cybernetic eyes and our cars drive/fly themselves and we still need to put up LED traffic lights? Sure it makes sure in the outskirts to pick up a 4x4 offroader and do some cool desert driving for side missions. But in Night City? It should be modeled after pedestrians, and it is in some cases, but the road layout clearly looks like it was modeled for a city in 2012 and not 2077. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving the story (watching let's plays no less, I don't have the specs to run the game myself). I think it's a great game despite the bugs and performance issues that will unfortunately haunt CDPR for a great deal of time. But some of the plot holes are just so deep, it hurts to think about because of how much better the story would be. For example, I know the breaching minigame where you have to click through the matrix to complete the sequence of hex codes is unrealistic and not how you would hack a real computer. Obviously, I'm not going to gripe about that, it's a minigame inside of a video game and it's meant for entertainment, not realism. But, come on, you introduce us to cybernetic eye implants and we still have to use a 27" monitor to check our email? Why would you ever use a monitor again?
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Because people want to drive cars in games. I for one would be very bored if I had to take an automated system like public transport or self driving cars.
  - simias 6y ago
    It depends on the type of the game. Deus Ex, Vampire the Masquerade, (many) Fallout games and countless others have no or little driving and I don't think it would really elevate those games. Would Vampire the Masquerade be a better game if you could just drive between setpieces in a fully rendered city instead of having a loading screen? Probably, but it would also increase the development workload by an order of magnitude for what would effectively be a gimmick that wouldn't really add a lot to the game. And even outside of RPGs, there are countless adventure and FPS games without vehicles. Doom doesn't have cars, neither does Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry or Resident Evil. Of course if you're thinking of something like "GTA V, but you can't drive cars" then obviously that seems very tedious, but if you build the game with this constraint in mind it shouldn't be much of an issue. Then you can focus on other aspects of the game. Cyberpunk is clearly not at its best when you're in a vehicle, and there's no telling what else they could've implemented and finished if they had cut it entirely and focused on other aspects of the game instead.

by simias 6y ago

bird_monster 6y ago

I believe I saw on Reddit a post that attempted to map all the dialogue/in game decision options, and found that 98% of choices ended up not mattering. Only 2% of player-choice decided which ending (of the 5) you got. edit To rephrase, I don't even think it's about the endings at all. Most of the choices in the game do not actual change the trajectory of your character. Most of the decisions put you on the same track. Kill steve, don't kill steve, even if it seems like it mattered to some part of the story, it actually did not.

folkrav 6y ago
I'd be curious to see this for other games for comparison. The number seems high, but when I start really thinking about it, I can't think of many games where multiple endings relied on much more than a handful of key decisions.
chrisco255 6y ago
It's not all about the endings though. Mass Effect famously only had 2 endings (which everyone raged about), but the plot itself is interesting to see the different branches in the story on their own.
- oarabbus_ 6y ago
  Not comparable, your choices actually "matter" as you play the game, until the end where it's revealed nothing you did mattered. In this game the lack of choices mattering is apparent from the beginning. Most gamers may not care but for a certain type of gamer, this is a game ruiner. For example with ME3 again, I had fun the entire way through the game, assuming my prior games' choices mattered. And there actually were different dialogue options, references to past choices, etc. The ending was awful, and I will never replay that game ever. But if my choices didn't matter even while playing, before the ending... well that's just an awful game to a person like me. I would never play a minute of a story-based, choice-based game where I know the choices don't matter.
- bird_monster 6y ago
  It's not about ending, but the branching story isn't actually branching at all. You make a decision and, regardless of what you chose, end up in the same place. The amount of decisions that actually stick, or actually change your progression through the game, are very low. "Do x or y" where both X and Y cannot be undone and seem like heavy decisions, ultimately do not change the outcome of any future story items. Side with Ben or side with Jill, doesn't matter, they both treat you the same afterwards and it never mattered at all which you picked.
  - mercer 6y ago
    Even with just one ending, a game can do branching well for all the sub-story endings that most games have. Hell, even The Witcher 3 did this incredibly well. Spoiler incoming for those who haven't played it yet. "The Bloody Baron" quest not only has three endings, IIRC, but one of your choices can lead to entire village dying. And I'm pretty sure there's a few other variables that can end up having some effect at later points in the story. Granted, it's probably the most-cited example of great Witcher 3 quests, second perhaps only to the romancing options (again, 3 possible outcomes), but I've already come across a few more main and sub-quests where reloading and trying a different option was meaningful. As part of the journey, they might not affect the ending, but in an RPG style game with quests, it's just as much about the journey.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
Assuming all choices are between two options, you could make this claim about any game with (five endings and...) more than three choices for the player to make. if one of the choices has three options, two choices will do the job of selecting between 5 endings. What's the point of the map, if all you're concerned about is which ending you get? If there are 40 choices with an average of 3 options each, it's still obvious before you buy or even hear anything about the game that it won't have 12,157,665,459,056,928,801 endings.
- namrog84 6y ago
  You fell into a local maxima or made an assumption that got you tunneled visioned. You can definitely have N number of choices contribute to 2 or more endings and still have every choice matter. You can have 100 choices with 3 options, and have all of the make an impact on the ending and still only have 2-3 endings. Or any number of endings between 2 and n (in your case the 12*10^m. Have each choice do a +1, 0, or -1 to some internal metrics. You could call this a good or evil system, but it could be a ton of different things. They could be doing +1,0,-1 to corpo, streetkid, and nomad rankings. Some choices might do +1 to streetkid and nomad, and 0 to corpo, you could have any number of combinations. Or you could have 1 choice do +10 to corpo. Then at the end, whichever had the highest score would be your ending. Or you could do if highest was 10-30 points, you'd get 1 ending, but if your highest was 40+ youd get super ending. Like if you were mostly corpo, but still a bit others, maybe you become middle management in final cinematic at corpo X, but if you were like ALL IN on corpo choices, maybe you'd become new president of some corpo Y. That way every choice matters, and you can still have a few different endings. And the 'vanilla basic ending' being where you are choices were mostly neutral, or what they guessed majority of playerbase would choose. But what OP was saying, is that 98% of questions have 0 impact on anything. Which makes them not impactful and not matter at all, and that often is boring.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    The system you describe does not have the property that every choice makes a difference to the ending. Most of them still don't. An internal counter going up, without changing the ending you get, is not making a difference to the ending.

kmonsen 6y ago

I posted this somewhere else, the game has a ton of interesting concepts but they ran out of time a long time ago and half assed everything. Cut the content in third and make it 3x deeper and it would have been a great game (bugs and all). Well perhaps not on last generation consoles, I have not tried it there.

nexuist 6y ago

> If they had cut off the driving completely for instance This is one of my biggest gripes with the game. You literally have self driving cars built into the lore (and the story - Delamain) AND flying cars (Trauma Team, police officers), why the hell does anyone care about owning a car or driving it? We have cybernetic eyes and our cars drive/fly themselves and we still need to put up LED traffic lights? Sure it makes sure in the outskirts to pick up a 4x4 offroader and do some cool desert driving for side missions. But in Night City? It should be modeled after pedestrians, and it is in some cases, but the road layout clearly looks like it was modeled for a city in 2012 and not 2077. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving the story (watching let's plays no less, I don't have the specs to run the game myself). I think it's a great game despite the bugs and performance issues that will unfortunately haunt CDPR for a great deal of time. But some of the plot holes are just so deep, it hurts to think about because of how much better the story would be. For example, I know the breaching minigame where you have to click through the matrix to complete the sequence of hex codes is unrealistic and not how you would hack a real computer. Obviously, I'm not going to gripe about that, it's a minigame inside of a video game and it's meant for entertainment, not realism. But, come on, you introduce us to cybernetic eye implants and we still have to use a 27" monitor to check our email? Why would you ever use a monitor again?

cercatrova 6y ago
Because people want to drive cars in games. I for one would be very bored if I had to take an automated system like public transport or self driving cars.
- simias 6y ago
  It depends on the type of the game. Deus Ex, Vampire the Masquerade, (many) Fallout games and countless others have no or little driving and I don't think it would really elevate those games. Would Vampire the Masquerade be a better game if you could just drive between setpieces in a fully rendered city instead of having a loading screen? Probably, but it would also increase the development workload by an order of magnitude for what would effectively be a gimmick that wouldn't really add a lot to the game. And even outside of RPGs, there are countless adventure and FPS games without vehicles. Doom doesn't have cars, neither does Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry or Resident Evil. Of course if you're thinking of something like "GTA V, but you can't drive cars" then obviously that seems very tedious, but if you build the game with this constraint in mind it shouldn't be much of an issue. Then you can focus on other aspects of the game. Cyberpunk is clearly not at its best when you're in a vehicle, and there's no telling what else they could've implemented and finished if they had cut it entirely and focused on other aspects of the game instead.