18 ms·

The Strange, Unfinished Saga of Cyberpunk 2077

170 points by mitchbob 5y ago

mitchbob 5y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/brbbv https://archive.ph/brbbv
Multicomp 5y ago
A drive-by pronouncement, one that is probably wrong because of how reductive it is, but it is visceral to me because I've been dealing with a similar situation at work: you can't trick computers. You can't intimidate them into working with groupthink, coercive meetings, aggressive talks, or vague threats of losing face, position, or job. They are binary. You either make something that produces the output you want, or you get a buggy, unworkable mess (to various levels of unworkable). All the crunch and pain and buggy games are a result of humans trying to force the other humans who are programming the games and content, and indirectly, the computers themselves into doing a rush job. You can't rush art. Programming is an art since whatever is being programmed has never been made before, else you could go Copy + Paste and be done. Yes, there are millions of paintings of meadows, just as there are millions of copies of very similar but ever-so-slightly different boring line of business applications. But if you want THIS painting, this one that you have commissioned to show the meadow in YOUR back yard, you can't rush the artist, or else the painting quality will be reduced. Depending on how much rush you add, the quality can be subtly bad but close enough, or horrifically bad as if, say, this pretentious commenter were painting it. Let the artists (programmers) take the time they need to produce the artifact. Yes, the artists can sometimes get stuck in cycles of tweaks (goldplating) and need to be told this artifact is done, ship it, but it always seems like we lean too far to the other side: feature factories, churn churn churn, crunch crunch crunch. Let the artists paint / program in peace!
- willis936 5y ago
  I thought the magic of Halo died a decade ago but I see the 180 that Infinite pulled in the past year and recently learned that Staten returned around that time. As Feynmann said, there are no miracle men, but Staten knows the formula for making a good game. He was there when Bungie had creative freedom and was making games that they wanted to play. Having him come on as a leader with political power was the only way Infinite could have ever been anything other than a disaster. The recent IGN interview was great. It was an hour of hot chocolate for my niche demographic. It also confirmed that the magic of Halo was what we thought it was all along. You want to make a great game? Watch the Halo Vid Docs and take notes. https://youtu.be/EqfPclVRioI https://youtu.be/EqfPclVRioI
  - pas 5y ago
    could you please tl;dr the magic for those who are completely out of the Haloverse? (I played about 3 levels of the first one, it was ok for that time, I know people really love it, but so do Doom, or Diablo, etc)
    - willis936 5y ago
      Bungie in its day was very grounded and in-tune with "the player experience". The team would play the game with each other at the end of every day and have fun doing it. Only things that made the game more fun were put in. As for storytelling in the campaigns: it was a space opera complete with mysticism and an epic journey. It's really hard to stretch that into a never-ending story, but the books have done well. The games have not. The first problem is in making the self-insert chief a human. It was obvious from the beginning. When I played Halo 4 I had a mental list of all the ways the creative direction dropped the ball. There's something that 343's culture has never understood about the Halo games. They think it's a Michael Bay film because the audience is young men but it's more like Star Wars V. This is a highlight reel of what I'm talking about. https://youtu.be/6qfx9eoB-88 https://youtu.be/6qfx9eoB-88
- Kranar 5y ago
  I'll go against the grain and say that you can rush a game, you can overwork people, and that in many cases, for many companies, doing so is the only path to success. We're talking about one of the most successful companies in Poland that you only know about because they managed to produce some of the most popular and profitable games ever created, and they didn't get to this point by letting developers and managers take their sweet time. Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it? Of course not... it was developed with just as much of a crunch, pressure and "inhumane working conditions" [1] as Cyberpunk 2077, but because it was a resounding success on all platforms, no one batted an eye. The issues with Cyberpunk 2077 have next to nothing to do with crunch time, they simply tried to make a game for a platform that was never going to be able to support it, regardless of how much time they took. The game on PC is a masterpiece of technology, it looks and feels amazing and it's a resounding success. The failure on PS4 and XBox is because those platforms were still very large markets and they wanted to take advantage of them and well push come to shove, there's just no way of making the game play well on them. That's all there is to this story, making a game for a platform that can't support it is going to be a failure. Now that Cyberpunk has failed, people will use that failure as a way to argue about things that likely have nothing to do with the cause of the failure, and you know maybe that's a good thing and better working conditions come of it... I don't know... what I do know is even if CD Projekt Red decides to change its working culture for the next game they make, there's dozens of other new game studios rising up and it may be the case that the only way for them to compete with the existing giants is to work day and night to the bone on making the next masterpiece. [1] https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period-for-the-witcher-3-was-not-humane/ https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period...
  - kvark 5y ago
    I'm sorry, the game on PC was a crappy bugfest. And as for being "impossible" on consoles... Isn't it effectively GTA in a different setting? GTA managed to run fine, and Cyberpunk could, but they weren't able to reach it.
    - 5y ago
- zargon 5y ago
  Like artists, some programmers are able to make the tradeoffs to get the product out the door and others aren't. Compare Brandon Sanderson, who announces annually what to expect from him in the coming year and generally lives up to it, to Patrick Rothfuss, who lashes out to attack any fan who asks about the novel he claimed to be working on for the last 10 years. Similar to game titles such as Minecraft vs Star Citizen. Some people will never finish or keep starting over or keep expanding scope, and others have a gift of the ability to balance conflicting needs just right. It's more about getting the right personalities on your team than giving blanket license for artists to take as long as they please.
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    Everyone, every writer anyway, knows that Sanderson is a freak of nature. Much to be admired, but not a standard by which to measure yourself.
    - zargon 5y ago
      Certainly true. Both examples are on the extreme side of the spectrum.
- louthy 5y ago
  Artists don’t get paid until their work is complete, do you think programmers would accept that model?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - eru 5y ago
    If the people who made that offer had a good track record, and the money was good enough, I would. (In some sense, this reminds me of getting startup equity, which is basically worthless until the company goes public.)
- eru 5y ago
  > You can't rush art. Programming is an art since whatever is being programmed has never been made before, else you could go Copy + Paste and be done. Eh, if you want to make a comparison, I would put most corporate programming into the bin of 'craft', much more than 'art'. It's of course all subjective, and there's no one true category. They are just different ways of thinking about the subject.
  - thuccess129 5y ago
    > I would put most corporate programming into the bin of 'craft', much more than 'art'. A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract. Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes.
    - eru 5y ago
      > A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract. It totally depends. Most corporate programming is CRUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delet...), so not much arithmetic involved. But a lot of 'book keeping', and organising your information. Not rocket science, but more listening to your stakeholders. > Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes. See also Carmack etc. But I was talking about the typical programming tasks.
sarosh 5y ago
An interesting take from Mike Pondsmith given his heavy involvement in the venture at the end of (at least in my opinion) well-written article: "[C]omparing the tabletop experience with its video-game incarnation, he noted that the latter doesn’t really compare to the former when it comes to self-expression. “You could be you in a tabletop game and bring all the stuff that you wanted to bring into it,” he said. “A tabletop game is limitless. A video game, by its very nature of how it’s designed, has some limits.” "
- webwielder2 5y ago
  Not all of us have held onto our childlike wonder and imagination, so it's nice to have graphics I must admit.
- willis936 5y ago
  Tabletop also has limits, otherwise it wouldn't have any rules. By this logic pretend play is the ultimate game but good luck finding a willing player over 12.
  - friedman23 5y ago
    > pretend play is the ultimate game but good luck finding a willing player over 12. What do you think improv is? And pen and paper RPGs are a form of improv constrained by some rules. But those rules are what people agree for them to be and you can make them as restrictive or as loose as you can agree to.
    - willis936 5y ago
      My point is that taking it to the extreme then stopping at tabletop as the natural best is nonsense. Tabletop has rules. If rules are the enemy then tabletop is not the ultimate. People enjoy frameworks. On one end of the spectrum is pretend play and on the other is a movie theatre. What spectrum of interactive entertainment you want to participate in is purely subjective and one is not "better" than another. Having fewer limits is not a virtue. It is worth nothing.
harel 5y ago
I waited, for a good while and jumped into the game on a high end PC around the time of the 1.3 patch. And I loved it. I don't usually clock over 90 hours in a game, but I easily done it here.
- adamnemecek 5y ago
  I agree, it was really dope. I still like Witcher 3 better but I don’t get the hate.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Animats 5y ago
The solution: paid overtime. Time and a half after 8 hours, time and a half after 5 days, and those multiply. This is why film scheduling is a serious discipline and software scheduling is a joke.
- nexuist 5y ago
  This is a brilliant idea and I'm curious if anyone has any opinions on why it wouldn't work. Paid overtime shifts financial responsibility to the PM who ordered overtime, because arguably a more competent PM would either push back against unrealistic deadlines or manage the team more efficiently to avoid overtime crunch. It sets the stage for competent management to prevail while incompetent managers are forced out of the org. I think this is great incentive structuring.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    Devil's advocate: As paid overtime becomes more common, people start factoring it in production costs, and standard hour salaries are adjusted accordingly. When people negociate they get told "don't worry, with X hours of overtime you'll get a pretty good pay" and we're back to square one. For a real world examole of that, Japanese companies have had these kind of deals for a few decades.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      At least those devs get something back for their crunch time then..
      - eru 5y ago
        The comment you replied to explained that the rates would be the same as now after some adjustment. (Of course, you can disagree with that.)
    - hamstergene 5y ago
      There are many countries where not paying for overtime >=2x is illegal, and nothing like that is happening
noduerme 5y ago
Crunch is what happens when you announce a release date and realize you can't make it. What happens when your release date is "when it's ready"? Star Citizen. Surely there's some happy medium.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Well, to be fair, Star Citizen has a massive financial incentive to trickle out paid content without releasing. The day they release is the day they cut the goose that lays golden eggs for them. Sure, they'll sell the meat, but those golden eggs are never coming back.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Yeah, it's evolved into an absurd and mercifully very unusual/difficult to imitate business model. But in my (early) experience on the project, the model of selling content to a nonexistent game was something Chris Roberts very much stumbled into by accident. When I started working with him I'm sure it never occurred to him that such a thing could even be lucrative. CR was extremely deadline-driven until the crowd funding and the fan forums got into it. Prior to that, it was specific goals, limits, milestones, and a pathway to launching ASAP. In a sense, the crowd preferred being strung along, or at least sending resources to things that would delay development in exchange for some holy grail down the road. The shift was profound when it happened. SC is a bad example for most things, because it really was started with the best of intentions but became such a shitshow that most people assume it was intended as a con from day one.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      Oh, I believe that they didn't start with this in mind, absolutely. To some extent, the whole thing seems to be a victim of its own massive crowdfunding success. Basically nothing they release now could ever live up to the hopes, so even without the profit motive, the incentives would lead to endless moving goalposts...
- hexatin 5y ago
atum47 5y ago
Did you read the letter that came with the Witcher 3? It was very touching, you could really see the care that was putted into the game. Hard to believe the same company released such a mess of a game right after. I bought it for 10 dollars in a sale and even so I felt robbed of my money. If I was looking at a npc and did a 360º with the camera, when looking that same npc the model would change.
- adamnemecek 5y ago
  Do you know what happened between the release of Witcher 3 and the release of Cyberpunk 2077? CDPR went public.
  - Kranar 5y ago
    CDPR went public before the release of Witcher 2 back in 2009 when it merged with Optimus S.A. (Witcher 2 was released in 2011) [1]. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/history/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/history/
bigmattystyles 5y ago
There’s a sequel going on with BF2042… the solution is simple, don’t preorder games. In reality, I know it’s unlikely. I’d be in favor of legislation forcing a return window that’s automated for pre orders.
- noahtallen 5y ago
  I believe Steam lets you return preordered games at any point before release. (At least, I was able to preorder New World, play the beta, and then, right before release, decide I didn’t want to keep it and got a refund.)
- 3a2d29 5y ago
  Unpopular opinion incoming: The solution is consumers paying way higher prices for games. The reason games are rushed is because labor is a huge cost, and it isn't cost effective to continually bleed money waiting for revenue. Easier to just release unfinished.
  - gruez 5y ago
    what's stopping them from pocketing the cash and still releasing it unfinished? after all, releases like cyberpunk 2077 shows that people would still buy it.
  - Youden 5y ago
    Why do consumers need to pay way higher prices for games? In 2000 you could buy Deus Ex for $40. It was a fantastic and fantastically successful game, developed with a budget of ~$7 million dollars. It needed 175000 sales to break even, which it did. These days the standard price for a game is ~$60, so we are paying more. The market has also grown enormously. Video games used to be a thing played exclusively by "nerds" and now nearly everyone plays them in some form. And that's not even touching the whole micro purchases thing. So revenue has already increased, why do we need to increase it even further?
    - ptr 5y ago
      A movie entertains for ~2 hours and costs ~$10, ~$5/h. In this perspective, games are very cheap.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Very odd to read an article in 2021 written for an (American!) audience that the editor judged needs an explanation of what D&D is. Can The New Yorker's audience really be THAT out of touch?
- eru 5y ago
  Not everyone is familiar with all aspects of (pop) culture. Giving a brief explanation helps the parts of the audience that need it, and everyone else can just quickly gloss over it. I am sure there's plenty of stuff that I found obvious that you don't know, and vice versa.
  - nikanj 5y ago
    Can't please everyone, the next commenter is going to complain how some article assumes everyone knows the basic rules of baseball.
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      As a non-American, I have no clue how Baseball works. It's just chonky dudes chewing tobacco and hitting a ball really hard. Then sauntering over to a white pillow for a rest, right? =)
      - eru 5y ago
        From what I've heard, Baseball is like a simplified, Americanified version of Cricket. Something like Baseball used to be called Rounders and played by pupils. (Of course, I have at most the vaguest idea how Cricket works.)
      - wly_cdgr 5y ago
        Baseball is just golf for the working class
        eru 5y ago
        Golf also used to be the golf of the common people, too.
meowphius 5y ago
2077 is a fantastic game, and the only thing I wish is that I had never let my opinion of the game be colored by reddit and ycombinator.
- soared 5y ago
  The best way to foster and learn about a hobby is reading its subreddit. Also, the quickest and surest way to kill your love for a hobby.. is reading its subreddit.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  Same. I stopped reading articles and posts about it because they were all just a pile of whining, while I was truly enjoying the game. I now had the same with MTGA. Turns out discussion about games seems to always turn into complaining.
- mey 5y ago
  It is a great game, but marketed incorrectly. It isn't an open world game. It is a narrative driven looter shooter with amazing visuals. It isn't the game I wanted. I have zero desire the replay it (and you can't really play past the 'end'). It is worth the price of admission IF you have a computer to run it, which is a significant hurdle. Interestingly I played Psychonauts 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 back to back, both at times felt like playing a movie rendered into video game form.
  - mjevans 5y ago
    Any game with voiced dialogue is either going to have one single story, a bunch of little threads that don't interact much, or both. Some games might give you a bit of wiggle room to get most or all of the content in a single playthrough; but usually that's going to be a fairly rigid solution since any slack time translates to a slowed narrative pace for casual players. It will likely look like a movie, but with some choose your own adventure cutting-room-floor edits and maybe player controlled pacing.
    - mey 5y ago
ekianjo 5y ago
> You could be you in a tabletop game and bring all the stuff that you wanted to bring into it,” he said. “A tabletop game is limitless. A video game, by its very nature of how it’s designed, has some limits.” Thats it? Such a uber long article to reach such a feeble insight? Not impressed, New Yorker
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  What a weird thing to say. Board games and video games are two very different media with different capabilities and limitations.
  - needle0 5y ago
    I'd imagine one would have a tendency to consider what you're personally working on as superior in some way to something you're not.
- eru 5y ago
  A tabletop game is limited to (essentially) what you can make with cardboard and flavour text. You can add flavour text to a video game as well. FTL is a great example of that making the game feel much bigger.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    RPGs are not regular tabletop games. Nobody was talking about Monopoly in that article. The whole point was about pen and paper RPG vs video games.
  - GuestHNUser 5y ago
    >A tabletop game is limited to (essentially) what you can make with cardboard and flavour text. Maybe for board games. But for tabletop rpgs, I think it's different. Games like Dungeons & Dragons are limited more by what you can describe with language and reasonably bookkeep without slowing down the pace of play.
  - e12e 5y ago
nikanj 5y ago
Source: "My friend who works w/ games knows someone who's at CDPR" Rumour has it, management got extremely ambitious with AI. Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc. The devs tried to explain how absolutely unfeasible that is, but management was convinced it's possible - and would indeed be ground-breaking. After a large number of years of toiling with the problem, the writing on the wall was finally seen. The NPC AI was scrapped and replaced with crude "we'll just spawn the cops around you so they don't have to have a chase mode"-level hacks, to allow them to ship in 2020. Now they're stuck in limbo, because the players are still waiting for those marvellous AI miracles that were promised, but they remain absolutely impossible to deliver. CDPR can patch things like the car physics, but people's expectations were thoroughly mismanaged and they'll forever be disappointed
- stared 5y ago
  Risking hubris: With current GPT-3 technology (or even GPT-2, accessible by then), it should be possible to create each agent unique. But if the research started earlier, I am not surprised by the dissonance between marketing and devs.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    The release date is not when work on the game starts, it's when work on the game ends.
- hericium 5y ago
  > Rumour has it, management got extremely ambitious with AI. Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc. They received some AI-related grant[1] from the local government and did whatever they could to avoid penalties. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/pl/media/aktualnosci/30-mln-zl-dla-grupy-cd-projekt-innowacje-ramach-programu-gameinn/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/pl/media/aktualnosci/30-mln-zl-dla... - original source but in Polish
  - Springtime 5y ago
    Found the English version of that source[1]. Seems to have had five criteria[2] with AI being one such. Would be interested if you had a link about the penalties you mention regarding GameINN. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-secures-30-million-pln-gameinn-innovation-funds/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-sec... [2] https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/alerty-innowacje/13-PwC-Alert-GAMEINN-v1-ENG.pdf https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/alerty-innowacje/13-PwC-Alert-GAME...
jerrygoyal 5y ago
I've always wondered why articles in NewYorker are so lengthier. Do journalists there get paid by words or what.
johnyzee 5y ago
What a weirdly apologetic article. Could it have something to do with the remarks near the bottom? CD Projekt has spent the year since the game’s launch trying to win back the faith of gamers—and investors.
Sholmesy 5y ago
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of my favorite games of all time. It was unplayable on console, and a buggy mess on release (even on PC), but some of the acting and story telling in the game is really something else. I've been playing games for 30 years and nothing has really come close in terms of voice acting. Judy, V (both male & female VO's are great, but I prefer the female one), Keanu Reeves does his best work, and is totally at home in a melodramatic setting, all the smaller characters have proper voice actors that are more than just an after thought. The story is interesting, there are limited, but real choices along the way, along with a plethora of non-impactful decisions, that merely change how your character interacts with the world. The world itself feels great, the architecture of the city feels real, and it's the first game that I've played that explored the vertical aspects of a city, though they definitely could've done more. The action aspects are a little limited, surface level stuff. It's such a shame that the game wasn't given the same scope it has right now, but another year or two for polish (pun unintended...) and I think the systems in the game could be fleshed out and be much more fun. For anyone that has moderately decent hardware, I highly recommend a play through. EDIT: forgot about the music. Might be the best soundtrack of anything ever. Movie/TV/Game/Other.
- gnrlst 5y ago
  While it's not one of my fav game of all time, I have to say it was a great opportunity for me to try Stadia. I preordered the game and it came with a 1 month pro subscription, a controller and a chromecast all included for free, and I enjoyed smooth bug-free play from launch day (I have a gigabit connection so felt native). Highly recommend! Full disclosure, I haven't played in a while because the game selection is limited. I just want to play "quadruple A" titles like Last of Us 2 and RDD2.
- BingoAhoy 5y ago
  I feel similarly. The art is amazing and really sucks you. But that perhaps is it's downfall, overfocus on aesthetics and creativity rather than gameplay. David Jaffe the creator of God of War mentioned that the lead developers of the game were creative people rather than people that have the qualities of finishing things up. Forget his exact words, but that was the gist of it.
Exendroinient 5y ago
This game was marketed not as a coherent game but as a mix of the best tropes from rpg's and open world genre. That's why they only showed one faked vertical slice and development for that have been scrapped and restarted from scratch. Scope creep and false too good to be true marketing destroyed this game.

170 points by mitchbob 5y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/brbbv https://archive.ph/brbbv

A drive-by pronouncement, one that is probably wrong because of how reductive it is, but it is visceral to me because I've been dealing with a similar situation at work: you can't trick computers. You can't intimidate them into working with groupthink, coercive meetings, aggressive talks, or vague threats of losing face, position, or job. They are binary. You either make something that produces the output you want, or you get a buggy, unworkable mess (to various levels of unworkable). All the crunch and pain and buggy games are a result of humans trying to force the other humans who are programming the games and content, and indirectly, the computers themselves into doing a rush job. You can't rush art. Programming is an art since whatever is being programmed has never been made before, else you could go Copy + Paste and be done. Yes, there are millions of paintings of meadows, just as there are millions of copies of very similar but ever-so-slightly different boring line of business applications. But if you want THIS painting, this one that you have commissioned to show the meadow in YOUR back yard, you can't rush the artist, or else the painting quality will be reduced. Depending on how much rush you add, the quality can be subtly bad but close enough, or horrifically bad as if, say, this pretentious commenter were painting it. Let the artists (programmers) take the time they need to produce the artifact. Yes, the artists can sometimes get stuck in cycles of tweaks (goldplating) and need to be told this artifact is done, ship it, but it always seems like we lean too far to the other side: feature factories, churn churn churn, crunch crunch crunch. Let the artists paint / program in peace!

willis936 5y ago
I thought the magic of Halo died a decade ago but I see the 180 that Infinite pulled in the past year and recently learned that Staten returned around that time. As Feynmann said, there are no miracle men, but Staten knows the formula for making a good game. He was there when Bungie had creative freedom and was making games that they wanted to play. Having him come on as a leader with political power was the only way Infinite could have ever been anything other than a disaster. The recent IGN interview was great. It was an hour of hot chocolate for my niche demographic. It also confirmed that the magic of Halo was what we thought it was all along. You want to make a great game? Watch the Halo Vid Docs and take notes. https://youtu.be/EqfPclVRioI https://youtu.be/EqfPclVRioI
- pas 5y ago
  could you please tl;dr the magic for those who are completely out of the Haloverse? (I played about 3 levels of the first one, it was ok for that time, I know people really love it, but so do Doom, or Diablo, etc)
  - willis936 5y ago
    Bungie in its day was very grounded and in-tune with "the player experience". The team would play the game with each other at the end of every day and have fun doing it. Only things that made the game more fun were put in. As for storytelling in the campaigns: it was a space opera complete with mysticism and an epic journey. It's really hard to stretch that into a never-ending story, but the books have done well. The games have not. The first problem is in making the self-insert chief a human. It was obvious from the beginning. When I played Halo 4 I had a mental list of all the ways the creative direction dropped the ball. There's something that 343's culture has never understood about the Halo games. They think it's a Michael Bay film because the audience is young men but it's more like Star Wars V. This is a highlight reel of what I'm talking about. https://youtu.be/6qfx9eoB-88 https://youtu.be/6qfx9eoB-88
Kranar 5y ago
I'll go against the grain and say that you can rush a game, you can overwork people, and that in many cases, for many companies, doing so is the only path to success. We're talking about one of the most successful companies in Poland that you only know about because they managed to produce some of the most popular and profitable games ever created, and they didn't get to this point by letting developers and managers take their sweet time. Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it? Of course not... it was developed with just as much of a crunch, pressure and "inhumane working conditions" [1] as Cyberpunk 2077, but because it was a resounding success on all platforms, no one batted an eye. The issues with Cyberpunk 2077 have next to nothing to do with crunch time, they simply tried to make a game for a platform that was never going to be able to support it, regardless of how much time they took. The game on PC is a masterpiece of technology, it looks and feels amazing and it's a resounding success. The failure on PS4 and XBox is because those platforms were still very large markets and they wanted to take advantage of them and well push come to shove, there's just no way of making the game play well on them. That's all there is to this story, making a game for a platform that can't support it is going to be a failure. Now that Cyberpunk has failed, people will use that failure as a way to argue about things that likely have nothing to do with the cause of the failure, and you know maybe that's a good thing and better working conditions come of it... I don't know... what I do know is even if CD Projekt Red decides to change its working culture for the next game they make, there's dozens of other new game studios rising up and it may be the case that the only way for them to compete with the existing giants is to work day and night to the bone on making the next masterpiece. [1] https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period-for-the-witcher-3-was-not-humane/ https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period...
- kvark 5y ago
  I'm sorry, the game on PC was a crappy bugfest. And as for being "impossible" on consoles... Isn't it effectively GTA in a different setting? GTA managed to run fine, and Cyberpunk could, but they weren't able to reach it.
  - 5y ago
zargon 5y ago
Like artists, some programmers are able to make the tradeoffs to get the product out the door and others aren't. Compare Brandon Sanderson, who announces annually what to expect from him in the coming year and generally lives up to it, to Patrick Rothfuss, who lashes out to attack any fan who asks about the novel he claimed to be working on for the last 10 years. Similar to game titles such as Minecraft vs Star Citizen. Some people will never finish or keep starting over or keep expanding scope, and others have a gift of the ability to balance conflicting needs just right. It's more about getting the right personalities on your team than giving blanket license for artists to take as long as they please.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  Everyone, every writer anyway, knows that Sanderson is a freak of nature. Much to be admired, but not a standard by which to measure yourself.
  - zargon 5y ago
    Certainly true. Both examples are on the extreme side of the spectrum.
louthy 5y ago
Artists don’t get paid until their work is complete, do you think programmers would accept that model?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- eru 5y ago
  If the people who made that offer had a good track record, and the money was good enough, I would. (In some sense, this reminds me of getting startup equity, which is basically worthless until the company goes public.)
eru 5y ago
> You can't rush art. Programming is an art since whatever is being programmed has never been made before, else you could go Copy + Paste and be done. Eh, if you want to make a comparison, I would put most corporate programming into the bin of 'craft', much more than 'art'. It's of course all subjective, and there's no one true category. They are just different ways of thinking about the subject.
- thuccess129 5y ago
  > I would put most corporate programming into the bin of 'craft', much more than 'art'. A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract. Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes.
  - eru 5y ago
    > A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract. It totally depends. Most corporate programming is CRUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delet...), so not much arithmetic involved. But a lot of 'book keeping', and organising your information. Not rocket science, but more listening to your stakeholders. > Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes. See also Carmack etc. But I was talking about the typical programming tasks.

sarosh 5y ago

An interesting take from Mike Pondsmith given his heavy involvement in the venture at the end of (at least in my opinion) well-written article: "[C]omparing the tabletop experience with its video-game incarnation, he noted that the latter doesn’t really compare to the former when it comes to self-expression. “You could be you in a tabletop game and bring all the stuff that you wanted to bring into it,” he said. “A tabletop game is limitless. A video game, by its very nature of how it’s designed, has some limits.” "

webwielder2 5y ago
Not all of us have held onto our childlike wonder and imagination, so it's nice to have graphics I must admit.
willis936 5y ago
Tabletop also has limits, otherwise it wouldn't have any rules. By this logic pretend play is the ultimate game but good luck finding a willing player over 12.
- friedman23 5y ago
  > pretend play is the ultimate game but good luck finding a willing player over 12. What do you think improv is? And pen and paper RPGs are a form of improv constrained by some rules. But those rules are what people agree for them to be and you can make them as restrictive or as loose as you can agree to.
  - willis936 5y ago
    My point is that taking it to the extreme then stopping at tabletop as the natural best is nonsense. Tabletop has rules. If rules are the enemy then tabletop is not the ultimate. People enjoy frameworks. On one end of the spectrum is pretend play and on the other is a movie theatre. What spectrum of interactive entertainment you want to participate in is purely subjective and one is not "better" than another. Having fewer limits is not a virtue. It is worth nothing.

harel 5y ago

I waited, for a good while and jumped into the game on a high end PC around the time of the 1.3 patch. And I loved it. I don't usually clock over 90 hours in a game, but I easily done it here.

adamnemecek 5y ago
I agree, it was really dope. I still like Witcher 3 better but I don’t get the hate.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Animats 5y ago

The solution: paid overtime. Time and a half after 8 hours, time and a half after 5 days, and those multiply. This is why film scheduling is a serious discipline and software scheduling is a joke.

nexuist 5y ago
This is a brilliant idea and I'm curious if anyone has any opinions on why it wouldn't work. Paid overtime shifts financial responsibility to the PM who ordered overtime, because arguably a more competent PM would either push back against unrealistic deadlines or manage the team more efficiently to avoid overtime crunch. It sets the stage for competent management to prevail while incompetent managers are forced out of the org. I think this is great incentive structuring.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Devil's advocate: As paid overtime becomes more common, people start factoring it in production costs, and standard hour salaries are adjusted accordingly. When people negociate they get told "don't worry, with X hours of overtime you'll get a pretty good pay" and we're back to square one. For a real world examole of that, Japanese companies have had these kind of deals for a few decades.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    At least those devs get something back for their crunch time then..
    - eru 5y ago
      The comment you replied to explained that the rates would be the same as now after some adjustment. (Of course, you can disagree with that.)
  - hamstergene 5y ago
    There are many countries where not paying for overtime >=2x is illegal, and nothing like that is happening

noduerme 5y ago

Crunch is what happens when you announce a release date and realize you can't make it. What happens when your release date is "when it's ready"? Star Citizen. Surely there's some happy medium.

tsimionescu 5y ago
Well, to be fair, Star Citizen has a massive financial incentive to trickle out paid content without releasing. The day they release is the day they cut the goose that lays golden eggs for them. Sure, they'll sell the meat, but those golden eggs are never coming back.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Yeah, it's evolved into an absurd and mercifully very unusual/difficult to imitate business model. But in my (early) experience on the project, the model of selling content to a nonexistent game was something Chris Roberts very much stumbled into by accident. When I started working with him I'm sure it never occurred to him that such a thing could even be lucrative. CR was extremely deadline-driven until the crowd funding and the fan forums got into it. Prior to that, it was specific goals, limits, milestones, and a pathway to launching ASAP. In a sense, the crowd preferred being strung along, or at least sending resources to things that would delay development in exchange for some holy grail down the road. The shift was profound when it happened. SC is a bad example for most things, because it really was started with the best of intentions but became such a shitshow that most people assume it was intended as a con from day one.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Oh, I believe that they didn't start with this in mind, absolutely. To some extent, the whole thing seems to be a victim of its own massive crowdfunding success. Basically nothing they release now could ever live up to the hopes, so even without the profit motive, the incentives would lead to endless moving goalposts...
hexatin 5y ago

atum47 5y ago

Did you read the letter that came with the Witcher 3? It was very touching, you could really see the care that was putted into the game. Hard to believe the same company released such a mess of a game right after. I bought it for 10 dollars in a sale and even so I felt robbed of my money. If I was looking at a npc and did a 360º with the camera, when looking that same npc the model would change.

adamnemecek 5y ago
Do you know what happened between the release of Witcher 3 and the release of Cyberpunk 2077? CDPR went public.
- Kranar 5y ago
  CDPR went public before the release of Witcher 2 back in 2009 when it merged with Optimus S.A. (Witcher 2 was released in 2011) [1]. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/history/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/history/

bigmattystyles 5y ago

There’s a sequel going on with BF2042… the solution is simple, don’t preorder games. In reality, I know it’s unlikely. I’d be in favor of legislation forcing a return window that’s automated for pre orders.

noahtallen 5y ago
I believe Steam lets you return preordered games at any point before release. (At least, I was able to preorder New World, play the beta, and then, right before release, decide I didn’t want to keep it and got a refund.)
3a2d29 5y ago
Unpopular opinion incoming: The solution is consumers paying way higher prices for games. The reason games are rushed is because labor is a huge cost, and it isn't cost effective to continually bleed money waiting for revenue. Easier to just release unfinished.
- gruez 5y ago
  what's stopping them from pocketing the cash and still releasing it unfinished? after all, releases like cyberpunk 2077 shows that people would still buy it.
- Youden 5y ago
  Why do consumers need to pay way higher prices for games? In 2000 you could buy Deus Ex for $40. It was a fantastic and fantastically successful game, developed with a budget of ~$7 million dollars. It needed 175000 sales to break even, which it did. These days the standard price for a game is ~$60, so we are paying more. The market has also grown enormously. Video games used to be a thing played exclusively by "nerds" and now nearly everyone plays them in some form. And that's not even touching the whole micro purchases thing. So revenue has already increased, why do we need to increase it even further?
  - ptr 5y ago
    A movie entertains for ~2 hours and costs ~$10, ~$5/h. In this perspective, games are very cheap.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Very odd to read an article in 2021 written for an (American!) audience that the editor judged needs an explanation of what D&D is. Can The New Yorker's audience really be THAT out of touch?

eru 5y ago
Not everyone is familiar with all aspects of (pop) culture. Giving a brief explanation helps the parts of the audience that need it, and everyone else can just quickly gloss over it. I am sure there's plenty of stuff that I found obvious that you don't know, and vice versa.
- nikanj 5y ago
  Can't please everyone, the next commenter is going to complain how some article assumes everyone knows the basic rules of baseball.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    As a non-American, I have no clue how Baseball works. It's just chonky dudes chewing tobacco and hitting a ball really hard. Then sauntering over to a white pillow for a rest, right? =)
    - eru 5y ago
      From what I've heard, Baseball is like a simplified, Americanified version of Cricket. Something like Baseball used to be called Rounders and played by pupils. (Of course, I have at most the vaguest idea how Cricket works.)
    - wly_cdgr 5y ago
      Baseball is just golf for the working class
      - eru 5y ago
        Golf also used to be the golf of the common people, too.

meowphius 5y ago

2077 is a fantastic game, and the only thing I wish is that I had never let my opinion of the game be colored by reddit and ycombinator.

soared 5y ago
The best way to foster and learn about a hobby is reading its subreddit. Also, the quickest and surest way to kill your love for a hobby.. is reading its subreddit.
yoz-y 5y ago
Same. I stopped reading articles and posts about it because they were all just a pile of whining, while I was truly enjoying the game. I now had the same with MTGA. Turns out discussion about games seems to always turn into complaining.
mey 5y ago
It is a great game, but marketed incorrectly. It isn't an open world game. It is a narrative driven looter shooter with amazing visuals. It isn't the game I wanted. I have zero desire the replay it (and you can't really play past the 'end'). It is worth the price of admission IF you have a computer to run it, which is a significant hurdle. Interestingly I played Psychonauts 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 back to back, both at times felt like playing a movie rendered into video game form.
- mjevans 5y ago
  Any game with voiced dialogue is either going to have one single story, a bunch of little threads that don't interact much, or both. Some games might give you a bit of wiggle room to get most or all of the content in a single playthrough; but usually that's going to be a fairly rigid solution since any slack time translates to a slowed narrative pace for casual players. It will likely look like a movie, but with some choose your own adventure cutting-room-floor edits and maybe player controlled pacing.
  - mey 5y ago

ekianjo 5y ago

> You could be you in a tabletop game and bring all the stuff that you wanted to bring into it,” he said. “A tabletop game is limitless. A video game, by its very nature of how it’s designed, has some limits.” Thats it? Such a uber long article to reach such a feeble insight? Not impressed, New Yorker

LudwigNagasena 5y ago
What a weird thing to say. Board games and video games are two very different media with different capabilities and limitations.
- needle0 5y ago
  I'd imagine one would have a tendency to consider what you're personally working on as superior in some way to something you're not.
eru 5y ago
A tabletop game is limited to (essentially) what you can make with cardboard and flavour text. You can add flavour text to a video game as well. FTL is a great example of that making the game feel much bigger.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  RPGs are not regular tabletop games. Nobody was talking about Monopoly in that article. The whole point was about pen and paper RPG vs video games.
- GuestHNUser 5y ago
  >A tabletop game is limited to (essentially) what you can make with cardboard and flavour text. Maybe for board games. But for tabletop rpgs, I think it's different. Games like Dungeons & Dragons are limited more by what you can describe with language and reasonably bookkeep without slowing down the pace of play.
- e12e 5y ago

nikanj 5y ago

Source: "My friend who works w/ games knows someone who's at CDPR" Rumour has it, management got extremely ambitious with AI. Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc. The devs tried to explain how absolutely unfeasible that is, but management was convinced it's possible - and would indeed be ground-breaking. After a large number of years of toiling with the problem, the writing on the wall was finally seen. The NPC AI was scrapped and replaced with crude "we'll just spawn the cops around you so they don't have to have a chase mode"-level hacks, to allow them to ship in 2020. Now they're stuck in limbo, because the players are still waiting for those marvellous AI miracles that were promised, but they remain absolutely impossible to deliver. CDPR can patch things like the car physics, but people's expectations were thoroughly mismanaged and they'll forever be disappointed

stared 5y ago
Risking hubris: With current GPT-3 technology (or even GPT-2, accessible by then), it should be possible to create each agent unique. But if the research started earlier, I am not surprised by the dissonance between marketing and devs.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  The release date is not when work on the game starts, it's when work on the game ends.
hericium 5y ago
> Rumour has it, management got extremely ambitious with AI. Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc. They received some AI-related grant[1] from the local government and did whatever they could to avoid penalties. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/pl/media/aktualnosci/30-mln-zl-dla-grupy-cd-projekt-innowacje-ramach-programu-gameinn/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/pl/media/aktualnosci/30-mln-zl-dla... - original source but in Polish
- Springtime 5y ago
  Found the English version of that source[1]. Seems to have had five criteria[2] with AI being one such. Would be interested if you had a link about the penalties you mention regarding GameINN. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-secures-30-million-pln-gameinn-innovation-funds/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-sec... [2] https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/alerty-innowacje/13-PwC-Alert-GAMEINN-v1-ENG.pdf https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/alerty-innowacje/13-PwC-Alert-GAME...

jerrygoyal 5y ago

I've always wondered why articles in NewYorker are so lengthier. Do journalists there get paid by words or what.

johnyzee 5y ago

What a weirdly apologetic article. Could it have something to do with the remarks near the bottom? CD Projekt has spent the year since the game’s launch trying to win back the faith of gamers—and investors.

Sholmesy 5y ago

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of my favorite games of all time. It was unplayable on console, and a buggy mess on release (even on PC), but some of the acting and story telling in the game is really something else. I've been playing games for 30 years and nothing has really come close in terms of voice acting. Judy, V (both male & female VO's are great, but I prefer the female one), Keanu Reeves does his best work, and is totally at home in a melodramatic setting, all the smaller characters have proper voice actors that are more than just an after thought. The story is interesting, there are limited, but real choices along the way, along with a plethora of non-impactful decisions, that merely change how your character interacts with the world. The world itself feels great, the architecture of the city feels real, and it's the first game that I've played that explored the vertical aspects of a city, though they definitely could've done more. The action aspects are a little limited, surface level stuff. It's such a shame that the game wasn't given the same scope it has right now, but another year or two for polish (pun unintended...) and I think the systems in the game could be fleshed out and be much more fun. For anyone that has moderately decent hardware, I highly recommend a play through. EDIT: forgot about the music. Might be the best soundtrack of anything ever. Movie/TV/Game/Other.

gnrlst 5y ago
While it's not one of my fav game of all time, I have to say it was a great opportunity for me to try Stadia. I preordered the game and it came with a 1 month pro subscription, a controller and a chromecast all included for free, and I enjoyed smooth bug-free play from launch day (I have a gigabit connection so felt native). Highly recommend! Full disclosure, I haven't played in a while because the game selection is limited. I just want to play "quadruple A" titles like Last of Us 2 and RDD2.
BingoAhoy 5y ago
I feel similarly. The art is amazing and really sucks you. But that perhaps is it's downfall, overfocus on aesthetics and creativity rather than gameplay. David Jaffe the creator of God of War mentioned that the lead developers of the game were creative people rather than people that have the qualities of finishing things up. Forget his exact words, but that was the gist of it.

Exendroinient 5y ago

This game was marketed not as a coherent game but as a mix of the best tropes from rpg's and open world genre. That's why they only showed one faked vertical slice and development for that have been scrapped and restarted from scratch. Scope creep and false too good to be true marketing destroyed this game.