Cyberpunk 2077 Grieving Thread

[Sinner's Sandwich]

but they had to lock on either scope (content) or time (fixed release date) but fucked themselves by going for both.

How did they not know this?? Blaming 'diversity hires' is easy but Witcher 3 was also released in a shitty state. CDPFail didn't learn anything from their past mistakes.

 

[Fougaro]

I think you can have a grand scope project done in medium time, but you absolutely need top notch talent for that. Not divershitty hires.

Something obviously went wrong here.

You can, but you will have to pick which point of the triangle is the most important one you want to lock on in the end if you want your project to be successful. CD Project Red should have from the beginning either locked on time and sacrificed the scope while keeping their mouths shut on what will be in the game, or locked on the scope and said that the game will be out when it's done. By going for both they failed at both, as in the game was delayed multiple times while the game itself was an unfinished mess with a lot of toned down and cut khantent. If anything, the botched release of Cyberpunk 2077 can serve as an important life lesson.

 

[WinchesterPremium]

Did we ever confirm the "Le Andromeda dev" meme? Like I said the credits should be out.

 

[societyguy01]

Look at what has become of Cyberpunk 2077, look at what has become of our once prized video games. Games dumbed down more than ever before, massive cope from Fanboys™ and from games journalists, kiked developers charging exorbitant prices for shitty games that aren't even finished anymore. And who is responsible for this? Who is responsible for despoiling our mancaves, for polluting the internet with gamer™ influencers and shills? For letting this sorry state of our gaming reich industry be the status quo for so long?

I know who is responsible, and I'm not afraid to tell you. They shuffle on mass, these vermin, these casual gamers, the vile Untermensch of the world pouring into the gaming sphere and polluting our once beautiful world. It is THEY who are responsible for Cyberpunk 2077, it is THEY who have led the gaming industry down such a path of wretchedness and degeneracy. EVERYWHERE one sees a game fail miserably one sees the shadows of the long nosed danger-hair sub-humans who can do nothing but destroy. But do not worry, friends. For I propose a solution to this problem, a final solution, one that will shut the lying mouths of those lying casuals up for good.

This is a call for action for all true gamers out there. We will wage an unparalleled, fanatic war against the eternal casual menace. No more will they speak for true gamers, as us race soldiers hardcore gamers march down the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin purging the putrid casual menace from our sacred game development studios! They will be thrown out of OUR stores, swept away from OUR streets, excised from OUR media and OUR autistic forums. The reddit legions will try to stop us. They say that they have massed more numbers than we could ever muster, but do not fear, because every single hardcore gamer™© is worth 100,000 redditor maggots.

In the end, after all the fire and brimstone has cleared, and we have attained total victory, then will we smile knowing that no one will have to play Cyberpunk 2077 ever again.

 

[Yeshuash]

Soooo, any actual sources for the whole "main story is only 15 hours" thing or is this just another rumour spread out by the hate train? Is it ACTUALLY possible to beat the game without touching the side content (being uderpowered and stuff)?

 

[Ruin]

Soooo, any actual sources for the whole "main story is only 15 hours" thing or is this just another rumour spread out by the hate train?

The main quest chain is very short for an RPG, around ten or so hours maybe fifteen at the most if you're slow and exhaust every dialogue choice. There are about 15 hours of side quests of varying quality and 35-40 hours of open world Ubisoft style bullshit where you clear map markers and do heists.

I've beaten the game doing all side quests and a good chunk of the open world stuff.

is this a good enough source for you?

 

[Yeshuash]

The main quest chain is very short for an RPG, around ten or so hours maybe fifteen at the most if you're slow and exhaust every dialogue choice. There are about 15 hours of side quests of varying quality and 35-40 hours of open world Ubisoft style bullshit where you clear map markers and do heists.

I've beaten the game doing all side quests and a good chunk of the open world stuff.

is this a good enough source for you?

I was just wondering as the whole "It's 15 hours long!" thing kinda popped out out of nowhere and people just ran with it.

Kinda funny how people jumped on that as SKYRIM's main quest was 9-12 hours and all the rest was faffing about in the world and modding in anime cat girls.

That is if you managed to get past the constant crashes on launch day.

 

[Ruin]

I was just wondering as the whole "It's 15 hours long!" thing kinda popped out out of nowhere and people just ran with it.

Kinda funny how people jumped on that as SKYRIM's main quest was 9-12 hours and all the rest was faffing about in the world and modding in anime cat girls.

That is if you managed to get past the constant crashes on launch day.

The length isn't really what bothers me. The poor quality writing and technical problems are what sunk it. If you don't mind open world stuff there's like 75-80 hours of gameplay here. I'd say main story plus all side quests is around 45 hours which is pretty good.

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

The length isn't really what bothers me. The poor quality writing and technical problems are what sunk it. If you don't mind open world stuff there's like 75-80 hours of gameplay here. I'd say main story plus all side quests is around 45 hours which is pretty good.

I haven’t felt the need to go back and finish it since it really sunk in how unbalanced and unfinished it is. Did hacker builds really need to be so good that they render everything else redundant? Why put points into Cool as the ostensible stealth stat when you can blow out cameras, mute comms, render enemies blind or deaf, poison/shock/burn them, or make em just straight up drop dead in the span of about 6 seconds. How did they not have time to edit the description of the gorilla arms if they removed them being able to rip out doors and turrets? Why even put racing sidequests in if anything besides a few of the bikes handle like the fucking Mako from ME1?

 

[Fougaro]

Did we ever confirm the "Le Andromeda dev" meme? Like I said the credits should be out.

If true, I'd be more interested if Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous release can be blamed on them. From what I could gather, and I might be proven wrong in the near future, it was mostly - if not entirely - management that fucked up especially when it came to planning. It still baffles me, especially in hindsight, that they insisted on last-gen console support since it was one of the things that ended up fucking them in the ass, and not even in the Greek way.

 

[Ruin]

Also Fallout The Frontier is out on the 15th so there's even less of an reason to play Cyberpunk. And unlike Cyberpunk the Frontier boasts a 30+ hour main story according to the devs and is an actual RPG.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1356060/The_Frontier/

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

Also Fallout The Frontier is out on the 15th so there's even less of an reason to play Cyberpunk. And unlike Cyberpunk the Frontier boasts a 30+ hour main story according to the devs and is an actual RPG.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1356060/The_Frontier/

My big beef with these big content mods is that the audio quality is so inconsistent. It's annoying to hear someone speak clearly but then someone else is talking through a tin can.

 

[robobobo]

If true, I'd be more interested if Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous release can be blamed on them. From what I could gather, and I might be proven wrong in the near future, it was mostly - if not entirely - management that fucked up especially when it came to planning. It still baffles me, especially in hindsight, that they insisted on last-gen console support since it was one of the things that ended up fucking them in the ass, and not even in the Greek way.

I very much doubt that a handful of idiots from Canada managed to sink an entire AAA game. Contributed, sure, but to try to lay the blame at their feet seems insane, given that there was a team of hundreds involved.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

I very much doubt that a handful of idiots from Canada managed to sink an entire AAA game. Contributed, sure, but to try to lay the blame at their feet seems insane, given that there was a team of hundreds involved.

Blaming dangerhairs & diversity hires for the entire disaster is fucking lazy & autistic. There obviously is more shady shit going on behind the scenes. The CEO of CDPR for example lied about the state of the last gen version.

 

[jje100010001]

You can, but you will have to pick which point of the triangle is the most important one you want to lock on in the end if you want your project to be successful. CD Project Red should have from the beginning either locked on time and sacrificed the scope while keeping their mouths shut on what will be in the game, or locked on the scope and said that the game will be out when it's done. By going for both they failed at both, as in the game was delayed multiple times while the game itself was an unfinished mess with a lot of toned down and cut khantent. If anything, the botched release of Cyberpunk 2077 can serve as an important life lesson.

The weird thing is, isn’t game dev chock of similar game dev failures, with several big AAA failures in recent years? There’s probably more case studies of what not to do, than of best practices out th



Literally a Dude-trust-me post, but interesting rumors on the dev issues:

Spoiler: Tortured dev hell

Don't worry. There is a good chance that these mechanics appear during the year, because they were created, but they were cut out before the game premiere. After the premiere, a lot of facts and stories about the game's production started to be revealed. It seems to me that this information does not reach the English-speaking media, but there is a lot of it in the Polish language.

The most important ones are: The game has been developed since 2012. Originally, the game was supposed to resemble very much the Witcher 3 (we were supposed to play with a detective known from the first trailer, the game was supposed to have a first-person and third-person view, be dark, and the main storyline was supposed to talk about the conspiracy of the corporation with the government connected with the plague of cyberpsychois.

In 2016 the scriptwriter was changed and despite the advanced work on the game (which was to come out in 2017 at the latest) the whole game was deleted and started again. The new scenario was much more complex and soon it turned out that the used game engine is not able to work properly with such an advanced game. In 2016 the whole game was rewritten for the new engine. In 2018 the acting sessions for the game were already in progress. The game assumed that the scenario will look completely different depending on the choice of gender, character orgin, and the result of the mission with the chip. It was supposed to be 18 different games! Each scenario had its own missions, unique characters and locations. For example, the results of a mission with a stolen chip depended on whether Jackie dies and it is the V who will implant the chip, Jackie will survive and it is he who will implant the chip, or maybe we will tempt the corporation and give the chip back and Jackie will survive but be our enemy. Each of these three scenarios had its own narrator.

One of them was Johnny Silverhand. Keanu Reeves liked the script so much that he asked for a bigger role for his character. As a result, the whole story was rebuilt and the other two narrators were thrown out of the game. One of them was definitely supposed to be Hideo Kojima. The other one was probably Jackie. We also know that in one of the scenarios the character played a huge role of Lady Gaga (it is possible that she was to be the third narrator).

As a result of additional work (an important factor was the employment of people with no experience in managerial positions, who with their stupid ideas sabotaged the work of programmers) many advanced gameplay mechanics were neglected. In mid-2019 it became obvious that the game will not be ready by 2020. It was therefore decided to cut out further storyline elements such as: storyline threads regardless of gender, an advanced system of relations with gangs, characters about corporations, 8 hours of prologue, which was summarized into a film interlude, and which explained the rules of the world to the player, built a tower with characters, and taught the mechanic.

In early 2020, all versions of the game were full of bugs, plot inconsistencies and mechanics that were not working, and the game itself was unoptimized. The postponement of the first release was only to cut out more missions and mechanics such as: advanced AI of drivers, opponents and police, crowd AI, advanced model of environmental damage and vehicles. The following were thrown out of the game a year earlier: train driving, flying vehicles, floating vehicles, running on walls, and vehicle tuning mechanics were not even started.

Now we know that all forces have been directed to fix the bugs by stopping work on two role-playing additions. It is possible that CDPR will add removed mechanics and feature content as free DLC. Most of these things are partially done and need only be fine-tuned. It would be a shame to throw away so much work, especially since releasing the deleted content would restore CDPR's reputation among players.

YT post about game development

This is a repost of a comment at yt about the game development: Don't worry. There is a good chance that these mechanics appear during the year, because they were created, but they were cut out before the game premiere. After the premiere, a lot of facts and stories about the game's production...

forums.cdprojektred.com

 

[societyguy01]

Literally a Dude-trust-me post

I believe it, even it could be just posting from hindsight and deducing from the current dumpster firing burning at CD Projekt red HQ
Here's a video by LegacyKilla for those interested detailing Cyberpunk 2077's ungraceful, inexorable fall
Make sure to take note of the big ass red flag about the company losing key developers along the way and the Glassdoor reviews mentioned even all the way back then

 

[Tor Lugosi]

My biggest problem with the game is just how obvious it feels that this game is several different versions of the game stitched together into a sort of Frankenstein's monster, leading to a lot of noticeable cut content and feeling that a lot of nonsensical elements probably made more sense in a previous version of the game.

- I feel like there's a version of the game wherein your choices were meant to affect how much control Johnny Silverhand has over you and how quickly the 'change' in your brain and body happens. I think your introduction to him supports this: he's set up as an antagonist that wants to take control of your body. Yet after that scene the idea that he can take control without you first giving it up is largely dropped and he's written far less antagonistic towards V.

In early quests once you're stuck with Johnny you're given choices to agree with him and act like him (e.g. smoking) or to reject him, and even cut conversations with him short by taking the omega blockers. These choices mostly disappear the further you get into the game and the choices that are there don't seem to impact much of anything.

Tying into this is the 'meditation' quest-chain with the monk. If the game did track how much control Johnny has then a series of side quests wherein V finds inner-peace and centers himself could have been a way for players to lower the 'control' stat. In the game we got, though, these meditation quests seem to serve no purpose and have no payoff.

The game does *appear* to track how friendly you are with Johnny but I'm not sure what all affects this. I always told him to fuck off and took the omega blockers when I could yet the game acted as if we had become true bros by the time of act 3. I'm not sure if how the game tracks this is buggy or if the developers just didn't put in an alternate set of scenes that reflected a bad relationship.

- The main story quests and the rest of the game feel at odds with each other. According to the main plot Arasaka thinks you killed their leader and stole an important prototype from them. Yet nothing ever actually comes of that outside of the handful of main story quests that deal directly with Arasaka. Being hunted by one of the most powerful corporations in the world never seems to affect any side quest nor are there any side quests that deal with stuff like, say, them sending a kill squad after you or having to deal with an assassin that they hired.

Then there's also the Voodoo Boys. Much like Arasaka they feel like they barely exist outside of the main story quest-chain that deals with them. Even after they fucked me over twice during their quests I left them alive because I figured they'd surely have some sort of content tied to them or I'd be able to call in a favor during the ending. But, nope, they never showed up again.

Lastly there's the cyberpsycho quests. The game's main plot deals with V inserting a cybernetic implant and it fucking him up. The cyberpsycho quests deal with the eye-patch lady wanting to research how cybernetics can fuck up people. I feel like the connection there is too strong and obvious for it just to be a coincidence. Furthermore, this quest-chain has no real payoff; I managed to keep all the targets alive and all I got was a quest to meet the eye-patch lady in person so she can basically say "Good job, buddy. Thanks." and that's literally it, which is to say that whatever originally planned conclusion to this bunch of quests likely got cut.

- The side gigs feel weird. This observation I'm less confident about but I feel like each fixer was meant to have their own quest chain with the gigs tying together and leading to a final mission for each fixer. The only evidence I have for this is that each fixer has an NPC you rescue that gets their own entry into the database and who then sits around next to the fixer for the rest of the game, as if they were meant to be important and have some sort of content, and yet those NPCs are never tied to anything else. Then there's also the fact that the Padre is given a connection to streetpunk V that never goes anywhere.

- Finally, it's obvious the game they were working on as late as 2019 was majorly different than one we got. Like this article that talks about the police system. None of the game's systems are nearly as in-depth as described there. The article also hints at a system that tracks V's reputation with NPCs but, again, there's nothing like that in the game.

 

[Urbanmech]

My biggest problem with the game is just how obvious it feels that this game is several different versions of the game stitched together into a sort of Frankenstein's monster, leading to a lot of noticeable cut content and feeling that a lot of nonsensical elements probably made more sense in a previous version of the game.

- I feel like there's a version of the game wherein your choices were meant to affect how much control Johnny Silverhand has over you and how quickly the 'change' in your brain and body happens. I think your introduction to him supports this: he's set up as an antagonist that wants to take control of your body. Yet after that scene the idea that he can take control without you first giving it up is largely dropped and he's written far less antagonistic towards V.

In early quests once you're stuck with Johnny you're given choices to agree with him and act like him (e.g. smoking) or to reject him, and even cut conversations with him short by taking the omega blockers. These choices mostly disappear the further you get into the game and the choices that are there don't seem to impact much of anything.

Tying into this is the 'meditation' quest-chain with the monk. If the game did track how much control Johnny has then a series of side quests wherein V finds inner-peace and centers himself could have been a way for players to lower the 'control' stat. In the game we got, though, these meditation quests seem to serve no purpose and have no payoff.

The game does *appear* to track how friendly you are with Johnny but I'm not sure what all affects this. I always told him to fuck off and took the omega blockers when I could yet the game acted as if we had become true bros by the time of act 3. I'm not sure if how the game tracks this is buggy or if the developers just didn't put in an alternate set of scenes that reflected a bad relationship.

- The main story quests and the rest of the game feel at odds with each other. According to the main plot Arasaka thinks you killed their leader and stole an important prototype from them. Yet nothing ever actually comes of that outside of the handful of main story quests that deal directly with Arasaka. Being hunted by one of the most powerful corporations in the world never seems to affect any side quest nor are there any side quests that deal with stuff like, say, them sending a kill squad after you or having to deal with an assassin that they hired.

Then there's also the Voodoo Boys. Much like Arasaka they feel like they barely exist outside of the main story quest-chain that deals with them. Even after they fucked me over twice during their quests I left them alive because I figured they'd surely have some sort of content tied to them or I'd be able to call in a favor during the ending. But, nope, they never showed up again.

Lastly there's the cyberpsycho quests. The game's main plot deals with V inserting a cybernetic implant and it fucking him up. The cyberpsycho quests deal with the eye-patch lady wanting to research how cybernetics can fuck up people. I feel like the connection there is too strong and obvious for it just to be a coincidence. Furthermore, this quest-chain has no real payoff; I managed to keep all the targets alive and all I got was a quest to meet the eye-patch lady in person so she can basically say "Good job, buddy. Thanks." and that's literally it, which is to say that whatever originally planned conclusion to this bunch of quests likely got cut.

- The side gigs feel weird. This observation I'm less confident about but I feel like each fixer was meant to have their own quest chain with the gigs tying together and leading to a final mission for each fixer. The only evidence I have for this is that each fixer has an NPC you rescue that gets their own entry into the database and who then sits around next to the fixer for the rest of the game, as if they were meant to be important and have some sort of content, and yet those NPCs are never tied to anything else. Then there's also the fact that the Padre is given a connection to streetpunk V that never goes anywhere.

- Finally, it's obvious the game they were working on as late as 2019 was majorly different than one we got. Like this article that talks about the police system. None of the game's systems are nearly as in-depth as described there. The article also hints at a system that tracks V's reputation with NPCs but, again, there's nothing like that in the game.

There is also "Birna Bran" moments in the game but I am not sure how many there are. Could be a few or 10+ who knows. Problem is the world is too big to find them and there is no real hint they would exist so its really annoying because you just kind of have to wander around to find them, at least with Birna it was just Skellige. It actually makes me miss the 'POI" system in Witcher 3 since I could know where to look for the interesting stuff instead of wandering around hoping to find it.

 

[DDBCAE CBAADCBE]

Great game 10/10. Fuck the fans they deserve to be mad.

 

[Fougaro]

The weird thing is, isn’t game dev chock of similar game dev failures, with several big AAA failures in recent years? There’s probably more case studies of what not to do, than of best practices out th



Literally a Dude-trust-me post, but interesting rumors on the dev issues:

Spoiler: Tortured dev hell

Don't worry. There is a good chance that these mechanics appear during the year, because they were created, but they were cut out before the game premiere. After the premiere, a lot of facts and stories about the game's production started to be revealed. It seems to me that this information does not reach the English-speaking media, but there is a lot of it in the Polish language.

The most important ones are: The game has been developed since 2012. Originally, the game was supposed to resemble very much the Witcher 3 (we were supposed to play with a detective known from the first trailer, the game was supposed to have a first-person and third-person view, be dark, and the main storyline was supposed to talk about the conspiracy of the corporation with the government connected with the plague of cyberpsychois.

In 2016 the scriptwriter was changed and despite the advanced work on the game (which was to come out in 2017 at the latest) the whole game was deleted and started again. The new scenario was much more complex and soon it turned out that the used game engine is not able to work properly with such an advanced game. In 2016 the whole game was rewritten for the new engine. In 2018 the acting sessions for the game were already in progress. The game assumed that the scenario will look completely different depending on the choice of gender, character orgin, and the result of the mission with the chip. It was supposed to be 18 different games! Each scenario had its own missions, unique characters and locations. For example, the results of a mission with a stolen chip depended on whether Jackie dies and it is the V who will implant the chip, Jackie will survive and it is he who will implant the chip, or maybe we will tempt the corporation and give the chip back and Jackie will survive but be our enemy. Each of these three scenarios had its own narrator.

One of them was Johnny Silverhand. Keanu Reeves liked the script so much that he asked for a bigger role for his character. As a result, the whole story was rebuilt and the other two narrators were thrown out of the game. One of them was definitely supposed to be Hideo Kojima. The other one was probably Jackie. We also know that in one of the scenarios the character played a huge role of Lady Gaga (it is possible that she was to be the third narrator).

As a result of additional work (an important factor was the employment of people with no experience in managerial positions, who with their stupid ideas sabotaged the work of programmers) many advanced gameplay mechanics were neglected. In mid-2019 it became obvious that the game will not be ready by 2020. It was therefore decided to cut out further storyline elements such as: storyline threads regardless of gender, an advanced system of relations with gangs, characters about corporations, 8 hours of prologue, which was summarized into a film interlude, and which explained the rules of the world to the player, built a tower with characters, and taught the mechanic.

In early 2020, all versions of the game were full of bugs, plot inconsistencies and mechanics that were not working, and the game itself was unoptimized. The postponement of the first release was only to cut out more missions and mechanics such as: advanced AI of drivers, opponents and police, crowd AI, advanced model of environmental damage and vehicles. The following were thrown out of the game a year earlier: train driving, flying vehicles, floating vehicles, running on walls, and vehicle tuning mechanics were not even started.

Now we know that all forces have been directed to fix the bugs by stopping work on two role-playing additions. It is possible that CDPR will add removed mechanics and feature content as free DLC. Most of these things are partially done and need only be fine-tuned. It would be a shame to throw away so much work, especially since releasing the deleted content would restore CDPR's reputation among players.

YT post about game development

This is a repost of a comment at yt about the game development: Don't worry. There is a good chance that these mechanics appear during the year, because they were created, but they were cut out before the game premiere. After the premiere, a lot of facts and stories about the game's production...

forums.cdprojektred.com

Usually I'm treating these "insider" posts as bullshit until proven otherwise, but the claims made are plausible and would explain a lot. If they pull a No Man's Sky with Cyberpunk 2077 remains to be seen, but based on what we know so far, we might be dealing with Rooster Teeth levels of managerial incompetence over at CD Project Red.