“Our trademark is the freedom given to the player, but always with limits,” Kalemba tells Lega Nerd
Aye, they try to hype the idea of a main quest line as something that defines their design.
😅
Thinking back I’m not sure I want Witcher 4 to feel more like CP2077, tbh. Less, if anything.
CDPR should stop hyping their games so much and just focus on making a good game. Announce and release in a 6 month window.
Maybe they need to hire Larian to consult.
Yeah, the money they are putting in hyping the game would be better spent on development. Don’t talk about it to people who aren’t involved in making it, just do it. I much prefer the steam early access method where it you think you have a good idea, you release it early on for a cheaper price. Then you see how it does and receive player feedback and iterate from there.
Too much hype can make a game seem worse by raising expectations too high.
I know they are probably bombarded with requests for comments and interviews, but CDPR have learnt nothing from CP2077.
they are going to over-sell this again, promising things that don’t materialize because they are dreaming of the thing now when it’s still 3-4 years away, then people are going to be disappointed when it releases and doesn’t have all the things they talk about.
Obviously consumers haven’t learnt anything either, we eat this up, but CDPR is going to get the fallout from it.
Obviously consumers haven’t learnt anything either, we eat this up, but CDPR is going to get the fallout from it.
I waited for almost 3 years of patches and a deep discount and I’m still somewhat disappointed, it’s just three shitty ubisoft sandboxs stacked in a next gen suit.
Interestingly, if they use UE5/6, a LOT of the growing pains of Cyberpunk 2077 are immediately solved.
They wanted long-distance, high-detail scenes, but that led to the game running like shit.
UE5+ is excellent for that. It allows for more detail than any other engine.
Essentially they can now actually focus on producing a GAME, rather than a next-gen engine + a game, as was the case with Cyberpunk 2077.
So I give them the benefit of the doubt here.
Witcher is also a world they’re highly experienced in, so they don’t really need so much worldbuilding work either.
I’m talking specifically of the over-promising and under-delivering on game design. not the technical issues which is a whole separate problem that may or may not be solved by UE5
Now if only CDPR would eliminate their crunch work environment, and release games when the DEVS say it’s ready.
If you can’t afford advertising the game prior to launch, just don’t. That’s where for example Bethesda saved a ton of money. Released “complete” games within 1-3 months of the first announcement. (Do mind I’ve lost all hope in Bethesda)
In other hand, over-promising in terms of what’s actually currently out is fine. The issue is when you …
- Don’t have the devtime. (Board releasing the game way before it’s ready, because marketing is so damn expensive, and the stockholders want it now not later)
- Don’t have the skill. (Which means re-training all your employees constantly)
- Don’t have the work morale. (Which leads to talent bleed, further exaggerating point 2.)
Additionally, this isn’t new IP like Cybeypunk was, you’re not designing in-game systems from the ground up or hashing out the gameplay loop…you’re just improving on an already existing formula that is well received. The main challenge is the new engine, but as you’ve said they will also get a lot of problems solved with UE too. I think it’ll be fine in the end.
Lmfao what “freedom”
Seriously does anyone know what they’re talking about or is this just marketing bs?
I feel like the kind of “freedom” players want from an RPG is somewhat inconsistent with playing as a specific character, i.e. Geralt. For me, I want to be my own character and decide who they are and what they do. I never really got on with Geralt because I don’t want to be a moody medieval jedi, I’d much rather be a whimsical wizard or something.
Ah yeah, definitely.
As someone who personally enjoys a told story more than a lot of directionless freedom (because I get bored after a few dozen hours, so I want the game to get its thing told and then I’m ready for the next game, basically) I of course enjoyed Geralt’s directed character more, but the two are definitely incompatible at a very basic level.
And honestly, none is inherently better, though I wish studios understood more readily just how different the underlying approach is. If someone creates a defined story then give me those fully defined characters. Give me a cool story through which I learn of them. With a few surprises. Make it like a book! On the other hand, if something is freeform, then go hard the opposite way. Make it sandbox-y! Allow me to create narrative myself through what I do, don’t hold my hand and try to guide me back onto rails.
(That is, the main story was just about the part I enjoyed the least in CP2077 next to the bugs, and I really don’t think V’s character fits the gameplay and what we players do in it very well. V is an interesting character, but not for an open world do-whatever-you-want game, and the game they created doesn’t fit a character that is supposed to have a specific design very well.)
Then play elder scrolls? Witcher has never been anything close to what you’re describing
I’m not suggesting it should be at all. Not sure how you got that from my comment. I liked the Witcher 3, honestly, but it isn’t a game about freedom and it shouldn’t be imo. It tells character focused stories well, which is harder to do the more choice you give the player.
So you don’t want the R in RPG, and what you’ll get for that is the same generic game over and over again.
What? That isn’t what I said at all.
“You don’t want to be forced to play a specific role, and that removes the R in RPG” is what they are saying. However, I disagree with them. Real RPGs let you choose your role, ethical alignment, and quirks of behavior. Even older video games like Fallout 3 have that. Being forced to play a specific role is almost antithetical to the concept of RPGs.
Of course, maybe that’s not what they meant at all.
My confidence in this studio is severely shaken. Don’t see why we should listen to their marketing hype after the 2077 debacle.
I played CP2077 only recently after 2.01 patch and it’s kind of ok as an ubisoft sandbox. There’s something like 40 hours of well made content that’s on rails and a lot of really generic filler missions. I’m kind of disappointed and not because I expect voiced exposition and writing from such filler, but I did expect gameplay that was tuned to be challenging and it’s not. Seriously, Watch Dogs 2 (which is actually ubisoft) had better designed and balanced side missions. Here it’s just have these 5 dudes standing on a corner, you can kill them by hacking their shit without them ever seeing you or getting a chance to react. It’s a nice world that’s an average game garnished with a lot of Potemkin content.
Potemkin content - what a great term and so apt for CP2077
I feel like cyberpunk was a great game, even on release. The story and gameplay were great, it just had performance issues for some PCs and it shouldn’t have been released on consoles at the time.
That said, CDPR marketing team needs to learn to temper expectations
I got it at release as well and I could not disagree more. It was buggy, broken, and incomplete. I watched police NPCs spawn in from the sky, my game softlocked when a story essential npc fell through the world. These were commonly observed issues, among a litany of other ones. You gotta have some serious rose tinted glasses to think it was an acceptable product on release.
Imo Gameplay and story were like a 2.5/5, went back for PL and it might be a 3. Gameplay is serviceable at best. Story was lifted from an GITS:SAC episode which is about the most praise I have for the game aside from the art department. The 3D assets in 2077 are inarguably beautiful.
I know survivor bias or w/e but literally no one I know irl who played it 10+ had those issues unless they were on console.
I played it for over a hundred hours immediately after release and only saw a few minor bugs like audio/lip animations not matching for some scenes. I don’t know how all my friends/coworkers were so lucky when all you see on the internet is “worst game ever, doesn’t work at all on release” comments
Same! Pre-ordered and played hundreds of hours. It should’ve been released 6 months later but most of the bugs weren’t game-breaking. If an NPC had their arms stretched out to the side or whatever, I’d just have a laugh and move on. I’ve had to reload a save to get a side quest to trigger twice. I don’t think it’s even ever crashed on me though.
It’s just become blindly accepted that it is/was unplayable. I remember seeing so many articles months, even a year, after its release just confused about how so many people could be playing this unplayable game. Yet it’s always been consistently in Steam’s top 25 games for active players. It’s a weird disconnect.
Same experience here. I’m pretty sure at least 75% of the complaints were from consoles that should have never had the game released for.
Yet the game was still released and marketed to them - thus the issue
It definitely shouldn’t have been, but that doesn’t mean the game is shit, just marketing is bad.
Bugs and performance aside it was still a mess with very little to make it an lifelike and interesting place. The combat was unbalanced as hell, with only a few things being viable and the most effective classes in combat could be multi-specc’d. Sure why not have a hacker that can slow mo and use melee while also being proficient with guns? No way that could break the game balance.
Literally just overhauling the police system doubled the interactivity of the game by allowing you to actually engage with the crime&justice system beyond getting instantly killed by MaxTac because they can spawn three stories up and four blocks from where you just killed someone with a silenced sniper rifle.
I’ve a day one buyer and I wouldn’t even consider the game worth full price until 2.0. I’d say it was maybe worth 30-40 with 1.6 because most of the egregious bugs had been removed.
I feel like I’m in the minority here, but imo CP2077 is a much more fun game than the Witcher 3. I couldn’t get more than a few hours into TW3 without getting bored, which was never a problem with CP2077.
It was actually one of the major reasons I didn’t initially buy CP2077, as I very much disliked the gameplay of TW3
Personally I spent over a hundred hours in TW3 and finished all the DLC whereas I couldn’t get past the first few intro missions to CP2077. Gave it up in under 20 hours or so. Can’t even remember why the game just never stuck out as special in any way to me.
Funny, cause I’m the same except flipped. I’m going on 300 hours into CP2077, but couldn’t make it past hour 5-6 of TW3 for much the same reason.
Same here. I love Cyberpunk, but I just can’t get into Witcher 3 after attempting it a few times. It’s boring, the combat is shitty and I’m just not interested enough in the lore to deal with it. Not that the combat in Cyberpunk is great either. I guess I’m just more interested in that world.
Tiny boat we’re in. I started with the witcher 2 right after having played dragon’s dogma and couldn’t handle the extremely clunky combat. My friends assured me 3 was a huge step forward and I was harassed to play the whole game on stream, and I did. Honestly, not that big of a step, the world felt starkly dead compared to other open world fare, the combat was years behind games that came out at the same time, and the story and setting did not feel very unique to me at all.
I felt the same way about a lot of the heavier dialogue that people did at large about Forspoken. Plot felt like it was on stilts, barely hitting the points it needed to to keep my interest. Not that it was out of context bits like Forspoken, but the dialogue felt out of touch with the setting really frequently. Poor selection of magic despite what was shown to you in-setting. Build balancing like an mmo where nothing you craft or otherwise come into owning early on actually mattered at all. 15 more armor was not changing the number of hits you could take in a fight it all.
TW 3 wasn’t super inventive or even really fun compared to other games that launched when it did or even before, and I don’t understand the extreme hype for it when everyone I talk to says the first two games are so wildly different and worth skipping, which has been my experience. If it’s not about the characters’ story arcs across all 3 games, what the hell is it that makes people enjoy it so much? I’ve looked hard, I’ve played hard, and I just never found it.
What freedom? You can’t even choose how your character speaks when there are usually 2 options and they both sound the same.
