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313 hours in Cyberpunk
Preem.
I can't wait for opinions on Cyberpunk to completely flip again after GTA6 releases and has a properly working sandbox. The cop system update has drastically improved it but they're still missing so much. Imagine if it had actually tried to be good instead of just pretty.
Pretty sure opinions on it will flip back and forth frequently. Everyone clearly wants to like it but it just doesn't meet the expectations.
Clearly needs a sort of gang war system, and the cops are just another gang that's hovering over the other gangs. And... idk.
I think it would be a shame for the map to go to waste though, it's a pretty big high detail map (with not much to do in it).
Gang war and various obvious world interactions. Corpo citizens should have insurance with Trauma Team, their injury should result in a Trauma Team callout involving extreme violence. There should be private fire services that fight one another for fires in the city. There should be significantly more potential random interactions with world and city. Just expand the sandbox. Should Trauma Team meet cops getting in their way? What happens? Private corporations and cops? Different groups and how they interact. All of them should have different responses and different possible outcomes depending on what they randomly encounter in the world while going about their primary duties. The more of these things you add the more interesting and spicy any world things become for the player as emergent gameplay outcomes start occurring.
Add random crimes to the world too. Someone robs a civilian, what happens? How do other civilians react to it? How does the nearby gang react? How do the cops react? Trauma Team? Fire people? Etc etc etc. Different things for different crimes. Random corpo things too.
Right now they're just events at designated places in the world. It's a diorama. A very very pretty diorama waiting for you to interact with it. It doesn't live, it doesn't do its own thing.
You stand in a street in GTA or RDR and let the world go by and random shit starts happening when interactions kick off. A fender bender turns into a homicide turns into a shoot out with the police turns into ambulances showing up and so on and so forth. This shit seems trivial but it really gives life to the world and stops everything feeling like a bunch of cardboard cutouts neatly arranged into scenes.
There should be private fire services that fight one another for fires in the city.
Love this. They really should have leaned into the Snow Crash side of the genre more.
It would be so funny to see a car pileup occur, fires break out in the cars, multiple fire services show up and then proceed to have a massive shootout with each other over claiming the fire and rescue for themselves. In the meantime any civilians caught in the shootout that get wounded start triggering traumateam callouts. Literally all hell breaks loose. Trauma Team goes to war with all the fire services. Top tier of militarised police get called out. Shit seriously goes down.
This is the kind of emergent world gameplay that COULD exist in a cyberpunk city setting. You can make that shit absolutely complete and total mayhem and it fits the world.
Don't forget having News crews show up. They don't have to do anything other than just be a presence.
Have the local gang come put the fires out while the private fire services fight each other to the death lmao. Cementing why local people put up with having the gang around as they generally benefit the residents more than the cops or city services.
None of this is in there because cdpr are a bunch of PiS voters that collectively can't decide whether the setting is aspirational or atrocious. So these horrific ideas of the kind of hell the city should be don't fit their team's ideology.
You could do some really cool shit with sex workers and various NPCs at the bottom of society too that could all be emergent but there's just no passion to do anything with it that isn't directly in a quest.
Just little vignettes like that were one really obvious thing that was missing. There were a handful of places where you could see like the cops at a scene or the apartment down the hall with the guy on the ground, but there were only a few of those and they never changed; that same guy was still down on the ground in the hallway days or weeks later. Making things happen that have nothing to do with the player is a great way to make the world feel alive, and there are so many fun options for that in a cyberpunk setting.
but there were only a few of those and they never changed; that same guy was still down on the ground in the hallway days or weeks later
Yeah exactly. That shit ends up making it feel like a model train set. Beautiful and well made but not alive. Just a carefully crafted scene.
Yeah, I agree. I honestly don't think these things would be that hard to code or intense on your computer either.
They're not, they just fucked around or prioritised other things thinking that they could coast by on the same formula that Witcher 3 had. The thing is that the diorama works fine in Witcher 3 because the player has no expectation of how a dark fantasy village should work as a sandbox. It's just a bunch of small village people milling about. Works fine. More or less the same for the medieval city too. The shallowness of the world doesn't hurt it.
A modern setting though? And with expectations of the genre? You can't claim to be making AAA and then not really meet the standards that even small studios have met.
also needs stuff to actually do in the world. it's basically pointless. it sucks cause it's an amazing world, but lack of anything to do and just all the NPCs looking copy/pasted makes it lame. altho i will say with lack of shit to do i definitely spent a lot more time finding my own shit to do, trying to get into areas you're not meant to etc
Eh, they're trying to do different things. Cyberpunk is more about the narrative and first person combat, while GTA will be more about the sandbox and a horrendous microtransaction-riddled multiplayer mode.
Having played Cyberpunk quite a bit both before (2 full playthroughs) and after (Phantom Liberty + a bit of messing around) the big update that "fixed" cops, it didn't really make a difference. Sure, cops won't teleport behind you, but just like before there is no reason to ever interact with the cops because they don't give you loot, XP, or money. Getting a wanted level was always just a random accident due to either accidentally hitting a cop car while driving somewhere or a stray bullet hitting a civilian.
For what it's worth I'd still consider Cyberpunk to be bad, but it's better than GTA5 because at least the implied setting is interesting.
I don't know why people are still so keen to hate on Cyberpunk. It's actually pretty fun. I've always likened it to Oblivion: not at all what was promised and janky as hell, but still very fun and engrossing and charming in its own way. It's dripping with flavor, even if it tends on the shallower side.
Expectations. It was sold as a next gen, with features that still aren't in the game yet like car modding. The audience basically ended up led to believe it was going to be Rockstar tier and well, we both know GTA5 is significantly beyond it at a technical level, let alone RDR2. It didn't even launch with basic open world city stuff that was established way back in GTA3.
Had expectations been managed differently and people led to expect Witcher 3 but in first person with reasonable gunplay but not top tier then the reaction would've been way different. It's fun for what it is, but you can't get back the fact people wanted and believed it would be something significantly more.
Hence my Oblivion comparison. Yes, I know it's nothing like they promised. I'm still going to play it for hundreds of hours and mod it until it breaks because I enjoy the flavor and I'm having fun.
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