In the gamer spaces I've been before the launch, everyone have this "siege" mentality where they preemptively assumes that any kind of criticism must have come from "journos" and SJWs who wants to tear down the game for not conforming to an "agenda". Like the whole epilepsy thing where capital Gs lost their shit to a benign advisory.
Browsing the cyberpunk sub is a treat. still going to pirate it tho
Game is pretty fun from what I've gotten to play so far. Which only solidified my opinion that games are fun but g*mers suck. It depends on the community, for some reason the PS4 subreddit was pretty decent, but most online discourse about video games really fucking sucks.
There was a point that I realized that the cars and pedestrians have no ai beyond basic collision avoidance and it all kinda snapped into place what CDPR had done. Also I'm posting all over the subreddit about how this wouldn't have happened with a publicly owned game studio and getting some traction.
There's also a surprising amout of racists, one guy just said CDPR proved they're no different from the other greedy Polaks and called me a SJW for calling him a racist shitheel lol. Also claimed you can't be racist towards Polish people...R*ddit is a shithole.
This game made me realize that cdpr don't have the technical talent appropriate for an open world game. They did the same trick with most of the NPCs in Witcher 3, it's just less obvious when the open world is there to get you do go around slaying monsters, and isn't meant to be a large city centered around the NPCs. Also wtf happened to the writing? TW3 was beloved because it had a ton of interesting and we'll written sideplots. So far the main story is just a bunch of cliches glued together and the side stories and other tasks have been so shallow that I'm considering them as grind and putting on a podcast.
Overall it's fun because I'm kind of a sucker for rpg-fps hybrids, but it manages to simultaneously highlight the studios weakest point and reveal that their strengths may have been a fluke.
Yeah, the writing is just inscrutable sometimes. Like the opening sequences have you at different positions with other characters, but after you wake up in the dump it all just snaps into the game. Like Delamain goes from a hired cab ride that's a look at the capitalist hellscape that is Night City ("I can't take you to a doctor, you already prepaid for a trip to the motel, I will dispose of your body though") to like your best friend when you wake up with Keanu with no explanation. Meanwhile basically every side character in Witcher had at least a small sidequest associated with learning about them or an entry in the codex or flavor text in a well designed area that usually could tell you a bit about the character just from the layout.
The Keanu thing had an explanation, it was just nonsensical. Like Keanu's character was put in the relic as a form of eternal punishment, but for some reason they gave him the nanotech and made it that he overrides the consciousness of whoever he's inserted into? Giving him a corporeal form and essentially immortality doesn't seem like what they had in mind. Although maybe later in the game they'll reveal that the scientist who vanished is on his side so I won't complain about that part yet.
And you make a good point with Delamain, they ruin their own valid critiques in order to start a fetch quest. Although the quest setup does contain its own criticism, i.e. that replacing workers with an AI carries its own risks.
The story feels like it was written by a dozen different people that weren't communicating with each other.
The publicly owned game studio argument sounds interesting let’s hear it
The reason CDPR pushed out the game early is because their shareholders are spooked by Covid and are worried that a recession will kill the games industry so they wanted to get it out before Christmas.
A publicly owned games company wouldn't need to answer to shareholders in the same way. They also wouldn't treat their employees like shit like CDPR has been. State employees would also have a game dev union that would allow the actual developers to have negotiating power not just for their own salary, but also for the direction of the game.
There's also the public domain aspect, the game would be released directly to public domain and whatever engine they made would have to be open source so modding would be insanely easy and if the game was broken or had issues it could be maintained by the fans without hacky solutions.
Open sourcing a big AAA game would also create a great community for people to get together and learn how the games work. Think about how the open source community is so good at coming together and teaching people things. This would be the same, but for game development wothout the need for purchasing an expensive license to get access to dev tools.
I also threw in the "and America could have all this for 0.01% of our military budget" ($700Million/year).
Very based comrade