CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14) • Hacker News Board

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#431

Post by Aunche » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

pojzon wrote: post #38

_cs2017_ wrote: post #27

Wasn't it obvious to anyone who play-tested on last-gen consoles that the game is nearly unplayable and so will receive horrendous reviews? Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management. So why did the management still decide to go ahead with the release this year? After reading this transcript, I didn't find the answer to these questions. "Underestimated the scale and complexity…

CDPR is owned in 66% by investors. And investors want ROI and there is nothing better than holiday season for that. They also knew about how bad the game runs on PS4 and released it either way because “money>everything”. Its really that simple.

Blaming investors underplays how much CDPR messed up. Basically all AAA games are funded by investors, so it's not an excuse for a bad release.

Investors were told that the game would release in April, which is why many of them invested in the company in the first place. It's reasonable to expect them to finish 7 months later.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#432

Post by cbozeman » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

winrid wrote: post #427

cbozeman wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So fortunately I've never played any open-world game except for Skyrim, which just didn't really hold my interest... or maybe it was the fact I lost my save game due to a faulty SSD, I dunno. At any rate, I love this game. I love the story. I love Night City. I love the graphics. I won't lie and say I'm a huge Cyberpunk pen & paper fan; I'm not. I knew more about Shadowrun than Cyberpunk, and that was from the old SN…

Sure, maybe it will be a great game in six months. But you don't buy a new car and say "in six months this is going to be a great car" - you have expectations when you put the money down...

> But you don't buy a new car and say "in six months this is going to be a great car"

Sure you do, because we're moving to a new type of reality whereby software is a determinant of features. A lot of people haven't gotten the memo on this yet though.

All Tesla vehicles ship with everything necessary for Autopilot, all the hardware and sensors. If you want to turn it on, you just unlock it with software. Tesla vehicles also get feature updates regularly.

Computer hardware has been this way for awhile. NVIDIA specifically has a history of improving the performance of their GPUs simply with new driver updates, in some cases with ridiculous performance gains on the order of 7-10%. Just from software optimization.

A video game is purely software, so the optimization limits are truly limited only by the hardware upon which it is run and stored.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#433

Post by arugulum » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

_qwfv wrote: post #321

ineedasername wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* it's not really cyberpunk* Having read a bunch of great (and not so great) cyberpunk fiction from the 80's & 90's, that's actually a theme that really shines through here for me. Crazy cybernetics & brain/computer interfaces, hacking, drugs, weird AI doing things like running a transport/security company with some splinter groups that have existential crisis... I really get that original cyberpunk vibe.

Your main character says not all cops are bastards. Strong punk energy. eyeroll It's extremely a game that is pastiche of cyberpunk, diving neither into the cyber nor punk beyond skinning things. Where's the Ghost in the Shell examination of the self? Where's the dive into what it means to have modifiable bodies? Where's the anti-establishment story (oh wait, the game opens with praise of the cops by multiple charact…

>Your main character says not all cops are bastards.

IIRC this comment was made when you're on a quest and partnered with probably the one good cop on the force, who was also suspended for doing his job. The quest started based on the incompetence of the police leading to him needing to ask V for help to pursue the case. And the comment was made in reference to this one guy you're trying to help out. Meanwhile the next quest V will matter-of-factly state that the cops can't be trusted to handle so-and-so issue.

So please don't take lines out of their context.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#434

Post by tomc1985 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:26 AM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #343

ineedasername wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* it's not really cyberpunk* Having read a bunch of great (and not so great) cyberpunk fiction from the 80's & 90's, that's actually a theme that really shines through here for me. Crazy cybernetics & brain/computer interfaces, hacking, drugs, weird AI doing things like running a transport/security company with some splinter groups that have existential crisis... I really get that original cyberpunk vibe.

It has the vibe (aesthetics), like most modern "cyberpunk" works. The tech, hacking, drugs, and weird AI were mostly the setting for the main themes of corporate power and how technology enabled new forms of control/manipulation. When an article compared William Gibson's visions to Second Life, he rejected the notion explicitly[1]: But as Gully Jimson says, in The Horse's Mouth, "It wasn't the vision I had." Neither…

Don't worry, after a few twists and turns the story becomes very, very cyberpunky. But there's a large gap until that happens. I think of it as an 8-hour long tutorial.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#435

Post by esyir » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:29 AM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #377

willis936 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes. You can see the global illumination ray traced lighting specular reflections off of the face of a T-posed one-line-of-dialog hooker.

The game looks way better than pre-release marketing footage [0], which gets zero recognition and only a bunch of hate. Meanwhile when Ubisoft releases yet another "Doesn't look anything like the marketing footage", usually also crunched into existence, people just shrug it off. In that context it's really weird how everybody seems to be dog-piling on CDPR right now for the most weird reasons, when otherwise they hav…

I'd say that it feels like someone in the media has an axe to grind here. CDPR's policies seem like above average for the admittedly dismal field of game development, but they're drawing particular flack, especially when other companies with worse treatment conditions (naughty dog) instead get lionized.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#436

Post by arugulum » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:31 AM UTC

panopticon wrote: post #400

Jarolis wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an RPG, not a tactical sim shooter. What's with this criticism?

Being an RPG doesn't nullify this criticism if combat is a primary game mechanic. Deus Ex is an action RPG, and they did combat (both stealth and gunplay) much better than Cyberpunk.

>Being an RPG doesn't nullify this criticism if combat is a primary game mechanic.

It does, because a common running theme in RPGs is that you get stronger as the game progresses, and in Cyberpunk, by the middle of the game every character build (melee, stealth, guns) easily dismantles enemies. It is only early-game where the enemies seem difficult because your character hasn't had their skill-trees built up yet.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#437

Post by sdenton4 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #382

willis936 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TW3. CDPR dropped the ball (though not quite this hard) but pulled through within a year. No Man’s Sky missed that target but still managed to eventually have a (supposedly) decent product. Ask the average gamer how they feel about No Man’s Sky. Most other big budget case studies either completely failed, were decent within a year, or shipped in a complete state.

Wasn't just TW3, pretty much every Witcher game had issues on release that where fixed over the following time period trough a combination of patching, free DLC and paid DLC, ultimately culminating in the enhanced editions. In that context CDPR has a very positive track record many people just flat out ignore; I've seen people on Reddit claim the game is an "unfixable mess" and how CDPR will just "cut their losses" b…

Yeah, for giant open world games I kinda just expect a year of bugs before it's actually pretty dialed in... Bethesda has done a lot of work to lower expectations in this genre.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#438

Post by arminiusreturns » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

I'm going to skip telling about all the bugs I have run into, so I'll just get down to what I think happened here.

Two primary things:

One) They targeted consoles when they shouldn't have. Cyberpunk is a game that should have been pc only first, and then later ported to consoles. They had a hammer (the engine) and saw nails (consoles), but in the game dev world the largest sets of complications come from trying to support different environments. The same can be said often in the normal software world, trying to be cross compatible when sometimes thats the wrong thing to do. When you do the math, targeting consoles, and especially if you go for last gen, the beancounter numbers show the ROI increase over just pc or just pc and latest gen are very high... and then instead of the development resources that should have gone into the AI, customization, bug-squashing, etc, go into console work.

Two) They focused too much on building the individual quests instead of the emergent opportunities which abound. It seems like they spent too much time on hand crafting quest levels, especially the ones that involved Silverhand. Many quests have their own complete loaded levels you can't get to from the main game world. By doing so, they probably wasted tons of tester and dev hours on those individual levels instead of the open game world bugs and features.

I suspect also that quite a few features just got ripped out and replaced with placeholders while the bugs get worked out more. There is no way the AI they touted so long ago is really in this state, for example, so I suspect if you give it half a year, lots of expected features will suddenly start showing up in updates and the game will end up in a much better state.

All in all, I enjoy the game world, and it has moments where it really shines. It also has madness inducing and show stopping bugs that most normal players just won't put up with... (~100+ proc kills/game freezes to finish main story line on linux/proton).

Why do beancounters always ruin everything they touch? What should have been one of the best games ever released was one of the best releases to ever money.

Two years from now it will be primo, I'm sure. The question is will there be enough backlash to change anything? Given the amount of money they made and are still making, I doubt it. Different industry, same bullshit as everywhere else.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#439

Post by tomc1985 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:34 AM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #403

nkohari wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, this comes across as hipsterism. I know it's trendy to hate on the game right now, but c'mon. How much of the game have you played? The entire main quest is about transhumanism and corporate control. Cyberpsychosis and the Maelstrom are used as a means for examining the results of the overuse of body modification. Just like the Cyberpunk RPG, it was very heavily inspired by Gibson's work, and I mean that in a goo…

I think that cyber psychos are a really tired way to translate an old tabletop game mechanic into a story beat. What's more interesting -- amputees and disabled folks go BERSERK when they get treatment, or what if we escaped the bounds of the human form. Why does this game have such an extremely boring view of what humanity could be if you had access to mods. Gender, race, body type, even the configuration of limbs a…

Step into the shoes of almost any past futurist and you'll find that humanity usually took the boring, predictable route, technologically. There is an inherent cynicism in the setting that needs to shine through as a fundamental part of the genre's identity.

Also, it's only 57 years in the future. You're not going to advance that much in that time. Personally I think the aesthetic seems a little too trapped in 80s retrofuturism -- I guess I agree with Gibson there -- but that was always the interpretation of cyberpunk and scifi that I liked the most so it gets a pass.

There is plenty of whimsical, optimistic visions into the future, and while I think a setting that explores "high tech, low life" in that context would be cool to see, it'd feel a lot closer to Star Wars than "cyberpunk".

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#440

Post by esyir » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 7:37 AM UTC

nynx wrote: post #362

setpatchaddress wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty happy with it (on a high-spec PC). I've never seen a great interstitial "hacker" interface in a game. Unless you go full Shenzhen I/O, it has to be simplified into meaninglessness. I wonder if some people just prefer dirt and elves and magic to steel and glass. I like Witcher 3 well enough, but it's not a world I want to spend endless time in. I see the charm, but I'm not that interested in that world. Sha…

Ha! I'd love if a big game like this had Shenzhen I/O style hacking.

Well, we're dev-enriched here. I think the mainstream gamer population would not be nearly as pleased. After all, Factorio and it's ilk eats people like us.