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)

#551

Post by xiphias2 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

Guthur wrote: post #54

Merman_Mike wrote: post #8

> Hi, this is Michał Nowakowski – the second question; would having more developers help deliver the game on old-gens? In terms of delivering the game at a certain point, it’s really not about the number of people; it’s not like throwing in – in the last month – 200 or so people would actually help. So, the answer is no; this is not related to the fact that we could have thrown 300 or 500 more people into the fray an…

I've come up with what I think is reasonably relateble analogy. If I want to build a 1000 brick wall and it takes a bricklayer 1 sec to lay a brick will getting 1000 brick layers allow me to build the wall in 1 sec? If you analyse this analogy you see where you might be able to get some scale, such as pipeline and starting on different parts, but it highlights challenges there such as alignment and communication.

Maybe the speedup is not linear, but thinking back to the hospital built in a few days in Wuhan, you can speed up building by employing lots of people.

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

#552

Post by baud147258 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 11:57 AM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #394

blihp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think for a second that employees 'are not afraid to convey such bad news'. Between the massive years-long hype, delays and bad press about crunch time around the title, not to mention being the most lucrative time of year for a game release, it's very likely that management egos were fully engaged in this release. When that happens reality is no longer driving, or even on, the bus. There may have been one or t…

I heard an interesting take: that CDPR knew that this would happen, but had to choose between "missing the holidays" and "launching even though it's broken" and decided the latter was just less of a problem.

perhaps they didn't have the choice of not launching, money-wise?

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

#553

Post by neuronic » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 11:58 AM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #383

zemo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management. it seems pretty clear that they're terribly abusive employers, so if anything I would assume the opposite is true: that it's an environment where the QA staff is chronically underpaid, lives in perpetual fear of dismissal, and is told that working on the biggest game ever is the honor of a lifetime.

> it seems pretty clear that they're terribly abusive employers How so? They changed the revenue based bonuses to be paid out regardless of review averages [0]. They at least tried to make a commitment to less crunch, while over at Rockstar the amount of crunch for RDR2 was something the co-founder publicly bragged about [1]. Now people on forums are citing RDR2 as an example for "How to make a great open world game!…

But crunch has little to do with the state of the game right now. It's a fundamentally broken game, still fun, lots of positive points as well and with a great main quest line. You can see the effort and love (on PC).

But several critical components of the system seem like placeholders. Especially AI in all its forms is really bad (combat, driving, NPCs).

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

#554

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 11:59 AM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #542

Hamuko wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also knew about how bad the game runs on PS4 If by "they" you mean investors, I'm not sure if that's correct. > CD Projekt joint-CEO Adam Kaciński has praised Cyberpunk 2077's performance on PS4 and Xbox One in an investor call. > Speaking earlier this week on Wednesday (and transcribed by Seeking Alpha), Kaciński said that Cyberpunk 2077's performance on the base PS4 and Xbox One consoles is "surprisingly goo…

Of course by "surprisingly good" he meant "I'm surprised it runs at all" and everyone else heard "it runs great".

[deleted]

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

#555

Post by madeofpalk » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 12:05 PM UTC

_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…

> Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management.

I do not think this is a safe assumption to make. You're assuming each person passes this higher and higher up in the chain for a decision to be made.

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

#556

Post by washadjeffmad » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 12:07 PM UTC

Rapzid wrote: post #169

frakkingcylons wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDPR is paying their staff the full bonus for Cyberpunk 2077 due to the circumstances of the release. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/cd-projek...

Probably need them to stay and fix the bugs instead of rage quitting when their bonuses are withheld likely because decisions made outside their control.

I felt like management withheld the bonuses to get them to stay on to finish the game. Major patches have already been promised for Jan and Feb because it's basically early access quality, and I bet more than a few devs are ready to walk away.

I know if tensions were high after a long crunch and I just got a big payout before a major family holiday, I'd need some convincing to go back in.

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

#557

Post by alias_neo » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 12:09 PM UTC

mypalmike wrote: post #544

alias_neo wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll reserve final judgement for when the PS5 version comes out, but aside from 60FPS, the current build looks like crap on PS5. It runs sub 1080p most of the time, lighting and shadows are horrific, it's technically speaking the worst looking PS4 game I've played, including on an actual PS4. Visually in terms of atmosphere it looks great, if you can see through the low resolution and terrible LOD. I believe they can…

> runs sub 1080p most of the time Does it change resolution as you play?

In theory it's using DRS (Dynamic Resolution Scaling) but I've never seen it change to a "good" resolution.

The 1.04 patch improved things but many textures are extremely poor while others right next to them are sharp and clear. For example, a building or railing texture will be good, but a dumpster or any other object which isn't fixed will be extremely low resolution. On the whole it's very soft and just gives a "blurry" or "out of focus" feel.

The result for me is eye strain as it feels like I'm always trying to focus on something that won't be focused.

Subjectively speaking, it _feels_ worse quality than a 1080p game when I was playing on PS4. I don't have any real evidence to back it up though.

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

#558

Post by niea_11 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 12:10 PM UTC

easton wrote: post #135

niea_11 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a maxim from the essay "The Mythical Man-Month" saying that adding people to a late software project makes it later. It takes time for new people to become productive, communication becomes difficult and some tasks can't be "parallelized". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

That wasn’t really the analyst’s question though. He wondered given the size and complexity of the game, should more people have been on the project from the ground floor (not added in the last month once they weren’t going to clear the bug tracker), or was it a organizational/management issue that they couldn’t get something good from the talent they had?

You are correct. I think that Nowakowski misunderstood the question, and assumed it's mainly about the delays.

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

#559

Post by canofbars » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 12:21 PM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #462

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has been very popular in gaming PCs for the last 3 years now. The Zen 2 release offered 99% of the gaming performance of an intel chip at a fraction of the cost and it completely blows away intel in non gaming workloads so its what most people picked unless spending an extra $300 for 2fps is your thing.

> The Zen 2 release offered 99% of the gaming performance of an intel chip Zen 2 is a good deal for it's overall versatility and particularly the amount of physical cores one gets for the amount of money paid. But gaming wise Zen 2 struggles to keep pace with any Intel CPU above the 10600k, particularly when the Intel's are overclocked, where they have much more headroom than both Zen 2 or Zen 3. Meaning that anybody…

>anybody who wanted maximum gaming performance, above all else, had pretty much no other choice except for Intel

Which means nothing for the vast majority of users since the cpu was far from holding them back which is why we have seen most pc builds include an AMD cpu for the last few years because very few people want to pay way more to get a slightly higher number in a specific benchmark and see nothing in reality for the money.

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

#560

Post by astrange » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 12:33 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #478

to11mtm wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not familiar with Polish labour law, but it could be that in Poland like in many other European countries concepts such as "denying overtime" are inherently illegal. Which explains why so many Ubisoft games are made in Canada...

No, the reason why so many Ubisoft games are made in Canada(and other studios as well, take a walk around central montreal, there's tonnes of games studios there) is that the Canadian government is giving out massive subsidies to the game industry to grow it there(last I've heard it's literally half of every salary - an absolutely ridiculous amount of money). If you compare the cost of having an employee in Canada to…

I’ve always thought it was interesting that video games are the only kind of software that’s often made outside big tech hubs - not to mention the only kind an ordinary person enjoys using enough to emulate!

Does Canada not subsidize other tech work? I’ve heard the pay at Blackberry was terrible for instance. The only good thing is that Canadians will be impressed if you call yourself a software engineer because they think you have an iron ring.