CYBERPUNK 2077 Delayed!!!

[R3L3NTL3SS]

Being honest, I had high hopes for this game but haven't been impressed by the gameplay I've seen so far. Hopefully the delay allows some improvements.

I also think first person was a mistake. What's the point of being a Cyperpunk body-modder type character and then never seeing your character except in menus? And this very likely won't stand up to a good FPS in terms of shooting mechanics or feel. Better to lean into the RPG and customization elements with 3rd person, IMO.

Haven't seen enough gameplay to even call it one way or another IMO.
But the trailers sure look absolutely incredible.

[gbullock32]

Haven't seen enough gameplay to even call it one way or another IMO.
But the trailers sure look absolutely incredible.

I don't want to say they can get away with 'meh' gameplay because their stories are amazing since it feels like cope, but the Witcher always had mediocre combat IMO.

[Destor]

Bonuses are made to be cut, game dev 101 when you miss a release date, unfortunately. Although the execs usually still get their multi million dollar payouts even if the dev team gets screwed.

I doubt they're not all doing minimum 60 hour weeks there, for all the noise that reeeeesetera makes about le evil crunch it's a necessary evil when dealing with the reality of developing a game, I can't imagine how crazy it must be trying to QA this one.

No doubt man, QA on a game like this must be imposing af. Especially with the amount of hype, people will be extremely critical after launch


I trust CDPR on the first-person end of things and believe they’ll do some awesome stuff with it, stuff that we can’t really appreciate yet. Not being able to see character customization in third person ain’t a big deal to me and is something other games have pulled off without too much backlash, Borderlands being one I can think of that has pretty extensive customization but is almost entirely first person.

[AlwaysFocuss]

fuuuck guys imagine all the stuff that can change in ur life from the time in between delays... can't wait for this chit but ill have 10 kids by then

[R3L3NTL3SS]

fuuuck guys imagine all the stuff that can change in ur life from the time in between delays... can't wait for this chit but ill have 10 kids by then

Lmao, literally what's going on in my head since they announced this delay. (Not kids though. Got 3 and I'm snipped so that's done.)

But yeah...

"What if I die before then?"

[2RDEYE]

wtf u guys are making me paranoid

[doughnutking]

Gentlemen, September will come around quickly and you will all get to play it (as long as you don't die from coronavirus) so relax.

[R3L3NTL3SS]

Gentlemen, September will come around quickly and you will all get to play it (as long as you don't die from coronavirus) so relax.

Dunno. From the first release date announcement until now sure crawled by. And we aren't even to the first release date given of April...so yeah...September isn't exactly right around the corner.

[Muzzlrpress]

Gentlemen, September will come around quickly and you will all get to play it (as long as you don't die from coronavirus) so relax.

Lol, that's on the back half of the year.

[nkiritsis13]

Although this might seem like a non sequitur, bear with me for a moment, but I happened to watch a Digital Foundry interview with the executive producer and studio director at id discussing Doom Eternal that broached a few topics that had me thinking about the delay:

Spoiler!

Around the 3:20 mark, they brought up the possibility of ray tracing integration, and he notes that they experimented with implementation about a year ago, but with so much still left to do, they pulled back on that to instead pursue releasing the game as close to on time as possible and to the highest degree of quality.

This was something I had actually forgot about as it pertains to CdProjektRed, who is partnered with Nvidia to implement ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077. Another aspect to the delay could very well be in a similar vein to what the id studio director said in regards to trying to meet time tables and nailing the quality of what they already have going on.

Ray tracing is still in an early phase right now, with it being limited to often gimmicky situations for a variety of reasons at the moment, with the limited availability and current state of RT-capable hardware being the primary quandary. Current RTX cards are the only available option, with only the highest tiers being the most equipped to handle it without massive performance hits elsewhere, which in turn realistically translates into lower demand until it is more widely adopted.

Nvidia's next gen GPUs are not out quite yet, so while this is at least some potential reprieve for waiting consumers, it also means CDPR has to optimize for the current ray tracing capabilities, as well as likely including headroom for what the next round of RTX cards will be capable of handling. That also means being able to possibly run ray tracing features on the next generation consoles, which are also not out and with no console precedent to work from.

There is also a brief mention of next gen consoles, but they're planning something to maintain the fidelity for the higher standards expected on new hardware. The video author goes with his own hypothesis that developers will update them with patches, which we saw a similar approach with the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X enhancements.

6 minutes in is what really caught my attention though, was a specific note about the Switch version being handled by Panic Button, who also worked on the Doom and Wolfenstein II Switch ports, and how they are also helping along with the base game as well. This detail strikes me as a particularly interesting parallel to the situation with CDPR and QLOC, with both having larger developers teaming up with studios who deal with porting to lower spec hardware.

Perhaps a key difference (we don't really know) is that id's engine is able to scale very well as mentioned in the video, but we don't know (1) how Doom Eternal will specifically scale down, i.e. what it has to turn down or sacrifice to hit reasonable benchmarks depending on hardware, and (2) how Red Engine will perform the same with Cyberpunk.

Finally, he talks about increasing the scale of the game and optimizing the worlds to handle these now larger worlds, with his design team would always try to go bigger, resulting in the engine team having to figure out how to work call things unseen or enable and disable things on the fly constantly to focus on what is in front of the player.

As an aside, factoring in these larger world with more complex AI, I have to imagine that it takes a toll on the processing component, which is another mark against the current gen systems.

Anyway, if we apply a similar enough mindset to Cyberpunk's development with more complex, denser worlds, advanced scripting and AI, and all of that good stuff, they would have naturally run into a similar chase with optimizing the Red Engine to run on currently available hardware. That is less of an issue for PCs, especially with how they have a range of user end customization options and the capacity to be upgraded, but the current consoles have no such luxuries, yet still have to somehow run games that are increasing in demands despite their stagnancy.

CDPR saying rumors that it runs like chit on consoles aren't true. Still sticking to what they said originally that they're just polishing and finalizing things.


K...

I have a hard time believing that a game that was set to release in 3 months suddenly needs 5 additional months on top of that for the sake of polishing things up.

I'm skeptical on that as well, although elterrible987 is right about these companies not sputtering out delay notices every other month.

I can't blame anyone for doing the same since constant delays would put people on edge, and likewise, admitting that delays were in place to get the game functioning on 7 year old, glorified mobile APUs would be awkward for everyone.

Again, this is why pre-orders set so early are so inane: even the developers don't really know when the game is going to release, let alone how well it can even run on the lowest hardware, but go ahead and let people reserve their spots for random drops to 15 frames per second.

A combination of factors seems most reasonable, although I would be shocked if the delay was not in some way related to trying to mash the game into an acceptable range for an original Xbox One or PS4.

Being honest, I had high hopes for this game but haven't been impressed by the gameplay I've seen so far. Hopefully the delay allows some improvements.

I also think first person was a mistake. What's the point of being a Cyperpunk body-modder type character and then never seeing your character except in menus? And this very likely won't stand up to a good FPS in terms of shooting mechanics or feel. Better to lean into the RPG and customization elements with 3rd person, IMO.

While I've grown to really enjoy the 3rd person perspective, the one problem I can see is because we're in a cramped, cyberpunk, urban environment, navigating during hectic combat would probably be a nightmare to make functional and remotely fluid. We'd likely end up with something stilted and overly reliant on canned actions like Deus Ex where your gluing yourself to walls just to not get gunned down.

If I had to guess, they probably went with this direction because the setting favors guns, which 1st person accommodates extremely for immersion and producing satisfying gameplay. Contrast that to 3rd person, which can be exception for more melee combat oriented games not only for the better view to compensate for situational awareness that would be unavailable in 1st person, but seeing the animations play out in 3rd person helps deliver a degree of weight that 1st person games never deliver.

With shooters, how the character handles the gun in their hands, recoils from discharging the weapon, reloads, and all of those other more "intimate" details that provide their own punch and weightiness.

One aspect of the cyber modding that will benefit the most from being in 1st person is all of the additional overlays and visual queues that make you feel like you, say, added an ocular implant or retinal addon of some sort. Seeing that firsthand as though through eyes can at least be done creatively to enhance immersion, whereas 3rd person has a tendency to feel like another Witcher sense/Arkham/Assassin's Creed "vision" filter.

From the gameplay footage they've shown, the visual overlays fit the atmosphere so perfectly that I can't help but see it as finally immersing us into a cyberpunk world in video game form that would not be the same if the combat was third person. For example, seeing the map in the corner of your eye knowing that you're in a cyberpunk setting sort of clicks, whereas having a floating map constantly in the corner of your screen while walking around definitely creates a different sensation. I would go so far as to say that one additional reason to avoid that on CDPR's part is to avoid that particular "gamey" nuance that I can imagine many people would immediately connect to something like, "oh, this is Grand Theft Auto but cyberpunk."

Core gameplay aside, I really hope they do as VTheKing suggested with an additional button to switch to 3rd person for non-combat scenarios like just walking around the city. While the things I mentioned apply to gameplay during combat or even cutscenes (helps not to have to animate customized faces talking), you're absolutely right about everything else that concerns the rest of your customization. How you look and dress is also such an integral part to the setting that would feel grossly shortchanged if restricted to brief snippets in, say, the occasional reflection.

I don't want to say they can get away with 'meh' gameplay because their stories are amazing since it feels like cope, but the Witcher always had mediocre combat IMO.

The Witcher 2 stole my interest the moment it started... and then I started playing.



Although with Cyberpunk, I'm fairly confident in their gameplay this time around because it looks very fluid and well structured, especially for an RPG.

I suppose one aspect is how with a typical fantasy RPG, you can sort of fudge combat a little more because they typically emphasis melee engagements, which is further assisted by featuring armor. We can suspend our disbelief that a knight took several blows to kill because plate armor isn't made of cardboard (as opposed to in movies...).

Then there are RPGs that involve guns that almost seem like they didn't bother to even try to make decent gun combat (Fallout, Outer Worlds). Despite how there is no longer that suspension of disbelief because we're talking about firearms and what not, it's not impossible to at least make the gunplay fun if games like Borderlands exist.

But Cyberpunk's gameplay looks legitimately good for a strictly action game, never mind an RPG.