Most games end up GTA and it’s annoying as fuck. I liked the idea of Watchdogs but once I got it it was just GTA with some hacking. Can I have something like a hacking game the doesn’t rely on guns and driving and possibly is more stealth and clever shit? Nah. I guess not.
1 Like
I wish it was more like Deus Ex, too, but I would settle for more like GTA. That game had a lot of good design.
yeah, and i mean big publishers like microsoft set up their holidays years in advance. and it’s stupid. it seems like it’d be better to slow burn multiple possible winners and pick them up when they’re ready. that seems to be nintendo’s in-house route.
i wonder if places like cdpr have pressure from investors to release on certain dates so people can get their returns? i noticed their stock peaked the day before release and tanked immediately after
it is a maddening industry, with way too much overtime and randomly canceled projects. i keep a toe in because i do love getting to work with people of so many different skill sets and talents. i can’t abide full-time work anymore though
[ edit to add: ]
^ this is what i suspect about cp77. they probably started off with the idea of a futuristic witcher, or a gta witcher and they probably only recently figured out what that meant. but then had seven years of code to debug to get it out the door.
So also: Anthem
1 Like
It’s actually this one:
1 Like
Absolutely they did. I’ve worked at a bunch of public and a bunch of private game developers, and without a doubt the public ones make worse quality decisions in order to hit quarterly numbers. As soon a developer goes public, their priorities completely shift, and the conversations in rooms with producers change entirely. It’s bizarre.
There’s another ship pressure that hasn’t been mentioned yet in this thread- company survival. I worked for a couple of smaller developers where we rushed the game out a bit because the company would go under if we didn’t. These games are a five year outlay of salaries and overhead for hundreds of engineers, artists, and designers. It’s a massive risk and many companies can’t carry that for long.
1 Like
that doesn’t say anything about the minute by minute gameplay, the way the controls work, whether to have cars and be able to drive them, how misisons work, how big a city is needed, how many npcs and how the interactions work, what the ui should look like, etc.
there’s an infinite number of implementations possible while still being faithful to the tabletop game
1 Like
I’m not sure I’ve played any game and said ‘Im sure glad Bethesda made this’ for that matter 
This is an interesting point. Bethesda games are deep and while they’re buggy they’re playable. This is mostly just buggy. Yesterday I was counting myself thankful if I could get through a scene without noticing something weird happening.
I did mention it myself in my own words but it still bears repeating, especially since you actually have experience in the field you’re able to explain it more clearly 
I have read interviews and articles about companies that released games that were messes just because they needed to release something in order to have enough money to start work on the next project or two.
Definitely! It’s really amazing how much overhead is involved in these games. I worked at one place that had three floors in a high-rise in a fancy neighborhood, around 500 employees, and was by all appearances a very successful company. Yet really, we were living project to project. All that infrastructure was the minimum needed to produce a AAA console game, and as soon as we had a substantial failure, the company went under. When outsiders would ask me about this stuff, they were always stunned that it takes 300 people five years to make one of these games. They think it’s much easier than that.
I think this is why originality is basically dead in this space. Everything is Call of Honor Medal Duty Part 12 or a GTA clone. When you’re putting the company on the line with every release, it has to be a guaranteed success, so you get very cautious with the design. You do stuff you know will probably sell okay, at least.
All the really interesting stuff is being done in indie and premium mobile now (not free-to-play mobile- those games are awful).
4 Likes
I wouldn’t neccisarily call them deep, these days at least. They’re big. But their sort of ground zero for expansive but vacant spaces and lots of side quests that are fairly linear and similar.
There’s a lot of map, and a lot of locations to visit. But the most you’ll find in the bulk of them is a few crafting materials, or a single block of text to read. Maybe there will some of that environmental story telling they get called out for. But most of the time it boils down “I have seen the skellington in this single room cabin/cave”.
There’s tons of side quests, including strings of quests for factions and companions. But they’re often simple go here, do that type quests. With the that more and more often being “kill” or collecting something. There’s plenty of good stuff in there. But overall there’s just a lot. The bulk of it a lot more perfunctory than the good stuff.
I tend to think of depth in this context as filling out the stuff you have. Longer more involved side quests. Locations with more going on.
You can compare it to a series like Dishonored. Which comes from the same parent company/publisher has a lot of mechanical similarities. And has a lot of the same exploration and environmental story telling at it’s heart.
It’s hub based, and individual maps are pretty small. But they’re intensely layered, with a large amount of individual floors/layers, entrances and exits. Out of the way cubbies and hidden areas. With individual buildings often having multiple things to find or do in them. And many such places packed into each distinct area in a given map, multiple areas in each map. Additional stuff becoming accessable with successive visits.
Side quests are relatively few, but they vary. Usually tie into or impact the main plot mission they occur during. Those main missions are well embedded in the environment, have multiple threads in them. Many ways to approach them, and multiple potential outcomes.
There’s only one or two kinds of equipment, they vary a lot, and their utility is distinct and immediate. There’s only two resources to collect, and they have immediate obvious uses. It’s either money for upgrades or food for health. The “collectables” or “secrets” to seek out have a distinct purpose, since they drive character advancement by unlocking points for the RPG system. And there’s like 1 of those.
They’re considerably smaller games than the Elder Scrolls or Fallout series. But what’s there is densely packed, and more complex. In terms of multiple steps, multiple approaches, the way they’re tied together.
It’s the same sort of thing Witcher 3 managed to pull off, although on a much larger map. And not all of it fit that mold. I think maybe they took the wrong lesson from their success there. Cause even before problems and delays became apparent a lot of the marketing was all about bigger and more with Cyberpunk. The map is bigger than the Witcher 3, there will be more features and so forth. And like Bethesda there are apparently auto-generating quests up in there now.
Vis a vis @VeronicaConnor 's point about scoping down. It really seems like this sort of scale creep is the enemy of depth. Just cause there’s no way there’s enough time or resources to fill all that space and time. With open world games and RPGs map size and playable hours are still huge marketing points.
We’ve seem multiple large open world and RPG devs follow that through to grindsville, and eventually a failed release.
3 Likes
if this was a subtle joke referring to how fallout was based on GURPS (though modified after the deal fell through for some reason), it’s brilliant. but yeah, it’s actually based on Cyberpunk 2020.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
