It's incredibly amusing how early marketing was blasted for presenting a game that appeared like Grand Theft Auto: 2077, when none of the technical and design backend has anything in common with the sandbox genre and struggles to accomplish even the most rudimentary facets of those games.
I will say, I think the NPC visual variety is excellent. The pool of mix-and-match assets being drawn from is enormous and while repeats exist (and are a technical inevitability) the actual variety of such theatrical and distinct looks seems pretty damn good to me.
But, as noted in other posts, the technical backend isn't there to accommodate an open world that in any way functions like a sandbox game. Having an entire city full of hand crafted NPCs numbering in the millions is just fucking insane to expect so I have no sympathy for people who thought that was going to happen. But the engine itself just isn't able to hold up a believably organic and dynamic city environment with the NPC algorithms as a core. Stuff like aggressive NPC culling, absolutely nothing in the ways of emergent or dynamic NPC events, and how cops spawn in the immediate vicinity instead of at a distant point out of view to give the illusion of arriving at the scene show how flimsy the backend is.
And the thing is you can get away with that fine in a game like The Witcher 3 that has relatively sparse population density by virtue of its open world setting and design. In The Witcher 3 you spend less time at a location, so the crude NPC animation cycles and basic roles work fine in making the town seem "alive" in a brief moment before you're gone. Novigrad density works fine as people walk around and commit to activities and events based on time of day and area of the city, but you can't attack anyone and you're always moving forward anyway. It's all window dressing but it works in the context of the game as it is.
Cyberpunk is built exactly like The Witcher 3, only the location doesn't compliment this direction. Instead it does the opposite; exposes the technical deficiencies and design limitations, resulting in overt sterility and absence of an organic, emergent population.
Like the most simple baseline in all sandbox games is maybe an NPC accidentally gets hit by a car or some shit, and medical professionals arrive. You'd think you'd have emergent events like that in Cyberpunk, where Trauma Team blasts down and the NPCs have their little emergent moments even if they'll all be respawned eventually and don't really matter. Or from another angle, the person who did the hit and run would have the cops chase after them followed by a shoot out. But absolutely none of that is there in Cyberpunk. None of the technical and design backend exists at all in how the NPCs are rendered, controlled, and integrated into the city.
And maybe that wasn't the intention. But again, by virtue of setting that limitation, if directional choice, really shines through and not in a good way.
Iniciado por eelnico09
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