EPTCyberpunk 2077 - Page 14
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ProMeTheus112
France2027 Posts
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Spook
Romania72 Posts
On top of this, you usually work with an unstable build pipeline since you have 300+ people trying to push their changes, which breaks the build a lot. You end up with something like 30% effective working time. I recommend reading this to get and idea of how planning fails in software development, including games. Taking all this into consideration, you have to get the bad content out and put the good one in: iterate on the core design in problem areas, iterate on the narrative people don't get and wait for public playtest to validate the changes. This can take ~2 weeks for a single change, if the pipeline is good, but there are no guarantees that the change is good and you may have to iterate a few time until you get it right. With a game as big as Cyberpunk it could be literally hundred of these types of changes. All this against a looming internal hard deadline because you have record all the voice lines, including localization, clean them and integrate them into the game (at least 6 months before the release). On top of this, you need 3-6 months of pure debug time or the game will be a buggy mess at launch. So, you have a huge amount of work to do under intense pressure, usually with an unstable pipeline and lots of intermediate internal deadlines that are much tighter than the actual release. Welcome to crunch! | ||
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thePunGun
598 Posts
"bad direction, core systems are not fun" are hurdles you've overcome once you've reached alpha (alpha status means all core systems are implemented and working as intended. If the alpha's not fun the game will usually get scrapped). The production of Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely well beyond that stage, according to that gamespot interview the crunch is mainly needed for bug fixing and polishing, which means the game's finished gameplay wise. CDPR also confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 has been playable from start to finish for months, but "there's still work to be done," which is why the company's board of directors unanimously voted for the delay. [link to full article]"Night City is massive--full of stories, content and places to visit, but due to the sheer scale and complexity of it all, we need more time to finish playtesting, fixing, and polishing," the company said. "We want Cyberpunk 2077 to be our crowning achievement for this generation and postponing launch will give us the precious months we need to make the game perfect." | ||
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Spook
Romania72 Posts
On January 19 2020 20:31 thePunGun wrote: There's different kinds of crunch at different stages of development Spook. Most of what you've mentioned like are hurdles you've overcome once you've reached alpha (alpha status means all core systems are implemented and working as intended. If the alpha's not fun the game will usually get scrapped). The production of Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely well beyond that stage, according to that gamespot interview the crunch is mainly needed for bug fixing and polishing, which means the game's finished gameplay wise. [link to full article] If would be very nice if that were so but do not confuse playable with good/fun. Games only reach a good enough state to be play tested around the last year of development. Until then it's mostly placeholder art and content taken out of context because only certain parts are done. What we get as players usually comes together in the last 6 months. Kotaku did a couple of articles on Anthem and Rockstar. Crunch culture is not that bad in Europe but bad direction and people pushing for a lot more than can be done is pretty much the norm. The Anthem article is textbook behavior for gaming companies. You can replace Anthem and EA from that article with any combo of AAA game/company and people on the development teams will resonate. I've been working in game dev for over 10 year and I still love it. Crunch happens rarely and I don't mind it, but I mind all the things I mentioned, and that you can also read in those articles, that get us to need crunch. | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17238 Posts
On January 19 2020 21:53 Spook wrote: If would be very nice if that were so but do not confuse playable with good/fun. Games only reach a good enough state to be play tested around the last year of development. Until then it's mostly placeholder art and content taken out of context because only certain parts are done. What we get as players usually comes together in the last 6 months. Kotaku did a couple of articles on Anthem and Rockstar. Crunch culture is not that bad in Europe but bad direction and people pushing for a lot more than can be done is pretty much the norm. The Anthem article is textbook behavior for gaming companies. You can replace Anthem and EA from that article with any combo of AAA game/company and people on the development teams will resonate. I've been working in game dev for over 10 year and I still love it. Crunch happens rarely and I don't mind it, but I mind all the things I mentioned, and that you can also read in those articles, that get us to need crunch. Please don't try to compare Anthem to CP2k77... Anthem was a mess for many years and it literally had like 1 year of actual development (if that) and even then they weren't entirely sure if some of the core things (flying) will be there in the end or not (or even which engine they'll be using). CP2k77 has had a pretty clear direction from the get go. They've been working on it for years, they have shown large fragments of the game that were fully playable to the public (and not just fake gameplay footage like Anthem did). The development process for those 2 games is absolutely nothing alike. In addition, CDPR has a lot of experience with open world RPGs in The Witcher series and that helps a lot too. I'm not worried at all at this point. If they delay and CP2k77 is a complete mess at launch (obviously there will be some bugs left, but shouldn't be anything gamebreaking) then I will be more wary with their next game, but right now they haven't given me a reason to be worried about anything. | ||
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Spook
Romania72 Posts
After the publication of our Anthem investigation last month, which documented a turbulent development marked by mismanagement, crunch, and anxiety, four former CD Projekt Red employees reached out to tell me that they had seen similar problems in Warsaw. “I’ve felt that there are hundreds of parallels that could be drawn between the story of the rocky development of Anthem and the story of the rocky and even-more-rocky-to-become development of Cyberpunk 2077,” said one former CDPR employee in an e-mail. “At times, I’ve felt I could just replace the studio name and the game title, and it would all look so similar, almost identical.” Although CD Projekt Red first announced Cyberpunk 2077 in 2013, development of the game didn’t really start until 2015, after the launch of The Witcher 3. Then followed a difficult period of preproduction (including at least one major directional shift), and the studio made the very-common mistake of moving their entire development team to Cyberpunk before the project could support that many people. Add major technological overhauls and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. “It’s always the same story across the entire industry,” said Badowski. “If you’re changing the technology and at the same time you’re producing the game, it’s a nightmare for most of the companies.” It led to a difficult period for the company, one marked by turnover and unclear direction. “The transition from The Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk, initially that was the hardest part, because a lot of these things have to be defined,” said Iwiński. “We have a demo which is sort of crystallizing the vision, to prove that it’s there.” source I wonder about the more recent direction change that happened when Keanu got involved and they had to redo the entire narrative to fit him in. But CD Projekt would never do something like this and keep the same project timeline since it would lead to crunch. They would never eventually realize that even with said crunch there just isn't enough time to ship on the release date they had announced just one year earlier, and delay the game. And they would definitely not expect the solution to the problem of shipping to be more crunch. | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17238 Posts
On January 20 2020 00:56 Spook wrote: Then followed a difficult period of preproduction (including at least one major directional shift) It is different. Sure, there are issues with overhauls and team mismanagement (that will happen everywhere). But just look at the part I quoted from your excerpt. Difficult pre-production is actually a good thing. Nothing really gets done in pre-production, it's mostly concept work and ironing things out. Directional shift is good because it means their original idea probably wasn't good enough. Also, you have to take into account that problems at CDPR were highlighted by former probably disgrunted employees (who probably worked on The Witcher series and there was a lot of problems and crunch there but CDPR said they've learned their lessons). All the problems you listed for CP were pre-prod and early production issues, after that it seems to have gone much smoother. Anthem was riddled with problems all the way through and stuff that should happen in pre-prod was actually happening near the end of their development cycle, which is a much bigger issue. We just have to wait and see. | ||
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Harris1st
Germany6824 Posts
CDPR have underestimated the project and will have to crunch through until release But they do have a better idea what has actually to be done than was ever the case with Anthem | ||
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abuse
Latvia1927 Posts
I mean, I understand - extra costs and whatnot, but I'm guessing you'd still be far better off this way.. | ||
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Harris1st
Germany6824 Posts
 Next gen consoles can easily double your sales numbers I guess | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17238 Posts
On January 21 2020 17:42 Harris1st wrote: If it's true that they don't even have next gen consoles in mind yet, they need the time after the release to get it ready. This means they have to crunch till christmas probably Next gen consoles can easily double your sales numbers I guess I think the delay is not necessarily caused by next gen consoles. It very well might be, but it's most likely a separate team that's responsible for porting it. The only reason I can think of to do that is to have it released for all platforms simultaneously instead of doing staggered releases (PC, PS4, X1 and later XX and PS5) to have bigger initial sales. If that's the case I think it's actually good, because while the console teams work on porting it to next gen the PC team has extra time to iron out the issues and polish it a bit more. I really hope that's what it is. | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
Last week, CD Projekt Red officially delayed their highly-anticipated RPG Cyberpunk 2077 to September 2020. The studio explained that the game is finished and playable but they still need more time to squash bugs and fix many glitches that are present in the current build. This is probably one of the reasons why CD Projekt Red decided to delay the game but according to Polish insider Borys Niespielak, current generation consoles are actually the main problem for the developers. Speaking in a podcast, which you can watch below, Niespielak says that the original Xbox One console is not powerful enough to run the game properly and apparently, Cyberpunk 2077 performance on the console is "extremely unsatisfactory". Borys' sources confirmed that if "this problem with Xbox has not been solved by January 2020, the release date must be postponed." Now, we would suggest that you take these rumours with a grain of salt, just like any other unofficial info but it would not be the first time that consoles have caused problems to CD Projekt Red. You may remember that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt received a pretty noticeable downgrade close to its release, and apparently, the reason for that was entirely due to consoles. As for the source, over at Discord, Polish players are pretty confident in Borys Niespielak, who seems to be as renowned as Jason Schreier in Poland. Discord user Klawiaturodzierzca even translated the best bits from the podcast and you can check them out in the screenshot below: ![[image loading]](https://media.altchar.com/prod/images/620_350/gm-5dcb861a-8539-4cdc-9cb2-4628fe9c0fd8-cp-discord.jpg) All in all, this is some pretty big news if true and we can only hope that CD Projekt Red will find a way to properly optimise Cyberpunk 2077 without any downgrades. Surely they cannot let it happen to them again, not after The Witcher 3 backlash anyway. Source | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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Yurie
11775 Posts
On January 26 2020 07:18 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: I don't see this as good news given their track record. https://twitter.com/qlocsa/status/1220717265236168704 Adding a team this late into the process seems to point to big problems that needs more/different people thrown at it to fix it. As for the PC vs console thing. If optimising for console is causing so much problems then it is a PC problem as well. Most people don't have that much more powerful machines than the consoles. Xbox one x is more or less the same performance as a geforce 1060, which is a very common pc. Then they want a tier below with medium/low settings as well for normal ps4/xbox one or lower end PCs. So it is the same optimisation problem in many ways. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ More people have weaker hardware than stronger ones when that is set as the benchmark. So being able to scale down to default PS4/xbox one level is what they want on PC as well. | ||
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Harris1st
Germany6824 Posts
On January 26 2020 18:09 Yurie wrote: Adding a team this late into the process seems to point to big problems that needs more/different people thrown at it to fix it. As for the PC vs console thing. If optimising for console is causing so much problems then it is a PC problem as well. Most people don't have that much more powerful machines than the consoles. Xbox one x is more or less the same performance as a geforce 1060, which is a very common pc. Then they want a tier below with medium/low settings as well for normal ps4/xbox one or lower end PCs. So it is the same optimisation problem in many ways. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ More people have weaker hardware than stronger ones when that is set as the benchmark. So being able to scale down to default PS4/xbox one level is what they want on PC as well. I'm no expert but isn't the first iteration of the PS4 / Xbox One like suuuper weak nowadays? Like more of a level of a Geforce 500/600 series? And Xbox one X is on the level of a 500$ PC I'd say fuck old gen consoles and go for next gen  | ||
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Jockmcplop
United Kingdom9500 Posts
I just read this and it seems to be artificially trying to put pressure on CDPR where there isn't really any. 'Backlash' for the Witcher 3's release? Was that the backlash where they won every single award ever and got game of the year for pretty much every gamer in the world?? If they need to downgrade to get it working, good, they should downgrade, if they want to wait for the new consoles, even better as long as i don't have to buy a new pc to get it to work! | ||
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Harris1st
Germany6824 Posts
On January 27 2020 19:42 Jockmcplop wrote: I just read this and it seems to be artificially trying to put pressure on CDPR where there isn't really any. 'Backlash' for the Witcher 3's release? Was that the backlash where they won every single award ever and got game of the year for pretty much every gamer in the world?? If they need to downgrade to get it working, good, they should downgrade, if they want to wait for the new consoles, even better as long as i don't have to buy a new pc to get it to work! There actually was quite some backlash. One of the reasons was, that they never properly explained why they "tuned down" "optimized" "downgraded" the graphics. If they did, this could have been easily avoided. Glad they state their reasoning openly now | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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zatic
Zurich15324 Posts
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Harris1st
Germany6824 Posts
On May 06 2020 16:35 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: ??? https://twitter.com/CyberpunkGame/status/1257686933830086656 A radio channel a la GTA? No idea | ||
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