Dunno, as I mentioned I find most endings uninspired. Mostly because it becomes a showdown of good vs evil with little room for surprises since it's the finale with a pre-constructed arrangement that follows a certain arc of suspense. I don't find that game or writer specific, it's a pretty widespread problem in fantasy especially. Even the "surprising plot reveal" at the end is so overused that it doesn't feel surprising at all anymore. It's one of the reasons some of my favorite plots end with the MC dying.
The thing is that I like the world building and character building arcs much more than the finales. There's much greater freedom early in a story to develop a plot or character in an interesting way and later on it's mostly a showdown with dices that all too often feel precast to fit general story arcs. It's pretty rare that authors pull of an ending that leaves me thinking that this was pretty cool since they mostly revolve around beating the BBE and there are only so many ways to do this and still remain a power fantasy.
I generally agree on the more structured story point though, too much freedom tends to be too distracting and usually the quality suffers. Naturally there are some exceptions and some of the more memorable quests I've played were side quests (I think I'll always remember that really small fetch the teddy bear quest in GW:factions), but if you don't create a world that's interesting and engaging on it's own and doesn't need the main plot at all really open world creates a ton of problems for writing and balancing.
maybe you can just fail the main quest in some way by not being present somewhere at some point or anything and the game reaches a end state that way or maybe you can keep doing other things also after idk but not having to finish main quest and maybe get a result from it sounds like a cool extra possibility
Hopefully they put it in so that people who don't have infinite time and patience to play a 100 hour game all the way through to the end can still get a total game experience. It sounds like exactly what the Witcher 3 was missing tbh.
I loved TW3 but I still never finished it. I wanted to also play other games. Too many modern games are designed with being the only game you game play for months in mind (just my opinion) and they all seem to want to suck up so much of your time. Its nice that a game with a huge open world might be designed with shortcuts as a major part of the game for us casuals
On July 20 2020 04:45 Sbrubbles wrote: Why would I want to end the game without resolving the main plotline? I'm imagining an ending "your character decides to say fuck it, ignores all pending plot threads, buys a patch of land and starts planting potatos, the end".
*cough* Morrowind *cough*
I've played it for many hundreds of hours. Not once have I finished the main plot line in Morrowind (I've never really gotten too far in the plot anyway, all the side content was simply more interesting).
That's fine, but would you say you "completed" the game?
This is really subjective. In my eyes I have completed all the goals I was interested in (reach max rank with specific factions, do a lot of exploration, steal cool shit etc.) so in a sense I did "complete" it. The main story got boring really fast while progressing through the ranks in Hlaalu and Telvanni was really cool. Finding Morag Tong and doing all the assignments there was a blast (I've spent like half a day trying to find the entrance to the guild). I think this side content was more interesting because you started as a scrub and went on to become a power player in political sense rather than just a mean killing machine. There was nuance and sense of progression whereas in the main plot line you're told straight away that you're the chosen one and then you proceed to kill a god. Not fun at all.
On July 20 2020 04:45 Sbrubbles wrote: Why would I want to end the game without resolving the main plotline? I'm imagining an ending "your character decides to say fuck it, ignores all pending plot threads, buys a patch of land and starts planting potatos, the end".
*cough* Morrowind *cough*
I've played it for many hundreds of hours. Not once have I finished the main plot line in Morrowind (I've never really gotten too far in the plot anyway, all the side content was simply more interesting).
That's fine, but would you say you "completed" the game?
This is really subjective. In my eyes I have completed all the goals I was interested in (reach max rank with specific factions, do a lot of exploration, steal cool shit etc.) so in a sense I did "complete" it. The main story got boring really fast while progressing through the ranks in Hlaalu and Telvanni was really cool. Finding Morag Tong and doing all the assignments there was a blast (I've spent like half a day trying to find the entrance to the guild). I think this side content was more interesting because you started as a scrub and went on to become a power player in political sense rather than just a mean killing machine. There was nuance and sense of progression whereas in the main plot line you're told straight away that you're the chosen one and then you proceed to kill a god. Not fun at all.
Interesting and it's a totally different experience from mine. I generally consider a single player RPG that can't convince me to finish the main plotline to be a failure. In good RPGs I expect plot to dazzle me in with interesting characters and motivations and at least try to pressume me with some sense of urgency (even if usually this urgency is fake, in order to allow side content). This is one of the things that made the BG series, Kotor, and DA origins such great games (BG did this wonderfully through the unexpected dream sequences that expanded on the story as you were mucking about).
I don't exactly hate sandbox RPGs (having played a "full" run of endless skies recently), but that game has "sandbox" on its sleeve and I knew from the get-to that the main quest (if it can be called that) was irrelevant and that exploration was all that mattered.
All that said, I doubt Cyberpunk 2077's claim that "You can complete Cyberpunk 2077 without finishing the main quest" actually means "complete" in the sense that you're describing it. What it actually means I have no idea, though right now I'm guessing it's alternate game end conditions like Simberto said. Hopefully they do it well, otherwise these will either feel like either failure states or easter eggs that will promptly lead the player to reload.
Main plot sucking you in is definitely a bonus, but I think in sandboxy RPGs it doesn't have to. What I liked about the Morrowind was immersion in the beginning (you being a released slave and giving details about yourself when you check in), when you arrive in a new world, can go anywhere to explore and are given just a tiny amount of guidance to get you started (the beginning of main plot is literally go join a guild and advance in rank a bit) and from then on you get hooked.
It really helped that Morrowind was such an alien land compared to most RPGs. It got me really keen on exploration and such (and phrases like "Greetings Outlander!" are now forever etched in my brain), in this regard Skyrim has failed miserably since it was so damn generic and I got bored with it about an hour in (and Oblivion is an afterthought with auto-scaling enemies).
I remember I also really liked the Might & Magic series. Also kinda sandboxy.
I think it's more along the line of a reputation/ morale system. And when you switch to the dark side too often (with side quests for example) You can't /won't defeat the endboss cause you are buddies with him and now there is two evil megalomaniacs which you have to defeat in Cyberpunk 2078
I feel like it'd be prudent to wait about a year after release to actually play the game. By that time it should be patched up and have most of the features in place.
On August 12 2020 00:36 yamato77 wrote: I don't exactly understand the idea that this game somehow won't be feature complete? Isn't that why they delayed it?
Nothing in the press events they've done so far is a red flag. I do not get the same impression that you all do.
I'm going from the size and complexity of this game. They will make the date but I don't think it will be without it's flaws or something that was missed and didn't get implemented on time. I know they're different companies, but Mass Effect Andromeda springs to mind.
On August 12 2020 00:36 yamato77 wrote: I don't exactly understand the idea that this game somehow won't be feature complete? Isn't that why they delayed it?
Nothing in the press events they've done so far is a red flag. I do not get the same impression that you all do.
I'm going from the size and complexity of this game. They will make the date but I don't think it will be without it's flaws or something that was missed and didn't get implemented on time. I know they're different companies, but Mass Effect Andromeda springs to mind.
That's a terrible comparison. Cyberpunk was announced three years before Andromeda was announced and Andromeda was released in 2017. Cyberpunk has been in development for much longer than Andromeda which was rushed out the door. There is zero reason to think this game won't be feature complete.
On August 12 2020 00:36 yamato77 wrote: I don't exactly understand the idea that this game somehow won't be feature complete? Isn't that why they delayed it?
Nothing in the press events they've done so far is a red flag. I do not get the same impression that you all do.
I'm going from the size and complexity of this game. They will make the date but I don't think it will be without it's flaws or something that was missed and didn't get implemented on time. I know they're different companies, but Mass Effect Andromeda springs to mind.
That's a terrible comparison. Cyberpunk was announced three years before Andromeda was announced and Andromeda was released in 2017. Cyberpunk has been in development for much longer than Andromeda which was rushed out the door. There is zero reason to think this game won't be feature complete.
CP2077 wasn't in real development until much later while they worked on Witcher. Andromeda was rushed, no argument there. But as you've seen from the trailers and snippets of gameplay, there are still things that need to be solved. Again, I'm not saying it won't be feature complete. I'm saying that it won't be without it's bugs and issues like every game. You can use Fallout if you'd like. The only game that I can think of that was almost perfect was Horizon Zero Dawn.
I'm not talking about it being some unplayable garbage or anything like that. I'm certain though that there will be bugs that will need to be patched and over time the game will probably undergo some optimizations, get balance changes and will get more content added to it.
I've said to wait about a year because that should be the time required to fully polish the game to bring it to the next level. There's plenty of great games that were good right off the bat but became truly great only later in their life (Borderlands 2, Total War: Warhammer 2 etc.).
I think the biggest thing will be the multiplayer aspect of it. That's going to take some time. And then the optimization for next gen consoles. Those are two big things but one needs to be fixed before the other.
On August 12 2020 00:36 yamato77 wrote: I don't exactly understand the idea that this game somehow won't be feature complete? Isn't that why they delayed it?
Nothing in the press events they've done so far is a red flag. I do not get the same impression that you all do.
I'm going from the size and complexity of this game. They will make the date but I don't think it will be without it's flaws or something that was missed and didn't get implemented on time. I know they're different companies, but Mass Effect Andromeda springs to mind.
That's a terrible comparison. Cyberpunk was announced three years before Andromeda was announced and Andromeda was released in 2017. Cyberpunk has been in development for much longer than Andromeda which was rushed out the door. There is zero reason to think this game won't be feature complete.
CP2077 wasn't in real development until much later while they worked on Witcher. Andromeda was rushed, no argument there. But as you've seen from the trailers and snippets of gameplay, there are still things that need to be solved. Again, I'm not saying it won't be feature complete. I'm saying that it won't be without it's bugs and issues like every game. You can use Fallout if you'd like. The only game that I can think of that was almost perfect was Horizon Zero Dawn.
Ok buys still been in serious development since at least 2016. That's way longer than any fall out game or Andromeda. It's not like cd project had a history of rushing out unpolished games. Like you are using other games by other developers to make your point that this wont be worth playing at launch even though cd projects last game was just as massive if not more so and was great on release
EPT
