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Comment by tracer4201 | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t played the game and don’t play video games too often, so my thoughts here perhaps sound naive.

“NPCs not having a problem being attacked” and “cars running on tracks” could be intentional design choices, right? We can speculate that the game’s feature set is unfinished, but is it also not possible that this video game in its “finished” state just isn’t what people wanted it to be? Clearly there are bugs and I agree the product right now isn’t finished, but once any glitches and performance issues are fixed, I’m not sure if the gameplay will ever meet expectations.

Edit: not sure of why I have -5 points.

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The biggesr gripe I've seen is that if it is an intentional design choice, it is completely contradictory to what CDPR promised. Through years of marketing they promised "unprecedented" levels of AI and interactability with NPCs. They promised things like situational police presence/response, etc. But currently, the game has NPC AI that's years behind (games released 5-10 years ago have better AI).

The fact that such features were promised is what is causing people to think (hope?) that these features are simply unfinished. If it is an intentional design choice and CDPR has no plan to improve them, that's a whole other issue with what was promised vs what was actually intended.

No. The game is simply not finished.

The problem with creating a huge open-world game and then stating in all your promotional material that this, "will be the most immersive open-world game we've ever created" means that it has to surpass, at a minimum, The Witcher 3.

However, you paint yourself into an even worse corner with that, because everyone's going to compare you to Grand Theft Auto series as well when you use the phrase "open-world game". And that's a real titan to go up against.

Its clearly obvious this game needed a bare minimum of 6 more months of development, if to do nothing more than fix just the bugs. But it really needs about 12-18 months of development just to add the features they claimed the game would have at launch.

Saying it’s the most “immersive open world game” is just marketing speak. Unless they promised a specific feature, it’s hard to say much. I’m not arguing that it’s not a finished game, so don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying that people assumed this was going to be the perfect video game. It’s clearly not, and performance/glitches aside, I’m not convinced of why everyone seems so surprised it’s not.

So you're taking the approach that (a) they were lying and (b) everyone listening to them lie was meant to realise they were lying? That... still seems like pretty bad behaviour.

I’m not saying they were lying. Saying it’s the “most immersive game ever” could mean a lot of different things based on your definition of immersion.

There’s no clear definition of being the “most immersive game”. Every piece of software has a finite feature set, based on time, cost, and a vast set of constraints - whether organizational, technical, people related, and so on.

The game isn’t ever going to live up to the hype.

The two items you listed are inaccurate. I’m taking the approach that the game had practically infinite hype and it had no where to go but to go but DOWN and disappoint people. I’m taking the approach that it’s worth looking at this from a realistic lens. Yes the game is unfinished, but there are plenty of “finished” games that aren’t great or even just good. They are flat out terrible. Why people seem to think Cyberpunk is meant to be some marvel is beyond me.

If they designed it as that from the start while promoting it as an open-world, they made a serious judgement error, as cbozeman explained. If you promote an open world with cars, you need cars that act believable.

If they attempted to have it be a believable feature of the game world, it's apparently entirely lost on consumers (e.g. a world with stupid cars could be explained in an interesting way as one where only few exceptions actually drive themselves, whereas most just rely on stupid automations taking care of it - but you need to present that in a way people understand).

Some of the things people found also indicates that a few systems like this actually exist but are only triggered very rarely, which suggests they were intended to be there but disabled because they don't work well enough/don't scale.

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