* The team size required for a modern day AAA title is significantly higher than that of HL days.

* The games design choices are vastly different. HL was very on the rails, though hides it it really well by giving you the illusion of a large world, this a really great design trick and HL is rightly lauded for it. In contrast CP2077 aims to be closer to a true open world that tries to provide a linear storyline inside a large world with more open level design with many auxilary story lines and interactive world building.

* HL had a single platform focus (PC) for the initial development whereas CP2077 try to straddle two very different hardware generations and a multitude of platforms. If CP2077 had, in a hypothetical world, only focused on PC and maybe current gen consoles (PS5 and XBox S) it would not have nearly the same level of negative press.

I'm often left unconvinced by statements like this. Is it that the team size for a modern AAA title is required to be so large, or is it just that they are so large? The diminishing returning from making teams ever bigger makes me wonder if having such large teams are just a sign of low-level, dragging general incompetence somewhere in the chain of people running the whole thing.

I don't have any hard evidence either way, but every so often when I see a small, well-run team of competent people turn out something really good, I wonder.

But if your goal is hip cliche AAA game, yeah, you need the huge team. I don't know if its much of a diminishing marginal utility of devs/artists either, so much as a sprawling tree of parallel but unrelated pieces.

The newer tomb raiders are the epitome of this to me. Every five minutes you're on a death defying leap with crumbling architecture or whatever. As close to the video game ideal of "every frame a painting".

A handcrafted open world doesn't scale all that well, and Cyberpunk, from my impressions, seems to be both large and vertical, which makes the challenge even harder. Pretty much the only open-world I've enjoyed in recent years is BOTW, and that world is pretty empty, if only because the setting is literally an apocalypse where most people died. (In fact, for people arguing for interaction density, there is a collectible in the game that is revealed when it is 100% to be a pile of feces, specifically to make fun of 100%-ters.)

Of course in many ways AAAs have dug their own pit of despair with this, they throw so much investment into it that they need to make sure they appeal to as large an audience as possible and cram as much content as possible in, while also having an eye to DLC later down the line, the economics demand it. Hence why CP2077 had to desperately try to get it to work on last gen console, otherwise they'd be immediately removing a massive portion of the market.

As consumers we can get as much enjoyment out of some indie level gamer. I for one have play way more hours of The Binding of Isaac than any AAA title I've played and it would have been a fraction of the development costs.

This comment seems to come out of nowhere. Cyberpunk isn't written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge. But rant time! I love ue4 blueprints. I think they're the bees knees because documentation of things is so hard, but blueprints make that so easy! The ability to grab a bunch of nodes and collapse them into one node means you can comfortably make your top level view of things just a series of collapsed nodes with long form descriptions in full sentences. So your high level stuff is basically pseudocode.

Most people don't do this of course. But then most people don't write good code, and lots of people writing blueprints one sees in the wild don't even know how to code to begin with.

Blueprints are, imo, what people really want when they think they want jupyter notebooks for data science.

It’s in (their in-house) REDengine 4 according to Wikipedia (citing https://archive.today/20180405084214/https://www.gamezone.co...). But perhaps that has Blueprint-inspired visual development tools?

Most definitely represents my scatterbrain state of mind as of late ;)

As boogies states, this is the crux of what I was trying to get at re: tooling. Considering Cyberpunk 2077 as a massive non-linear narrative. What does the graph tying it all together look like? With hundreds of designers adding their contribution. How do you reason about the whole? Even basic algorithms such as "can I reach this node from every other node"?

Monkey Hero (1999) used node based game dev and I'm sure they weren't the first.

The only time blueprints fail me are

1) Really nitty gritty networking stuff 2) More classic CS algorithmic stuff, with strings, arrays, sorting, etc.

The latter feels very solveable. Maybe in ue5...

This feels wild, in a good way, but I wish there were python or julia: >Luna will let you paste any Haskell, C and JavaScript code into a component, handling the Interoperability for you.

The canonical example for me(which was ironically is in Half-Life) is that the AI for the grunts is surprisingly simple. If you throw a grenade they were scripted to shout "grenade" and navigate to the nearest nav node.

Tons of people thought there was really complex AI behind that behavior but it was just a couple of really well telegraphed "if()" checks.

I guess if you are able to formulate the problem as a state machine, you could use something like bounded model checking to ensure it doesn't blow up, but the problems there are twofold: Firstly, that's way too complicated and brittle for a game codebase, and secondly your average game developer probably doesn't even know what it is to begin with.

This is probably just me not really understanding the domain, but this sounds like a version of the halting problem?

Even if it’s not, isn’t that just an extra layer doing what the collision engine is meant to do in the first place? And if you can monitor a system to ensure correctness, couldn’t you use a similar mechanism to make the original system correct to begin with? And if you can’t do that, how can you expect to make the supervisory layer correct?

For that reason there should be a "user level" interpretation of the physics engine results, looking ahead in time and correcting.

“Let’s monitor in real time for whether any possible combination of inputs could produce a technically valid but undesirable state” doesn’t sound any less complicated or more effective than finding bugs and fixing them.

The Destiny version doesn’t require understanding the bug, only recognizing after the fact that the player has, say, clipped out of bounds. Doesn’t matter how you got there. That sounds like a decent compromise for a pvp game where preventing exploits is very important.

But being able to extrapolate that the current state will lead to a bad state implies that you already understand the bug and could, you know, fix it.

Yes, you could have for example energy limiters and total momentum checks in your algorithms. Energy can not be added in a collision. In a collision between two finite mass objects, total momentum is preserved (you can't use this with collisions with the ground). Maybe games already do this?

You could also just fudge the equations to avoid singularities, like always add +1 to the divider. This could probably cause other problems though.

Personally I had to get a refund after a few hours because of dozens of crashes, and an unreasonable amount of bugs, and I really wanted to play that game. I even installed Windows to be sure it wasn't Proton related. My PC is high-end.

Game itself is remarkable by quality of the story, acting, etc. World is huge and beautiful. Insane amount of quests. In GTA V, for example, you can really only play golf outside of the main quest line.

As to the grandparent comment - one day maybe I will understand what really causes this split in reception/bug prevalence, but today is not that day. Very much recommended (and save when you play, not only because gonks can jump you up, and not only because you may fail to date the super hot Panam [or River for the ladies], but also because it does crash/break every 5-10 hours of gameplay).

a split between the older gen and next gen consoles/PC? Or perhaps a gradient of bug tolerance, compounded by how much issues each user experiences (depending on the hardware used). Though I've heard that it's not just the bugs that cause issues

If your answer to that is “buy a new device”, you need to get outside more.

like which device exactly ? Most complaints were about base PS4. This is how it runs on base PS4, those are the "mayor" game breaking bugs people are crying about: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/854702029?t=00h45m00s [1] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/857020318?t=01h09m53s [2]

TLDR:

- 30fps with drops to 20. For reference Remedy shipped Control running all the way down to 10fps [Both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One can see prolonged frame-rate drops in sustained combat, dropping all the way down to 10 frames per second at its absolute worst.] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-contr...

- crashes once every 5-7 hours of continuous gameplay. Not a game breaking problem since it auto saves often. Saving game is one of the fastest of any games I played, its instant, no slowdowns when autosaving.

- has problems with streaming game assets on time (geometry[1], animations[2]). Claire's races are perhaps the only problematic part of the game due to this bug. GPS markers on the ground load too slowly.

... and thats it. The rest of the game works exactly as on other platforms, including random animation glitches.

Stadia gives an experience similar to good PC, it’s the base console version where the vast majority will play where dynamic resolution scaling and inability to stream game assets in time destroy the game, not to mention the launch bug where save files corrupted if they went over 8mb...

It’s the only game ever Sony and Microsoft have had to remove from sale from digital store fronts due to quality issues, unheard of and shocking for a game with this budget etc. People will be dissecting what went wrong with this for years.

I played on a high end PC and still saw a lot of bugs, none game breaking thankfully though.

Half Life has no cohesive narrative. It is just a bunch of interesting random scenes thrown together and people make up their own narrative about it. It works but it's not a "cohesive narrative"

My guess is that it probably doesn't scale all that well. I think the issue it's so much the technology but the people who use it - when you see UE4 projects labelled "Blueprint only!" what that usually means in my experience is unmaintainable, unsearchable, no version control etc.

They're great for animations, but for anything vaguely structured they're just slow and RSI inducing.