GurtTractor wrote:

Paul the sparky wrote:

Just saw this. First new Crowbcat vid in a fucking age. Was maybe expecting him to do something for Watchdogs 3, but this seems like his magnum opus.

Watched this last night, hard to see how they can fix so much in any kind of reasonable time. I feel really bad for everyone who worked hard on it (outside of leadership/exec level), the engineers, tech artists and QA in particular, man I can only imagine the crunch.

Tbf any game looks fucking awful if you pull together the glitches from milllions upon millions of hours play time across millions of gamers. 99% of what is shown in that video I haven't, and I'm sure millions of others haven't and never will experience.

Its a fucking disastrous launch and has some glaring issues across the board, no doubt, and CDPR deserve everything they get but you can make anything look like the worst thing in existence with glitch compilations. Funny, though.

You can turn a lot of PC games to utter glitch fest fuckwittery by having a terrible spec too.

Yeah I stopped watching because I just thought "this is such a put up job." It's like a different game to the one I'm playing. For a start, it's using mods go give you certain POVs. So what of crowds do weird stupid shit when you're not looking at them? Utterly bizarre.

CDPR did rush it. I still haven't completed it because I struggle for time to play, when I do I'll do a write up.

GurtTractor wrote:

The vid is very much satire and not a definitive analysis of technical issues, it takes the piss obvs. But it has some very fair points about the marketing and hype vs reality. The AI being really stupid just walking back and forth etc seems legit from vids I've seen, that is a huge disappointment for immersion, especially as they went in on marketing boasting about fancy AI routines.

Its not somethjng you'll ever actively see in an actual playthrough tbh, unless as is done in the video you stand in the same spot continuously for a long time observing.

Its no doubt sloppy as fuck from CDPR and again, they deserve every criticism, but its such a weird observation I see chucked at the game as im yet to know of anyone who is so intrinsically drawn into a game, any game that they actively follow and study the fake life routines of NPCs.

But as you say, they promised what they couldn't do. I have had the reskinned same NPC models thing, which is noticable the first time, but then they are just there to pad the world. As in nearly all large open world games, NPCs are just padding to give semi-semblance to life.

Watch Dogs tried the interact with any NPC bollocks and its hilariously bad.

I fully agree with a lot of criticism thrown at this and at times even playjng it I've laughed at parts being piss poor, but some of the hysteria around game mechanics and such is so absolutely batshit in places. Its like reverse Stockholm with some parts of the gaming 'culture'.

Fair enough. Even taking away the bugs though, the gulf between what they said and what was delivered seems bad. We're not talking 'said years ago' either I think, said fairly recently. I'm not watching the vid again to check

I'll never tell folks they're wrong for enjoying a game though and I'm happy those that are enjoying it are having a blast. I haven't played it, for clarity.

And I do have all the feels for the team, I bet it's still going on right now, like as I'm typing there'll be bleary eyed engineers, tired QA and stressed-to-fuck producers in some office somewhere.

Yeah I really feel for the team, they deserve better than this. You can feel real aoul in aspects of the game, and then its so hollow elsewhere.

CDPR basically dived into the NMS/Molyneux problem of falling for, and believing their own hype/adulation. You'd be real fucking pissed as a coder or summat hearing your bosses spouting such nonsense publically, knowing its never gonna be what they say.

Yeah it's the leadership team at CDPR that deserve all the blame. Yer mans in the trenches, my heart goes out to 'em.

GurtTractor wrote:

He did a vid on Crackdown 3 vs the original, which was quite fair. Crackdown 3 is actually a very fun little game, I enjoyed it despite the reduction in interaction detail. I think it's just about a yearning for even greater and more immersive game worlds.

As you say, hype killed this for a lot of people, CDPR solely to blame. It is not the game they portrayed at all and if you cant get over the promises they gave you're gonna have a very bad time.

I like open world games primarily as a timesink. If you poke at any large, open world game its holes become apparent very quickly. Like GTA and fuck all interiors to go into, relatively shit NPCs also and that aside from a bit of pool/golf/forced 'friend' shit theres really not much there.

I will praise Rockstar on making beautiful fucking worlds though.

RDR2 is probably the pinnacle for me but once those scripted NPC events start to loop its as equally hollow as any other open world.

Glorious place to stroll around and enjoy the scenery in too. Likewise with this I love hopping on a bike, putting the jazz station on and zooming around with the neon and distinctive areas.

I guess as these game worlds scale up in size and fidelity it just becomes incredibly costly, both in terms of studio cost and for the hardware that has to run it, to keep a really consistent level of interactive detail in animations, physics effects, etc. A lot of big budget games now are very polished on the surface, but as soon as you start messing around in the worlds you can notice how shallow they are in many aspects compared to earlier games. I think that's what most of Crowbcat's comparison vids are about.

I read a theory, and its only that, but to me it makes sense.

Basically they had the branching paths, with Keanu Silverhand as a smaller kinda character. But then they got Keanu on as the big bastard star and holy shit its Keanu and Silverhand now needs to be a big bollocks lead and holy shit ITS KEANU!.

This then led to them reworking the entire plot and flow, and subsequently fucking up all 3 branches in such a ridiculously small timescale that they couldnt restructure, write and build it all again to any extent in time for release.

It explains the lazy as fuck '6 months later' montage thing plus the relatively short campaign length, alongside lack of clear distinguishable differences in choice. Those moments felt to me as if they should have been plot beats.

SPOILERS FUUUUUUUUUCKOS

And also go in expecting nothing. Just imagine you found this for £20 in gamestation two months after release type game.

I knew of it but knew nowt about it tbh. I knew some people were excited, that's it.