Can we discuss Cyberpunk 2077?

Will this be the best game ever or a big disappointment like other over-hyped games? What kind of game is closest to it in terms of gameplay? Assassin's Creed?

The game uses the REDengine 2 game engine. Do you think this game could (or should) have been made with Unity?

How much would it cost to license the REDengine?

Some people are saying it will be exclusive to PlayStation 5.

 

It's a first person open world game. Less Assassin's Creed, more Deus Ex.

No, also no. Unity will never outdo a more specialized engine.

Infinity dollars, as its CD Projekt's in-house engine, not one up for licensing.

Platforms are already confirmed as PS4, Xbox One, and Windows.

 

Unity is just a game engine, it combines a set of technologies common to most game engines, e.g. PhysX, DirectX, Sound, Music and a programming language with an API or three.

However in the case of Read Dead 2 of Cyberpunk 2077 they will have spent a lot of time adding their own tools and development pipeline to create a large open world... These tools and technologies would need to be added on top of what Unity provides to build a game similar in scope an ability to these AAA games.

For instance loading a large level in earlier versions of Unity would cause massive slowdowns, and moving across massive landscapes or cityscapes would require dynamic scene loading (I think this is in the works?).

Then you would need a dynamic city or frontier simulation running constantly in the background or at least within the vicinity of the player.

It's the interaction of the characters around you and the detailed settings that bring these worlds to life...

or

So you could make a game like this using any good game engine, but it would be a starting off point and to reach AAA quality you would probably need to build upon and probably retool the game engine to make it.

Also you would need a lot of great AAA artists and developers to make it which would require a lot of money.

 

I tell you what is a bit disappointing about the trailer/game play is that when you're walking down the street, none of the people look at you or each other. This is kind of unrealistic because in real life people will look at you at the very least to not bump into you. They're all walking around as if everyone else is invisible. Even when they are looking at you they still look like dead-eyed puppets. Why would you spend millions of $$ making all those art assets and not spend two days making a good eye-looking system?

 

I'm guessing you live in a small town, as every time I have been to a big city the weirdest part is how much people avoid looking at anyone.

 

Even better, if the NPCs looked away as you passed by. Also, yeah, all the ladies look at me when I strut my funky stuff down the sidewalk.

This is kind of a cyberpunk aesthetic too. Except the pizza restaurant is not flying.

 

Its definitely pretty funky xD

 

My initial impressions of the game is that it has lost the blade runner style vibe of gloomy/fog/lots of rain type of vibe, instead it's like some sort of pg13 rated fun sun happy hour outside look to it... and the graphics have a sort of consolized stamp of approval.. not pc master race game of the year decade type edition. ..I mean pc master race is dead now that MS has allowed to many idiots satyan tard face, to steer windows into becoming a pile of garbage.

If Cyberpunk2077 turns out to be Cyberflunk2077 then maybe Star Citizen will be the game... it's got some way to go still.

Some people are saying winblows10 might become an even more sort of dumbed down pile of crap that the future xblock will run as a sort of hybrid S*** pc, while windows desktop become a hybrid S*** console.. complete with retard idiocracy looking S*** ux/ui... wait hangon it's already at that point nvm

 

Well that we can disagree on because Unity's changed from being general purpose to "you can give it purpose". SRP and ECS likely means it'll perform pretty much the same providing RED's engine is utterly optimal.

Might not be possible to go faster and it's meaningless to go lower. I don't think the old assumptions are holding up for much longer not just because of ECS + SRP, but because you can make it utterly and specifically non general in the same way with just a few edits.

Dunno here where I am, people try not to look at each other unless they want a proper good hiding.

And in nicer places they're only interested in their phones. So maybe those npcs walking along are actually watching a twitch stream in some semi forward looking daze thanks to AR.

 

It's cyberpunk and it's by an awesome studio so either way I'm buying it. I've purposely not watched any of the gameplay footage(I did watch the first two trailers). This isn't like the fantasy genre which has tons to choose from and you can be pickier.

It probably doesn't hurt I own all the Cyberpunk 2020 guides etc. Doom and gloom and blade runner vibe was never really how that IP was set. High style and looking good while you use crazy tech was more the focus.

 

Anyone who played Witcher series, will know minimum expectations.
There is even probability, there will be reference to Witcher3. But that will be probably more familiar to its players / book readers.

 

I hope they aren't going to cutesify everything and make it pg13.

What I would like is for it to emphasise more on the "punk" than the "cyber". Have all the costumes designed by Jean-Paul-Gautier or something. Or some twisting of reality and virtual reality by have real life images of people in the game.

I think maybe that the problem is cyberpunk is not something people believe is really the future anymore. Because it turned out that punk died out in the 90's some time and was replaced by hipsters then by instagrammers and YouTube social commentators. That would be interesting to put in the game if each NPC had their own "show" on the internet.

Also, it would be cool if each NPC had their own unique cybernetic enhancement. And that part of the game was to make use of different NPC enchancements. Maybe hack into their eyes to spy on people. Or take control of their robotic arms.

IDK I will buy it when it comes on sale for $15.

 

I'm not interested in games like this whatsoever. I'm tired of open world games. I'm tired of lame stories. I feel like if story is going to be involved in a game in any meanigful way it should be first written by a professional, best selling authro, and have the game designed around that. Not a half-assed mash up of idiotic story and ho-hum gameplay like we keep getting.

And I'm tired of art styles that try reaally reaally hard to look super cool. Just like a good writer tells a story without you noticing their authorship at all, I think the art directors for games like this need to practice subtlety, lean closer to realistic believability, and not feel like they constantly have to push things over the top every chance they get.

The big publishers are trying to really go overboard with the whole gameplay experience but IMO they aren't getting the basics right. Games are always complex in all the wrong ways, simplified in all the dumb ways, and its just my personal taste but all the game art feels samey and boring. I doubt I'll be buying any new AAA games from here on out unless something major changes. Doesn't seem like anybody is serving my demographic and the LCD just keeps getting lower as the budgets go higher.

 

I really suggest get familiar with company, which is making game, their previous game making history, and current story writer for cyber punk. That would at least shine some light on current concept, before even starting randomly rambling. If you don't care, why even commenting? Or are you?

 

that's my thoughts on the game. Of course I'm familiar with cd projekt red.

 

Until I see the actual gains from this, I'm standing by my claim. So far the only thing we've seen are tech demos.

 

Right yeah I understand. I've been working with ECS and HDRP for a bit and I see personal gains for my project that are bewilderingly-better than anything I've had before. It's got a long way to go but my confidence is high that Unity is ready engine wise around 2019.3 for some serious gains as you mention, for everyone not just the obsessives like me (need great docs, polish, bugfixes, perf improvements), totally agree with you.

Quietly confident tho.

 

What I don't understand is the licensed IP for the game is heavily based on everything you said you don't like, it's not like they are deviating drastically from the cyberpunk 2020 concepts.

Super cool looking art direction is literally a requirement, and the story is based on decades of material.

 

well, don't let me ruin it for you guys. I'm just really not interested in this game despite the hype, reputation of the developers, and high production values. For the same reasons I'm always griping about almost any new game. I really think there is a large demographic of gamers or potential gamers who are being completely ignored. With a little bit different approach I could totally get into a game like this. I love any kind of futurism, but I feel almost all games are catered to a less mature audience with the attention span of gnats, so I continually feel disappointed. It seems where ever there is a chance to apply skill, a chance to sharpen and refine, big developers instead choose to blunt and soften. So if games began as crude wooden arrows, with the goal of becoming a laser guided missile, they are instead becoming like rocks, despite the apparent increasing complexity and hollywood pizzazz.

Don't mind me. I've got a headache and I'm cranky.

 

As of your personal taste, which is fine, what are you missing in RPG type games? Sorry, I am not getting your last sentence, referring to game become rock. I assume you mean sinking? Does that apply to Witcher series as well? If so, what these games are missing in your humble opinion?

What would make them more "mature"? You know, I am adult as well, and hard to say for me, these titles are directed to just to young audience.

 

And just to add, the new Unity ECS tech, is just emerging. Not even complete, and already gained huge interest of devs. Just looking at the ECS and jobs forum. We have even examples of games in full production, using mostly ECS, as conversion from classic OOP. So indeed, these are not just words thrown on a wind. But we see things happening in real time.

 

I see your Saturday Night Fever and raise you:

 

ECS is amazing for bandwidth intensive simple functions, so it opens the doors to larger scenes with more moving parts.

The thing is can it provide the complexity needed to run a full cyberpunk city block with factions competing, trading and communicating.

For instance say we have a library of a 32 thousand* question and responses (procedurally generated) each with a weighting for insult/supplication/appeasement/challenge/agreement a set of dimensions that depending on the recipients state of mind and needs trigger a response from the library.

This interaction system could be made as an ECS system that has a data history with LOD for players hacking the comms channel e.g. it would just be an index into the response library.

So each faction and member of that faction would have connections to other NPCs and factions they have had dealings with... can you see how this NPC interaction graph could grow very large for a big city or even a few blocks of a big city.

The data for one NPC could span not just the people he directly interacts with but also the people his people/friends/family faction interact with.

And you would probably want at least a fuzzy logic system to deal with this logic or even an ML system depending on it's bandwidth limitations to get a full set of dynamic reactions and interactions within a living breathing cyberpunk world.

And this is just the intercommunication between characters, not their world navigating, daily living, routines and actions depending on their character types and personality traits and proximity and interactions with others.

Actually could ECS find a good response within 32,000 potential replies, I'm not convinced it is very good at deep searches over partitioned/branching data structures, due to limited chunk size.

 

This is very interesting problem to discuss. But out of top of my head, I have no direct answer, or solution.
I am sure with bit of tinkering, ECS can be used, to provide such functionality.

I think best approach could be, to build ECS based database. Such can hold information about between character relationships, factions, goals, quests, etc.

 

It's true. Tree-hierarchy isn't always the best option, even if you're thinking about the data hierarchically. I have a very good example. Dialog systems usually tree-hierarchies, right?
Well, yes, but there are many instanced, when this is not the best option, because it's slow to execute and search the branches.
This is why they invented the flat-dialog system.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015528/AI-driven-Dynamic-Dialog-through
Don't let the title fool you.

The same pattern can be applied to decision making / relationships as well.

 

That is a good lecture and fascinating that a Query based SQL style dialogue system can work so well. The thing is can ECS Systems be made to work with dynamic queries*?

*ECS Systems need to match data with a query or filter only this filter tends to be hard coded.

Is it possible to build a dynamic or script based query system to get this dialogue query system working in ECS?

 

ECS is good but I'm not seeing the value of it for everyday code like dialogue so far. Dialogue is very dependent on data access out of order. You deal with lots of strings, lots of comparisons and at this point ECS is running sub optimally enough to just say f-it and go OOP.

 

In theory ECS could provide very powerful string handling features that are available in the SIMD features of modern CPUs...

e.g. SIMD string algorithms -> http://0x80.pl/articles/simd-strfind.html

 

Dialog doesn't require "powerful string handling". It's a few essentially random lookups in a dataset.

It does not require "power". It requires an appropriately planned data structure, and it it almost never needs to be particularly complicated. Check out interactive fiction tools. It's pretty standard graph traversal stuff.

 

Since typical DB tables have IDs, it is totally possible, to use IDs and numeric values for lookups.
Sure, at current ECS format strings are not supported, but DB can be made in ECS, at least partially functional (no direct strings lookup.).

 

I prefer to completely ignore games until a few days after they're released. All the pre-release promotion can be inaccurate or misleading, and sometimes the game is cancelled altogether. Also, after a few days you can start to read about all the interesting little technical problems that other people are having before you decide to buy it.

 

I go even further with that. I don't mind playing game, if is released months or even years ago. Mostly for for single player. But if is strictly multiplier, which is already dead, then I don't bother about such title at all. I will probably watch few vids and that makes my day.

 

Not sure what there is to discuss, they've been talking about this game since 2012 and it hasn't been released yet.. It's as mythical as the FF7 remake.!

 

We know that game isn't small. And initial priority for RED team was focus and finish Witcher. They did however announced, ready when is ready.

But referring to OP question

These wouldn't be viable at current stage of game dev. Not because of Unity ECS dev. but because already made progress in Cyberpunk. It is not easy to just switch engines like that. And I bet, lot of techniques / assets are probably reused from last Witcher. Which in Unity that would require probably complete rebuild from prototypes / scratch.

 

TBH I know that it would be silly for them to use Unity. But I had to add that question to make it relevant to the Unity Forum.

 

Wrong. It’s actually using REDengine 4.