Topic-Free Mega Thread - v 1.11.2020

General
4092

The lack of spelling out whether they’ll work on the fundamentals of Cyberpunk 2077 annoys me. Yes, the game has technical problems and bugs, but it’s not only about that.

  • Inventory management could get a rework.
  • Consumables/food are ■■■■■■■ useless.
  • Anything related to underwater breathing are ■■■■■■■ useless.
  • At least a quarter of the perks are ■■■■■■■ useless and a waste of a perk level.
  • Arguably core mechanics, such as being able to move mods between weapons/armor are locked behind high attribute levels (like 15 or so, I think). Using mods in any armor/weapon before you get that one doesn’t make sense, as you’d basically waste the mod for a weapon you’re soon to discard soon enough anyway.
  • Similar, cyberware such as 60% HP increase is locked behind a high attribute level (like 15 in Body or so), which is also the attribute that gives you HP to begin with, meaning characters will little HP (Body) will remain with little, whereas characters with more HP (Body) will get even ■■■■■■■ more of it.
  • Too many obscure combat elements that has an unacceptable trade off, causing them to be irrelevant entirely. Such as the Berserk mode and the Slowdown mode which both requires swapping out your Quickhacking Cyberware shit, meaning you can’t even quickhack if you want to use those things — and quickhacking is too damn important and useful to swap it out.
    • Same with stuff like the arm missile launcher thingy - shit essentially replaces the grenade tossing key, meaning you replace one useful combat ability with a slightly more useful variant but otherwise you don’t actually /gain/ anything from it, and switching between the two are less intuitive and slower than the alternative arm thingies (which just have you hitting 4 once more to toggle usually).
  • And so on and so forth…

Bugs and performance issues are the least of the game’s problem. That shit’s just surface problems, but Cyberpunk 2077 had much larger fundamental issues or lackluster implementations that promotes the Early Access feeling even /if/ the game were to glitch out a lot less.

2 Likes
4093

Also, noticed yet that the game applies RNG on loot, and this RNG rerolls after reloading a save? I got a really good legendary katana in a side mission, but ended up dying soon after. Upon reloading the save, the katana loot drop was nerfed and had like 25% its original damage, making it effectively a downgrade for my character. I had to reload that ■■■■■■■ save some 10 or more times just to get the same drop as the first time.

That shit ain’t funny.

4094

I suppose with a lot of work they could get something like a enhanced edition out but compared to Witcher 1 or Witcher 2 the games are much larger and the scope is much bigger so any core rework of the game including game mechanics would be very extensive and take a lot of time.

Only examples I can think of would be No Man’s Sky over the course of several years became better and better from the launch state and then there’s Final Fantasy XIV (14) where Square Enix acknowledged the problems but it’s closer to a rework or remaking of the game complete with CGI trailer showing them ending the old game, risky but it appears to have worked out really well.

It’s not something you see happen a lot even bigger patches and overhauls like the Enhanced Editions for the first two Witcher games didn’t really change up existing mechanics it mostly added to the game and polished up existing stuff.
(Improvements found within Heart of Stone and even more so Blood and Wine are also mostly contained to these episodes and content for Witcher 3 far as I know.)

Dying Light as another example though also one where Techland mostly added to the game and fleshed it out further alongside frequent bug fixes and improvements, shame the sequel ended up in development hell over multiple different views of what the game should have been and a myriad of problems and delays as a result.

Different team now too with the developers of the older games in higher positions within CD Project RED and the early showcases of the game also featured stuff that I think has been mentioned as not even being in the game though some of the early videos and footage would have changed within the eight or so years it’s been since reveal.

Lengthy post again but I do hope they can turn things around and start fixing the game up but I am going to be a bit reserved in expectations unless they outright announce they are working over the entire game but I don’t think they have the budget or time frame for that plus investors and ongoing investigations for other ongoing problems that have been brought up like the working conditions and more.

EDIT: Especially with planned additional content and the work on a version developed more for the new console hardware and the features these have rather than running the existing game on faster hardware.

4095

I doubt we’ll ever see these fundamental issues fixed or reworked myself. Had they actually gone for an “Early Access” approach, we would’ve, but a “released” product not in “full development” any longer typically only sees surface issues fixed alongside the release of new content through DLCs etc.

I hate it. Even fixing all of the surface stuff only makes it a solid game — but hardly a “masterpiece.”

2 Likes
4096

Nioh 2 PC edition features.

It’s what you would expect mostly though I like the 60 FPS support and above up to 144 plus ultra wide hopefully being well supported kinda hard to tell from the video.

HDR’s supported but the trailers idea of illustrating this is to crank contrast to 150% or so. ~

Also as an extra there’s a total need for anti-aliasing (Super sampling might be a way though.) and dubbed English voice acting with lip sync on par with the best of old dubbed German VHS tapes.

EDIT: Zen 4 info as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/kx4okk/underfox_on_twitter_the_use_of_a_mini_processor/

Put a processor on the processor to manage the processors sleep process.
:smiley:

1 Like
4097

So many things you brought up are definitely absolutely correct. Quickhacking is too good to replace out with any other mod. And yeah RNG is purely stupid in this game. Not to mention the other things you mentioned definitely bothered me a great deal. like alcohol stuff and such is well not even good. There is a mod on Nexus that legitely converts all food items to two different groups b/c that makes total sense the food items don’t have any difference between each item. I never understood why they even added the oxygen underwater stuff. There is no point there is that kind of thing in the game except for Judy mission which you are wearing a damn wetsuit.

Inventory management definitely needs fixing. Wish there was more ways to filter stuff and such. I am positive we will see massive overhaul mods coming out for cyberpunk soon once the modding scene kicks into full throttle. Already seeing decent mods that are almost necessity.

4098

At least they didn’t crank the color saturation up and call that HDR. That’s a very pleasing HDR visualization in SDR, compared to ones I’ve seen elsewhere.

What they really need to do, though, is make an HDR version of the trailer :slight_smile: HDR game capture and streaming is finally practical and if you want to impress people with HDR in your game, you do that!

(i.e. > [4K HDR] Kena: Bridge of Spirits - Announcement Trailer (PS5) - YouTube )

1 Like
4099

And seems that they spent so much time make it pretty, but forget to fill it with content. I would say this is the new no man sky, pretty but shallow.
As you said it, even without the bugs, average at best.

4100

Considering what they did with TW1 EE and TW2 EE I disagree.

4101

Reading up about those editions doesn’t give me much hope.

From the looks of things, TW2 EE focused almost exclusively on various bugs and the addition of new content in the form of quests, videos, and locations. Nothing major seems to have been entirely reworked in that patch.

The main relatable thing in TW1 EE seems to be the redesigned inventory system alone. All the rest (from what I can gather) seems to just be bug fixes, various general technical enhancements, localization rework, etc. The other core aspects of that game seems to have been left alone (beyond fixing bugs etc).

Following that trend, a “Cyberpunk 2077 Enhanced Edition” might’ve reworked zero or one fundamental element of the game, while the rest of such an update would focus on bug fixes, maybe rewriting some dialogue lines here and there, or similar general ‘basic’ improvements.

  • It’s entirely possible (and most likely) that CDPR doesn’t even see these fundamental issues as issues per se, but merely the expected or even desired consequences of the intended game design. And if they do, then they’ll never rework those systems either – instead they’ll merely fix various bugs that the design expresses, while leaving the overall state of it left alone.

For example, with Cyberpunk it might mean that they would remove some of the currently useless perks that exists (e.g. hold a pistol when grabbing a body of an enemy) instead of implementing the missing gameplay element (hold a pistol when holding someone from the behind), while still leaving other useless perks in the game such as the Crit Chance/Crit Damage increase perks that’s utterly useless when you have weapons that regularly rolls 90%+ of those stats anyway.

Basically, fixing superfluous ‘bugs’ while leaving the more fundamental ones alone that requires much more time to rework and properly ‘fix’.

A few other examples that I can think of to give an idea of what I mean:

  • Police spawning will see a change to not spawn within a circle of a certain size around the player – while leaving the overall behavior of randomly spawned in entities alone (e.g. cops would not be dynamically notified of the player’s action and then drive towards the area and look for the player).
  • NPC “driving” will be improved to be able to handle some more scenarios (e.g. change lane if one is occupied or “drive” around a tiny obstacle) – while leaving the implementation still tied to the current predefined paths where there’s no actual “intelligence” behind the driving (e.g. cops would still not be able to drive or chase the player intelligently in a car).
  • Inventory system might get a new “Quests” tab to highlight those items, and individual items might be renamed and quest lines changed a bit to make it easier to find some items that requires navigating the inventory – while still leaving the current inventory and overall item system (food, consumables, etc) the same lackluster as it is today.
  • Some useless perks will be removed from the game as they rely on missing features – while still leaving other useless perks inside the game since they serve to “extend the repository of perks available.”
  • and so on and so forth.

Basically mostly bug fixes or superfluous changes or “improvements” that hides the fundamental issues (and limitations) of the chosen design instead of actually reworking elements entirely.

An example of where something similar could be seen was in Dragon Age 2 from BioWare. That game spawns enemies on top of the player from the ceiling – they literally fall down among you and your party. This was a heavily criticized element of the game as it broke immersion and just looked off and cheap. And what did BioWare do? They didn’t rework the existing spawning in the base of the game – instead they, for new DLC locations only, chose a slightly different approach where enemies spawned in from the sides and then ran against the player’s party. They left spawning in the base game alone and only included the ‘improvements’ (and only superfluous ones at that) in new locations. This is the sort of approach (for the most part) that i can see CDPR take as well, combined with the earlier mentioned bug fixes or superfluous changes or “improvements” to attempt to hide the limitations of the chosen design.

While I don’t doubt CDPR will fix some things, I doubt they’ll touch on everything, or even them all in fundamental ways, basically.

A bit long of a post and random ramblings but hopefully I’ve explained my thinking a bit more :smiley:

4102

The reason we see so few game developers rework fundamental aspects of a game post-release, by the way, is because doing so generally doesn’t bring you sales, nor does many players replay the game to experience those sorts of things.

Instead what most developers focus on is everything tied to new content, such as new areas/locations, new quests, and new gameplay elements that doesn’t conflict with existing elements.

It’s a much bigger undertaking and time demanding challenge to rework a fundamental gameplay element than to merely patch it up in a few places. This is because such fundamental changes have unexpected consequences elsewhere – especially in how they interact with other core gameplay elements. The current ‘status quo’ of the game is a “known state”, basically, and so those can be predicted when adding new separate features. However reworking a core gameplay element will introduce new bugs, unexpected behaviors, or weird interactions all over the place, which then needs its own share of time spent on it fixing those things up.

This is probably likewise why I doubt we’ll ever see a full functional gang/territory conflict system implemented in Night City. Such a massive new feature introduced in the city introduces the potential for massive complications in regards to other elements such as existing quests or side content and overall gaming experience.

4103

Is there a way to adjust what % space left on the drive SK blocks screenshots. Had a few achievement screenshots not get taken even with about 100GB left on that drive.
This is with SK v20.12.30, don’t know what version is the latest released.

It’s a nice idea, because I hadn’t realised the remaining space was getting low for me again on that drive, I’d just prefer to either make it less % for blocking screenshots, or to at least take the screenshot and then warn me on the space remaining if there’s still a few gig left.

4104

Which one of the conditions failed? I can probably make it configurable, just didn’t expect the very small limit I set to actually trigger on any systems (certainly not this quickly).

  // Don't take screenshots if the storage for one single screenshot is > 85% of remaining space
  if (static_cast <double> (bytes_needed) > static_cast <double> (useable.QuadPart) * .85)
  {
    SK_ImGui_Warning (L"Not enough Disk Space to take Screenshot, please free up or disable feature.");
    return false;
  }

  // Don't take screenshots if the general free space is < 3%
  if (static_cast <double> (free.QuadPart) / static_cast <double> (capacity.QuadPart) < 0.03)
  {
    SK_ImGui_Warning (L"Free space on Screenshot Drive is < 3%, disabling Screenshots.");
    return false;
  }

Also, the point about taking the screenshot and then warning is a good idea. I was just a bit worried about, well, the warning dialog itself ending up in screenshots, lol.

4105

Was the 3% one.

Yeah I was thinking when writing that post if it was warning but still taking it there’d be screenshots of the warning, so maybe screenshot then a couple seconds later or something show the warning

4106

Is there any way of setting a hard limit instead? E.g. 500 MB or something? Percentages are suboptimal in a world with ever increasing HDD spaces.

E.g. 3% of an 8 TB drive is 240 GB.

At work we saw similar “false positives” with our free disk space event triggers, and ended up setting separate thresholds for drives above 500 GB, if I remember it correctly. For drives at or below 500 GB in total space, an alert would be thrown if the free space was below 5%, but for drives above 500 GB, we used a hard threshold instead of a percentage based one, say 25 GB or so.

So for smaller drives the percentage based threshold would still be be relevant as it would decrease alongside the drive space, but for larger drives we didn’t rely on it because of the false positives it tend to result in when discussing drives in the size of multiple terabytes.

4107

I’m fairly confident I can fill those pretty efficiently too :slight_smile:

The real reason the feature exists is because, unlike pretty anything else that takes screenshots, SK is so efficient that you could sit there with the keybind to trigger these things held (or whatever Frostbite games do with input) for an entire game and not know you’ve been filling the drive the whole time :stuck_out_tongue: That’s better detected through rate of change of disk free space than the current system I’ve got though.

4108

Hmm. :slight_smile:

Usually there’s a small pause or hitch should give this feature more use then instead of ReShade or the basic PrintScreen ha ha.

Sounds good if that’s been removed almost entirely.

Guess a option or toggle for whether it’s percentage based or a specific storage size it warns about could be useful for larger drives too.
Used to have more fun with screenshots but now it’s mostly some tweaking or just getting through the game maybe finding something funny or notable occasionally. :stuck_out_tongue:

4109

Is it not possible to bypass DWM in flip mode when the game window is setup like this?

image
image2560×1440 372 KB

Was thinking i could use the unused black space for other windows like for the trade website for the game etc.

4110

Assuming the game’s scaling isn’t problematic, and you can get rid of that window border, you can get a somewhat performant Flip Model presentation path even if the game’s in a centered window like that. The compositor will not be disabled, but you’ll avoid some of its performance issues.

4111

Yes i can get rid of the border using SK, though why is the compositor not bypassed shouldn’t flip mode write directly to the window regardless of screensize etc?

was thinking i could have the game at 1080p window while the monitor is at 4k, as i can’t play most games at 4k res.