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[TheAssist]

This is an interesting take that I actually thought about myself as someone who really likes the world design in the Yakuza games while playing Cyberpunk.

TLDW:
- We all know CP was dev hell
- Still the game suffered numerous AI bugs at launch (and still does), many of which are associated with cars
- Having cars obviously impacts how big your world needs to be and how much assets need to be made (that hardly anyone ever sees)
- It also influences the complexity of your AI systems (meaning more work and more bugs for little gain)
- Car centric design leads to a lot of micro management in terms of how quest areas need to be designed (what happens when a players drives in here with a bus...)
- There are probably more cost efficient ways to build a world that still plays nicely with the themes of Cyberpunk, without the game and its world being car centric

I very much agree with this take. As I said, I love the worlds in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. Everything feels much more "real" and immersive. Cars are just a set dressing. Its not like driving cars in GTA, Cyberpunk or any similar game is ever fun. Its just a means of getting faster from A to B...but for what reason and at what cost.
Actually Like a Dragon Inifinite Wealth is the perfect case and point. While the game itself does not let you drive a car, it is set in a car centric city and I immediately felt it having a negative impact on immersion, time it takes to go from to B and just being frustrated every time the game wanted me to go from one end of the map to the other (as someone who usually never fast travels in these games).

So is driving a car in a modern open world something that just needs to be there for your immersion, or do you think games should be designed in a more intelligent way to avoid feature bloat and reduce dev costs (or at least use the ressources to spend more time on story, immersion, gameplay, etc.).
Maybe more concrete: Should "AA" games like Mafia bother with cars or should they focus more on their strength.

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

Sounds like excuses to make games cheaper and faster while still charging us more.
I thought Mafia's cars and horses are great, hell the cars and radio tunes are the best part of Mafia 3.

 

[Sgt.Asher]

Disagree to the max. i love the cars in cyberpunk, especially the cheap ass kei cars the triangle being my favorite.

Oh of course it's adam something, Dude is militantly anti-car.

 

[R6Rider]

Its not like driving cars in GTA, Cyberpunk or any similar game is ever fun.

Not even remotely true. I find driving in most of the games fun. Cyberpunk's driving is terrible, but I find GTA games and Watch Dogs, for example, fun in different ways. I even enjoyed the driving in LA Noir despite the city being mostly empty.

Besides the Yakuza games aren't even sandbox style games. You can run around the world, but there's very little in terms of interacting outside of scripted things.

 

[diffusionx]

I thought Cp2077 had one of the better city designs in terms of versimilitude and also car differentiation in recent memory

 

[Icymanipulator]

Depends on the game but having a way to get around faster is nice be that a car, horse or some other mount.

 

[Loomy]

- There are probably more cost efficient ways to build a world that still plays nicely with the themes of Cyberpunk, without the game and its world being car centric

Night City in the game is too clean and too open. Should be way more dense. They should also have set the game in Japan like the book they liberally borrowed from.

 

[Senua]

 

[TintoConCasera]

based Yoko was right all along.

 

[ungalo]

I love the worlds in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. Everything feels much more "real" and immersive

yeah ? I think if Cyberpunk was designed like Yakuza it would be far less realistic and immersive, Yakuza does its best with limited cost and that's good, but that's not "more immersive"

now you can question the design philosophy of Cyberpunk for other reasons, but as of now the game is a reference when it comes to immersion, even though it's still not close to the best GTA-like in terms of interaction, physics, AI and all of that, it makes up for it by having different qualities such as the sense of scale, level of details in closed environment etc

Now, was it worth it ? Should they have gone for a more constrained type of game with more depth and not bother implementing all those systems like cars ? RPG fans probably think so.

 

[TerribleAtThisGame]

Give cars a double jump and I'm back in. Fuck a basic bitch car

 

[nemiroff]

I don't get it.

One of my favorite things in both gtaiv and gtav was driving/racing around the city

 

[Judge Magister]

I got to be honest here, back then when i played Fallout 3 and Borderlands, i couldn't cope with constantly being on foot in Fallout.

 

[Danjin44]

Who cares about cars when you have mechs.....

 

[hououinkyouma00]

Sounds like excuses to make games cheaper and faster while still charging us more.
I thought Mafia's cars and horses are great, hell the cars and radio tunes are the only good part of Mafia 3.

Fixed that for you

 

[asdasdasdbb]

OP's source must be one of those dirty Public Transit people.

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

Fixed that for you

Ha! I'd say the dlc expansions were good and I kinda got to own a bar.

 

[kevboard]

having a modern open workd game where you can't drive (could be explained in context) would be interesting ngl. anything that gives a game a unique feel is a good thing imo.

 

[vaibhavpisal]

GTA games absolutely must have cars though.

Cyberpunk, dunno if I want a game like that must have cars. They can make smaller, more dense world suitable for on foot traversal. That would be fine.

 

[Judge Magister]

Who cares about cars when you have mechs.....

 

[Exoil]

I wish they they would've let my type BIGDADDY in the console for KCD2 to spawn myself a sweet Winsett's Z to drive to the next quest marker with style instead of having to use that pesky horse. Horses are so 1403.

More cars for the people!

 

[Danjin44]

 

[calico]

GTA without cars

 

[Rush2112]

Cyberpunk handled this really well at launch. Soon as you got in a car, the police arrested you.

 

[Fafalada]

- Having cars obviously impacts how big your world needs to be and how much assets need to be made (that hardly anyone ever sees)
- It also influences the complexity of your AI systems (meaning more work and more bugs for little gain)
- Car centric design leads to a lot of micro management in terms of how quest areas need to be designed (what happens when a players drives in here with a bus...)
- There are probably more cost efficient ways to build a world that still plays nicely with the themes of Cyberpunk, without the game and its world being car centric

While this is all true - the problem isn't really 'cars' - it's more 'AAA the way things work'. Ie. we're talking about segment of the industry that is both entirely self indulgent and driven by the 'bigger=better'. So cars making maps bigger, development more complex, and challenges to overcome more numerous - is basically a poster child for placating AAA egos - especially in studios that are renowned by this - as is case in point.

TLDR - telling the likes of CDPR , R* etc. - there are more efficient ways to make a game of similar or better quality will 100% of the time have this reaction:

 

[Wildebeest]

The only time I think cars have been an essential prop in cyberpunk fiction is with JG Ballard's novel Crash where people have a sexual kink about being in car crashes. The most important cyberpunk texts IMO are Neuromancer and The Stars My Destination. In Stars the whole idea is that people could teleport using "jaunting" so there were no cars. In Neuromancer the main setting was "the sprawl" which was a very densely packed urban location where, I think, Adam is right in saying that cars just would not have been practical or had much space. There is much more focus in the book on going places in "cyberspace" and even space travel. At first it seems like Adam might be reaching hard when it comes to finding Cyberpunk weird for having such a focus on cars but I can't actually disagree with him.

 

[Icymanipulator]

There's also something to be said about the "relationship" you have with your mount in a game. For instance, in Cyberpunk i absolutely fell in love with the Akira bike. It became a part of my character's identity.

 

[Magic Carpet]

I need to retry Starfield now that they have moon buggies. That was a positive wsn't it?

 

[TheAssist]

yeah ? I think if Cyberpunk was designed like Yakuza it would be far less realistic and immersive, Yakuza does its best with limited cost and that's good, but that's not "more immersive"

now you can question the design philosophy of Cyberpunk for other reasons, but as of now the game is a reference when it comes to immersion, even though it's still not close to the best GTA-like in terms of interaction, physics, AI and all of that, it makes up for it by having different qualities such as the sense of scale, level of details in closed environment etc

Now, was it worth it ? Should they have gone for a more constrained type of game with more depth and not bother implementing all those systems like cars ? RPG fans probably think so.

Ok let me put it in other words.
Every time I get out of the car in CP, its feels like I am in a concrete desert waste land with nothing to do and see. there is absolutely no reason to not be in the car. Unless you are in of of those "quest zones" were they deliberately dont let you drive your car and it instantly is so much more dense and interesting. So many people who have conversations, so many stores and things to interact with. These are the moments CP shines.

The car is simply there to get me from one of these points to the next. But at what cost. The amount of work to build this world and the AI to drive it is somewhat insane. Simply so we can have a more real life feeling transition. Personally I dont think thats worth it.

Its not that I hate the game or anything, I had great fun and I only played it this year. I also enjoyed driving through the desert with my 930 911 Porsche Turbo. But its definitively not the most fun I had and at the end of the day I would trade it for more immersive on foot environments, because I could get the same vibes with better driving in an actual driving game. At the end of the day there will always be tradeoffs and since game did not need to be a GTA like game to begin with, I think other priorities would have served the game better (speaking in hindsight at least).

 

[calistan]

Ok let me put it in other words.
Every time I get out of the car in CP, its feels like I am in a concrete desert waste land with nothing to do and see. there is absolutely no reason to not be in the car. Unless you are in of of those "quest zones" were they deliberately dont let you drive your car and it instantly is so much more dense and interesting. So many people who have conversations, so many stores and things to interact with. These are the moments CP shines.

The car is simply there to get me from one of these points to the next. But at what cost. The amount of work to build this world and the AI to drive it is somewhat insane. Simply so we can have a more real life feeling transition. Personally I dont think thats worth it.

Its not that I hate the game or anything, I had great fun and I only played it this year. I also enjoyed driving through the desert with my 930 911 Porsche Turbo. But its definitively not the most fun I had and at the end of the day I would trade it for more immersive on foot environments, because I could get the same vibes with better driving in an actual driving game. At the end of the day there will always be tradeoffs and since game did not need to be a GTA like game to begin with, I think other priorities would have served the game better (speaking in hindsight at least).

The flip side of that is games where they contrive some reason for cars to be excluded from the streets, like Deus Ex Human Revolution or Robocop.

It often makes sense from a gameplay perspective, but when all you get is parked cars as scenery, it makes for a very artificial-looking urban location.

Oh, another set of empty videogame streets with locked gates and police barriers at the exits - let's explore!

 

[Aenima]

Cyberpunk has the best open world city ever created in a videogame. The city size is not a problem, the cars are not a problem, the AI in the game is a problem. While the cities in GTA are also great, the AI in GTA is what really brings the world to life in a way that Cyberpunk never manages to do it.

 

[kevboard]

 

[Radical_3d]

I'd like to see a video about how open worlds negatively influence game design.

 

[kevboard]

The flip side of that is games where they contrive some reason for cars to be excluded from the streets, like Deus Ex Human Revolution or Robocop.

It often makes sense from a gameplay perspective, but when all you get is parked cars as scenery, it makes for a very artificial-looking urban location.

Oh, another set of empty videogame streets with locked gates and police barriers at the exits - let's explore!

you could just say your character doesn't have a car, and in a cyberpunk themed game you could explain not being able to steal a car by saying something like, that cars are tied to the implants of the owners. the more futuristic the setting, the easier it is it explain why you can't just go and drive a vehicle by just making up some sci-fi reason for it.

as for there only being parked cars, I mean, you don't have to do that either. you can still have rudimentary traffic happening. and again, in a scifi setting you can easily make it so that running into traffic is just super deadly because, say, all the cars drive insanely fast because they are fully AI controlled and stuff like that. so they'll just run you over because they are programmed to... it's a dystopian cyberpunk setting after all... fuck the pedestrians! the rich guys with cars don't care and the politicians don't care either.

 

[Judge Magister]

Transformers never interested me and i know almost nothing about it but that game was cool!

 

[Denton]

Extremely idiotic OP.

 

[kevboard]

Transformers never interested me and i know almost nothing about it but that game was cool!

same. the most I've ever interacted with Transformers outside of this game is watching the Bumblebee movie... which was surprisingly actually good.

 

[notseqi]

Probably repeating myself but I had no problems on a low PC with a 2600x and a Vega56. That you thought this was gonna be the best thing since sliced bread on consoles does me a boggle of the minderino.
This is the enthusiast forum, where everything is deliberated, weighed and sliced to the max, innit? Hello, is this thing on?

Edit: cars were okay and got wayyy better with updates

 

[calistan]

you could just say your character doesn't have a car, and in a cyberpunk themed game you could explain not being able to steal a car by saying something like, that cars are tied to the implants of the owners. the more futuristic the setting, the easier it is it explain why you can't just go and drive a vehicle by just making up some sci-fi reason for it.

as for there only being parked cars, I mean, you don't have to do that either. you can still have rudimentary traffic happening. and again, in a scifi setting you can easily make it so that running into traffic is just super deadly because, say, all the cars drive insanely fast because they are fully AI controlled and stuff like that. so they'll just run you over because they are programmed to... it's a dystopian cyberpunk setting after all... fuck the pedestrians! the rich guys with cars don't care and the politicians don't care either.

I don't know, it sounds like you'd be turning part of the game into Crossy Road.

If you have small urban areas to explore, it's weird not to have any cars in them. But if you have cars, then you have to have some sort of AI to react to the player stepping into the road - instant death would be no fun.

But then the reaction has to be more complex than just stopping robotically until you're out of the way. You need angry drivers and police, and eventually you end up in the Cyberpunk situation.

 

[TheAssist]

Extremely idiotic OP.

Good feedback and thanks for your contribution. Putting you in my prayers tonight.

 

[kevboard]

I don't know, it sounds like you'd be turning part of the game into Crossy Road.

If you have small urban areas to explore, it's weird not to have any cars in them. But if you have cars, then you have to have some sort of AI to react to the player stepping into the road - instant death would be no fun.

But then the reaction has to be more complex than just stopping robotically until you're out of the way. You need angry drivers and police, and eventually you end up in the Cyberpunk situation.

I think you can absolutely have relatively simple AI in such cases.
once again, in a dystopian scifi setting you can in fact explain robotic reactions by cars through the tech used to make them work.

it could robotically stop. then give an automated warning to step aside. and after a few seconds, if you don't comply, it will just run you over. that's pretty simple AI behaviour, but fits the scifi setting.

the passengers inside would only need to look at you annoyed or angry and have a few voice lines maybe... others might just sit in there not even taking note of you and being distracted because they are watching something online etc.

 

[StereoVsn]

yeah ? I think if Cyberpunk was designed like Yakuza it would be far less realistic and immersive, Yakuza does its best with limited cost and that's good, but that's not "more immersive"

now you can question the design philosophy of Cyberpunk for other reasons, but as of now the game is a reference when it comes to immersion, even though it's still not close to the best GTA-like in terms of interaction, physics, AI and all of that, it makes up for it by having different qualities such as the sense of scale, level of details in closed environment etc

Now, was it worth it ? Should they have gone for a more constrained type of game with more depth and not bother implementing all those systems like cars ? RPG fans probably think so.

Cyberpunk 2077 has 0 immersion. There is no interactivity besides repeating shootouts.

You can't hack different stores or get into building Deus Ex style. There is no environmental destruction. NPCs are all ephemeral.

While city design is very good, there is nothing to do there really besides shooting up some people.

 

[Imru’ al-Qays]

Honestly Cyberpunk would have been better if Night City had been a subway-centric metropolis like Tokyo. Car-centric LA just doesn't make sense as a future setting - hell, it doesn't even make sense in the real world, hence why LA is spending billions to try to bootstrap itself a subway system.

 

[kevboard]

Cyberpunk 2077 has 0 immersion. There is no interactivity besides repeating shootouts.

You can't hack different stores or get into building Deus Ex style. There is no environmental destruction. NPCs are all ephemeral.

While city design is very good, there is nothing to do there really besides shooting up some people.

that's sadly the case with nearly any open world game. back on PS2 that wasn't really much of an issue since it was all still new and exciting.
but now? almost nothing has changed since.

it's all just 99% window-dressing and 1% actually interactive/interesting.

 

[StereoVsn]

that's sadly the case with nearly any open world game. back on PS2 that wasn't really much of an issue since it was all still new and exciting.
but now? almost nothing has changed since.

it's all just 99% window-dressing and 1% actually interactive/interesting.

This is one of the reasons that I liked KCD 2 so much as Warhorse did an absolutely amazing job with interactivity in an Open World setting.

 

[CamHostage]

So is driving a car in a modern open world something that just needs to be there for your immersion, or do you think games should be designed in a more intelligent way to avoid feature bloat and reduce dev costs (or at least use the ressources to spend more time on story, immersion, gameplay, etc.).

Yeah, everything about increasing the scope of a world's complexity sounds like clear plusses... until it actually has to get built. Then, the complications arise, which some developers are able to manage and have projects which compliment the additions, but other perfectly talented teams can still lose their focus or not get it to fit.

BTW, the flipside of this doesn't happen much anymore, but it's also interesting to consider how the reverse is similar: adding on-foot components to vehicle-based games can fail to scale down / convert. The game's limited sense of accurate detail gets exposed at walking speeds, and human animation/motion/camera systems are hard to graft into the game's formula to meet the new perspective. Worlds made for cars or planes (or skateboards, even) aren't always as fun when you try to slow down and walk around in them.

I remember how cool it seemed when Driver 2 added the ability to get out of the car and even take other people's cars... then you step out of the car and go, "Uh oh, this didn't work out as much as I wanted it to."

Somehow GTA3 got it all right in one go*, and made it look easy. However, if you look at the games which came before it as well as the many games and franchise updates which chased it, you can learn a bit about how hard it really is to be both a running and a driving game at the same time.

(*Yeah, it followed GTA 1/2, but 3 was about as from-scratch as it gets in a 3D conversion of a 2D/2.5D franchise... besides, the on-foot play in the old GTAs was not great in a similar way that we're talking about here.)

 

[calico]

The contention was that cars are only set dressing and/or a method of getting from A to B (transportation) in GTA. This is not the case and has never been the case; they have been an integral part of the gameplay since the series began. The title itself being a pretty big hint.

Even in Mafia, vehicles are (or at least were, I haven't played the new one) frequently relied upon for gameplay beyond just transportation. The first gameplay in Mafia 1 is a car chase sequence iirc.

 

[Jakk]

Could not disagree more. Being able to steal any car and go anywhere is probably the biggest reason GTA became so popular.

 

[TheAssist]

The contention was that cars are only set dressing and/or a method of getting from A to B (transportation) in GTA. This is not the case and has never been the case; they have been an integral part of the gameplay since the series began. The title itself being a pretty big hint.

Even in Mafia, vehicles are (or at least were, I haven't played the new one) frequently relied upon for gameplay beyond just transportation. The first gameplay in Mafia 1 is a car chase sequence iirc.

True. I am also not saying no game should have drivable cars. If you have the budget and skillset to do it, go for it.

But for CDPR it was their first game in a modern setting. And as several people have said, you can perfectly do a CP setting without drivable cars. Scoping down for their first modern sandbox game would have opened up resources for more pedestrian focused, dense, immersive areas with a higher degree of interactivity and all that with less bugs.

Learning from that experience they could have still scoped up for a second entry. But no, the immediate default thought had to be "we need cars". With all the trials and tribulations that come with that.

Also Mafia had been widely criticized (even at the time) that its open world feels empty and non interactive and that the driving physics are subpar and not very fun.
Personally I liked the driving in Mafia games. But I think its important to think about what the associate costs are and what one could do with those resources at other places.

 

[freemandos]

It's like other mechanics, it's only bad when their implementation detracts from the experience (for example Quake 4). Yakuza is great without cars and I'll never miss them. But GTA? Mafia? Nah.

And btw, Mafia 1 driving parts are great. Most criticism was basically because "it wasn' like GTA", "they're slow" or "you can't skip a traffic light".