How cars negatively influence game design

Good feedback and thanks for your contribution. Putting you in my prayers tonight.
It should be self-evident why OP is idiotic, but ok. It is idiotic because it assumes that one design is better than another, and it assumes everyone has the same taste. It assumes Cyberpunk would be a better game if it had vastly smaller city and no cars. And that is obviously nonsense for huge number of people. I have 260 hours in Cyberpunk 2077. Finishing the story took me 140. What did I do the other 120? Drive and walk around Night City. Enjoying its sights and ambiance and the amazing cyberpunkish stable of cars. Cyberpunk has better car design than most racing games, with brilliantly constructed both interiors and exteriors. Would be a huge shame to lose that.

Mafia 1/2/3 would not be anywhere near as fun without the driving. Mafia 1 had more detailed physics than most racing games of the time. It even supported wheels with manual shifter and force feedback. Mafia 2 and 3 in its simulation setting is extremely enjoyable to drive in. Again, you are asking for much worse games to be made.

I tried Yakuza 0 three times. I always dropped it after few hours, because of its inconsistent presentation (nonvoiced dialogue, weird sounds) and too much emphasis on combat. Plus absence of driving, which I enjoy. But you will not see me create threads asking for Yakuza to be something other than it is.
 
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I think the guy is a bit too anti-car in general. I do love my walkable cities and wouldn't trade it for what I've seen in the US. But that doesn't mean cars are always shit. They have their purpose. And in games, it's fun to drive around. And to be fair, in a corpo-dystopia like it is presented in Cyberpunk, I would fully expect cities to be designed as car-centric as possible because corpos want you to buy cars and other shit.
 
It should be self-evident why OP is idiotic, but ok. It is idiotic because it assumes that one design is better than another, and it assumes everyone has the same taste. It assumes Cyberpunk would be a better game if it had vastly smaller city and no cars. And that is obviously nonsense for huge number of people. I have 260 hours in Cyberpunk 2077. Finishing the story took me 140. What did I do the other 120? Drive and walk around Night City. Enjoying its sights and ambiance and the amazing cyberpunkish stable of cars. Cyberpunk has better car design than most racing games, with brilliantly constructed both interiors and exteriors. Would be a huge shame to lose that.

Mafia 1/2/3 would not be anywhere near as fun without the driving. Mafia 1 had more detailed physics than most racing games of the time. It even supported wheels with manual shifter and force feedback. Mafia 2 and 3 in its simulation setting is extremely enjoyable to drive in. Again, you are asking for much worse games to be made.

I tried Yakuza 0 three times. I always dropped it after few hours, because of its inconsistent presentation (nonvoiced dialogue, weird sounds) and too much emphasis on combat. Plus absence of driving, which I enjoy. But you will not see me create threads asking for Yakuza to be something other than it is.

See, its obvious to you but it might not be to someone else. Which is why we discuss things and dont just assume everyone who doesnt share my opinion is a fucking idiot and also a cunt. At least now I know why you disagree and I get your points, its not that I dont enjoy these things as well (when they work). Its just that I dont enjoy them enough to justify 10 year dev cycles with unpaid overtime and and a bug infested game that needs another 5 years of patching as a result. But we can agree to disagree on that part.
 
Might be, but as someone who really likes racing games I find the opinion that driving in GTA is as anywhere near good...well its an opinion for sure D:
Both games can exist. Personally I enjoy cruising in my car in a game and listening to the radio. Might stop off and rob a liquor store, then back on the road.

Plus how can you re-create cities like NYC, LA and Miami without cars? Those are sprawling metropolises and cars is how we get around them. I appreciate the walkable smaller cites too. But a giant world is also welcome.
 
So what's the alternative? Would Cyberpunk be a better game if it was divided up into small dense levels based around missions, and you never got to see the wider city and surrounding areas?

It migh not have taken as long to make, but I don't think it would have attracted as much attention.
 
dont just assume everyone who doesnt share my opinion is a fucking idiot and also a cunt.
I called you neither; I called the original post (OP) idiotic, not you personally.
I disagree about your assessment of Cyberpunk too - the game may have started originally development in 2012, but it got shelved in favour of Witcher 3 and development restarted from scratch in 2016 - and PC version was fine at release for the most part (I finished it then without any significant issues, all quests finished, no crashes). So it was 4 years of development, not a decade, and the game was not really that "bug infested", aside from lastgen consoles which were buggy only due to slow HDD and RAM unable to cope with the streaming system. Never should have been released on those.
 
Video is total nonsense. The exact part where I stopped watching is when he implied that cities feel cosy and safe because being enclosed by buildings puts your brain at ease due to them forming an "organic protective structure". Cities are a stressful and overstimulating environment, frequently crime and pollution ridden, and often contribute to poorer mental health outcomes compared with living in the suburbs. It's extremely common for people to feel a mental burden being lifted simply by taking a short retreat into the countryside. He has it exactly backwards lmao.

So to describe being entombed in their synthetic cement walls as feeling at all "organic", while also deriding wider rural spaces just because they require a car for accessibility reasons, is frankly ridiculous. A large part of why Night City feels so dystopian is because you are surrounded by so many walled structures. Take away the cars and the pedestrians and the city still feels ominous just through its design.

Guy probably romanticizes the Kowloon Walled City despite being a dank and crime infested literal slum.
 
So what's the alternative? Would Cyberpunk be a better game if it was divided up into small dense levels based around missions, and you never got to see the wider city and surrounding areas?

It migh not have taken as long to make, but I don't think it would have attracted as much attention.

from a game design standpoint it absolutely would have been better. because even games from the turn of the millennium have more meaningful interactivity and content density than Cyberpunk has.
 
So what's the alternative? Would Cyberpunk be a better game if it was divided up into small dense levels based around missions, and you never got to see the wider city and surrounding areas?

It migh not have taken as long to make, but I don't think it would have attracted as much attention.

Of course there is a place for bigger games if you have the money and talent for it. But at the time, CDPR at least did not have the talent. They also did not start with the Witcher 3 right out of the gate. Witcher 1 and 2 were much smaller in scale and they learned from everything they did or didnt do. They could have started on a smaller scale when it comes to modern open World games and create something more intimate but still good, focus on their strengths (imho character writing and quest design). This way they could've learned while doing and also create revenue and lower cost/risk for both them and investors. But it somehow it feels like ego got the better of them and they took the third step before the first.
I called you neither; I called the original post (OP) idiotic, not you personally.
I disagree about your assessment of Cyberpunk too - the game may have started originally development in 2012, but it got shelved in favour of Witcher 3 and development restarted from scratch in 2016 - and PC version was fine at release for the most part (I finished it then without any significant issues, all quests finished, no crashes). So it was 4 years of development, not a decade, and the game was not really that "bug infested", aside from lastgen consoles which were buggy only due to slow HDD and RAM unable to cope with the streaming system. Never should have been released on those.
I get what you mean, but that argument comes across as ingenuine. Its like saying I dont think your ugly, its just that your face looks like a car drove over it. I am exaggerating, but anyways.

I understand all your points and they are valid, but saying CP was not a buggy mess at release...uff, I think the thousands of bug and glitches compilation about the game beg to differ, not just on old gen.

To reiterate my point, I am not against cars in games or big open worlds. But to me it feels like a lot of dev teams who make games like this, do not have pedigree to do so and would have been better of making smaller, more focused games and then slowly gain expertise in how to create these worlds to fill them with meaningful content and mechanics instead of spending most of their budget on making the game "car save". Create a strong base and expand from there, kind of like witcher 1 through 3.
 
Might be, but as someone who really likes racing games I find the opinion that driving in GTA is as anywhere near good...well its an opinion for sure D:
It is all about expectations.
Plus you said racing games not racing sims :messenger_smirking:
The genre goes from whatever pc only ultra realistic drving simulator to the burnout series.
What im getting at is, you could say "i don't find the driving gameplay anywhere other than a simulator interesting or fun", but saying the driving gameplay is bad in GTA or any other open world is a bad faith argument . You can have a lot of fun driving in GTA or riding a bike in Cyberpunk, as long as you don't expect assetto corsa type gameplay.

(thanks for responding so courteously to my abrasive message by the way)
 
Driving is the one thing I don´t like in CP. It´s also the reason why I´m avoiding the racing quests. Steering feels unresponsive and unnatural. Like a Super Mario Ice level.
You also notice so much more on foot.
 
Might be, but as someone who really likes racing games I find the opinion that driving in GTA is as anywhere near good...well its an opinion for sure D:
I love racing games. Trackmania, Ride, Wipeout, Karting ... anything. But driving as a secondary layer in games is just a waste of time. It's just trying to add everything but those additions are just okayish and hence do not only not improve the games but make them worse than they could be. Drag the actual content down. Driving was interesting in the original Mafia (not remake), iirc because the police would stop you if you do not follow the rules, so no speeding and mayhem like usual, and these old cars were not even in GT Legends. I think only Grand Prix Legends ever used proper old cars for a racing game. So an era totally neglected by racing. But in every other open world game it is just an A to B tool. Expands the time needed to do stuff while never being an actually good racing game.
Including them requires another design, a bigger map. Kinda like the Batman games feeling weird once they left the confines of the original Asylum but the population remaining only thugs, no adapting to their own new design requirements. But Yakuza also suffers from its very compact but still on foot big map which requires running back and forth just to get to missions, which is not the same as to backtrack after unlocking something which is imho another more meaningful thing, also not the same as proper exploration where you look into every corner once or twice but not over and over and over again. Anyway, moving somewhere never feels like actually playing anything. So whenever it takes too long, which it needs to otherwise it would be even more pointless, it just feels boring and like filler. Probably is the reason why I can not view any open world game as really good, everything turned into a linear game where missions just start seamlessly and don't have to be visited first would be better. Even hate open world in racing games. I race for x hours already, no need to add another y hours just to get to the starting line.
 
I love to drive around Night City doing nothing just as a form of escapism. It's really fun with Oled and HDR , getting immersed in a virtual world.

Maybe you have a better real life out there than me OP you don't need to do something like this.

I used to drive for fun in GTA vice cities to enjoying the vibe
 
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.
Body Harvest did it right four years earlier. Though, it was smaller game in scope and density.
 
It should be self-evident why OP is idiotic, but ok. It is idiotic because it assumes that one design is better than another, and it assumes everyone has the same taste. It assumes Cyberpunk would be a better game if it had vastly smaller city and no cars. And that is obviously nonsense for huge number of people. I have 260 hours in Cyberpunk 2077. Finishing the story took me 140. What did I do the other 120? Drive and walk around Night City. Enjoying its sights and ambiance and the amazing cyberpunkish stable of cars. Cyberpunk has better car design than most racing games, with brilliantly constructed both interiors and exteriors. Would be a huge shame to lose that.

Mafia 1/2/3 would not be anywhere near as fun without the driving. Mafia 1 had more detailed physics than most racing games of the time. It even supported wheels with manual shifter and force feedback. Mafia 2 and 3 in its simulation setting is extremely enjoyable to drive in. Again, you are asking for much worse games to be made.

I tried Yakuza 0 three times. I always dropped it after few hours, because of its inconsistent presentation (nonvoiced dialogue, weird sounds) and too much emphasis on combat. Plus absence of driving, which I enjoy. But you will not see me create threads asking for Yakuza to be something other than it is.
Yea, obviously different strokes for different folks, but I thought they did a great jobwith the driving and city design of Cyberpunk 2077. That's what I want in a cyberpunk type of game, massive scale and great ambiance, not four city blocks like Yakua.

I also think the fanbase overall is with me on this, because they added features like the subway to increase that city atmophere and exploring just to explore vibe.

Some of us like cities just like, as a concept, and enjoy city design in games.
 
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That's what I want in a cyberpunk type of game, massive scale and great ambiance, not four city blocks like Yakua.
Yes, in fact, for small scale we already have Deus Ex. Cyberpunk's promise of large open driveable city wrapped around a story driven RPG was its entire point and main promise, which it delivered on.
 
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